Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

The touch startled him. There was an electric quality to it, and a quality of sudden intimacy, as though they’d known each other far longer than the length of a car ride.

She drew her finger back.

They watched each other for a bit.

“Are you hungry?” he asked finally.

“Ravenous.”

“Thirsty?”

“Parched.”

“You know of somewhere we can go? Get something to eat and drink?”

“You won’t get my secrets that way, Gabriel Hunt. For just a glass of wine.”

Gabriel smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”

She parked the Peugeot near the waterfront. There was no sign of the police. They walked to a sidewalk café that was open late. The crowd inside was young, mostly college-age, and loud; Gabriel and Sammi took an outside table where they could talk privately. She ordered them a plate of socca , a Niçois specialty consisting of a thin layer of chick-pea flour and olive oil batter fried on a griddle, as well as a dish of stuffed vegetables. Gabriel consented to the waiter’s offer to bring a bottle of the house’s red wine.

The table was lit by a pair of candles in tiny glass holders. Gabriel couldn’t help but admire Sammi’s features in the flickering light, the play of shadow over her tanned skin (so much darker than most redheads he knew—and yet the red looked natural). Her eyes were an even brighter blue than he remembered from his first glimpse of her in the apartment. She wore a small medallion of some kind on a gold chain around her neck, and as she leaned toward him it dangled in the inviting darkness between her peach-shaped breasts.

“What is that?” he asked, indicating the medallion.

“This?” She lifted the chain with one finger, let the piece dangle in the light of the flame. “This is nothing, really. I wear it for sentimental reasons. It once belonged to my mother, who is no longer with us.”

“It looks old.”

“More than two hundred years,” she said. “It’s a French coin from around 1800. A franc. An old franc, from Napoleon’s time.”

Gabriel thought about the print of Napoleon on the wall of Lucy’s apartment, defaced by blade and marker. The old boy seemed to be turning up everywhere. But that was what it meant to come to France, of course. Two centuries later, his influence was still palpable.

“Speaking of Napoleon, do you know why my sister had that print up on her wall?” Gabriel asked. “Had she developed an interest in history?”

“Cifer? No. History was my specialty, not hers. I gave her the print for her birthday. I told her once she reminded me of Napoleon. Small, but very, very brilliant.”

“I’m surprised I never noticed the resemblance,” Gabriel said.

“Well,” Sammi said, in a tone of consolation, “you are not French.”

The wine arrived then, and Gabriel went through the performance of sniffing the cork and swirling the wine and satisfying the waiter by pronouncing it good enough. When the waiter left, Sammi took one swallow and burst out laughing. “It’s awful!”

“It is,” Gabriel said. “Worst I’ve had in years.”

“But, but—why didn’t you send it back?”

“I’m not here for the wine,” he said.

They found each other’s eyes, and neither looked away for some time.

“Can you tell me,” Sammi said, “is Cifer in serious danger?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I hope not. But she may be. A group calling themselves the Alliance of the Pharaohs claims to have kidnapped her. Have you ever heard of them?”

“God in heaven,” she said. “I remember our Mediterranean History professor mentioning them. That’s the class Lucy and I were in together.”

“Really? Your professor mentioned them? My brother Michael—he has two degrees in history, and he’d never heard of them.”

“That’s because they’re not historical,” Sammi said, “they’re entirely modern. A sect operating in present-day Egypt. Very radical. Made up of intensely passionate Egyptian nationalists. Among other things, their aim is to repatriate any Egyptian artifacts and treasures they see as having been stolen by other countries.”

“Stolen’s a bit strong,” Gabriel said. “Most of what’s in museums was legally obtained.”

“Most is not all,” Sammi said, “and ‘legally obtained’ is in the eye of the beholder. And in their eyes a great wrong has been committed. One they feel calls for revenge.”

“The thefts in Istanbul—”

“And from the Louvre, yes. We discussed them in class. Our professor didn’t approve of the tactic—”

“By ‘tactic’ you mean beheading the security guards?”

“—but he seemed sympathetic to the desire for Egypt to have her artifacts back. But then, he was Egyptian himself.”

“Do you suppose he’d be willing to talk to me? I’d like to know more about this group before I meet with them.”

“I wouldn’t know how to contact him—he was a visiting professor only, he went back to Egypt at the end of the semester. But, Gabriel,” she said, reaching out and taking hold of his hand, “surely you are not going to meet with members of this group. Of all people, not you.”

“Why ‘of all people’?” Gabriel said.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you known for? How many precious artifacts have you taken out of Egypt and her neighbors and brought back to the United States? If this group has two enemies, it must be you and Howard Carter. And Howard Carter they can no longer kill.”

“I may not be quite as easy to kill as they think,” Gabriel said.

Sammi’s voice shook when she spoke. “But don’t you see? That is why they took Cifer. With her life in the balance, how could you dare to fight them?”

“I’ll think of something,” Gabriel said, with more confidence than he felt. “Listen, did you find anything when you searched Lucy’s apartment? Anything that might be helpful?”

“Just this.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small plastic bag. It contained the other half of the broken glass syringe, the half with the plunger. “It was on the floor in the bedroom.”

Gabriel nodded. “I found the other half behind the bed. Can I take it Lucy isn’t a drug user?”

“Hardly! She doesn’t even like to drink very much.”

“Then it must have been the kidnappers,” Gabriel said. “Some sort of knock-out drug, maybe.”

“We’ll find out,” Sammi said. “Before I picked you up, I called a man I know who has a pharmacy and he agreed to run some tests. In fact—” She took out her cell phone and looked at the clock on its display. “We’d better get going, it’s almost eleven.”

“He stays open till eleven?”

“Jean? No, he closes at seven; eight on weekends. But that’s for ordinary customers. For me . . . he’ll make an exception.”

Gabriel tried to read the expression he saw in her eyes. “Sounds like he might prefer if I stayed in the car,” he said.

“I am sure he would,” Sammi said. “But I would not.” And she squeezed his hand once more.

Chapter 5

La pharmacie was closed, of course, but Sammi rang the bell and after a moment, a light went on in the back. Someone came to the door, flicked a switch, and the metal security gate rolled up slowly. Then the door swung open.

The chemist was a man in his forties, the sort you could tell had been fit once but hadn’t kept at it, so that now he was glad to have a bulky pharmacy apron to hide behind. He was mostly bald and had a pair of glasses hanging on a chain around his neck. He smiled warmly at Sammi, greeted her in French, and, wrapping his arms around her, kissed her on both cheeks. Her body language revealed all—to Gabriel. The chemist seemed oblivious to the discomfort she showed in his embrace.