Hunt at the Well of Eternity (2 page)

As the man teetered, Gabriel got his first good look at him. He was big, well over six feet tall, with massive shoulders that strained the seams of the uniform jacket. He hadn’t gotten those shoulders carrying trays of champagne, nor was waitering likely to be how he’d acquired his broken nose or the network of scars along both cheeks and around his eyes.

The punch had momentum and all of Gabriel’s weight and strength behind it. Despite being bigger and heavier than Gabriel, the man reeled from the impact. His hands went up in the air…

And the whiskey bottle flew out of his grip, turning over and over as it soared high and then came crashing down to shatter on the marble floor in an explosion of glass and liquid.

Mariella Montez had just seen several men beaten and several more shot, and she’d watched it all without showing any abnormal distress, any grief. But now, as she saw the glass shatter and its contents lost, she screamed, a low, plaintive wail, as if her heart had been ripped out.

It was such a soul-rending cry that Gabriel had to turn and look at her. She had clapped her hands to her face and her eyes were wide with horror. Before he could ask her for an explanation, Gabriel heard the scuff of shoe leather behind him.

The punch Gabriel landed as he spun would have knocked most men out cold, but not this red-jacketed plug-ugly. The man was still upright, swinging a long, brawny arm in a backhanded swipe that smashed into Gabriel’s jaw. Gabriel staggered but managed to stay on his feet.

He yelled, “Michael, no!” as his younger brother came running up and jumped onto the big man’s back.

The phony waiter grunted and turned in place with Michael clinging to him, then brushed Michael off like a horse swatting away a fly. As Michael fell backward with his arms windmilling, he crashed into Gabriel. Their legs tangled and both of them went down.

That gave the waiter enough time to grab Mariella, throw her over his shoulder, and start galloping toward one of the rear exits. The other waiters covered hisretreat with blazing automatics. Gabriel scrambled up but couldn’t give chase. Flying lead forced him to grab Michael and duck behind one of the thick pillars as slugs pitted it.

He risked a glance around the pillar when he heard Mariella scream. She was pounding her fists against her captor’s back as he ran, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows.

Gabriel grimaced and wished again that he’d brought a gun with him tonight. He would have risked a shot at the son of a bitch’s legs to bring him down.

As it was, all he could do was pull his head back while bullets chipped splinters of plaster from the pillar next to his ear. His last sight of Mariella came as she was carried, still struggling, through the rear exit.

“The back!” a cop yelled from the front of the Great Hall. “Somebody cover the back!” Other cops were pouring into the room finally, and Gabriel saw two of them salute, turn on their heels and run out again, no doubt headed for the back.

But they would get there too late, Gabriel knew. Despite all the chaos, the waiters had sliced through the scene with brisk efficiency, like sharks through a school of minnows. Whoever and what ever else they were, they were professionals. Chances were their getaway was already arranged and they would be gone before any of the police could reach the back of the huge museum building.

Gabriel turned to Michael and said, “What the hell were you thinking, jumping on that guy?”

“I had to do something.”

“You do plenty,” Gabriel said. “Leave the jumping on people to me.”

“What was that he was after, anyway? It was rolling and spinning around so much I never got a good look at it.”

“I did,” Gabriel said. “It was a whiskey bottle.”

“A bottle of whiskey!”

Gabriel shook his head. “That’s not what I said. Come on.”

The shooting had stopped. Police officers and fire department paramedics were spreading out through the hall to check on the people who were injured.

Gabriel frowned as he scanned the room. He didn’t see any of the red-jacketed figures they’d taken down during the fray. The phony waiters had taken their wounded with them.

Michael still wasn’t too steady on his feet, so Gabriel kept one hand under his brother’s arm as he led him toward the spot where the bottle had shattered. He knelt, touched a couple of fingers to the wet spot on the floor, and then smelled them.

“That’s not whiskey,” he said. Not that he’d thought it had been—whatever had been in the bottle hadn’t been dark enough to be whiskey. “Doesn’t smell like any other kind of booze, either.”

