Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

The man cast a critical eye over the scene before him. “I hope so,” he said, his British accent icy. “I didn’t pay to be woken by gunfire and fisticuffs. If I’d wanted that I could have stayed in Brixton. Excuse me, miss.” As he climbed the stairs, hugging the wall, another figure passed him on the way down. It was Sheba, wearing an identical gray robe—they must have had them hanging in all the rooms. Who would have thought it, amenities in a place like this.

“Gabriel?” Sheba said. “You okay?”

“I’m still standing,” he said. “More or less.”

“DeGroet?”

“On his way,” Gabriel said. He took Lucy’s box out of his pocket, glanced at it. “Just a hundred fourteen miles off.”

“How do you know that…?” Sheba asked and then raised a hand, palm out. “Never mind. I’ll go get dressed. We’re in 304.” She vanished up the stairs.

Gabriel walked from one of the bodies to the next. The man he’d shot had stopped moaning; he seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. He’d live, though. The same couldn’t be said for Molnar, who’d joined his brother at last. Gabriel stopped beside the third man, who was conscious but curled up on the floor, both hands pressed to his abdomen. Gabriel aimed the gun down at him. “What did DeGroet want you to do?”

“Bring you…” The man coughed, spat a bloody wad onto the tiles. “Bring you to him.”

“Just me?”

“The woman, too.”

“Not the old man?”

“What old man?”

Gabriel nodded. Maybe now that Chios had given up its secrets, DeGroet had decided he didn’t need Tigranes anymore. On the other hand, maybe he just hadn’t told this guy about him.

“Well, tell DeGroet,” Gabriel said, “that we’re leaving the country tonight. That we’re going back to Cairo. If he’s so eager to see us, he can find us there.” When the man didn’t respond, he thumbed back the gun’s hammer. “Got that?”

The man nodded violently. “To Cairo.” He didn’t sound as though he believed it, and Gabriel knew better than to think DeGroet would—but he had to try. Maybe DeGroet would at least divert some of his men to Cairo, evening up the sides a little.

“Now get up,” Gabriel said.

“I can’t…”

“Yes you can,” Gabriel said and nudged him forcefully with his foot. The man struggled to his knees, then to his feet. His face was ashen, clammy.

When he reached the door, the man turned back. “He’ll kill you,” he said, quietly. “You know that.”

“I know he’ll try,” Gabriel said. “Now, go.”

Up in Room 304, the gray robe was on the floor and Sheba was back in her khakis and tank top. Tigranes was asleep in one of the room’s two twin beds. Christos was standing at the window, looking out at the street below.

“You think it’s safe for us to stay here?” Christos said.

“I wouldn’t,” Gabriel said. “DeGroet’s got other things on his mind now, like the treasure and the two of us, but just to be safe—” He handed Christos a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. At least it wasn’t torn from a sandwich wrapper this time. “That’s my brother’s number. Explain what you need and he’ll take care of it. Stay any place you like.” He paused for a moment. “Just not the Four Seasons.”

“Of course not,” Christos said, “that would be much too expensive—”

“That’s not why,” Gabriel said. “Oh, and tell Michael, when you talk to him, that the man you’re rooming with has the Oedipodea committed to memory. My guess is you’ll get some professional recording apparatus in the mail the next day, and a job putting it to use if you want it.”

Christos looked over at the old man where he lay. “I don’t know how he’d feel about being recorded,” he said.

“Then I hope you’ve got a good memory,” Gabriel said, “because it’s got to be preserved somehow.”

Christos nodded uncertainly.

“Listen,” Gabriel said. “What’s in that man’s head is a priceless, priceless treasure. And he knows it. When you first brought me to Anavatos, he told me about having no son to pass the poem to. He doesn’t want it to die with him. If you explain to him that you’ll be keeping it alive, that you’ll teach it to your son someday…trust me, he’ll do it.” He turned to Sheba. “You could stay, too, you know. The Foundation could certainly use a linguist working on the project. The first translator of the Oedipodea —it could make your career.”

“That it could,” Sheba said, a hint of her long-buried Irish accent coming out in her fatigue. “And perhaps it will. But I’ll never feel safe unless I know this is over. And I can’t let you face it by yourself.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gabriel said, “I can—”

“You can, you can…do you ever listen to yourself?” She came over to him, put a hand on each of his shoulders. “You’re hurt, you’re tired. You’re not going to be alone, too. Besides,” she said, “I already got us on a plane leaving in—” she glanced over at the clock on the bedside table “—forty-seven minutes.”

“You got us on…” Gabriel said. “Who has a flight leaving Istanbul at three AM?”

“FedEx,” Sheba said.

“You got us on a FedEx plane?”

“The Hunt name really opens doors,” Sheba said. “You should try it sometime.”

He gathered her up in his arms, kissed the top of her head. So much for stewardesses and icepacks—but with a nonstop cargo flight they might be able to beat DeGroet to the island, even if he flew one of his own planes.

“Sheba McCoy,” Gabriel said, “have I ever told you how impressive you are?”

“Why don’t you hold that thought,” she said. “Just till we’re safely in the air.”

Chapter 21

“You really are,” Gabriel said, “impressive, I mean,” and this time Sheba just nodded. They were sprawled in the cargo hold of a huge FedEx plane, surrounded by cardboard boxes, bulging sacks, and the occasional wooden crate, all secured in a web of plastic netting. Sheba leaned back against a stack of padded envelopes, her shoes and socks beside her, a blanket wrapped around her against the unheated cabin’s chill. Gabriel had his boots off as well and was winding an Ace bandage around his left ankle. The copilot had found it in the first aid kit mounted above the emergency exit hatchway.

The first hour of the flight had been consumed by the crew filing back, one by one, to ask Gabriel about some of his more notorious exploits, like the expulsion from Libya in 2004 and the time he’d fled Peru on horseback with half the army chasing after him. That incident had made the Times and each of them in turn wanted to know about it. But after a while the questions petered out and eventually the crew returned to the flight deck and left them alone. There was a pair of empty jumpseats they could have used but as long as there was no turbulence it was actually more comfortable sitting on the floor, and so far the flight had been smooth. They might as well have been sailing a ship over a calm ocean.

“Most people,” Gabriel said, “facing half the things you have in the past forty-eight hours, would’ve fallen apart. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.”

“Oh, I’ve seen it, too,” Sheba said. “You met my sisters. Growing up, not a one of them was worth a damn in a scrape.”

“How’d you escape turning out like that?” Gabriel asked.

“It was my dad’s decision,” Sheba said. She opened the blanket and spread it to cover both of them. “He wanted a son so badly, and he kept trying, and what’d he end up with but a house full of women? It was him, my mother and my three sisters. Finally I came along and he decided he’d had enough. So from the time I was six or seven, he’d take me out with him when he went shooting and driving and fishing and living off the land.” Sheba shrugged. “I enjoyed it. My sisters thought I was mental, and maybe they were right, but…”