Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (3 page)

“But do be prepared,” the smoker said, “if I am incorrect and he is not glad—if, say, he is in a bad mood because his plans have been delayed this long—in that case you realize he will kill you just for suggesting such a thing. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Ah, go to hell,” Andras said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Maybe he’ll use you for practice, the way he did with Janos. Cut you to ribbons. With his saber, perhaps. It has always been his favorite.”

Andras said nothing.

“Or,” the smoker continued, “you could take the pay you were promised, go buy yourself a bottle and a girl, and keep your goddamn mouth shut. Mind you, it’s up to you which you do—I’m just saying you
could
do that. It’s your choice.”

“You’re a real bastard, Karoly, you know that?”

“Oh, yes,” Karoly said. “I know that—and as long as you don’t forget it, we’ll get along fine.”

Gabriel moved away from the wall of the hangar, where he’d been standing, his ear pressed to the metal. They were taking her back to DeGroet—back to Hungary, presum
ably, though probably not to the castle, not now that Gabriel had infiltrated it once. Hungary wasn’t a big country, relatively speaking, but it was big enough that one woman could quite easily be made to vanish. There was only one way to be sure that couldn’t happen—and that was to stay with her. But how…?

He waited until the crew working on unloading the truck wheeled the next crate down the short metal ramp in back. There was one man still inside, Gabriel saw, seated on a folding chair; behind the wheel, in the truck’s cab, there’d been one more. But that was all—temporarily the other men were all engaged in steering the bulky crates over to the hangar and onto the plane. That evened up the odds a bit, at least.

Gabriel walked casually up the ramp, gave a two-fingered wave to the seated man. There was only one crate left inside the truck. It was made of black plastic like the others he’d seen, with metal latches to keep the top down; the thing was at least six feet long and maybe two-and-a-half feet wide. It looked a little like a plastic coffin on wheels.

“Who are you?” the man said. He was paunchy and seemed to be thoroughly winded even though the extent of his physical labor appeared to have involved checking off items on a clipboard.

“I’m on Mr. DeGroet’s personal staff,” Gabriel said. “He wanted me to oversee this particular…” he waved at the crate “…container.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your name?”

“Gabor,” Gabriel said. “Gabor Nagy.” It was the most common Hungarian surname he could think of; it meant “big.”

The man flipped through a couple of pages on his clipboard and didn’t find any Nagy listed. “You’re not on here.”

“I should be—he’d be mad as hell if he found out I
wasn’t. Let me see.” He came up beside the man, who didn’t bother standing, just held the clipboard out. “I’m right there,” Gabriel said, pointing, and when the man took the clipboard back to peer at the page, Gabriel clocked him with a solid right cross. The man went down like a felled log.

Gabriel glanced outside. There was still no one in view, thankfully. With one hand under each armpit, he dragged the man down the ramp and around to the side of the truck. Once there, he rolled the man underneath, making sure to shove him far enough that he couldn’t be seen. They’d find him there eventually, or he’d come to on his own; they were unlikely to drive over him. Just in case, though, Gabriel left him between the truck’s wheels rather than in their path.

Then he went back up the ramp and unlatched the crate. It wasn’t full. Inside, under a folded-up blanket being used for padding, were two wooden racks of rifles and, below them, box after cardboard box of ammunition.

Guns and ammo. For what? What private army was DeGroet equipping? His own, presumably—but to what end?

There was no time for speculation: from outside Gabriel could hear the steps of the men returning, still distant for now but getting louder.

He lifted the gun racks out, wrapped the blanket loosely around them, and laid them down where the man had been sitting. He set the folding chair on top for good measure. He then climbed into the crate. It was a tight fit—but it was a fit. He lowered the cover gently and heard the latches catch. Would he be able to open them again from the inside? He thought so. A swift kick should do it. If not, maybe he could blast the latches open—with the vast selection of cartridges he was lying on he figured he could probably find some .45 caliber
rounds that would fit his Colt. Not that he relished the prospect of firing a gun in an enclosed container full of black powder.

