Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (2 page)

A second blast followed the first, tearing great gouts out of the wall opposite the door.

Gabriel put a finger to his lips, then gestured in the direction of the bedroom. Sheba nodded and began crawling that way on her hands and knees. Gabriel unholstered his Colt, armed it, waited one second…two seconds…three—and then popped up when he saw a shadow on the ruined surface of the door inch closer.

In a glimpse he saw the shotgun wielder, a big bear of a man in a black windbreaker, and behind him a pair of skinnier whippet types, hawk-nosed, their severe hair-lines shaved down to stubble. All three were holding handguns, though only the two in back had them pointed at Gabriel.

Gabriel fired twice and dodged away, not waiting to see who he’d hit. Return fire sounded loudly and bullet holes blossomed in the wall behind where Gabriel had been standing. A ricochet zinged into the mirror, which shattered, shards of glass pouring onto the floor with a sound like rain. This was the first bit of damage that really pissed Gabriel off—that mirror had been an antique. But there’d be time to mourn it later. If he was lucky.

The Colt was empty; he jammed it back in its holster and cast about for another weapon he could use.

Hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall was an
aboriginal boomerang he’d been given by the chief of a tribe in New Guinea. Gabriel had learned to throw it while he was there, and if he were in one of the wide open spaces for which it had been designed he might have pulled off a slick maneuver, taking out multiple assailants with one flick of his wrist. But he was in a Manhattan apartment, where the best thing you could say for a boomerang was that it was a pretty good-sized stick. When he saw one of the gunmen’s hands come into view, pistol extended, Gabriel swung the boomerang down, smashing the man’s wrist. The gun fell to the ground and Gabriel kicked it out of sight under a couch.

The second of the two skinny gunmen elbowed his fellow aside and thrust his pistol in Gabriel’s face, but Gabriel caught it backhanded with an upswing of the boomerang as the man squeezed off a shot. The bullet flew over Gabriel’s shoulder, into a window, and out over 70th Street. Gabriel swung once more, striking the man in the temple with a blow that split the wooden boomerang in half. The man crumpled. But behind him the other gunman had recovered sufficiently to leap forward, the squat blade of a boot knife shining in his left hand.

Dropping the remnants of the boomerang, Gabriel threw up an arm to block a jab that would otherwise have given him an impromptu tracheotomy. Then he swung his other fist into the man’s gut. But the man didn’t fold up in pain; on the contrary, he took the punch without reacting at all, not surprising given the rockhard solidity of the abdomen that had met Gabriel’s knuckles.

Pressing with a forearm that had none of the showy bulk of a weightlifter’s but all the strength, the man forced his knife closer and closer to Gabriel’s face, millimeter by millimeter. With his free hand, Gabriel grabbed the man’s injured wrist. The man squealed in
pain and Gabriel took the opportunity to lunge in and deliver a headbutt to his forehead.

If the man’s abdomen had been hard, that was nothing compared to his skull—Gabriel’s vision swam for a moment and his ears rang with the sound of the impact. But the strength went out of the other man’s arms, and he dropped to his knees amid the shards of the mirror. Gabriel lifted one of his own knees into the man’s chin and the guy slumped to one side, unconscious.

“Not so fast,” a voice said.

Gabriel looked up into the twin barrels of the shotgun.

“I reloaded it,” the man in the black windbreaker said, looking less like a bear now than a wolf, his eyes narrowed to slits, a vicious, hungry expression on his face. “In case you had the idea that maybe I hadn’t.”

Gabriel put his hands up, annoyed. Had his own shots hit no one at all?

“I always assume,” Gabriel said, “that any gun that’s pointed at me is loaded.”

“That’s smart,” the man said. “Now step back—over there by the couch will be fine.”

Gabriel stepped backwards toward the couch where he’d kicked the gun earlier. Looking over, he could just make out the shape of the barrel in the shadow by one leg. If the guy allowed him to sit down at that end—

An enormous clang sounded, like the ringing of a churchbell, and looking back Gabriel saw the man go down, shotgun and all. Sheba was standing above him with a newly dented brass coal scuttle clutched between her hands.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said.

“No problem,” Sheba said, tossing the scuttle aside. It clanged again when it landed. “I owed you one.”

“You owed me two,” Gabriel said, “but who’s counting. Come on.”

He led her back to the stairs. Before they made it one flight down, though, they heard a clatter of footsteps racing up toward them.

