Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (2 page)

No, wait
.

He had some tools in his pack and in his trouser pockets. A few pitons. A couple of ascenders. A rappel rack.

Gabriel thought that if he could place an anchor in the rock face, he just might be able to attach his rope and a carabiner. He could then use the assembly to raise himself a few feet. Then he’d have to plant another . . . and another . . . all the way to the top. If he ran out, he could pull out one of the lower ones and reuse it. The trip would be slow going and painfully tedious . . . but it could be done.

Now if he could just grow another arm or two
. . .

“So now what?” Manny called. His voice echoed in the well. “Dying from the fall would’ve been better than starving to death here.”

“Don’t be a pessimist, Manny,” Gabriel growled. “I’ll get us out of here. Trust me.”

He took a deep breath. What he was about to do required concentration.

Gabriel squeezed the ax handle harder with his right hand . . . and let go with his left. Hanging by only one arm, he reached back with his free hand and dug into his pack. His fingers found one of the pouches—he hoped it was the correct one—and wormed into it. He felt something cold, hard, and metallic. A piton! The angle was awkward, but he managed to grasp it. The next step was to pull it out of the pouch without . . .
dropping it
. . .

The piton fell into the darkness below.

He and Manny heard the clang when it hit bottom.

Gabriel rarely cursed, but he did so—loudly.

Let’s try that again
. . .

Still clinging to the handle with a very sore right hand, Gabriel reached back to the pack a second time. He dug into the pouch and took hold of another piton. This time he made sure he had it firmly in hand before removing it.

His right shoulder and upper arm were killing him. The strain was becoming unbearable.

To hell with not damaging the rock
.

With the piton in his left hand, he eyed the rock face in front of him. A small crack ran diagonally across the limestone. Aiming as best as he could, Gabriel jabbed the piton’s point into the crack. The first attempt only chipped some of the stone away. The second try created a small hole. With the third stab, the piton stuck.

Gabriel grabbed the ax handle with his left hand to relieve some of the tension on his right arm. Then, with his weakened but now free arm, he reached for the small hammer that hung on the right side of his belt. He succeeded in pulling it out of its sheath . . . but since the piton was to the left of his body, he now had to switch it to his other hand. He’d never be able to hammer it with his right hand.

Only one thing to do, and Gabriel knew he had only one shot to do it. There would be no second attempt.

Okay, the left hand is holding the ax. The right hand has the hammer. Let’s do it . . . Ready? . . . One . . . two . . . THREE!

Gabriel tossed the hammer into the air and grabbed the ax handle with his right hand while simultaneously releasing the handle with his left. The hammer had reached the top of its arc while he was making the exchange and was now plunging downward. Gabriel’s left
hand shot out and snatched the hammer out of midair as it fell.

He had to stop and breathe for a moment after that little stunt. Compared to it, hammering the piton into the limestone was easy.

Still using one hand, he unwrapped the rope from his shoulder and stuck an end in his mouth. He gripped it with his teeth, and then dug a carabiner out of a pocket. It was yet another awkward operation to secure the end of the rope to the ’biner with a bowline knot one-handed, but he did it. He then hooked the carabiner into the eye on the exterior end of the piton. The rope was now fixed and safe to use.

Then his cell phone rang.

“What the . . . ?” He looked back at Manny. “You mean to tell me there’s actually
service
down here?” Gabriel took hold of the rope with one hand and his legs, let go of the ax handle, and hung there, suspended.

The phone rang again.

“You’re not gonna answer that, are you?” Manny asked.

Gabriel hated cell phones the same way he hated most modern technology—but that didn’t stop him from feeling compelled to answer the thing when it rang. He fished it out of his trouser pocket and brought it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Gabriel?”

“Michael?”

Gabriel immediately pictured his younger brother sitting at his desk back in the luxury of his clean and comfortable New York office. He’d rarely envied his brother his stay-at-home life—but at this moment he came close.

“Are you sitting down?” Michael asked.

Gabriel grimaced. “Not precisely.”

“It’s Lucy, Gabriel.”