Pressing up gently against the underside of the crate’s lid with his palms opened the seal a crack, enough to let in a bit of air and a thread of light. The light was interrupted after a moment as two men climbed into the truck. One pair of legs sported khaki workpants, the other denim. Gabriel heard one of the men calling for someone named Stephen. Stephen didn’t answer, presumably because he was otherwise occupied under the truck. A quiet conversation in Hungarian ensued. The men were trying to decide what to do. Wait for Stephen to return from taking a leak or having a smoke or whatever he’d decided he had to do right this moment? Or just take the last crate and the hell with him?

They seemed to settle on “the hell with him” since Gabriel’s view was cut off as the men stepped closer and then he could feel the crate being rolled down the ramp.

They rolled him across level ground for a minute and then up another ramp—longer, steeper—and shoved him against a bulkhead. Raising the cover again, Gabriel saw that the crate was conveniently facing a window, so that even if the activation of the plane’s deafening jet engines minutes later hadn’t been enough of a clue, the view of the land dropping out of sight would have told him they were on their way.

Gabriel did his best to get comfortable in the cramped space. He took his phone from his pocket and glanced at the display. New York to Hungary was a nine-hour flight with good tailwinds.

As he watched, the battery portion of the phone’s readout silently dropped from four bars to three.

Gabriel hadn’t intended to sleep, but he found himself waking with a start as the plane’s landing gear touched down. They skipped once, twice, then settled on the tarmac, the big plane’s momentum carrying them forward along the runway as the power to the engines cut out. Gabriel chanced a peek outside through the seam, but the window was dark—and so, when he tried it, was his phone. He pressed all the buttons. Nothing.

Had something kept them in the air longer than expected? Or had they landed somewhere farther away than Budapest?

Which led to the next question: For how long had Michael been able to track his location? Maybe only halfway there, maybe up until the moment before he tried his phone. There was no way to know.

Gabriel heard the sound of seat belts unbuckling, heavy footsteps moving around the cabin. He did not hear any lighter steps he could identify as Sheba’s, and he didn’t hear her voice, but that didn’t mean anything—Andras could be carrying her, bound and gagged, or maybe she was being held in another part of the plane. They wouldn’t have hurt her or killed her, he was confident of that; not as long as DeGroet wanted her for some purpose of his own.

Gabriel groped around beneath him, felt the cardboard boxes of varying sizes, slipped his fingers under
one flap after another. He couldn’t see a thing, of course, and though he had the Zippo lighter with him that he always carried, he could hardly light it here—even if the sudden appearance of a glow from inside the crate wouldn’t give him away, the explosion it could easily set off would make the whole thing moot. But he’d handled enough guns in his day to be able to tell by feel a rifle cartridge from one for a semiautomatic pistol, a .32 from a .45. Telling a .44 Remington from a .45 Winchester was a bit harder, but not impossible. He ran the selection he found between his fingertips, comparing length and grooving. Wrong caliber was not so much of a worry—a cartridge too wide wouldn’t chamber and one too narrow would announce the fact by the too-roomy fit. Too long, same thing. But slightly too short would be easy to miss, and could lead to a shot that either didn’t go off when the time came or went off in a spectacularly bad way. So care was called for, and he exercised as much as he reasonably could, lying in the dark in a crate in the belly of a plane in the middle of god-only-knew-where.

He finished loading the cylinder just as the crate next to his was loudly pushed aside, smacking into the inner wall of the plane’s hull with a jolt that made Gabriel hope it contained something less explosive than the one he was in. His was the next to move, and he lay still when it did, not wanting to draw any attention.

Once they were down the ramp, Gabriel gently raised the cover of the crate again, hoping for some glimpse that would tell him where they were, but beyond a blinding ring of magnesium vapor lights he could see nothing at all, just solid black. It was nighttime wherever they were, and except in your major cities, nighttime tended to look much the same from place to place—especially when you could only see a sliver of it.