“Other way,” Gabriel said. They turned around and pounded back up, past the fifth floor, to the heavy metal door that led out onto the building’s roof. Even with the door shut behind them they could hear the footsteps and shouts of the men coming closer.

“Fire escape,” Gabriel said and pulled Sheba along.

At the edge of the roof they both leaned over the side, looked down at the topmost fire escape balcony some dozen feet below. Some old buildings in New York had metal ladders connecting the fire escape to the roof, but this wasn’t one of them. Some also had wide, modern fire escapes with protective railings to keep you from slipping off, but this wasn’t one of those either. The only way down from here was to climb over the edge of the roof, dangle, and let go—and if you slipped, you slipped five stories to the pavement.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sheba said. Her face had gone pale, much the same as it had in Hungary; sixty feet wasn’t three hundred, but a fall would be just as fatal. “Gabriel, I don’t know if I can—”

“Of course you can,” he said. “Here, I’ll lower you.” He wedged himself up against the stone wall at the edge of the roof and held tightly to her forearms as she carefully climbed onto the ledge. She extended one leg over the edge, then moved the other off, and as he suddenly found himself bearing her entire weight, Gabriel lost hold of one of her arms.

“Gabriel!”

“It’s okay, I’ve got you.” And he did, if only by one arm. He bent at the waist and carefully lowered her as far as he could. Her feet were still some distance from the platform. “Ready? I’m going to let go.”

“One second,” she said, and kicked off her heels
again. One landed on the fire escape—the other slipped between the widely spaced metal laths and plummeted to the concrete below.

“Ready?” Gabriel said again.

“Wait—”

The door banged open behind him then, and Gabriel let go. He heard Sheba’s scream and a clatter as she landed, but he couldn’t spare a glance to see how she was doing. Not with three men pouring through the doorway onto the roof, three men who all matched Gabriel’s six-foot height but topped him in breadth and whose revolvers were probably not as lacking in bullets. That’s what he had to assume, anyway.

He quickly ran through some options in his head. There wasn’t any place he could run—it was a small roof. There wasn’t much for him to take shelter behind, just a single roof fan in a metal housing, and if he tried that they could split up and pin him down from both sides. Maybe if he could somehow make it past them to the stairs—

Gabriel turned and vaulted over the side of the building.

There was no second cable waiting for him this time. No first cable, for that matter. Just a narrow fire escape and a five-story drop.

For an instant, as he fell through the air, Gabriel found himself thinking about how much of his adult life he’d spent jumping from high places with people who wanted to kill him close behind. It was a topic, he decided, that might reward reflection sometime, when he could think about it at his leisure. But as his feet hit the fire escape and his legs buckled under him and he slid toward the edge, his mind was drawn sharply back to more pressing matters.

Scrabbling with one arm, he caught hold of the last of the laths just as he plunged over the side. He held on
tight and found himself swinging from it in a great arc, back and forth, like a kid on a jungle gym. At the inner end of one swing he let go, dropping onto the next balcony down.

Glancing between the laths at his feet, he saw Sheba two flights below him, a shoe in one hand, descending as quickly as she could manage. Glancing up, he saw the men on the roof looking back down and then the barrels of their guns as they extended them toward him.

Three triggers were pulled simultaneously, and three bullets went spanging off various bits of metal between them and him.

Gabriel got his legs under him and, staying low, hurried down the metal steps. From overhead he heard the sound of first one, then another, of the men landing on the fire escape. The third attempted it but missed. A moment later he fell past Gabriel, arms windmilling desperately; their eyes locked for an instant and then he was gone. The sound when he hit the ground was wet and terrible.

Gabriel chanced another look down and was briefly concerned when he didn’t see Sheba below him. Then he realized it was because she’d already reached the bottom. He caught sight of her running along the sidewalk toward Park Avenue, both shoes in her hands now, bare feet pounding against the pavement.

Another bullet flew past him, this one within inches of his face. He saw Sheba stop and look back. “Go!” he shouted. “Don’t wait for me. Just go!”

She turned again—and ran head-on into the arms of a man who’d stepped around the corner into her path.

He was at least a foot taller than her and quite a bit heavier; despite the warm weather he wore a heavy overcoat and black leather gloves. And when she tried to back away, he wrapped his long arms around her and lifted her entirely off her feet.

The shoes fell from her hands.

Gabriel hurried to get to the bottom of the fire escape, but by the time he made it, leaping over the side of the lowest balcony and landing in a crouch, Sheba had already been bundled, screaming, into a black car that peeled away from the curb in a cloud of exhaust.

