Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (11 page)

The truck only had a quarter of a tank of gas and lousy brakes, but Gabriel figured the former would be enough to get them to the docks at Chios Town if the latter didn’t cause them to drive off the side of the mountain first.

Sheba was sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the two lengths of rope coiled in her lap. Tigranes and Christos were in the back of the truck, enjoying a bumpy ride. Gabriel kept the gas as close to the floor as he could while still making all the hairpin turns and switchbacks necessary to get to the bottom of the mountain. There was no telling how long they had before DeGroet’s men regrouped, found another truck and more supplies, and headed back up this narrow road. He really didn’t want to meet them head on.

As he drove, Gabriel filled Sheba in on what she’d missed. Her eyebrows rose quizzically when he came to the part about the living sphinxes.

“Really,” she said. “He told you there was a real sphinx.”

“Two of them. A boy sphinx in Egypt and a girl sphinx in Greece.”

“And they met.”

“Well, when Oedipus chased her out of Thebes, she had to go somewhere, didn’t she?” Gabriel slowed to take a particularly nasty turn, then sped up in the straightaway that followed.

“I thought the story was that she threw herself to her death off the side of a cliff after he answered her riddle,” Sheba said.

“She threw herself, but not to her death. Wings, remember?”

“Ah. Of course.”

“After a stop in Chios for, oh, a hundred years or so, she headed over to Egypt where she met her counterpart in Giza.”

“A hundred years? Just how long are these sphinxes supposed to live?”

“Oh, a few thousand years, give or take,” Gabriel said.

“According to the old man in the back of our truck,” Sheba said.

“According to Homer,” Gabriel said. He was silent for a moment. “If you ask the old man in the back of our truck.”

“All right, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I buy it. The lady sphinx spends a hundred years in Chios, then heads over to Giza, where the old Father of Fear wines and dines her, shows off the nifty statue of him they’ve got over there, and then what?”

“Back to Chios. She stays there for the rest of her life, from about 900 BC till about 250 or so, inspiring art and architecture and lending her face to the city’s coins. And somewhere in there she meets a young local boy and tells him her story…and he eventually tells it to the rest of the world when he grows up to become Homer.”

“I see,” Sheba said.

“Well, that makes one of us,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know what’s crazier, the idea of a three-thousand-year-old monster telling her story to a young Homer or the idea of a seventy-year-old monster chasing around after her lost treasure today.”

“Well, crazy or not, we know at least the second part’s true,” Sheba said.

“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “And if we knew it was just some archaeological treasure he was after, maybe we could let him have it. But it’s not. Or
maybe
it’s not—nobody knows. But we can’t take the chance.”

“Of what, exactly?” Sheba said. “Letting DeGroet get his hands on something that would give him the power to terrify with a glance? It’s not like the man isn’t plenty scary as it is.”

“It’s not a question of being scary,” Gabriel said. “If you believe Tigranes, it’s the power literally to paralyze with fear. And not just one person—a hundred people, a thousand at once, however many the sphinx looked upon. And with modern technology at DeGroet’s disposal, the ability to broadcast to millions…”

Sheba laughed, then stopped when she noticed Gabriel wasn’t laughing along. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I grant you, it could all be nonsense—DeGroet could be chasing after a myth. But if it’s not and he’s not…we can’t let him find what he’s after.”

“And how are we supposed to stop him?”

“By finding it ourselves first,” Gabriel said. “And while we’re at it, by finding him.”

“Oh, yeah? Did that map on the wall show you where he is?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “But I’ve got something that will.”

He reached into his pocket and held up Andras’ cell phone.

The sun was hanging low behind the mountains when they pulled up to the ferry landing. The ferry was there, bobbing in the water and bumping against the row of
old Goodyears lashed to the pilings as a cushion. Across the way, through the late afternoon haze, the coast of Turkey loomed. He could see the battlements of Çeşme Castle faintly in the distance.

“Book passage for four,” Gabriel said, passing Sheba a handful of money, all he had left except for a single hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

“They’re coming with us?”

“We can’t leave them here. We’ll find a safe place for them on the other side.”

“And where are you going?”

“To find a telephone,” Gabriel said, and he headed off toward a low bunker with cement walls that looked as though it served some official function. It was a law the world over: officials had telephones.

He had to ask several people dressed in crisp uniforms before being directed to a payphone hanging from a wall. Stickers on its side advertised taxi services and island tours. Gabriel dialed the operator and asked to place a collect call to New York.

The phone rang four times before Michael answered it. “Hello?”

“Will you accept a collect call,” the operator asked in heavily accented English, “from a Mr. Gabriel—”

“Yes, yes, absolutely, operator—put him through. Gabriel? Gabriel? Are you there? Are you okay?”

