Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (6 page)

“Oh,” Sheba said.

Gabriel steered them toward a slightly rockier, more mountainous section of the desert in the middle distance. He wasn’t at all confident they could reach it before being overtaken.

A gunshot split the air behind them and a bullet sped by near enough that they could feel the breeze from its passage.

“Take my gun,” Gabriel said, gesturing with his elbow toward his hip. “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

“Yes,” Sheba said, pulling the Colt from its holster. “What? You don’t think kids learn to shoot in Ireland?”

“Not at all,” Gabriel said. “I just didn’t know you had. Glad to hear otherwise.” Another gunshot exploded
near them. “You might want to start putting that learning to use now.”

Sheba had already swiveled in place and braced her arm against the camel’s hump, and now she squeezed off a shot that left the windshield of the nearest car behind them shattered. The car wheeled off erratically, its driver losing blood from a wound in his shoulder.

But there were more cars behind that one, more than there were bullets in the gun, and more guns in them, too; and though a racing camel wasn’t the easiest target in the world to hit from a moving car, it wasn’t the smallest target either, and they wouldn’t keep missing forever.

The area of rocky outcroppings was getting closer. It had something of the quality of a canyon, and Gabriel thought it might just be possible to lose the cars in there, if only because it would be too dangerous for them to drive into it, for fear of cracking up against the narrow walls. But first he had to make it there. It was going to be close. He kicked inward with his heels again, demanding of the poor beast every last ounce of energy it had.

They were within yards of the first outcropping when he heard the
put-put-put-put
of a helicopter’s blades.

His heart fell.
No. Not this close
—

As he watched, a black Sikorsky chopper rose up from behind the rocks, facing them. Beside the pilot, a man stood halfway out of the cockpit, one leg on the landing skid, a machine gun aimed down at them. And painted on the underside of the copter—it couldn’t be…

“Gabriel, watch out!” Sheba shouted, pointing.

“Hold onto me,” Gabriel said, and urged the animal forward. “Around my neck.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, but she followed his direction, looping her arms around him.

“Just hold on,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

The copter was charging downward toward them at a steep angle. The gunman hadn’t started firing yet, but they saw him take aim. He was almost on top of them.

“Gabriel!” Sheba screamed.

Then the gunman kicked something with one foot, and it fell, unfurling as it came, dangling below the belly of the copter, and Gabriel let go of the camel’s reins to reach up and grab hold as it passed overhead. A rope ladder—and as Gabriel held tight with one good arm and one wounded one to the lowest rung, they were swiftly lifted off the camel’s back, Gabriel clinging to the ladder and Sheba clinging onto him, legs wrapping tightly around his waist.

The gunman overhead cut loose with a flurry of bullets that brought the cars behind them to a screaming halt. A few of the drivers reached out through their open windows and fired up at them, but they were firing blind and the bullets missed by a mile.

The copter sped off, rapidly gaining altitude. Looking up, Gabriel saw the man above them toss his smoking gun into the cockpit and begin hauling the rope ladder back aboard.

Gabriel concentrated on holding onto the ladder until the skid was in reach, then carefully shifted his grip over. The man above him helped Sheba into the cabin, then stuck out a hand to help Gabriel.

“Michael send you?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper’s blades and engine, he said, “Told me to give you a message. Said keep your cell phone charged next time. We had a hell of a time locating you.”

Gabriel hauled himself up and inside. He fell back against the padded seat, breathing heavily.

The gunman pulled the cabin door shut and Gabriel saw in reverse on the glass the same thing he’d spotted
painted on the chopper’s belly from camelback below: the Hunt Foundation crest.

The pilot called back over his shoulder. “Where we going now?”

“You need a hospital?” the gunman asked, pointing to Gabriel’s bloody face and injured arm.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I can take care of that myself.” He dug into his pocket, passed the ancient coin to Sheba. Her eyes widened as she recognized the symbol on it.

“We’re going to Chios,” Gabriel said.

Sheba stood on the balcony and looked out over the cove with its beach of tiny volcanic pebbles worn smooth by the rolling surf. There was no one on the beach; no one within half a mile of the beach, in fact, other than her and Gabriel. The chopper had let them off in a nearby clearing and they’d walked the rest of the way. The first thing she’d done when they reached the house was strip off the satin dress, fill the tub with warm water, and soak her feet. They’d been filthy and scraped and bruised and sore and she’d kept soaking them till at least they weren’t filthy anymore.

Gabriel had explored the house, meanwhile, doing what he could to shore up the security of the place, which wasn’t much—it was a beach house on a Greek island, after all, not a fortress. Then he’d returned to the bathroom, where he’d taken off his shirt tenderly, wincing as the fabric pulled away from where it had stuck to the wound in his arm. He was for putting on a bandage and leaving it at that, but Sheba had insisted on dragging him into the tub and washing the wound, and the rest of him, too, while she was at it, and before either of them quite knew what was happening, her aching feet and his bruised and torn flesh were temporarily forgotten.

