Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

“Your sister, huh?” Devrim said. Gabriel nodded. “Looks nothing like you.”

“She takes after our mother,” he said.

“And you look like your father?”

“I look like the milkman,” Gabriel said, and Devrim gave him a confused look. Then he laughed, a single loud bark. “The milkman! Hah! You are a devil, Gabriel.”

Gabriel rotated his shoulder and flexed his arm, which was getting stiff where the blade had gone in. His palms were still raw from hanging onto the roots in Anavatos and his cheek ached every time he opened his mouth. “I must be,” he muttered. “I feel like hell.”

“Hey,” Lucy’s voice floated in from the other room, “I’ve got it. Wanna see?”

Gabriel levered himself to his feet again and returned to the table. “I thought you said it would take a while.”

“It did,” Lucy said. “Just not a long while. Sit.” He sat, stared at the screen she was pointing to proudly. It showed a Mercator map of the world with two blinking white symbols, one an X, the other an O. The X was sitting, pulsing, on the northern coastline of Turkey. The O was just off the eastern coast of Chios—and moving, slowly, one tick at a time, toward the X.

“That’s us?” Gabriel asked, pointing at the X.

“Right,” Lucy said. “And that’s the person you’re looking for. Though it looks more like he’s looking for you.” They both watched as the O came another tiny notch closer to the X.

Chapter 20

DeGroet was coming.

It was hardly a surprise—he needed to get to Sri Lanka as well, and Istanbul was the nearest major international hub. But Gabriel couldn’t help the feeling that there was more to it, that DeGroet had been briefed by the man they’d left behind on the pier, that he was coming via Turkey in part because he knew this was where they’d fled. Hell, maybe they’d somehow been followed into Turkey by one of DeGroet’s agents or their trail had been picked up once they arrived by someone he already had in place. There could be men closing in as they sat here—on Gabriel and Lucy in Devrim’s, or on Sheba in the hostel where he’d left her to arrange a room for Christos and Tigranes.

“We’ve got to go,” Gabriel said.

“What?” Lucy said. “This instant?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just not safe. Devrim,” he called, “you’ll take care of my sister another night, right?”

“Any night,” Devrim called back. “Every night. Till she weighs as much as my own daughter.”

“Thank you.” Gabriel shot a lingering look at the screen with its handy little map as Lucy began disconnecting her machinery and stuffing it back in her bag. This was exactly the sort of technology he hated—and yet…it wouldn’t hurt to know where DeGroet was at any given time. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could take this with me,” he said, lifting the unit.

“No,” Lucy said and plucked it out of his hands. “The way you carry on? It’d be smashed in five minutes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right. Well—”

“This on the other hand,” Lucy said, holding up a black plastic box the size of a pack of playing cards, “you can bang around till the cows come home and you won’t break it. Doesn’t have the fancy map on it, but what it’s got’s just as good.” She flicked a switch on the bottom of the box and a single row of red digits lit up along one of its shorter sides:

178SW

Then after a second the display changed:

177SW

“Miles?” Gabriel said.

“You prefer kilometers?”

“No,” Gabriel said, “I prefer miles.”

He slipped the box into his pocket beside his Zippo. “How long will the battery—”

“A week. If you keep it on the whole time, maybe a little less.” She finished packing, looked around for anything she’d missed. “You want me to show you how to change it?”

Gabriel shook his head. “This’ll all be over in a lot less than a week. One way or another.”

An anxious look crossed her face. She reached up a hand and stroked the side of his jaw, avoiding the raw slash that was just beginning to heal. “Just how much trouble are you in?”

“Oh, nothing too serious,” Gabriel said, and he worked up a smile he hoped didn’t look too phony. “You know better than to worry about me.”

She nodded, and the trust in her eyes took him back fifteen years, to when he was twenty-three and she was eleven and he’d keep her up past her bedtime with stories about the places he’d been and the dangers he’d faced. But there was a measure of concern in her expression, too. “I know you can take care of yourself. But—”

“But what?”

“I follow what you do, Gabriel. Newspaper articles, the things you publish, people posting online that they saw you one place or another—”

“Computers are powerful things,” Gabriel said.

“Yeah. Well. Any time your name pops up on my screen, there’s part of me that’s excited, but there’s part of me that’s sure each time it’s your obituary I’m going to read.” Her voice fell. “The famous Gabriel Hunt, clawed to death by wild dogs in Zambia. The famous Gabriel Hunt falls from the wing of an airplane. Something.”

“I always wear my seat belt on airplanes,” Gabriel said. “And dogs love me.”

“Well that’s a relief,” she said. “But I’m just talking the law of averages. You can be the best in the world at what you do and there’ll still come a day when you get unlucky.”

“Is that why you agreed to see me when Michael sent his note?” Gabriel said. “After all this time? Because you thought it might be your last chance?”

“Of course not,” she said. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I was just thinking, how many times are you and I going to be in the same place. The way you move around. The way I do.”

Gabriel lifted her chin with his knuckle. “Don’t worry about me, kid,” he said. “I always come out on top.”

“Well, good. You can prove it,” she said, tapping a forefinger against the pocket where the little box lay, “by not getting yourself killed before that battery runs out.”

They separated on Tevkifhane Street. Gabriel watched her back recede as she walked quickly in the direction of the Blue Mosque, that Laurel-and-Hardy contraption of slender minarets and squat domes. It was brightly lit and stood out against the pitch-black of the sky like a picture cut out from a magazine and pasted on a scrapbook page.

When he could no longer see her, Gabriel turned in the other direction and headed toward the hostel where Sheba was waiting. On the way he passed the Four Seasons hotel, located in what had once been a prison building. The man at the front entrance, who looked as though he might have held the same job back in the building’s earlier incarnation, touched two fingers to the brim of his cap and nodded as Gabriel went by.

A moment later, Gabriel heard footsteps behind him. Two men, he thought—possibly three. Trying to keep their steps quiet.

So the nod hadn’t been for him.

He risked a glance back, saw two men directly behind him, maybe ten yards away, and a third across the street. He didn’t recognize the first two—but the third was Mr. Molnar, the round-faced Magyar whose brother had had the bad sense to charge at him in Budapest when his Colt had still had a bullet in it. Their eyes met, and even at this distance Gabriel could see that the intensity of his feelings had not abated.

“Hunt!” he bellowed, followed by another of those curses that seem so ubiquitous in the Hungarian tongue. Then he and the other two started running toward Gabriel, who took off as well, racing toward the nearby intersection with Kutlugün Street. It was a dark street of short, red-roofed buildings, mostly little hotels and cafes, all of them shuttered tight at half past one in the morning. Gabriel kept going, sprinting for the nearest corner. Sheba was on the next street over, Akbiyik Caddesi, the Street of the White Moustache; it was a slightly less reputable avenue, where the hostels were dingier and the proprietors asked fewer questions, like why a young American woman might be renting a room for two Greek men using a third man’s credit card number.