He ran after the car, chasing it out into the street as more gunshots exploded behind him. The car swung around the corner onto Park, where for once—this being a weekend morning in New York City in the middle of August—traffic was practically nonexistent. There’d be no catching it on foot. Gabriel looked back the other way, saw a yellow cab speeding downtown, and stepped into its path. The car screeched to a stop just inches from his legs.

The cabbie, a turbaned and bearded Sikh, stuck his head out the driver-side window and shouted, “You wish to be killed? Is this what you desire?”

Gabriel threw open the door to the backseat, piled inside. “You see that car,” he said to the driver in Punjabi, “the black one, there? Follow it. Don’t let it out of your sight. A woman’s life depends on it.”

Through the rear window, Gabriel saw the men from the roof round the corner. One of them kicked Sheba’s shoes into the gutter as he ran. The other raised his gun.

“Now!” Gabriel said, ducking.

The cabbie glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the rear windshield of his car shatter. He put the gas pedal to the floor and, swerving around a double-parked delivery van, roared off.

They made it three blocks before a sedan pulled in behind them, a silver Audi with smoked-glass windows and a dent the size of a melon in the hood. The four silver circles across the car’s grill made Gabriel think of the ring in the nose of a bull, particularly when the driver revved the engine angrily and the car surged forward. The Audi came within a few feet of the cab’s rear bumper before the taxi driver—Rajiv Narindra, according to the ID displayed on the back of his seat—swerved again, nearly sideswiping a street-corner hotdog cart in his haste to change lanes.

Above the next intersection, the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Narindra sped through it. It turned red before the Audi reached it, but they sped through as well. A chorus of honking erupted behind them.

“Who are these men?” Narindra shouted back at Gabriel.

“They are hired killers, abductors,” Gabriel said, testing the limits of his Punjabi vocabulary. “They have taken a friend of mine and…mean to…” Damn it, what was the word? “Harm her.”

“Why?”

“If I could tell you that,” Gabriel muttered, in English this time, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He bent forward over the front seat, thankful to have gotten into one of the minority of cabs in New York
that didn’t have a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers. He rifled through the pile of odds and ends cluttering the passenger seat: a thick, spiral-bound book of maps, a handful of ballpoint pens, half a sandwich, an unopened bottle of Snapple. Narindra turned the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Gabriel against his shoulder, and then swung it back to the right.

“Do you have anything we could use as…” Gabriel’s language skills petered out again. Desperately he resorted to English. “A weapon—a gun…a, a, a
jack,
something heavy—anything you could use as a weapon?”

Narindra shook his head. “A weapon? This I do not have.”

Up ahead, Gabriel saw the black car speeding up, pulling away. A glance at their own speedometer showed they were doing close to fifty themselves.

From behind, meanwhile, came the
crack-crack-crack
of gunfire. Narindra cut across two lanes and then back.

Beggars can’t be choosers.
Gabriel grabbed the Snapple bottle and, turning in one swift movement, cocked his arm and launched the bottle through the open space where the rear windshield had been. The driver of the Audi pulled to one side to avoid it, but the bottle struck, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the glass.

That was something—but hardly enough. And now he was out of projectiles completely.

An arm holding a gun emerged from the Audi’s passenger-side window and fire erupted from the barrel. Gabriel dropped to his knees in the cab’s footwell. A line of bullet holes stitched across the back of the front seat, throwing puffs of padding into the air. That it was only shreds of foam rubber raining down on him and not blood was just dumb luck, Gabriel knew—two feet to the left and he’d have been hurtling down Park Avenue in a cab with a corpse at the wheel.

He peeked over the front seat again, looked at the dashboard. There had to be
something
—

The meter.

Mounted on a metal bar, tallying up his fare in 40-cent increments, a curl of cash register tape trailing from the receipt slot at the top—it was a compact unit but looked heavy, the perfect combination. It also looked firmly attached, but what had once been mounted had to be removable. It would be easier with the proper tools, of course, but—

Gabriel lunged forward, took hold of the meter with one hand on either side, and wrenched it violently.

“What are you doing?” Narindra cried. “I am responsible for that!”

“I’ll—” Gabriel wrenched at it again. “I’ll pay—” One more time.
Come on.
“I’ll pay for it,” he shouted, pulling and twisting till with a snap of breaking plastic and metal the unit came free. It made a sad little grinding noise as it lost power. “And the windshield,” Gabriel said breathlessly. “I’ll cover it all, just keep driving.”

