Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (13 page)

The man cast a critical eye over the scene before him. “I hope so,” he said, his British accent icy. “I didn’t pay to be woken by gunfire and fisticuffs. If I’d wanted that I could have stayed in Brixton. Excuse me, miss.” As he climbed the stairs, hugging the wall, another figure passed him on the way down. It was Sheba, wearing an identical gray robe—they must have had them hanging in all the rooms. Who would have thought it, amenities in a place like this.

“Gabriel?” Sheba said. “You okay?”

“I’m still standing,” he said. “More or less.”

“DeGroet?”

“On his way,” Gabriel said. He took Lucy’s box out of his pocket, glanced at it. “Just a hundred fourteen miles off.”

“How do you know that…?” Sheba asked and then
raised a hand, palm out. “Never mind. I’ll go get dressed. We’re in 304.” She vanished up the stairs.

Gabriel walked from one of the bodies to the next. The man he’d shot had stopped moaning; he seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. He’d live, though. The same couldn’t be said for Molnar, who’d joined his brother at last. Gabriel stopped beside the third man, who was conscious but curled up on the floor, both hands pressed to his abdomen. Gabriel aimed the gun down at him. “What did DeGroet want you to do?”

“Bring you…” The man coughed, spat a bloody wad onto the tiles. “Bring you to him.”

“Just me?”

“The woman, too.”

“Not the old man?”

“What old man?”

Gabriel nodded. Maybe now that Chios had given up its secrets, DeGroet had decided he didn’t need Tigranes anymore. On the other hand, maybe he just hadn’t told this guy about him.

“Well, tell DeGroet,” Gabriel said, “that we’re leaving the country tonight. That we’re going back to Cairo. If he’s so eager to see us, he can find us there.” When the man didn’t respond, he thumbed back the gun’s hammer. “Got that?”

The man nodded violently. “To Cairo.” He didn’t sound as though he believed it, and Gabriel knew better than to think DeGroet would—but he had to try. Maybe DeGroet would at least divert some of his men to Cairo, evening up the sides a little.

“Now get up,” Gabriel said.

“I can’t…”

“Yes you can,” Gabriel said and nudged him forcefully with his foot. The man struggled to his knees, then to his feet. His face was ashen, clammy.

When he reached the door, the man turned back. “He’ll kill you,” he said, quietly. “You know that.”

“I know he’ll try,” Gabriel said. “Now, go.”

Up in Room 304, the gray robe was on the floor and Sheba was back in her khakis and tank top. Tigranes was asleep in one of the room’s two twin beds. Christos was standing at the window, looking out at the street below.

“You think it’s safe for us to stay here?” Christos said.

“I wouldn’t,” Gabriel said. “DeGroet’s got other things on his mind now, like the treasure and the two of us, but just to be safe—” He handed Christos a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. At least it wasn’t torn from a sandwich wrapper this time. “That’s my brother’s number. Explain what you need and he’ll take care of it. Stay any place you like.” He paused for a moment. “Just not the Four Seasons.”

“Of course not,” Christos said, “that would be much too expensive—”

“That’s not why,” Gabriel said. “Oh, and tell Michael, when you talk to him, that the man you’re rooming with has the
Oedipodea
committed to memory. My guess is you’ll get some professional recording apparatus in the mail the next day, and a job putting it to use if you want it.”

Christos looked over at the old man where he lay. “I don’t know how he’d feel about being recorded,” he said.

“Then I hope you’ve got a good memory,” Gabriel said, “because it’s got to be preserved somehow.”

Christos nodded uncertainly.

“Listen,” Gabriel said. “What’s in that man’s head is a priceless, priceless treasure. And he knows it. When you
first brought me to Anavatos, he told me about having no son to pass the poem to. He doesn’t want it to die with him. If you explain to him that you’ll be keeping it alive, that you’ll teach it to
your
son someday…trust me, he’ll do it.” He turned to Sheba. “You could stay, too, you know. The Foundation could certainly use a linguist working on the project. The first translator of the
Oedipodea
—it could make your career.”

“That it could,” Sheba said, a hint of her long-buried Irish accent coming out in her fatigue. “And perhaps it will. But I’ll never feel safe unless I know this is over. And I can’t let you face it by yourself.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gabriel said, “I can—”

“You can, you can…do you ever listen to yourself?” She came over to him, put a hand on each of his shoulders. “You’re hurt, you’re tired. You’re not going to be alone, too. Besides,” she said, “I already got us on a plane leaving in—” she glanced over at the clock on the bedside table “—forty-seven minutes.”