He wet his fingers with the residue again and licked them, causing Michael to exclaim, “For God’s sake, Gabriel, don’t do that!”

Gabriel looked up. “Why not?”

“It could be some sort of toxin!”

Gabriel waited a moment, then shook his head. “Not a fast-acting one anyway.” He tasted it again. “It has no flavor at all.” He bent forward, sniffed at the spot directly. “No smell. No color. It’s not oily, not viscous. As far as I can tell, it’s water. Plain water.”

“Some poisons are flavorless and odorless.”

Gabriel nodded. “And not oily, sure. But so’s water, and I think that’s what this was a bottle of.”

Michael raised a hand to the cut on his head, winced as he touched it. “Why all that fuss over a whiskey bottle filled with…?”

“Water?”

“They went to a lot of trouble to get it away from Miss Montez.”

“Damned if I know.”

“You guys freeze!”

The brothers looked up at a beefy NYPD cop with a thick mustache dangling down over his upper lip. He had a service revolver leveled at them.

“Perfect timing, officer,” Gabriel said. “If you’ve got a key to the barn door, feel free to lock it.”

“Huh?”

“The horse.” Gabriel made a shooing gesture with one hand. “Gone.”

The cop turned to Michael. “What’s he talkin’ about?”

Michael gave Gabriel a look, then said, “Officer, we’re not armed, and we didn’t have anything to do with what happened here. We were guests at the reception. In fact, our Foundation was co host of the reception.”

The cop nodded toward the pieces of broken glass scattered across the floor. “What’s that you were monkeyin’ with?”

“That bottle appears to be what the gunmen were trying to obtain,” Michael said. “Along with a woman named Mariella Montez, who has been abducted.”

“Who’s this Montez?”

Gabriel said, “A young woman. About so tall—” Gabriel gestured with one hand. “Black hair. Busty. One of those phony waiters carried her off just before you got here.”

The cop sighed wearily. “Oh, Lord. That’s kidnappin’. Means we’ll have the damn FBI to deal with, too. Hey, stop that!”

Gabriel had taken a pen from his pocket and was using it to turn one of the larger pieces of broken glass over. “Look,” he said to Michael. “Most of the label is still intact.”

Michael leaned over and put his hands on his knees, squinting to study the label. The cop bent over beside him. “Old Pinebark,” Michael read. “Brewed in…Dobie’s Mill, Florida.” He looked at Gabriel and shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That doesn’t exactly surprise me, Michael,” Gabriel said as he straightened. “But I haven’t either. And here I thought I’d sampled just about every brand of rotgut, hooch, and Who-hit-John under the sun.”

“That’s hardly something to boast about,” Michael muttered.

“How about you, officer? You ever hear of Old—” But looking up, Gabriel saw the policeman wasn’t listening. He was staring at the cloth that had been wrapped around the bottle. It was lying on the floor of the Great Hall, wadded up and soiled from being trampled underfoot.

Gabriel walked over to it, squatted down on his haunches. There was some sort of design on the cloth. He used the tip of his pen to straighten it out.

“There you go, messing with evidence again,” the cop complained.

The cloth was perhaps thirty inches square. The faded colors and some tattering around the edges indicated that it was quite old; there were long-dried bloodstains spattered along one edge and even a dark-rimmed bullet hole in one spot. Crossed sabers were emblazoned in each corner. Set in a large, gilt-edged circle that took up most of the center of the flag was a picture of a gray-uniformed man on a magnificent, rearing stallion. In the background was a large white house with white columns, set among rolling green hills and fields covered with lush crops. Letters that arched above the circle read
Fifth GA. CAV-ALRY
, and below the picture, set slightly apart, were the letters
C S A
.

Gabriel said, “You’re the one with the history degree. Want to tell me what we’re looking at?”

“It appears,” Michael said, “to be the battle flag of a Confederate cavalry regiment.”

