Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

“You really don’t have anything a girl could wear,” she said, and swung the compartment door shut. “Not even a spare stewardess uniform.”

“No stewardesses,” Gabriel said, coming toward her.

“Oh? What do you do if you get thirsty in the middle of a flight?”

“I go to the galley,” Gabriel said, “and forage for myself.”

“And if you get lonely,” she said, “in the middle of a flight? Do you take care of that for yourself, too?”

He stopped an arm’s length from her and looked her up and down, from her bare feet to her dripping auburn hair. “Miss Ficatier, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were offering me an alternative.”

She smiled at him. “Who says you know better?”

When she woke, pleasantly sore and in need of another shower, Sammi saw Gabriel over by one of the windows, sketching on a piece of paper. She went over.

Gabriel looked up. “Your clothes are probably dry by now.” After her shower, she’d rinsed them in the bathroom sink and hung them on the towel rod.

“I’ll put them on in a bit,” she said. “Unless you mind—”

“Not in the slightest,” Gabriel said, kissing the side of her breast, “and Charlie’s too much of a gentleman to peek.”

Sammi stretched, heard her shoulders crack. “What are you working on?”

“A map,” Gabriel said. “Doing my best to reconstruct it from memory. Amun had it in his office—”

“Amun!” Sammi exclaimed, snapping her fingers. “I knew there was something I needed to tell you. I know who he is!”

“So do I,” Gabriel said. “He’s the second-in-command of the Alliance of the Pharaohs.”

“Maybe—but he’s also the professor I was telling you about, the one who taught the Mediterranean History course we took. Omar Amun. Did you get my text message?”

“Your text . . . ?”

Then Gabriel remembered. Back in Cairo.

THAT’S THE PRO

That’s the professor .

“I got part of it,” Gabriel said.

“Well, they grabbed me while I was typing it,” Sammi said. “I wasn’t sure I even pressed ‘Send.’ ”

“What the hell is a history professor from Nice doing high up in an organization like the Alliance?”

“I don’t know,” Sammi said. “He was just a visiting professor . . . and he did talk a lot about ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ and so forth, but . . .”

“But you didn’t think he’d cut anyone’s head off over it.”

“No,” Sammi said. Her face fell. “I feel . . . I feel terrible about the whole thing. I was the one who talked Cifer into taking his class—and I was the one who told him about you.”

Gabriel frowned. “What do you mean, told him about me?”

“There were only thirty seats in the class, and more than a hundred people applying. I thought it would help, that Cifer was the sister of the famous explorer, Gabriel Hunt . . .”

“I’m sure it did,” Gabriel said. “Especially once he realized he could get me to do the Alliance’s bidding by kidnapping her.”

“I didn’t know he would—” Sammi began, but Gabriel pressed a finger against her lips.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

“Except that it is. And now she is god only knows where, suffering god only knows what—”

“Shh,” Gabriel said. “Lucy’s fine.”

“What?”

“I got her out. She’s on a plane to Paris right now.”

“She’s . . . ? Really?” Sammi’s voice betrayed her excitement and relief. “You wouldn’t say that just to make me feel better—”

“Of course not,” Gabriel said. “Lucy’s fine.”

Sammi was startled to feel tears running down her cheeks. Gabriel drew her to his chest and she buried her face in his shirt. “I was so worried—so worried . . .”

He put his pen down and stroked the back of her head.

After a moment she looked up. “But if she really is fine,” she said, “and on her way back to France . . . why did you tell Charlie to take us to Corsica?”

“Let me tell you a story,” Gabriel said.

Charlie touched down smoothly at Campo dell’Oro Airport, located on the east side of the Gulf of Ajaccio, just north of the mouth of the Gravona River. The capital of Corsica sat on the western side of the island, a little south of the halfway median that bisected the country. It was the largest and most modern city in Corsica, though that wasn’t saying much—none of the municipalities were particularly large, and most were simple villages. Ajaccio had perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants. Among its few claims to fame was that it was the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte.

In the airport Gabriel tore a map from a pad of them at the car rental counter and compared it to the one he’d sketched out on the plane. He’d marked as many of the pinned landmarks as he could recall, particularly the ones near the spot where “the web” had been written in Arabic. It was an area in Southern Corsica near Filitosa, in the rough wilderness that Corsicans called the “maquis.” The last time he’d been to Corsica, Gabriel had gone to that region, pursuing a legendary urn rumored to have been buried beneath one of the clusters of menhirs—large, upright standing stones that had been carved around 1,500 BC. The urn had turned out to be a myth, but Gabriel’s photographs of the strange and paganistic menhirs had been good for a feature article in National Geographic .

If Napoleon had wanted to keep the Second Stone hidden, Gabriel thought, he couldn’t have chosen a better place for it—doubly so if he’d believed the stone to have mystical properties. Growing up in Corsica, he must have heard every fable and legend about the strange powers of this territory, and the endless maze of caves and rock structures buried in the hills certainly offered no shortage of hiding places.

With his money belt refilled from the stash on board the plane and a new Hunt Foundation credit card in his pocket, Gabriel had no difficulty renting a Renault Laguna 1.8 at the airport. He and Sammi drove it into the city and spent an hour and a half at a hardware store buying supplies: water and food, rope, climbing tools, flashlights, pickaxes. The final expenditure, because it was dark by the time they got out, was a hotel room for the night. At the front desk, Gabriel found himself confronted by the baleful eye of the manager, whose glance flicked from Gabriel to Sammi, from their naked ring fingers to their ankles, where no luggage stood. “Is monsieur certain he wishes but a single room, and not two? I can offer a most reasonable price on a second . . .”

Sammi stepped forward and matched the man glare for glare. “Monsieur is certain,” she said coldly in French, “and so is madame. One room will do, and I suggest you make it one without neighbors on either side if your guests are as sensitive about these things as you.”

The man handed over a key glacially. “Very well,” he said.

But in the end, the only noise they made in the room would have been inoffensive had their neighbors been librarians on one side and nuns on the other. A room service dinner of sadly overcooked steak and undercooked vegetables was followed by a phone call back to New York, where it was two in the morning but Michael nevertheless answered on the first ring.

“Have you heard from Lucy?” he wanted to know.

“I wouldn’t know,” Gabriel said. “I don’t have e-mail, and my phone’s . . .”

“Your phone is what?” Michael asked.

“Not so much a phone anymore as a collection of phone pieces. Lying somewhere in Cairo.”

Michael was silent for a moment, no doubt mourning the $30,000 piece of equipment. But only for a moment—his primary concern lay elsewhere. “If she couldn’t get you, she’d at least have called me, don’t you think?”