The urgency in Michael’s voice gave him pause. Lucy—short for Lucifer—was the youngest sibling in the family. Their imaginative parents had named each child after one of the archangels in the Bible. It didn’t seem to matter to them that their daughter would have to bear the ignominy of her moniker for the rest of her life. In an attempt at kindness, her brothers had called her Lucy, but in the years since she’d run away from home at age seventeen, she’d taken to calling herself “Cifer” instead. Pronounced like
cipher
, it made a fine name for the scofflaw computer hacker she’d turned herself into.

“What
about
Lucy?” Gabriel asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“No
, Michael, I’m not sitting down! Just tell me!”

“She’s in terrible danger. You need to come back to New York as quickly as you can.”

“How is she in danger?”

“It looks . . . it looks like she’s been kidnapped.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard Michael correctly. “Say that again?”

“She’s been
kidnapped
.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And there’s a ransom demand.”

“How much do they want?”

“They don’t want money, Gabriel. They want
you
.”

Gabriel tapped the intercom button outside the Hunt Foundation to announce his arrival, unlocked the front door, pocketed his key, and stepped into the foyer. The room was full of artwork, antiquities displayed in glass cases, and brochures about the organization for the rare occasions when some museum curator or endowment representative might visit the building. The rest of the ground floor consisted of a dining room and kitchen, a small library (the larger one was on the second floor), and one of Michael’s offices, where Gabriel was headed.

The brownstone, located on East 55th Street and York Avenue, overlooked the East River and was designated as a landmark. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had lived and worked there, raised three children there, and left it in trust to the Foundation in their wills, which had been triggered when they’d vanished at sea at the turn of the millennium. Michael, being the responsible one in the family, was legally appointed the manager of both the trust and the Foundation. That was perfectly fine with Gabriel. The less he had to deal with paperwork, taxes, endowments, grants, bills, and bureaucracy, the happier he was. He did find it handy to have money—you couldn’t mount international expeditions the way he
did without it—but he had no interest in the management of the various accounts and funds. Michael was a superb administrator and Gabriel knew such things were better off in his hands.

“There you are,” Michael said as his brother stepped through the office door. The room was spacious, containing a pair of antique trestle tables, a gorgeous nineteenth-century mahogany desk, one wall lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets, and two more lined similarly with packed bookshelves. What generally irritated Gabriel was how organized and uncluttered it was. And normally Michael’s appearance matched the room’s: tidy, neat, unruffled. At thirty-two he was quite the opposite of his older brother. Where Gabriel was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, ropy, and apt to show up with stains from smoke or grease or blood on his clothing, Michael was slight and bookish, wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and was never seen with a strand of his thinning, sandy hair out of place. Except for the thinning hair, he hadn’t changed much since he was a boy. Gabriel had spent a fair portion of their childhood protecting Michael from neighborhood bullies, in neighborhoods all over the world, and not one of the encounters had discomposed Michael in the slightest.

But he was discomposed now.

“Talk to me,” Gabriel said as he dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t look good. I received an e-mail from an anonymous account. I printed it out.” Michael handed it across the desk. Gabriel took it.

TO: MICHAEL HUNT—HUNT FOUNDATION
THE ALLIANCE OF THE PHARAOHS INFORMS YOU
THAT WE HAVE LUCIFER HUNT. DO NOT CONTACT
POLICE. DO NOT CONTACT FBI. YOUR SISTER WILL
DIE IF YOU DO. WE REQUIRE THE SERVICES OF
GABRIEL HUNT. HE SHALL MEET OUR REPRESENTATIVE
ALONE, REPEAT ALONE, IN CAIRO.

The message went on to designate the time and place of a rendezvous three days in the future. At a stall in a public bazaar.

“After nine years, Gabriel!” Michael snatched the paper from Gabriel’s hand and waved it in the air. “Nine years we don’t hear from her, we don’t know if she’s alive or dead, and then this.”

Actually, Gabriel knew, Michael
had
heard from her a few times—but only over the Internet, under her “Cifer” pseudonym, which Michael assumed belonged to a thuggish, unsavory male who eked out a living skulking around the alleyways of the online underworld. It was an impression Gabriel had not disabused him of, even after learning the truth himself.

“My god, Gabriel. If they hurt her—”

“Do we know anything about this Alliance of the Pharaohs?” Gabriel asked.

“I spent the last twenty-four hours going through everything we have on Egypt. There’s no mention of the group in any of the books we have, nothing in any of our files. The best I could do was a few hits on the Internet.”

