Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (23 page)

Gabriel held up a hand. “I’m all right. I’m
all right
. Really.” He looked at his sleeve and the reddened skin showing beneath. “It’s nothing a fifth of bourbon won’t cure.”

Sammi’s eyes dropped to the crate and to the corner of gray stone peeking out from the packing material. “The Stone! You got the Stone.”

Gabriel glanced at the emergency personnel, who were working hard to put out the fire. He held a finger to his lips.

“We can discuss it in the car,” he said.

And together they wheeled the crate away, into the night.

The plane was fueled and ready for takeoff from the same private airstrip at the Marrakesh airport they had previously used. They hadn’t been able to fit the crate in the trunk of the car, so Gabriel had lifted the Stone out and left it with Sammi in the backseat. He lugged it up the stairs of the plane now, surprised not to see Charlie waiting for them at the top of the steps. “Could use a hand here,” he called—but the cockpit door was already shut and with the engines revving loudly it was clear that Charlie was gearing up to start taxiing, so Gabriel carried the heavy piece the length of the plane on his own, his arms aching from the strain. His entire body ached, in fact, and the options for good bourbon were few, though he thought there might be a bottle stashed somewhere on board.

The plane took off a few minutes later and they soared into a predawn sky that was just beginning to turn all sorts of shades of pink and orange at the horizon. Sammi sat with her face pressed to the window, watching. Lucy sat beside her, head back and eyes shut. She wasn’t asleep, since from time to time she would nod in response to something Sammi said to her in French, but she wasn’t entirely awake either.

“Hey, Gabriel,” Lucy mumbled.

“Yes?” he said.

“Did I say thank you yet?”

“You don’t have to thank me. I’m your brother. It’s my job.”

She smiled. “Well, thank you anyway. You’re a good brother.”

“Get some sleep,” Gabriel said.

They sat in silence as the Challenger tilted, turned, and then leveled at around 30,000 feet. Gabriel looked out the window and watched Marrakesh disappear from view. It would be a long while before he had any desire to revisit it. He sighed and then turned his attention to an English-language newspaper he had bought from a vending machine at the airport.

Strapped snugly into the seat beside him, wrapped in a blanket, was the Second Stone. He was tempted to unwrap it just a bit, begin looking over its inscriptions; but there would be time enough for that on the second leg of the flight, from France to New York. For now, the thing to do was just leave it alone. It had already been subjected to more handling in the past few hours than in the two hundred years before, and he didn’t want to risk damaging it in some—

The plane lurched unexpectedly.

Sammi and Lucy both looked over at him.

“I’ll go see if everything’s okay,” Gabriel answered. He unbuckled his seat belt, stood, and walked down the aisle to the cockpit door. Gabriel knocked and called, “Charlie? What’s going on?”

There was no answer. Instead, the plane veered violently, knocking Gabriel off his feet and onto the seats next to him. Gabriel looked out the window. The scenery was swinging past the windows—they were changing course.

Gabriel got to his feet and tried the cockpit door. It was locked—which may have been standard operating procedure on commercial flights, but not on the Hunt Foundation’s private jet.

He rapped again. “Charlie! Open the door!”

Nothing.

This isn’t good
.

Unlike commercial airplanes, the door to the Challenger’s cockpit wasn’t break-proof, so it wasn’t difficult for Gabriel to raise his foot and kick the door in.

He followed the swinging door into the cockpit, then stopped dead.

Reza Arif stood inside the broken door. He held a Parabellum-Pistole in his right hand. The barrel was pointed at Gabriel’s chest.

“Back up, Gabriel. Hands in the air.”

“Goddamn it,” Gabriel muttered. He looked past Arif and saw that Charlie had a gag tied around his mouth and his hands cinched together with a pair of plastic crowd-restraint cuffs. Somehow he was still flying the plane. “How did you get on board?”

“How did I get on board?” Arif laughed. “Do you forget the connections I have in my country? I may be wanted by the police, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pull strings, especially at an airport owned by my good friends in the
Union Corse
. Access to a privately owned jet at the airstrip? That’s nothing.” He jerked his head toward Charlie. “Your pilot has been very accommodating. He knows that if he tries anything stupid we will all die. I’ve instructed him to take us where I want to go.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you, Gabriel. You’ll find out when we land. If you’re still alive when we land—it’s up to you.”