“Crazy, you are crazy,” Narindra said, and Gabriel didn’t bother to argue. Instead, he turned back, crawled halfway out onto the trunk of the cab and, anchoring his feet against the back of the rear seat, rose up on his knees, hefted the taxi meter in both hands, took aim, and hurled it directly at the Audi’s windshield.

A direct hit would smash the glass this time—it was already cracked. And whatever smashed the glass would continue on through the glass into the driver’s face at a relative velocity of somewhere north of fifty miles per hour. Realizing this, the driver pulled the wheel violently to the right, and this time he succeeded in avoiding the missile, though only by inches. What he didn’t succeed in avoiding was the curb, which vanished under his right front tire as the Audi leapt onto the sidewalk; or the fire hydrant by the curb, which crumpled the front
of the car like it was made of tinfoil. The driver and his passenger were both hurled forward and would have collided painfully—maybe fatally—with the steering wheel in one case and the windshield in the other, had it not been for the car’s airbags, which deployed with showroom precision.

Safe cars, Audis.

Gabriel carefully crawled backwards, ducking back into the cab and collapsing in the backseat. He saw Narindra eyeing him in the mirror.

This was the moment of truth—would he stop the car and insist that Gabriel get out, which in practice would mean losing the other car, and Sheba, possibly permanently? Or would Narindra keep going, to help save a young woman’s life?

“You say you will pay?” Narindra said.

“Anything,” Gabriel said. “Name your price.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Five thousand,” Gabriel said.

“You are crazy,” Narindra said. But he kept driving.

The black car was half a mile ahead by then, but they made up some distance when it turned crosstown and began plowing through the slightly denser traffic on the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. They reached the tunnel entrance just a few hundred yards behind the other car and spotted it again the instant they emerged.

They were on the highway now, barreling through the wilds of northern New Jersey, and could really put on some speed, but at Gabriel’s request Narindra hung back, leaving several car lengths and at least one lane between them and the black car at all times. From the rear they presented an unusual sight, with the missing windshield and the trunk riddled with bullet holes, but from the front there was nothing out of the ordinary—just a New York cab taking someone on a short hop
outside the city—and Gabriel was counting on their being able to go unnoticed, as long as they didn’t get too close.

It was the only choice. Gabriel couldn’t see trying to run the other car off the road or bring them to a stop in some other way, not with Sheba’s life at stake and Narindra at risk, too—especially not when the occupants of the other car were almost certainly better armed than he was. The thing to do was to find out where they were taking her; he could regroup then, return with the proper equipment and help, maybe even involve the police. Or maybe he’d mount a solo rescue the way he had in Hungary. There were all sorts of options. But first he needed to know where they were planning to stash her.

It was with a sinking feeling that Gabriel saw the airfields and hangars of Teterboro Airport loom at the horizon.

Narindra said, “They seem to be headed for the—”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, “I see it.”

Stashing didn’t look like it was in the cards.

He fingered the cell phone in his pocket. He hated the things, but even he had to concede there were times when they were indispensable. He speed-dialed Michael’s number and, while it rang, dug a handful of hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket. He passed three to Narindra across the tattered back of the front seat. “A down payment,” he said. Then, to Michael: “Two things, Michael, and I don’t have much time to talk. First: I need you to take care of someone for me…a cab driver, his name is Rajiv Narindra, he’ll be calling you…five thousand dollars…he can tell you that himself. Just make sure he gets what he needs—it’s got to be enough to repair his taxi plus some extra. That’s right, on the Foundation’s tab.” Gabriel paused while Michael peppered him with questions, most of which he couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to and the remainder of which he
didn’t want to. When his brother fell silent again, Gabriel said, “Second thing: I may not be home for a little while. I’ve got a feeling there’s some plane travel in my future.”

Michael’s tinny voice sounded weary through the phone’s speaker. “When has there ever not been?”

“Well, this is a little different than usual. I don’t have a ticket, I don’t have a passport, and I don’t know where I’m headed.”

“Getting away from it all?”

“I wish,” Gabriel said. “Now, listen. I’m going to leave my phone turned on and I want you to track it—to track me. You understand? I may need your help when I get wherever it is that I’m going.”

“My help?” Michael sounded anxious suddenly. He was only thirty-two, six years younger than Gabriel, but he worried like an old man. “What’s going on, Gabriel? Are you in trouble?”