“The Fifth Georgia Cavalry was commanded by Brigadier General Granville Fordham Fargo,” Michael said several hours later as he pointed at a yellowed page in the over-sized volume spread open on the room’s cherrywood reading table, itself an antique. He and Gabriel were in the Sutton Place brownstone that served as the headquarters of the Hunt Foundation, as well as Michael’s home.

The brothers had spent a portion of the intervening hours being questioned by the police at the scene, but they hadn’t been able to tell the cops anything beyond what was obvious: Someone had substituted gunmen for the real waiters who were supposed to serve at the reception, apparently for the purpose of kidnapping Mariella Montez and stealing the bottle she had brought with her to the museum. When the bottle shattered, they satisfied themselves with just grabbing her.

The grisly discovery of the bodies of the real waiters in the catering van parked behind the museum provided grim confirmation. Each of them had been killed by a single shot to the back of the head. Professional executions.

Instead of returning to his own rooms on the top floor of the Discoverers League building, Gabriel had come here to the brownstone with Michael. Michael had been sorting through one musty volume after another in the library adjoining his office for over an hour while Gabriel paced impatiently. The books Michael had pulled from the shelves were stacked in neat piles on the floor and the table. Only two were open.

Gabriel reversed a chair and straddled it as Michael went on, “The Fifth Georgia was raised from a county in the southern part of the state, near the border with Florida. Just across the border is where this place Dobie’s Mill was located. That also happens to be the location of the only major battle the regiment took part in, the Battle of Olustee. That was in 1864. There’s a list here of all the officers who served.”

“I don’t guess any of them were named Montez?”

Michael shook his head. “No.”

“What about that Old Pinebark distillery? You find anything about that?”

Michael hesitated. He loosened his bow tie and pulled it from around his neck, then opened his collar, which he hadn’t done until now. Gabriel had long since thrown his tuxedo jacket over the back of a chair, with the tie and cummerbund stuffed in the pockets.

“That’s actually rather odd,” Michael said. He moved over to the second open book, turned it around so it was facing Gabriel. “According to Hogan’s
History of Distilling in America
, the Old Pinebark distillery was destroyed during the war and never rebuilt.”

“I don’t suppose you mean World War II,” Gabriel said.

“No,” Michael said. “The Civil War.”

Gabriel frowned. “That would mean that bottle was at least—”

“A hundred forty-four years old,” Michael said with a nod.

“So we’ve got an antique whiskey bottle wrapped in a battle flag from the Civil War,” Gabriel said.

“Yes, and if the police find out that we have them, we’re going to be in trouble,” Michael warned.

The cop who had questioned them at the museum had been called away by one of his superiors, and Gabriel had taken the opportunity to carry the flag over behind one of the pillars, where he quickly folded it up and stashed it at the small of his back, under his shirt. The piece of broken glass with the label attached had gone into his pocket.

The flag was now spread out on the table next to the books. The piece of the bottle rested atop the elaborately decorated cloth.

“What did you find out about Mariella Montez?”

“Nothing,” Michael said. He waved in the direction of the computer sitting in one corner of the room, as out of place among the ceiling-high shelves of old books as a cell phone in a monastery. “Not even online. It’s as if…she doesn’t exist.”

“She exists, all right,” Gabriel said, thinking about the way Mariella had felt to him when he bumped into her. Though he’d been too distracted to appreciate it at the time, he wouldn’t soon forget that steel-under-velvet body.

Gabriel went on, “Why’d she want to give the flag and the bottle to you?”

Michael spread his hands. “Lots of people bring antiques to the Hunt Foundation—to evaluate, to identify. To buy. Usually items of older vintage than the Civil War, true, but…”

“You think she wanted you to buy them from her?” Gabriel asked. “An old whiskey bottle full of water?”

“It may have had some sort of value other than the purely economic,” Michael said, and Gabriel remembered how she’d screamed when the bottle broke.

“There’s one way to find out,” Gabriel said.

“How?”

“You said the distillery was in northern Florida, near where this regiment fought its only battle…?”