“And then?”

“And then we shall see. First of all, I will relieve you of the Second Stone, for the second time. Even though the Alliance isn’t around to take it off my hands anymore, I am sure I can find a buyer willing to pay a handsome price for it. I’ve already had an offer of forty-five million—but I think I can get at least a hundred. Do you think the Hunt Foundation would be interested in making a bid?”

“I think the Hunt Foundation would be interested in seeing you in a jail cell. Or a morgue.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Arif said. “I suggest you take your seat, now, Gabriel. Oh, and please hand me your weapon. You do still carry that revolver, don’t you?”

“Better than that German piece of junk you’re holding.”

“What are you talking about? A Luger in fine shape is one of the most sought-after collectibles in the world. It’s an excellent semiautomatic. Each magazine holds eight rounds, which is two more than your Colt. A thirty-three percent advantage.” He held out his hand. Gabriel reluctantly pulled his Colt out of its holster and handed it to Arif. Arid dropped it into a carry-on bag that sat on the copilot seat. “Thank you. Now back to your seat. And buckle up.”

Gabriel scowled at him, but turned when prodded with Arif’s gun. Arif followed him back.

“My two favorite women,” he said, nodding toward where Sammi and Lucy were sitting. “How nice to see you again.”

“You know that shooting a pistol in here wouldn’t be a very good idea,” Gabriel said. “Which makes your threat a little meaningless.”

“I don’t see you acting like it’s meaningless,” Arif
said. “And that’s because you know the nonsense you see in the movies isn’t true—that business about plummeting cabin pressure and people being sucked out through the windows. It’s good for one of your James Bond pictures, but it doesn’t work that way in real life.

“You’re right, of course, that I don’t
want
to fire the gun in here. But I will if I have to. So please, none of you do anything stupid, all right? This will all be over in a few hours. We’ll land, I’ll take the Stone, and you lot can go off to wherever you like, unmolested.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “You give your word.”

Arif shrugged.

“I know you, Reza. You have no intention of letting us go. The Hunt Foundation’s jet is going to mysteriously disappear, isn’t that right? And its pilot and three passengers along with it.”

Arif waved the Luger. “That’s enough. If you want to live, I suggest you be quiet.”

A new voice spoke then, coming from unseen speakers around the plane’s cabin. Looking over, Gabriel saw Sammi’s finger resting on one of the buttons on her armrest. The one with a picture of a telephone on it.

“Reza,”
Michael Hunt said,
“if you touch any of them, I will personally see that you pay for it.”

“You?” Arif said, with a laugh. He looked up at the plane’s ceiling, as though that’s where the voice was coming from. “Michael Hunt, with your books and your scrolls and your ancient languages? What will you do, Michael, bore me to death?”

“Don’t underestimate me, Reza,”
Michael said.
“You’re not the only shady operator I know.”

“ ‘Shady operator.’ You wound me, Michael, you really do. I aspired at least to ‘nefarious.’ ” He swung the gun to point at Sammi. “Enough. Hang up on him.”

Gabriel didn’t need any more opportunity than that. He launched himself out of his seat and jumped at Arif, tackling him from the side. Together they tumbled into the cabin’s aisle, Arif clawing at Gabriel’s face, Gabriel slugging him in the neck with one hand and grabbing hold of Arif’s gun hand with the other.

“What’s going on?”
Michael asked.
“Sammi? Lucy? Somebody—”

Arif swung his free hand, connecting painfully with Gabriel’s ear. Gabriel’s grip on the gun loosened and Arif yanked it free. He scooted backward and got an arm around Gabriel’s throat. Gabriel grabbed hold of Arif’s arm, trying to pull it off him, but a moment later felt the barrel of the Luger pressing against his head.

“I said,
enough
.” Arif was breathing heavily. “You people don’t listen, do you?”

“Will somebody tell me what’s happening?”

“I’ll tell you what’s happening, Michael,” Arif said, and jabbed the gun violently against Gabriel’s skull. “I am pointing a gun at your brother’s head and in a moment I am going to blow his brains out. After which I’ll decide just what to do with your sister. How do you like that?”

“Don’t—”

Lucy unbuckled her seat belt and stood, swaying a bit as she did.