“Calm down, Michael. I’m fine.”

“Is Sheba…?”

“She’s fine, too. We’re both a little banged up—”

“I knew it,” Michael said miserably.

“—but nothing that won’t heal. Now, listen, Michael, I need something from you.”

“Anything.”

“I need the name of someone in this area who could hack into a busted cell phone and tell me what the last
number it got called by was—and then trace that number.”

“Where are you?”

“Chios. But in a few minutes I’m going to be headed to Turkey.”

“Çeşme?”

“That’s right,” Gabriel said. He heard Michael typing on a computer keyboard.

“Mm,” Michael muttered to himself. “No, he’s…no…”

Gabriel turned to look out the window. Dusk was descending suddenly, as it always did in this part of the world; one minute it was still light out, the next you’d be looking at a starry sky.

“Do you think you could make it up to Istanbul?” Michael asked suddenly.

“If we had to,” Gabriel said. “Why? Who’s in Istanbul?”

“There’s someone the Foundation has used before—he goes by the name ‘Cipher,’ moves around a lot, but last we heard he was in Istanbul. Never met the man myself, just e-mail back and forth, but he really knows his stuff. Computers, phones—what you’re talking about would be right up his alley.”

“How’d you find him?”

“He came to us,” Michael said. “Couple of years back, offered to help with a project we were working on at the time. Don’t know how he found out about it…but then he wouldn’t be very good at what he does if he hadn’t been able to, right?”

“I suppose,” Gabriel said, not much liking the sound of it. He preferred dealing with people who went by their names, not clever handles like “Cipher.” For that matter, he preferred dealing with almost anything to dealing with computers and cell phones. But sometimes
you had to. “Can you send him a message, let him know I’m on my way?”

“Already done,” Michael said. “How can I contact you to let you know what he—” Michael stopped in midsentence. “Well, well, will you look at that.”

“What?”

“I just got a message back from him,” Michael said. “Literally, right now. From Cipher.”

“Well, that should make you feel important,” Gabriel said.

“You, too—listen to this: ‘The famous Gabriel Hunt, coming here? How could I say no?’ That’s what he wrote. ‘Tell him to meet me at the Basilica Cistern at midnight.’ The famous Gabriel Hunt. How do you like that?”

“Not much,” Gabriel said.

“Can you make it there by midnight?”

Gabriel looked at his watch. “Only if I hang up now,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there. And Michael—”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” He hung up.

He returned to the pier, threaded his way through a small crowd to where the ferry was tied up. Tigranes and Christos were already on board. Sheba was waiting at the foot of the ramp, two tickets in her hand. Her face lit up when she saw Gabriel coming toward her—but then her expression changed to one of alarm.

Gabriel looked back over his shoulder. Coming up the long road to the docks was a jeep and at its wheel was a man he recognized even at this distance—it was the knife artist from Anavatos, the one who’d thrown him off the cliff.

“Come on,” he said, “get on board.” He hustled Sheba up the ramp and, reaching over to the bitt the ferry’s hawser was coiled around, he yanked the great rope free.

“We are not ready to depart yet!” a crewman said, rushing up.

“Hundred dollars says you are,” Gabriel said and handed over his last bill. He patted the man on the shoulder. “Go.”

The man scurried up front and a moment later the engine sputtered to life.

By the time the jeep squealed to a stop by the dock, the ferry was twenty yards out to sea and plowing toward Turkey. He saw the driver leap out of the truck and run up to the water’s edge. He tore the cap he was wearing from his head and dashed it to the wooden planks at his feet. “We will find you!” he shouted at the departing ship.
“Wherever you run, we will find you!”

“Or vice versa,” Gabriel whispered.

The Basilica Cistern had stood in more or less its present form, Gabriel knew, since the sixth century, when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great had had it constructed. It was hard to imagine that it had once served a municipal function, supplying water to the Topkapi Palace. A grand underground space filled with ranks of colossal columns, hundreds of them, each thirty feet high, stretched as far as the eye could see beneath an arched and vaulted ceiling. The Turks called it
Yerebatan Sarayi,
the sunken palace. Each column was lit from below with flame red lights, giving the space an ominous appearance. You expected a man in a cape and domino mask to step into view at any moment from behind one of the columns, carrying a wax-sealed missive—or a dagger to slip between your ribs. Which no doubt was why this man Cipher had chosen it for their meeting. His name itself suggested his taste for the dramatic.

In one corner of the space, a quartet was playing for an appreciative audience of tourists seated in metal folding chairs, the sounds of lute and zither, flute and fiddle filling the air with mournful Ottoman melodies. Gabriel steered clear of the area. Cipher wouldn’t be caught out in the open like that, he felt sure; men who spent their lives behind the screens of laptop computers infiltrating global telecommunications networks generally didn’t congregate with tour groups at midnight concerts.

