Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

“Very well. Follow me.” And Tigranes headed down the stairs, his sandals slapping against the stone once more.

At the ground floor, he led them past the open front archway (Gabriel glanced outside: no men in sight, not yet), to a small chamber at the far wall. A closet, really—they could barely all fit inside and there was no door to it. As soon as anyone entered the building they’d be seen.

“This is no good,” Gabriel said, turning to Tigranes, but Tigranes wasn’t there.

Christos and Gabriel looked at each other, baffled—the old man, who had been standing behind them, had vanished somehow while they weren’t looking. Then they heard the slap of his sandals overhead.

Gabriel looked up. There was no ceiling to the closet, and Tigranes was ten feet up, climbing the wall using hand- and toeholds carved into the stone like the rungs of a ladder, the phorminx hanging across his back from a leather strap. He was moving quickly; for an octogenarian, the man was remarkably spry.

Gabriel gestured for Christos to go up next, and while the young man did, Gabriel drew his Colt. From the street outside he heard voices. The men were talking, in Greek.

So Andras had rounded up some local talent this time.

Then he heard Andras himself, speaking English, telling them to shut the hell up. And in the quiet that fell he heard one gun after another being armed.

He looked up. Christos was ten feet overhead now and Tigranes was nowhere to be seen. As Gabriel watched, he saw the upper half of Christos’ body vanish as well—into what he could only assume, since he couldn’t see it from below, was a hole in the wall separating this building from the one beside it.

“Old man!” came a shout from the street. “Come out and talk!”

Gabriel holstered his pistol and began climbing.

“We will count to three and then we will come in. You don’t want this, Tigranes. It’ll go easier for you if you just come out.”

A moment later the counting began, but Gabriel only heard the first number— Tria! —before he reached the hole Tigranes and Christos had entered and dove into it himself. Christos was in front of him, crawling swiftly on his hands and knees along a stone tunnel, its inner walls the pink and beige of cut sandstone, light coming in through crevices where the ancient mortar had crumbled away. Past him, Gabriel could just make out Tigranes’ chiton-covered rear and the phorminx lying against his back, nearly scraping the ceiling as he crawled.

Judging from the length of the tunnel, it had to pass through quite a few adjacent buildings, turning periodically as the angles of the neighboring houses required. They passed several openings leading down to closets like the one through which they’d entered. Apparently the residents of Anavatos hadn’t relied solely on the inaccessibility of their town for purposes of holding out against a siege—tunnels like these would have helped them resist occupation as well.

Though in the end, of course, it hadn’t been enough. Gabriel did his best not to think about this.

From some distance back they heard, very quietly, the sound of shouting and pounding footsteps.

“Ask him where we get out,” Gabriel whispered to Christos, who passed the question along. He whispered back a moment later: “Next one over.”

Then Christos disappeared around a turn in the tunnel, and when Gabriel made the turn himself he saw Christos and Tigranes both on their knees in a wider chamber with a chimney leading up. “Where does this lead us?” Gabriel asked.

“To the end,” Tigranes said, and started climbing.

Well, that would more or less have to be the answer, Gabriel supposed: there were only so many buildings standing side by side and no tunnel could go on forever. Perhaps there would be a way for them to climb down the wall of the last building and then get behind Andras and his men, sneak back to the road and return on foot back to a more inhabited part of the island…

Gabriel followed Christos up the short shaft of rock and stepped out onto a flat surface. It wasn’t the roof of a building. It was the stony ground at the edge of a cliff.

This was the end, indeed—the end of Anavatos, the edge at which the town’s inhabitants had made their final stand, and from which they had leapt to their deaths. Only one hardy tree grew here, its roots clinging to the rock and dangling over the edge.

“What did you bring us here for?” Gabriel said, looking out over the sheer fall and the rocks far below. “There’s no way out!”

A shout rose in the distance: “Over there! I see them!”

“There is,” Tigranes said, “there is a way—”

“Then you’d better tell us pretty quickly what it is,” Gabriel said. He pulled his gun. Two bullets—damn it, how did he wind up down to two bullets again? And no telling whether they’d even fire…

“Down the mountain,” Tigranes began.

“What,” Christos said, the fear evident in his voice, “climbing down the side?”

“To a point,” Tigranes said.

“Where?” Christos said.

But there was no time for an answer as men rose into view just yards away, arms and legs pumping as they ran toward the dead end where their prey was cornered.

Gabriel pulled the trigger and a gunshot split the air, taking one of the men down. But the others kept coming.

“Get into the tunnel,” he shouted, “we’ve got to go back—” And he made for the opening of the chimney. But before he could get there, a man emerged from it, a short Greek with hair the color of steel wool and a jagged scar across his forehead. The man was holding a gun and he fired it without pausing even to aim, and it was only that overeagerness that saved Gabriel from catching a bullet in the chest. Gabriel threw himself against the man, knocking his gun away and taking him to the ground. But another came up right behind him. This one did take the time to aim, steadying his gun hand carefully while Gabriel and the scarred man grappled on the ground at his feet.

“No!” Christos shouted, and launched himself at the standing gunman, tackling him around the knees. They fell to the ground in a heap, the barrel of the gunman’s pistol just millimeters from where Gabriel lay below the scarred Greek, his throat clutched in the shorter man’s hands. Gabriel’s saw the gunman’s eyes spark with a vicious elation, saw his finger tighten on the trigger—

Desperately, Gabriel rolled over as the gun beside him fired. The explosion was deafening. But it was his enemy’s head the bullet entered, not his own. The man’s hands fell away from his throat and Gabriel staggered to his feet. He kicked the gun out of the other man’s hand while Christos slugged him, hard, in the face.

“Enough!” came a nasal voice and it took Gabriel a moment to realize the word had been spoken in Hungarian, not Greek. He looked up, raising his Colt at the same time. Andras was standing near the edge of the cliff, one meaty arm around Tigranes’ throat, the other holding a pistol to the old man’s temple.

“Drop your gun, Hunt,” Andras said, “or the old man dies.”

“Lajos would skin you alive if you killed him,” Gabriel said. “He’s the only man on earth who knows about the sphinx.”

“What Mr. DeGroet does or doesn’t do is my problem,” Andras said, “not yours. Drop your gun.”

Behind him, Gabriel heard the sound of footsteps racing up to within a yard or two, then pattering to a halt. Five men, six men—who knew how many. Too many. One bullet just wasn’t enough, even if he’d been willing to risk Tigranes’ life. Which he wasn’t.

Gabriel reluctantly released the hammer of his Colt and let it slide from his hand to the ground.

He felt men take hold of each of his elbows roughly, felt his wrists drawn together behind his back, felt a length of rope binding them together. A few feet away, he saw another pair of men take hold of Christos.