Now she was standing in the salt breeze wafting off the Aegean, naked as Aphrodite, long hair lying in a damp tangle between her shoulder blades, and Gabriel
was seated at a glass-topped table beside her, dressed once again from the waist down, waiting while his shirt dried on the balcony’s railing. He was flipping the ancient coin and catching it in his palm.

“It’s impossible, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “You know that.”

“
You
know it. You’re the Ph.D. All I know is that this coin was in the statue’s mouth.”

“Chios was populated that early, but the Greeks didn’t start minting coins until the seventh century BC. The Great Sphinx is almost two thousand years older than that.”

“Well, maybe it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe someone in Chios started making coins earlier than anyone thinks. Or maybe whoever dug that passageway and chamber did it two thousand years after the Sphinx was carved. There’s only one thing we know for sure.”

She turned to face him. It was distracting to say the least. “What’s that?” she said.

“I found this coin,” Gabriel said, “in the statue’s mouth.”

She came over and took it from him. The design depicted a seated sphinx facing to the left beside a narrow wine jug—an amphora—overhung by a bunch of grapes. The sphinx’s face was in profile and clearly meant to be female. Her feathered wings coiled up from her shoulders. It was one of the most familiar images of ancient numismatics, the sphinx emblem of Chios.

“What do you think, how did a Greek coin get into a hidden room deep inside the Great Sphinx in Egypt?” Gabriel said.

“There was plenty of contact between their cultures,” Sheba said. “As soon as the Greeks started coming over by boat, you see influences from each civilization on the other.”

“But a coin in a statue’s mouth—is that a ritual you’ve ever heard of?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Me, neither,” Gabriel said. He got up, grabbed his shirt, and headed inside. Sheba followed.

“What about the map on the wall?” Sheba asked. He’d told her about the map during the flight over, while the gunman had been radioing ahead, trying to find an empty house the Foundation could rent on four hours’ notice.

“No question about it,” Gabriel said, “it was crude, but it was clearly a drawing of the southern coastline of India with Sri Lanka below it.”

“The dates are off there as well,” Sheba said. “We know there was trade between Egypt and Sri Lanka as early as 1500 BC, but not a thousand years earlier.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gabriel said, “but I’ve found when you’re dealing with ancient history, plus or minus a thousand years can be well within the margin of error.”

“Spoken like a man who flunked history.”

“I aced math, though.”

“Gabriel,” Sheba said, “you can’t deny there’s something funny going on here. A statue of a sphinx that’s carved in a realistic style that wouldn’t be developed till thousands of years later…a map of a place the Egyptians wouldn’t make it to for centuries…a coin that wouldn’t be minted for centuries…”

“Yeah. Well, we’re not going to find an explanation sitting around here.” He pulled his shirt on over the thick pad of gauze tapped to his upper arm. Stitches would’ve been better, but stitches would have to wait. “We need to find someone who can tell us something about this coin. A local expert.”

“Where are you going to look for one?”

“Closest town’s probably Avgonyma,” he said. “Figured I’d head over there, scout around.”

“Be careful,” Sheba said. “DeGroet might have men here.”

Gabriel shook his head. “He never saw the coin. And no one followed us in the chopper.”

“DeGroet’s even richer than you are, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “He could have men on every island in the Mediterranean.”

“I’ll be careful,” Gabriel said. He buckled on his holster and put his jacket on over it. Ninety degrees outside and he was wearing a leather jacket.

“Don’t act like you’re doing
me
a favor,” Sheba said. “Though actually you could do me one if you wanted to. While you’re in town.”

Gabriel paused in the doorway. “What’s that?”

“You could get me a pair of shoes,” Sheba said.

Leather jacket or not, there were worse ways to spend an hour than on a two-mile walk through the sand and scrub of a Greek island, the midday sun shining down on you, no living soul in sight but a pair of goats, the iron bells around their necks clanking as they grazed. Chios lay in the Aegean Sea like a muscled forearm, its elbow jutting toward Turkey, its fist toward the Cyclades. Gabriel’s destination was just below the bicep, where a tattoo of an anchor or a mermaid might go if the arm in question belonged to a sailor—or of a sphinx if it belonged to one of the island’s traditionalists. The sphinx had been a symbol of Chios dating back to the island’s prehistory, when its rocky shores had been inhabited by primitive communities of fishermen and winemakers and farmers. Many amphorae from the period had survived, the clay surfaces of the vessels bearing the same sphinx-and-grapes design as the coin now in his pocket,
scrapings of their interiors revealing the ancient residue of wine or olive oil or the peculiar mastic resin native to Chios.