“You got us on…” Gabriel said. “Who has a flight leaving Istanbul at three
AM
?”

“FedEx,” Sheba said.

“You got us on a
FedEx
plane?”

“The Hunt name really opens doors,” Sheba said. “You should try it sometime.”

He gathered her up in his arms, kissed the top of her head. So much for stewardesses and icepacks—but with a nonstop cargo flight they might be able to beat DeGroet to the island, even if he flew one of his own planes.

“Sheba McCoy,” Gabriel said, “have I ever told you how impressive you are?”

“Why don’t you hold that thought,” she said. “Just till we’re safely in the air.”

“You really are,” Gabriel said, “impressive, I mean,” and this time Sheba just nodded. They were sprawled in the cargo hold of a huge FedEx plane, surrounded by cardboard boxes, bulging sacks, and the occasional wooden crate, all secured in a web of plastic netting. Sheba leaned back against a stack of padded envelopes, her shoes and socks beside her, a blanket wrapped around her against the unheated cabin’s chill. Gabriel had his boots off as well and was winding an Ace bandage around his left ankle. The copilot had found it in the first aid kit mounted above the emergency exit hatchway.

The first hour of the flight had been consumed by the crew filing back, one by one, to ask Gabriel about some of his more notorious exploits, like the expulsion from Libya in 2004 and the time he’d fled Peru on horseback with half the army chasing after him. That incident had made the
Times
and each of them in turn wanted to know about it. But after a while the questions petered out and eventually the crew returned to the flight deck and left them alone. There was a pair of empty jumpseats they could have used but as long as there was no turbulence it was actually more comfortable sitting on the floor, and so far the flight had been smooth. They might as well have been sailing a ship over a calm ocean.

“Most people,” Gabriel said, “facing half the things
you have in the past forty-eight hours, would’ve fallen apart. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.”

“Oh, I’ve seen it, too,” Sheba said. “You met my sisters. Growing up, not a one of them was worth a damn in a scrape.”

“How’d you escape turning out like that?” Gabriel asked.

“It was my dad’s decision,” Sheba said. She opened the blanket and spread it to cover both of them. “He wanted a son so badly, and he kept trying, and what’d he end up with but a house full of women? It was him, my mother and my three sisters. Finally I came along and he decided he’d had enough. So from the time I was six or seven, he’d take me out with him when he went shooting and driving and fishing and living off the land.” Sheba shrugged. “I enjoyed it. My sisters thought I was mental, and maybe they were right, but…”

“But you enjoyed it.”

“And now I know how to reload a rifle or hook up a climbing harness or change a flat tire—”

“Oh, that, too?”

“I’m a whiz with flat tires.” She snapped her fingers. “On and off like that.”

“Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Wait tables,” she said. “I’m a real bad waitress. Did it for a summer, and my god, I was awful. Made no tips.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Anything else?”

She bent over him, brought her lips close to his. “Taking no for an answer. Not getting what I want. I’m terrible at that.”

Gabriel smiled. “I’m not too good at it myself,” he said.

They landed in Kurunegala, on a private airstrip near the train depot. The town was centrally located at the
intersection of the A6 and A10 motorways, within reach of all parts of the country. Dambulla was just thirty miles away to the northeast, and the spot marked on the map, Gabriel estimated, would be another ten miles or so past that.

On the way out of the plane, he rummaged through the emergency supplies cabinet by the door. Flares, life jackets, a long-handled flashlight—plenty of things that might be useful in a pinch. No ammunition for a Colt Peacemaker, though. That would have been too much to hope for.

Gabriel asked the pilot if he could grab a few things, and the pilot nodded. “Whatever you need. We’ll restock at the hangar.”

Gabriel took a couple of items, handed some to Sheba. Then he handed a cardboard box to the pilot. There’d been a rack of shipping supplies against one wall of the plane and he’d prepared the package while they were in flight. The account number he’d filled in was the Hunt Foundation’s and the address the package was going to was the Discoverers League building in New York. No point lugging two guns around when one of them was empty. And Andras had been right. The Colt
was
an antique, one that (the story went) had once belonged to either Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson. Who knew if it was true—but if he wasn’t going to be able to use the thing, he might as well keep it safe.