Then a streak of red satin passed in front of him. He
craned his neck to keep it in view as long as he could, but it was gone in an instant, followed close behind by the rougher folds of a long overcoat. “Keep moving,” came Andras’ voice, though whether he was talking to Sheba or the men loading the crates, Gabriel couldn’t guess. In any event, both kept moving, and within minutes all the crates were on trucks and tearing along a road that seemed paved but just barely so—Gabriel felt every pit and gully in the surface as they passed over it.

But at least they were on their way. Gabriel settled back for the ride.

They unloaded him, along with the other crates, a bit more than an hour later—Gabriel’s cellphone may have died and its clock with it, but the luminous dial of his wristwatch, made in 1945 and only repaired once since, was still giving off its pale glow. Sometimes, he thought, the old technologies were better.

The texture of the ground under the wheels of his crate changed after a minute, from solid to…something less than solid, almost as though they’d left pavement for dirt, or not even dirt—it seemed looser, somehow. And the sound was different as they passed over it.

After a time, they came to a stop. All around him, Gabriel heard men walking rapidly, but barely any conversation, only the occasional order issued in a low bark. His crate was jostled once by another and then shifted to a new location a few yards away. A peek outside showed more crates around him, some stacked two or three high—he at least could be grateful that so far nothing had been stacked on top of his.

A car pulled up then, not in his sight, but in his hearing. The door opened and slammed shut, and a new set of footsteps approached. A set with three beats to it rather than two: slap, slap, click; slap, slap, click. Gabriel tensed at the sound.

“Well, well,” Lajos DeGroet’s voice came, from perhaps twenty feet away. “Well, well, well. My dear girl. So good to see you again.”

“Who the hell do you think you are,” Sheba said, sounding far more measured and reasonable than Gabriel thought he would in her place, “that you can kidnap a woman off the streets of New York City, fly her halfway around the world, and, and…”

“That’s all right, my dear. Let it out. You are angry and I don’t blame you.”

“You don’t
blame
me?
You don’t blame me?”

“No, don’t hold her back,” DeGroet said, apparently to one of his men, perhaps Andras, “let her go. She won’t attack me. She knows better than that.” Gabriel heard a click followed by the sound of metal sliding against metal, and he knew DeGroet had turned the grip of his iron walking stick and drawn from within the modified fencing saber it hid. “Don’t you, my dear?”

Lajos DeGroet, son of a Dutch father and a Hungarian mother, both from artistocratic families with wealth and property to burn, had led the unproductive life his parentage entitled him to—with one exception. In his youth he’d gravitated toward the sport of fencing and at age twenty he’d competed for Hungary in the summer Olympics in Rome. He’d won a silver medal that year but famously refused to accept it; four years later, after intensive training under the great Hungarian fencing master Rudolf Kárpáti, himself a six-time gold medalist, DeGroet had returned from Tokyo with a gold.

After that, DeGroet had largely vanished from the public eye, returning to his family’s customary pastimes of accumulating and squandering money in spectacular but private fashion. Gabriel had crossed paths with him more than once, since the man was an inveterate collector—the acquisitive sort who can’t stop raising his paddle at
an auction and, because of the resources at his command, never has to. Which was fine if you were on the selling end of a transaction, as Gabriel had been more than once—there’d been the gilt ceremonial bowl from Myanmar and the skull fragment from central Africa. But if you were competing with DeGroet to
buy
something, you might as well pack up and go home, and Gabriel had discovered that as well. The trust that underlaid the Hunt Foundation was considerable, containing as it did all the many millions of dollars his parents’ bestselling books had brought in over the years (a rich enough haul during their lives, but an absolute flood after their disappearance at sea in 2000 landed them on the front page of every newspaper in the world)—but there were fortunes and there were fortunes, and Gabriel could have bankrupted the Hunt family fortune twice over without making a dent in DeGroet’s.

