Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (18 page)

“After two hundred years?”

“There’s apparently a group still in existence that’s devoted to keeping the secret.”

“Then wouldn’t they want to get rid of any markers?”

“Not if the markers are part of the secret they’re protecting,” Gabriel said.

Sammi studied the terrain in front of her. “Is this what you Americans mean when you say ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’?”

“Might as well be.” Gabriel began to walk along the tree line, studying the ground and the trunks. He found no signs of recent visitation, nor any indication of any man-made objects. He looked at the map again. “I don’t get it. It’s as if the trail stops cold.”

“Are you sure it really exists?”

He thought of the nonexistent urn he’d come to Corsica to find the last time. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

He put the map away and moved forward, through the trees. There was no trail, so the brush was difficult to step across. Sammi tailed behind him.

“Watch your step,” he warned.

As they continued deeper into the
maquis
, Gabriel systematically scanned their surroundings left and right. If they didn’t find something concrete soon, they’d have to turn back. What consequences that might have for Lucy, he didn’t know and didn’t want to contemplate. He could tell the Alliance that in his expert opinion the Stone didn’t exist, or at least the hiding place on Corsica didn’t. They might even believe him—but that wouldn’t stop them from killing him. Or Lucy.

Maybe if he could break her free again, get her back to New York—

He never had the chance to finish the thought, because at that moment he saw the menhir.

It was twenty yards in front of them and off to one side, hidden by an especially dense group of trees, a menhir similar to the ones behind them at Filitosa. Gabriel ran toward it, Sammi at his heels. He pushed aside a branch and stepped closer. This one wasn’t ancient. It was old—but not prehistoric. The stone wasn’t nearly as weathered, the features on the carved face at the top more distinct.

It was the face of a young man—a boy, really—and on the sides of the towering stone were the suggestions of a military uniform. The figure’s face was turned to the left, in profile.

“I don’t believe it,” Sammi said.

“What?”

She pointed up toward where the figure’s shoulders would have been if it were a full sculpture. “The insignia of the Military College of Brienne. He was not yet ten years old. This is Napoleon, Gabriel.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “It was when he first left Corsica. He came back during the Revolution, and once later, after returning from Egypt—but he was never again to make his home here for any length of time. This was the last age at which he was purely a Corsican—when he was still Napoleone di Buonaparte, not yet Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Gabriel walked around the menhir. “That tells us the trail exists. The question is, where do we go from here?”

Sammi followed the statue’s gaze to the left. “Maybe this way?”

“Makes as much sense as anything.”

They walked through the brush in that direction. A hollow log, the remnant of a fallen tree, lay across their path. Gabriel stepped over it, but as he set his foot down, something snapped.

“Don’t move,” Gabriel said.

Sammi looked around. “What is it?”

Gabriel was studying the log and the ground around it. He picked up a thin cord that had been attached to a spring mechanism. “It was booby-trapped.”

“But nothing happened,” Sammi said.

Gabriel shook his head. “Nothing we can see,” he said. He let the cord drop. “It triggered something. Probably an alarm.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Neither do I. Yet.” He drew his Colt.

They continued on in as close to a straight line as they could, through another thick grove of trees. On the far side, a narrow path opened up. Gabriel hurried along it until it widened into a clearing, roughly the same size as the one beside the wall of boulders. Only here there were no boulders, no wall—just a grassy slope, and in the side of the slope, an opening loosely concealed behind dead tree branches.

“Sammi, I think we may have found it,” Gabriel said. He heard something behind him, something heavy thudding to the ground. “Sammi?”

He spun around.

Silently and out of nowhere, six armed men had appeared between the trees. They all had guns—rifles and pistols—pointed at Gabriel. Sammi was lying facedown at the feet of a seventh man who held the butt of his rifle angled above the back of her head.

Gabriel let his gun fall to the ground and slowly raised
his hands. The man standing over Sammi, his broad Corsican features ruddy, had dark eyes, gray-black hair, and a full beard. He stepped forward.

“You are trespassing,” he said. “You may not go farther. In fact, you will not leave this place alive.”

“We’re not your enemy,” Gabriel said.

“Any man who sets foot here is my enemy,” the man said.