“And?”

Michael ran his fingers through his hair anxiously. “In the last two years, there have been two instances of Egyptian artifacts being stolen from major museums. The more recent was from the Louvre, in Paris. The French police attributed the crime to an
‘Alliance Pharaonique
.’ Another theft occurred in Istanbul a year earlier; Interpol
isn’t sure they’re related, but the items stolen in both cases were from the same period. We’re talking
ancient
Egypt—solid gold jewelry supposedly worn by Ramses II in Turkey, a goblet dating from Cleopatra’s reign at the Louvre.”

“That’s all we’ve got?”

Michael turned his hands palm up and the furrows on his forehead deepened.

“Great,” Gabriel said. “So we know they like Egyptian artifacts, which we might have been able to guess from their name. And we know they were able to find Lucy, despite her best efforts to stay hidden.” Gabriel didn’t mention that he’d met with Lucy a handful of times over the past few years himself, once in this very building—no reason to make Michael feel worse than he already did. Besides, in each of those cases it had been Lucy who had found Gabriel, not the other way around. “What I don’t understand is why they’d kidnap her just to get me to meet with them. Couldn’t they just make a phone call? We take appointments, don’t we?”

“They’re criminals,” Michael said. “I mean, if these
are
the same people responsible for those museum thefts. And if you’re the sort of person who does that, you’re probably perfectly comfortable kidnapping young women and probably don’t like to do things through ordinary channels . . . Gabriel,
what are you doing
?”

Gabriel stopped stretching his arms. He’d been doing it unconsciously. “Sorry. I pulled some muscles yesterday in that cave. It’s nothing. Just a little sore.”

“I can imagine,” Michael said, a censorious note creeping into his voice. “All I can say is thank goodness I was able to reach you down there. If you’d been out of range . . .”

“I thought I was,” Gabriel said.

“Well,” Michael said, “when you pay thirty thousand dollars for a cell phone, you do get something for your money.”

“Thirty thousand? Really?” Gabriel said. “I’ll try not to leave it in a cab.”

“Gabriel, what are we going to do?” Michael threw the printout onto the desk, where it slid off onto the floor. He didn’t pick it up. “I could never live with myself if they hurt her.”

“Lucy’s a tough customer,” Gabriel said. “She can handle herself. She’s probably giving them orders already.”

“She’s twenty-six years old,” Michael said. “These men are killers.”

“You didn’t say anything about killing,” Gabriel said.

“Two guards at the Louvre,” Michael said. “One in Turkey.” He paused, took a deep breath, let it out. “Decapitated.”

There was a beat of silence.

“So I guess I’m going to Cairo,” Gabriel said.

Michael nodded miserably.

“I’ll get her back,” Gabriel said.

“She may be dead already,” Michael said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

Gabriel picked the sheet of paper up from the floor. “They pulled this stunt because they want something from me,” he said. “As long as that’s the case, she’s alive.”

The Discoverers League was empty and quiet that night.

Gabriel had calmed his brother by taking him to Andrei’s place for a bite (Michael had protested that he wasn’t hungry, but after his third glass of
divin
he was able to put away a plate of Andrei’s
parjoale
). By the
time Gabriel had seen Michael home and hopped a taxi to the building on East 70th Street, it was nearly midnight.

Hank, the elderly doorman who’d been with the club seemingly since its founding, greeted Gabriel warmly and handed him a bundle of mail that had collected since the last time Gabriel had been home. Gabriel got into the elevator and took it to the top floor of the building, where he kept a suite of rooms. The League’s board of directors tolerated Gabriel’s presence in the building because of who he was—the Hunt Foundation contributed generously each year—and because some of his higher-profile finds brought the organization the sort of attention that helped with their other fund-raising. But their feelings about him were mixed. They’d had to spend a portion of the funds he donated on patching bullet holes in the walls and getting blood out of the upholstery, not to mention paying soaring insurance premiums, and some of the more staid directors complained that his exploits attracted less attention than notoriety. This discussion regularly consumed twenty or thirty minutes at the start of every board meeting; as the meeting room was directly below his apartment, Gabriel could sometimes hear the raised voices. But so far, no eviction notice had been slipped under the door, and the bullet holes kept getting repaired.