Although you never knew. Gabriel didn’t generally congregate with tour groups himself, yet he’d spent most of the past five hours on a bus with a church group out of West Virginia who’d taken a day trip to Çeş;me to see the castle and the museum and the seaside and now had the long trip back to Istanbul to look at each other’s digital photographs and share loud anecdotes about the marvels they had seen. Sheba had been the one to spot the coach parked outside the castle, its side painted with the
VARAN TURIZM
logo, its door open, the driver standing outside having a smoke. She’d also been the one to talk him into letting the four of them occupy the uncomfortable pair of benches in the rear by the lavatory in return for what little cash they had left and an extorted kiss on the cheek. Christos and Tigranes had piled on board gratefully and slept through most of the ride, the younger man leaning up against the window and snoring softly, the older sitting stock-still and silent in his seat.

“Your father?” one of the women from West Virginia had asked, and Gabriel had said, “My rabbi,” and she’d left him alone after that.

It was just as well that they’d made the trip, Gabriel thought as he circled around the interior of the cistern, pausing to look at every man who was there by himself and giving each a chance to look at him. In order to get a flight out to Sri Lanka they’d have had to make their way to one of the larger cities eventually, either to Istanbul or Ankara, and the drive would have been just as arduous either way. Still, around the end of the third hour, when the hymns had started, he had found himself wishing that they’d turned up some other form of transportation.

As he completed one full circuit of the space, he spotted a man standing between the two Medusa-head pillars in the rear corner, his face lit by the glow from a
palmtop computer, his stylus clicking away across its illuminated surface. Gabriel walked over, stood beside him, waited for him to look up. He wore thick glasses and had his hair cut short, with a cowlick standing up in back. The stubble dotting his lantern jaw said he hadn’t shaved in a day or two. Finally he put the stylus away and thumbed off the light. “Do I…know you?” he said.

“Cipher?”

He looked blank. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, this will be perfect, darling,” a woman’s voice interrupted. Turning, they both saw a petite brunette approaching. She was carrying a camera in one hand and had a notebook and pen in the other. “I can have them hide in here from the guards when they’re being chased—” Then she noticed Gabriel. “Hello,” she said. And to the man: “Want to introduce me?”

“I’d love to,” the man said, “but we hadn’t quite gotten to the point of introducing ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, “I thought you were someone else—”

“I’m Naomi,” the woman said, extending a hand. “We’re here doing research. I write historical fantasy novels and my husband here writes adventure stories.” Gabriel took her hand, shook it briefly, released it. “And you’re…?”

“Gabriel,” he said reluctantly.

“I knew it,” the man said. “I
do
know you. Gabriel Hunt, right? Darling, you remember, that book with the Phoenician temple art. You wrote that, right?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“But I recognize you, from the photo on the back.”

“I just wrote the introduction,” Gabriel said. “The publisher slapped my picture on it. Now, I’m sorry but I really have to go—”

“So soon?” came another voice, and a second woman
walked out from behind the nearer of the columns with the fearsome head of Medusa carved at the base. She was slender—no, more than that, she was skinny, almost gaunt; even in the red-tinged light Gabriel could see that her skin was pale, her cheeks hollow. She wore her dark hair chopped in a spiky pixie cut with ragged bangs and had a row of four or five silver rings in each earlobe. A tattoo of a serpent with a flicking tongue trailed down her throat, its tail disappearing beneath her chin. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, both of which looked battered enough that they probably wouldn’t survive another laundering, which made it just as well that they didn’t seem likely to get one any time soon. Her heavy boots added at least three inches to her height, but even so she only came to Gabriel’s chin. Over one shoulder was slung the strap of a bulging canvas satchel whose contents looked like they might weigh almost as much as she did.

But none of these things about her were what made Gabriel take a step back in disbelief.

He did that because he recognized her.

“The famous Gabriel Hunt,” she said. “Stay a while, why don’t you? Greet your fans.”

“Lucy?”
Gabriel said, and a wicked smile crossed her face.

“Cifer,” she said.

“Excuse us, please,” Gabriel said and pulled his sister by the arm toward an empty section of the cistern.

“That wasn’t very polite,” she said.

“What are you
doing
here?”

“I live here,” she said. “For now. You’re the one who’s dropping in out of nowhere and heading right back out an hour later.”

“Does Michael know…?”

“What, that the mysterious guy who’s been helping
him out with one thing or another for the past two years is his kid sister? Not a chance. And you’re not going to tell him, either. Not if you ever want to get your e-mail delivered again.”