“There is a group in Egypt, the Alliance of the Pharaohs—
Alliance Pharaonique
. They’ve taken your men in the past, tortured them. And now they’ve kidnapped my sister. Said they would kill her if I didn’t find the Second Stone for them.”

The man didn’t budge. “Then I am very sorry for you. It is a terrible thing to lose a sister. But at least you will have the comfort of dying first.”

“Hang on,” Gabriel said, “nobody has to die. We all want the same thing—the group in Egypt stopped. Surely there’s a way to—”

At the man’s feet, Sammi groaned.

“Can I help her up?” Gabriel said. When the man didn’t respond, Gabriel added, “You can shoot us if you want. But until you do, I’m going to help her.”

“Is she armed?”

“No.”

The man nodded slightly. Gabriel bent and extended a hand to Sammi, and she pulled herself up. She was unsteady on her feet and she winced when she put a hand to the back of her skull.

“Who are you?” she said.

The men said nothing.

“They’re the group organized by Napoleon’s brother,” Gabriel said. “To protect the Second Stone. Am I right?”

“You are,” the leader said, “and it is the seal on your death warrant. You know too much to live.” He raised his rifle, and the men behind him followed suit.

Gabriel gauged the distance to his Colt. He couldn’t outrun seven bullets.

“Wait,” he said. “I have a proposition—”

“What proposition?” the man said.

Gabriel’s mind was racing, trying to come up with an answer to that question. He saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger and began blurting out the first thing that came to mind, “We could make a—”

But Gabriel’s words were drowned out by a barrage of gunfire. Gabriel and Sammi both flinched and looked down at their own chests, but no bullets had struck them. Looking up, they saw spots of crimson erupting across the leader’s torso. His eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped to his knees, the rifle tumbling from his dead hands. The other men turned shouting in the direction the gunfire had come from and began firing blindly themselves.

Men wearing burnooses over their faces poured out of the forest, shooting as they came. Gabriel recognized the one in the lead—he didn’t need to see Kemnebi’s face to know it was him. Gabriel pulled Sammi to the ground as bullets whipped over their heads. The remaining Corsicans took cover behind trees. Skilled at maneuvering in this environment, they quickly vanished to obtain secure positions from which to shoot.

Gabriel’s Colt lay a few feet away, next to the Corsican leader’s body. Gabriel darted toward it but was forced
back by a spray of bullets. “Gabriel!” Sammi shouted. Turning, he saw that one of the Egyptians had run out from the trees and into the clearing, unsheathing a long knife as he came. With his other hand, the man pulled his burnoose away from his face, revealing a bruised jaw—and eyes burning with rage. Sammi rolled out of his path just as his blade descended, a bitter declaration in Arabic spraying from his lips. Gabriel lunged for his pistol, grabbed it, and rolled onto his back, firing at the attacker in one fluid motion. The Colt’s round slammed into the man’s shoulder, causing him to stumble—but he kept coming, knife swinging wildly. Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, aiming dead center on the purple and yellow bruise on the man’s face. The Colt jerked in his hand and the man went down, a spray of blood hanging in the air for an instant before pattering over his body.

Gabriel ran to Sammi in a crouch and pulled her toward the cave entrance.

Behind them, Gabriel heard the battle continuing fiercely, gunshots mixing with cries of pain, exclamations both in French and Arabic. The Corsican group may have been smaller in number, but they were managing to pick off the Alliance members. Gabriel glanced back and counted five bodies on the ground—besides the Corsican leader, the others were all Egyptian. It was what the Alliance got for attacking on the group’s home turf. But Gabriel couldn’t take much comfort from the fact, since if the Corsicans prevailed, it was what Gabriel and Sammi would get as well.

He started tearing away the loose branches covering the front of the cave, Sammi working beside him to open up enough room for them to squeeze inside. They got some help from a stray gunshot that splintered a particularly thick branch just inches away from Gabriel’s
hand. “Go,” Gabriel said, pushing Sammi toward the narrow hole they’d opened, and she slipped in sideways. Gabriel stole another glance back. The gun battle was still raging; for the moment, no one had the luxury of paying attention to them. He squeezed into the cave after Sammi. The noise of gunfire was instantly muted, replaced by the echoing sound of Sammi panting in the darkness beside him.

