Gabriel Hunt - Hunt at World's End

But up—up was another matter.

He dragged one of the chairs away from the table and placed it against the side of the building. He could hear Grissom’s men pounding and kicking the door. He had to hurry. Any moment they would switch to using their weapons to blast the lock open.

Even standing on the chair, the roof was too high for him to reach. However, there was a thick cement ledge, maybe ten inches high, running along the wall just below the roof. He reached for it, his fingers brushing the Turkish designs carved into the cement. The banging on the door stopped. He could picture them aiming their guns at the lock. He stepped up onto the back of the chair, got a firm hold on the ledge and pulled himself up. From there he hoisted himself onto the gravel and tarpaper surface of the roof. He bent down to help Joyce up, then left her to help Daniel while he took off the backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out his Colt. He put the backpack back on his shoulders as the sound of gunshots and splintering wood came from under them.

Daniel threw one fat, stubby leg onto the roof and hauled himself up, then lay on his back, huffing the fresh air and trying to catch his breath. Below, Gabriel heard the terrace door sliding open. Glancing over the roof’s edge, Gabriel saw Grissom’s men burst onto the balcony. Two of them raised guns his way.

“Move!” Gabriel shouted, ducking back from the edge as gunfire sped his way. Joyce helped Daniel to his feet, and the three of them ran across the roof, the gravel crunching under their heels. The hotel covered the better part of a city block and in the light of the setting sun, the roof seemed to extend forever. Halfway across, he ducked around a metal shed to find the roof access doorway, but it was locked from the inside. He rattled the knob once and kept moving. Behind them, Grissom’s men were still climbing up from the terrace below. Ahead, an obstacle course of turbine roof ventilators stretched for yards like a sea of low, gray onion domes. He started weaving around them as bullets began flying their way. Fortunately, climbing up to the roof had slowed Grissom’s men, so there was room enough between them to make aiming hard. But the sprint had taken its toll: Daniel was already out of breath and lagging behind, and Joyce was hanging back to help him. “Come on,” Gabriel said. “They’ll catch up if—”

The roof access door slammed open. Half a dozen men ran out onto the roof in pursuit. Gunshots cracked. Bullets ricocheted off the ventilators, dug into the gravel at their feet. Gabriel stopped, raising his Colt, but he couldn’t get a clear shot with Joyce and Daniel in the way. He let them rush by, then fired. One of the gunmen spun and fell. The others kept coming, filling the air with bullets. Gabriel ran, keeping his head down. A bullet ricocheted off a ventilator by his feet.

The field of ventilators ended and, a moment later, he saw the edge of the roof approaching. Joyce reached it first, skidding to a halt. She looked down, turned back to Gabriel.

Gabriel stopped at the edge, his heart pounding. He looked over and saw the white cement roof of the apartment building that abutted the hotel. The drop looked to be about fifteen feet. He could hear the shouts of the gunmen drawing closer. Their only chance was to keep moving.

“You’re going to have to hang down and drop. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. Go!” Joyce climbed over the edge, holding onto the concrete rim with a white-knuckled grip. Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel saw Daniel doing the same. Gabriel covered them, picking his shots carefully. He only had so many bullets, so he had to make each shot count. “Are you down?” he shouted. Joyce’s voice came from a distance: “Yes.”

Gabriel swung around and without pausing to look, jumped off the roof. He braced himself for a hard landing and rolled as his feet hit the surface below. The impact was jarring and one of his palms got badly scraped, but he lurched back to his feet and kept running, sprinting after Joyce and Daniel. They were climbing over a low brick wall separating this building from the next. Behind him, Grissom’s men reached the edge of the hotel’s roof and opened fire. Bullets chipped the cement all around him. He kept sprinting, pausing only once to toss a gunshot back their way.

“Gabriel!” It was Joyce shouting to him from the next building over. She had reached the roof access shed for this building and had her hand on the knob. “This one’s unlocked!”

He raced toward her as she pulled the door open. She stepped back with a startled expression on her face. An instant later, two burly men barreled out of the shed carrying axes in their hands.

Gabriel lowered his gun and hid it behind his back as they turned to face him.

“Miss,” one of the men said, “we’ll need you to stay back. You, too, sir.”

More men were emerging from the shed. They all wore the heavy rubberized uniform of the Turkish municipal fire brigade. One pointed in the direction of the Peninsula and they all began heading that way.

“Please make your way down to the ground floor, sir,” one of them said to Gabriel as he passed. “The fire is spreading. It isn’t safe for you up here.”

“No, it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Though I have to say, I feel a lot safer now that you’re here.” He glanced back. Grissom’s men had faded—they were nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 18

The cargo van rattled down a dark Turkish side street, carrying Edgar Grissom away from the Peninsula Hotel. He sat on the bare, corrugated metal floor in back while two of his men occupied the front seats. He coughed what he hoped was the last of the smoke out of his lungs and into his handkerchief. Any irritant only worsened his condition further. Back in the hotel room, he’d been immobilized for minutes, unable to do anything but cough and try to suck air into his lungs, air that wasn’t there. He’d been lucky that in the confusion he’d been able to drag himself to the door and out into the hallway. Another minute in that smoke…

Grissom looked at the specks of blood in his handkerchief, then folded it, stuffed it in his pocket, and finally allowed himself to look at the horror laid out across the van’s floor before him. Julian’s body still reeked of smoke. Portions of his clothing were charred. Ash dusted his pallid skin.

His dead skin.

The ivory handle of the dagger still protruded from just below Julian’s solar plexus. Grissom’s own weapon, modeled to his exact specifications after an ancient Chinese sacrificial dagger. They’d killed their own children, sacrificed them to the river gods, with daggers just like this one.

Julian.

He’d lost his wife to a disease that had cruelly taken her away from him little by little. And now he’d lost his son, his only child, the last of his family.

Lost him to Gabriel Hunt.

What Grissom felt wasn’t sadness. There was no mourning or regret. There was only a vast, cold emptiness inside him, surrounding a bright coal of burning heat. This was the vengeance he was preparing for Gabriel Hunt. He would nurse it, stoke it, keep the embers burning until the proper moment came—and then it would erupt into a proper conflagration. Erupt and sweep Hunt from the face of the earth.

The man in the passenger seat turned around. Grissom recognized his face: Wellington, an American mercenary he’d hired back in Southeast Asia. Wellington said something, indicating the walkie-talkie in his hand, but Grissom wasn’t listening. He was watching his son’s head roll limply on his neck with every turn the van took.

“Forgive me,” Grissom whispered to the corpse. “Forgive me.” He pulled the dagger from Julian’s torso, the three blades sliding out smeared with blood. The weapon that had taken his son’s life would take Hunt’s. He would make certain of that.