Arif and Gabriel both spoke at the same instant. “Sit down!”

She shook her head.

And from behind her back pulled Charlie’s Browning.

Sammi looked down, surprised to see the gun gone from where she’d stowed it before boarding, in the shoulder bag under her seat.

“Ah,” Arif said, “so the little sister is armed. I wouldn’t
trust her to shoot straight, though, not drugged the way she is—would you, Gabriel?”

Gabriel looked at his sister, looked at the tip of the gun, wavering slightly in her unsteady hands. His head and Arif’s were side by side. A miss by an inch would kill the wrong man.

“She’s a Hunt, you son of a bitch,” Gabriel said. “I’d trust her with my life.” And he nodded slightly.

Lucy pulled the trigger.

Arif’s grip slackened.

Gabriel released himself from it, throwing the dead man’s arm to one side. Arif slumped in the aisle as Gabriel stood.

Lucy’s hands dropped, the gun sliding from them to the floor. Her whole body was shaking. Gabriel took her in his arms. As he did, she started to cry.

“
Damn it
,” Michael said, “
somebody tell me what’s going on!
”

“It’s okay,” Sammi said. “Everything’s okay.”

Gabriel finished carrying out the last bags of garbage from Lucy’s apartment and sat down on the couch. They had been in Nice for twenty-four hours, doing nothing but restoring her home to its original condition. Practically everything had to be junked. She needed a new computer, new furniture, a new paint job. There was a lot of work still to be done.

“Maybe I should just leave,” she said, dropping down on the couch beside him. “I never stay in one place too long, and this one . . . let’s just say the memories here aren’t the best.”

“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Sammi called from the other room.

Gabriel shrugged. “I can’t tell you whether to stay, Lucy. You’ve always done what you wanted to do. Is there anything keeping you here?”

She rubbed her chin. “I don’t know. Not really. My work I can do anywhere. There’s Sammi . . . but you’d come with me if I decided to move to Spain, right? Or Denmark?”

“Maybe Spain,” Sammi said, appearing in the doorway. She was wiping her hands on a rag. “Denmark’s too cold.”

“Or maybe you’d like to go back to New York with Gabriel,” Lucy said. “I’ve seen the way you two have been looking at each other.”

Gabriel and Sammi did look at each other then. Gabriel couldn’t have said what the look in Sammi’s eyes meant, or what the one in his own eyes did. He didn’t plan to settle down in New York any time soon, with Sammi or anyone else—but spending some more time with her wasn’t at all an unappealing notion.

A ringing coming from Gabriel’s pocket broke the moment. He reached into it for the new cell phone Michael had overnighted to him. It had at least twice as many buttons on it as the last one, and no doubt had reception even if you were in outer space.

“Hello,” Gabriel said, flipping it open.

“Ah, Gabriel,” Michael said. “Glad to see you got the phone.”

“That’s sort of a funny thing to call me to check. I mean, if I hadn’t gotten it and you tried calling—”

“I didn’t call you to check,” Michael said. “I called you to say I’m on my way.”

“To Nice?” Gabriel said.

“To the third floor,” Michael said. A moment later footsteps sounded on the other side of the front door. A fist knocked briskly.

Gabriel turned to Lucy.

“You set this up,” she accused.

“Not me,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t—”

Another knock.

Gabriel closed the cell phone. “I bet he has a way of tracking this thing.”

“You think?” Lucy said.

“Do you want me to tell him to go away?” Gabriel said. “I will if you want me to.”

She stood. “No.”

She walked to the door, swung it open.

Michael was standing there in a suit and topcoat, hands in his coat pockets.

“Hey, Michael,” she said.

“Hello.”

She walked back to the couch. “You can come in, but I’m warning you, the place is a mess.”

Michael stepped inside. “That’s okay,” he said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “For nine years.”

Gabriel went over to Sammi. “Come on,” he said.

“Let’s go back to the place with that awful red wine, and you can finally tell me how you managed to escape from this apartment the day we met.”

“A good magician—” Sammi began, but Gabriel stopped her with a kiss. It went on for some time. When they finally separated they saw Lucy and Michael both staring at them.

“Maybe
we
should go,” Lucy said, “and leave you two here.”