So: a collector, of gold medals and golden artifacts and gold itself, no doubt, as well as all the other forms in which wealth could be stored or expressed; also a fencer, one of the best Hungary had ever fielded, which was another way of saying one of the best the world had ever seen; and though the man was nearing seventy now and had lost some height and some hair over the years, he’d lost not a bit of his old quickness or his skill with a blade. Or his arrogance, or his bad temper. He didn’t walk with a stick because, being old, he needed help with his balance. He did it to ensure he could always keep a sword close at hand.

“Now, my dear,” DeGroet said, in a voice whose attempt at sounding friendly was as unctuous as it was unconvincing, “as I had been about to tell you when your meddlesome friend insisted on seizing you from my care back at Balaton, I am a great admirer of your work. I have read all your papers. Your work on the iconogra
phy of the ancient world is not just accomplished, in my opinion it is groundbreaking.”

“You didn’t bring me here at gunpoint,” Sheba said, through what sounded like clenched teeth, “to compliment my scholarship.”

“On the contrary. That is precisely what I did. Andras, please, show her over here.” There was a brief flurry of footsteps and the voices, when they resumed, were further away. Gabriel thought this might be a good time to get out of the crate and quietly pressed upward with his knees until the latches popped. He climbed over the side, dropped lightly to the ground, looked around. But he was hemmed in by crates on all sides, so he couldn’t see a thing.

“…you see, Miss McCoy,” DeGroet was saying, “I have need of someone with your particular expertise. Some light, please, Andras. No, here.” A faint orange glow lightened a portion of the dark sky in the direction the voices were coming from. “Can you read that, my dear?”

“I don’t need to read it,” Sheba said. “I know what it says.”

“How foolish of me, of course you do. But just to humor me, could you perhaps tell
us
what it says.”

“It’s the story of the prince’s dream,” Sheba said. “How he came here and fell asleep at noon, with the sun overhead, and a voice spoke to him from heaven saying, ‘I am your father and you are my son, I shall give you dominion over the land and all those who live within its borders, if you shall honor me and do my bidding.’ Roughly speaking.”

“Very good,” DeGroet said. “But there is a specific instruction you omitted.”

“What? The bit about unburying him?”

“Yes,” DeGroet said. “That bit.”

“‘The sands in which I lie have covered me. Swear to me that you will do what I ask of you, my son, that I may know you as my source of help, and I may be joined with you in eternal sovereignty.’”

“‘The sands in which I lie,’” DeGroet repeated. “The young prince had the best of intentions, but he never did manage to fulfill his promise. It took three millennia to do the job—longer, nearly three and a half. And then they stopped, because they thought they were done. The fools.”

“What are you talking about?” Sheba said, and where he was crouching among the crates Gabriel thought the same thing. Three millennia? The Hungarian countryside boasted any number of ruins dating back to the time of the Romans, but those were only two thousand years old, not three or four thousand. There was nothing in the country that old.

And sands? Hungary was landlocked, for heaven’s sake.

Where the hell were they?

Gabriel glanced around, peered between the crates, saw no one facing in his direction. Reaching back into the crate he’d just exited, he dug under the boxes of ammunition till he uncovered the long barrel of a rifle—he’d felt it beneath him on the plane, but couldn’t get at it while he was lying on top of it. Now he set it down on the ground, loaded it, and slung a bandolier of extra rifle shells over his head. Just in case the bullets he’d slipped into his Colt didn’t fire after all. Or, hell, even if they did. DeGroet had at least a dozen men here, maybe more—it was impossible for Gabriel to be too heavily armed.

Gripping the rifle under one arm and unholstering the Colt, Gabriel crept cautiously out of his little enclosure and into the shadow of the truck that had brought him.
Then he stood up for the first time in twelve hours. Once the pins and needles in his legs had subsided, he leaned around the rear corner of the truck to get his first good look at where he was—and his jaw fell open.