The pilot smiled as he accepted the package. “It’ll be there tomorrow,” he said. “Guaranteed.”

They stepped out into ninety-degree heat and humidity so powerful that a layer of moisture formed on their skin in seconds. It was late afternoon, so they were at least spared the glare of the sun directly overhead, but walking through the damp, warm air felt uncomfortable enough. In the distance, beneath the thrumming of
airplane and truck engines, they heard a raucous chorus of chirps and caws mixed with the periodic screech of a monkey.

Kurunegala was shaped roughly like a flat-bottomed bowl, the plain the town was built on being surrounded by tall rock outcroppings the locals had named after the animals they resembled. The town’s name itself meant “Tusker Rock,” since the tallest of the outcroppings, a grim thousand-foot cliff, was said to resemble a
kurune,
a tusked elephant. Gabriel squinted, but he couldn’t see it. There was also a Tortoise Rock, a Goat Rock, a Beetle Rock, an Eel Rock, and a Monkey Rock, all of which looked to Gabriel like rocks. There was even (the railroad stationmaster told Gabriel in a fit of garrulousness) a Yakdessa Rock, at which point Sheba needed to translate for him since the stationmaster was at a loss to explain what sort of animal a Yakdessa might be.

“It’s not an animal,” Sheba said. “It’s a man. Like a shaman—he would help afflicted people who were possessed by
Yak.
”

“Possessed by yak,” Gabriel said.

“It’s the name of the Devil in Sinhala,” Sheba said.

“That certainly makes more sense,” Gabriel muttered.

He wasn’t used to not being able to speak the local language well enough to get by. Over the years he’d picked up at least a few words and phrases in most languages and was passably fluent in more than a dozen. But he’d never had the need or the opportunity to pick up Sinhala or Tamil, the languages of Sri Lanka. The one time he’d been here he’d managed to get by with a mixture of English, Urdu, and hand gestures. And pistol gestures, when he’d finally tracked down the statue. Those were understood everywhere.

He snuck a glance at the tracking device Lucy had
given him, then returned it to his pocket. DeGroet was just 141 miles northwest. And closing.

“Can we use your phone?” Gabriel asked the stationmaster, a younger man no more than five feet tall who squinted up at him myopically any time he didn’t understand what he was hearing, almost as though it were his eyes that were at fault. He was squinting now. “Your telephone. We need to make a telephone call, to Dambulla.”

“Dambulla?”

“Yes, Dambulla.”

“Train does not go.”

“No, I know that,” Gabriel said. “We want to use—”

“Highway,” the stationmaster said. “You must drive.” And he made steering wheel motions with his hands.

“You want to try?” Gabriel asked Sheba.

“If they’d had telephones back when they had yakdessas,” she said, “I’d know the word for it.”

Gabriel mimed picking up a phone receiver and dialing a number, then realized that gesture might not mean anything anymore, not to someone raised on cell phones. He mimed unfolding a cell phone and talking into it. The stationmaster’s eyes unclenched happily. He reached under his counter and pulled out a phone with a scratched and faded plastic case. He opened it, pressed a button, and handed it over.

Gabriel punched in a number he remembered well from his last time here and was relieved to hear a woman’s voice answer on the third ring. “’Allo,” she said, a hint of a French accent surviving the transit through the cheap loudspeaker.

“Dayani, this is Gabriel Hunt,” Gabriel said.

“Gabriel! My goodness. How
are
you? Are you thinking of coming back to our island for a visit sometime?”

“Actually, I’m in Kurunegala,” he said, “right now.
How would you feel about dropping everything you’re doing and driving out here to pick me up?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not sure my coworkers will like it so much, but I would feel just fine about it. Want to wait for me by the clock tower? I can be there in forty minutes.”

“I wish we could,” he said, thinking about his ankle. Taped up, it did hurt less, but it still hurt, and waiting would feel better than walking. “But we can’t. We’re going to start walking along the A6; just look for us on the side of the road.”

“Are you in some sort of trouble, Gabriel?”

“Some sort,” he said.

“
Naturellement,
” she said. “I’m leaving now.” And the connection broke.

Gabriel handed the phone back to the stationmaster.

“You…go to Dambulla?” the young man said. Gabriel nodded. “You go quick. Quick? Understand? Before rains come.”

“Rains,” Gabriel said.

The man squinted, searching for a word. “Later, big rains,” he said. Then his face relaxed. He knew the word he wanted.

“Monsoon,” he said.