“We’ll see,” Gabriel said. “Maybe not. But just in case, I want you to know where I am.”

Michael didn’t say anything for a bit. “You’re stringing a second cable here, aren’t you? In case the first one gets cut.”

“So to speak,” Gabriel said.

“All right. Consider yourself tracked. But, Gabriel—your cell battery won’t last forever. You know how plane travel drains it. If the flight’s more than ten hours…”

“Then let’s hope it isn’t,” Gabriel said, and ended the call before Michael could protest further. Up ahead, the black car had just driven off the main highway onto an unlabeled side road. Gabriel returned the phone to his jacket pocket. He didn’t turn it off.

They drove past the road the black car had used. Teterboro catered to private jets and chartered flights, with accommodations of varying degrees of exclusivity. Ordinary businessmen drove in through the main en
trance and underwent a check-in process similar to what they’d have gone through at LaGuardia or JFK; the wealthier sort drove on unlabeled roads up to private hangars and took off without once getting patted down or wanded or asked for I.D. They could carry all the Colts on board they wanted.

Narindra pulled the cab to a stop in a small cul-de-sac that was screened from view by a thick copse of trees. Gabriel got out and, using one of the pens from the front seat, dashed off Michael’s private office number on a scrap torn from the sandwich wrapper. Then he shook Narindra’s hand.

“Michael will take care of you,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”

Narindra said nothing. He was looking over the wreckage of his taxi.

“These men,” he said finally, “who kidnapped this friend of yours, this woman. Who shot up my car. You will see they get what they deserve, yes?”

“I’ll do my best,” Gabriel said.

On the far side of the trees a fence with coils of barbed wire at the top bore a sign warning that trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Gabriel pulled the sign off, carried it under his chin as he scaled the fence, and used it to press the strands of barbed wire out of his way. Once he’d bent enough strands down to make room, he climbed over the top and down the other side.

There were no more trees here, but there was plenty of underbrush, none of it recently trimmed, and by moving in a low crouch Gabriel was able to keep out of sight. The first hangar he passed was, as you might expect on a Sunday morning, empty, and the second seemed occupied only by a mechanic who was up to his elbows in a disassembled engine. But the third hangar was bustling.
Two trucks and several cars were parked outside, including the one he’d followed here from New York. The black car’s door opened as he watched. The big man came out first, walking backwards, and Sheba came with him, still clutched in his arms, her kicking feet swinging some distance off the ground. “Let me go!” she shouted, and Gabriel ached to race forward and make him do just that, pull the big ape’s paws off her, teach him a school-yard lesson about picking on someone his size. But there were too many other people around, easily a dozen or more, most of them this guy’s size or close to it, and most wearing holsters on their hips or under their arms. Some were unloading long, low crates from the back of a truck, others were wheeling the crates over to the hangar building. Gabriel might have been able to take any one of them, maybe two—but all at once? With nothing but his bare hands? There was bravery and then there was idiocy.

But he had to do something. He watched Sheba’s captor carry her into the hangar, and through the open bay doors Gabriel saw him drag her up the rear ramp of a cargo plane—the same place all the crates were being loaded. He tried to get a glimpse of the plane’s registration, but no luck—there were numbers on the tail, but nothing to indicate what country it might have come from or been heading to.

He crept closer, keeping the body of the larger of the two trucks between him and the workers still busily unloading and moving the cargo. Through the hangar doors, he heard a pair of voices in conversation, one nasal and high-pitched, the other a lifelong smoker’s rasp. Both had an accent, one he’d heard plenty of in recent weeks.

“You did well, Andras,” the smoker said, pronouncing the name the Hungarian way, with a soft “s”: AHN-drahsh. “Mr. DeGroet will be pleased to get her back.”

“Someone should cut the bitch’s nails,” Andras said. His was the nasal whine. “You see this? You see what she did to me?”

“Poor baby,” the smoker said. “A scratch.”

“It’s
three
scratches, and you wouldn’t find it so funny if it was your face. She nearly took my eye out.”

“What do you want for it, Andras, some iodine? Or maybe hazard pay?”

Andras grumbled. “And why
not
hazard pay? That’s not a bad idea.”

“Well, then,” the smoker said, “you go ahead and bring it up with Mr. DeGroet when we land, why don’t you? He’ll probably be glad to entertain your request.”

“He should be,” Andras said.