“Is it safe here?” she asked.

Was it safe, she wanted to know.

It was
safer
, certainly—for now.

But Gabriel had a feeling they’d just walked into Napoleon’s Web.

The entrance they’d come through was actually an abscess in the ground that narrowed to a tunnel through which only one person at a time could fit. Gabriel went first, with Sammi following directly behind him. He grabbed a flashlight from his rucksack and switched it on. The cave was dark, damp, and had a familiar smell of . . . yes, bat guano. “Watch your step,” he said. “It’s going to be slippery.”

“All right.”

“There are also supposed to be traps,” Gabriel said.

“Traps?”

“Three of them. According to the Alliance’s documents. Dreamed up by Napoleon himself and built to his specifications by his court engineer.”

“You’re not serious,” Sammi said.

“They seemed to be.”

He moved forward slowly. Where the flashlight’s beam landed, he saw insects scurry away, and he could feel some crunching underfoot as well. The tunnel continued, branching and forking into a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Gabriel pressed forward, taking the rightmost fork each time, just to make it easier to backtrack if it proved necessary. And it did—twice they reached dead ends and had to retrace their steps.

But eventually they reached a larger, open space, obviously man-made, that was about the size of a large bedroom. It had been carved from the stone of the hillside, the walls and ceiling shored up with vaults of rock. The noise of their footsteps echoed loudly even after they came to a stop.

“Strange,” Sammi said, and her voice reverberated:
strange—strange—strange
. . .

Gabriel heard a movement behind them, a swift scraping of stone against stone. He spun to face the entryway just in time to see it sealed up with a deafening thud as a stone slab slid into place from above. He ran up to it, searched along the base and sides for handholds, anything he might get a grip on and use to lift it. There weren’t any—and even if there had been, the slab must have weighed half a ton at the least.

“My god,” Sammi said, running up behind him, “did I do—” The echoes of her voice came back at her in a cacophonous crescendo, louder even than before they’d been sealed in, the repeated syllables crashing over one another. She covered her ears and let the end of her sentence remain unspoken.

Gabriel looked up as the echoes began to fade. He remembered another cave he’d been in, a cave of ice near the South Pole where the echoes of his party’s voices had shaken loose a rain of stalactites, razor sharp and deadly to the touch. At least there were no stalactites here.

But there was also no vent to the outside, as far as he could tell, and therefore no source of air. If they couldn’t find a way out of this room . . .

He clapped once and heard the concussive sound rebounding from wall to wall. Like being inside a drum.

“Look,” Sammi said very quietly, and she pointed at the far wall as the room picked up her whispered word
and threw it back at her:
look—look—look—look—look
. . .

Gabriel shined the light where Sammi was pointing. On the wall, chiseled into the rock, was an inscription in French:

Lui seul avec la voix et la qualité d’un français pourrait entrer
.

The wall itself appeared to be constructed from several rectangular blocks of stone similar to the one that had sealed off the entryway. Beyond the blocks would be . . . another passage?
Only one with the voice and quality of a Frenchman may enter
. Enter—not exit. Clearly this was the way they had to go. Gabriel pressed against the stones with his shoulder. He couldn’t budge them.

He leaned close to Sammi until his lips were pressed against her ear. “Any ideas?” he said in the tiniest voice he’d ever managed.

She shook her head.

Gabriel studied the stone wall more closely. He moved his fingers along the seam between the stones, tracing the outlines of each slab. There were no hidden levers or catches—not that he could find, anyway. There had to be another way to open it.

The voice of a Frenchman?

“Bonjour,”
he said, with his mouth close to the wall.

And he heard something, a quiet scraping of metal deep inside the wall. He braced himself against the stone blocks again and shoved, hard, but nothing happened.

“Bonjour,”
he said again, more loudly, and heard the echoes of his voice careen around him. Clearly, speaking was having an effect—but he had no idea what he
needed to say.
“Vous êtes un tres jolie mur . . . ouvrez, s’il vous plait . . .”
He pushed against the stones as hard as he could, and though he could hear the internal mechanism moving within the wall, he might as well have been pushing against a mountain for all the good it did.