After climbing from sea level up into hills high enough to qualify as small mountains, Gabriel emerged in a clearing surrounded by pine forest, the dusty road leading into a warren of one- and two-story stone buildings. The stones looked to have been quarried from the hills he had just climbed and fit together with the most rudimentary sort of mortar; from their boxy shape and general construction, the buildings looked like they dated back to the medieval period. One or two had thatched awnings and wooden chairs out front, some with wooden tables between them; most of the seats were unoccupied, though in one an old woman slept, baking in the sun with a cat at her feet.

The streets were largely empty, so Gabriel was a bit surprised when, on walking through the arched doorway of one of the buildings, he saw a crowd of perhaps a dozen and a half men breathlessly clustered around a bar. Then he recognized the sound of a transistor radio behind the bar delivering a sports announcer’s play-by-play. At one exclamation from the device the men all groaned, except for one who went around the circle collecting money from all the others. The bartender, a bald man with prominent eyes and a heavy five-o’clock shadow even at noon, flicked off the radio and the men dispersed to separate tables around the room, all except for two particularly disconsolate-looking souls who remained at the bar.

Gabriel took a seat beside them and ordered a glass of the local Ariousios Oinos. It was said that the city of Chios had been founded by a son of Dionysus himself, and the Chians were accordingly proud of their wine. It was heavy, heady stuff, a red so dark it was almost
black. You tasted echoes, Gabriel thought, swallowing, of Homer’s wine-dark seas, on which Odysseus and Agamemnon and so many others came to grief.

“Tourist?” the bartender said, in a thick accent and wearing a cheek-stretching grin. “American?”

“American,” Gabriel answered, in Greek, “but not a tourist.”

He saw the phony smile on the bartender’s face relax into something more like a normal human facial expression. It wasn’t a smile anymore so much as a tired grimace. “Would you look at me,” he said, “look at what I’ve come to, playing the monkey when someone comes in. Feh.” He spat on the floor from the side of his mouth. “No one comes here anymore. This used to be the high season. Now, maybe once every four days, five days, one tourist, one couple, maybe, they order one drink apiece and don’t tip. But I smile, smile, say thank you mister American, thank you for your dollar.” He spat again, then slopped some liquor from a jug into a water glass and sampled his own wares. “Cigarette?”

He held a crumpled pack out toward Gabriel.

“Thanks,” Gabriel said, pulling one cigarette out and letting it dangle between his fingers after the man lit it with a wooden match. He didn’t smoke, but he’d learned over the years that you didn’t make friends anywhere in the world by turning down an offered cigarette.

“So what brings you to this rump of a village?” One of the men next to Gabriel looked up angrily at this insult, but said nothing, perhaps because the bartender took the opportunity to refill his glass. “You’re a magazine writer, a photographer, what?” The bartender eyed Gabriel critically. “You don’t look Greek.”

“I’m not. Though I spent a lot of time here growing up. My parents loved it in Greece. They died not too far from here.”

The bartender nodded. “Then you are Greek enough. If your dead are buried in our soil.”

Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt, two of the bestselling authors of the last fifty years thanks to a pair of improbably successful books of religious history, weren’t buried anywhere—they’d disappeared at sea during a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean and Gabriel’s best efforts had failed to turn up any sign of their bodies. He’d spent eight months searching while, back home, Michael struggled to pick up the pieces of the estate and Lucy—poor Lucy, who’d had a strained relationship with their parents from the day she was born and they’d decided, oblivious classicists that they were, to name their third child after an archangel in the Bible, same as they had their first two, only the choices remaining were Raphael and Lucifer, and you couldn’t name a girl Raphael, could you?—had packed a bag and hopped a plane and severed all contact, taking what had been a family of five down to just Gabriel and Michael. Gabriel, Michael, and a foundation worth one hundred million dollars.

But Gabriel didn’t tell the bartender any of this, just nodded as though his parents’ graves were right here in Avgonyma, this rump of a village.

He tossed back the rest of his wine, took an obligatory drag on his cigarette, and dropped the coin on the bar. It spun for a second before landing sphinx-side up.

“Know anyone around here who could tell me about this?” Gabriel said. “Specifically, any connection between this sphinx of yours and the one in Egypt.”

He saw the bartender’s face pale. The man shook his head quickly. “You don’t want to ask about this, my friend.”

“Why not?” Gabriel said, reaching out to pick up the coin again. Another hand came down heavily on top of his, pinning his to the wood.

Looking to his right, Gabriel saw that the man beside him was standing now, though none too steadily. The other man at the bar got up, too.

“We don’t talk about the sphinx with nobody, American.” The man pressed down on Gabriel’s hand, grinding it into the bar. “You people just don’t listen, do you?”