“I don’t have e-mail.”

She rolled her eyes. “Figures. Fine. If you don’t want a tax audit each year for the next decade. Computers are powerful things, Gabriel.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Well, don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of telling Michael. It would break his heart.”

She looked off to one side. “He wouldn’t care.”

“Are you kidding? He hasn’t seen his sister in nine years, hasn’t heard from her, not a letter, not a call—as far as he knows. If he found out you’ve been playing him for a fool—”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “I’ve been helping him.”

“You’ve been lying to him.”

“Helpfully,” Lucy said.

Gabriel shook his head. He gave her a long look, taking her in from head to toe. “What’s happened to you? You haven’t been eating well.”

“I eat fine,” she said. “Just, you know, vegan. It’s a bitch getting your protein. But on the other hand the food’s cheap.”

“Cheap?” Gabriel said. He lowered his voice. “My god, Lucy, you shouldn’t be worried about money. You could have all the money you want—more than you could want—”

“Not that money. I don’t want it. It’s theirs, not ours.”

Gabriel put a hand on her shoulder but she shook it off. “They’re dead,” he said gently.

“They’re
missing,
” she said.

“It’s been nine years,” Gabriel said.

“It’s been nine years since you saw me, too. Am I dead?”

“Pretty close,” Gabriel said. “Look at you.” He pulled her heavy bag off her shoulder, slung it over his. She let him. “Come on. I’m buying you a proper meal.” Then he remembered he had no cash left. He went through a mental list of places he knew in the area that would be open at midnight and where the proprietor might throw the bill away. “Devrim. He’ll feed you.”

She followed him up the stairs to street level. “No meat,” she warned. He didn’t say anything. “Did you hear me? I’m serious. Not on my plate, not on yours, or I’m walking.”

“All right, princess,” Gabriel said.

“Call me that again and—”

“I know,” Gabriel said, “you’re walking.”

“No,” Lucy said. “Call me that again and you’re
not
walking, because I’ll break both your legs.”

They stared each other down. Then a crooked grin crept onto Gabriel’s face and, reaching out, he pulled her into a hug. After a moment, he could feel her thin arms digging hard into his back.

“My god, Lucy, it’s so good to see you again.”

She burrowed her forehead into his chest. When she spoke he could barely make out the words. “Why couldn’t you find them?”

He stroked back her hair. “I tried, Lucy. I tried.”

Devrim’s place was off Tevkifhane Street, up a flight of stairs. You couldn’t see it from outside. You just had to know it was there.

The big man greeted Gabriel warmly, slapping a meaty paw on either side of Gabriel’s hand and shaking vigorously. Then he turned to Lucy. “And who is this creature you bring to me, this starved thing? We fatten her up, no?”

“Gabriel—” she said, but he shushed her. She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped one foot.

“This is my sister,” Gabriel told Devrim.

“Ah. My apologies, miss. Any relative of Gabriel’s…” His voice trailed off. “Sit, I bring wine.”

They took a table in the corner farthest from the door and turned a pair of high-backed wooden chairs to screen them from view. Not that there was anyone else here at the moment, and not that Devrim himself would pry, but—

When Lucy began unpacking the satchel, Gabriel felt a bit like a surgical trainee on his first day in the OR, watching the doctors lay out instruments of which he didn’t even know the names, much less the functions. He sipped from the fat-bellied goblet of wine Devrim had brought and watched Lucy hook cables from this device to that, looked on as a little screen flickered to life and text began racing across it. “Spill that wine on anything you see and you’re a dead man,” Lucy said, her fingers darting nimbly over a keyboard.

“Not a problem,” Gabriel said, and drained the glass.

It was good wine. Devrim always managed to get his hands on the best.

“So Michael says you need a phone number traced,” Lucy said. “You’ve got what, a cell phone that called the number?”

“I’ve got a broken cell phone,” Gabriel said, “that was called by the number.” He took Andras’ phone from his pocket, set it down, and slid it across the scarred wooden surface of the table. Lucy looked at it. The screen had a jagged crack down its center and the phone’s hinged top half hung lopsidedly from the bottom. Lucy pressed the power button a couple of times and nothing happened.

“You don’t make things easy, do you?”

“Rarely,” Gabriel said.

Lucy pried open a panel at the back of the phone,
popped out the battery, and dug around inside the body of the phone. She slapped it twice, hard, against the heel of her hand, as though trying to jar something loose, then went digging again.

“Go talk to your friend,” she said, not looking at him as she poked at the phone’s innards. “I’m going to be a while.”

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Take your time.”

He found Devrim at the top of the stairs, smoking a long, thin, brown cigarette, the heavy smell of Turkish tobacco hanging in the corridor.

“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.