“That’s right,” Michael said. “Olustee.”

“Then it looks like I’m going to Florida,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel figured it was best to get out of New York as quickly as possible, and Michael knew better than to try to talk him out of it.

Taking the flag and the bottle fragment with him, Gabriel made a quick stop at the Discoverers League to change out of the tuxedo and throw a few things in a bag. He was accustomed to traveling light.

The heaviest thing he put in the bag was his old Colt .45 double-action Peacemaker with well-worn walnut grips. Legend had it that the gun had once belonged to a notorious Western shootist, although the owner changed from Billy the Kid to Bat Masterson to Wyatt Earp depending on which Old West expert you talked to.

Gabriel didn’t know if any of the stories were true. All he cared about was that the revolver was a fine old weapon in top-notch shape, and that it packed plenty of stopping power.

Wearing a broken-in brown leather bomber jacket against the late-night chill along with brown boots, khakis, and a dark blue work shirt, Gabriel threw his bag into the backseat of the convertible he kept in the League’s garage and headed for the small private airfield on Long Island where several aircraft belonging to the Hunt Foundation were hangered. It was well after midnight by now, but there was still a considerable amount of traffic on the Queensboro Bridge.

Not so much, though, that Gabriel didn’t notice the headlights coming up fast behind him as he made the turn onto the on-ramp.

His right foot increased its pressure on the accelerator. The convertible didn’t look like anything special, but Gabriel had souped up the engine so that it responded with a smooth, powerful purr and shot ahead.

At the same time, keeping his right hand on the wheel, he reached into his jacket with his left hand and pulled a cell phone from his shirt pocket. He didn’t have to look to see what he was doing as he flipped it open and thumbed a speed-dial number.

“Michael,” he said into the phone when his brother answered, “lock the brownstone down now.”

“Gabriel?” Michael’s voice sounded fuzzy, as if the phone call had dragged him out of sleep. “What’s wrong?”

“Just get the place locked down, then I’ll tell you.”

“Are you in trouble again?”

The fast-moving headlights behind him had cut the gap between the cars by a considerable margin, and Gabriel wasn’t halfway across the bridge yet. He weaved around a van and heard tires screeching and brakes squealing behind him. His pursuers were taking chances, trying to catch up to him before he reached the other end of the bridge. They probably hoped to force him off into the East River.

“No more than usual,” Gabriel said.

“Damn it,” Michael said. “Hang on.” Gabriel heard some shuffling on the other end, then the triple beep of the security system being activated. “All right,” Michael said a second later. “I’m locked in. Now, what can I do to help you?”

“Nothing.”

“Where are you?”

“Queensboro Bridge.” Gabriel sped up even more, but the headlights were gaining on him. The vehicle, a big black SUV, loomed behind him and rammed into the convertible’s rear end with a bone-jarring jolt. The car skidded toward the railing, high above the river, but Gabriel coolly steered out of the skid and regained control. “Somebody’s trying to keep me from leaving town.”

“My God! Are you all—”

“I’m fine, but I’ve got to go. Stay inside until you hear from me. Have your guys check all deliveries, even food.”

Michael started to say something else, but Gabriel was already flipping the phone shut. He stowed it away in his pocket and got both hands on the wheel again just as the SUV pulled up on the convertible’s right rear corner. It rammed hard into the fender and sent the smaller vehicle into a spin.

The other drivers on the bridge had seen that something was wrong and had pulled out of the way of the speeding cars. Which was good in terms of reducing the odds that he’d hit anyone, but it also meant there was nothing to stop his spin. He kept his left hand on the wheel, for what little good it did, and reached into the backseat with his right. He’d left the top of his bag unzipped, and his fingers wrapped around the butt of the Colt.

He jerked the gun free as the car slid to a stop across two lanes, facing the lights of Roo sevelt Island. The driver’s side was pointing toward the SUV, which had braked sharply after the collision. It picked up speed now, though, and Gabriel realized that the driver was planning to T-bone the convertible.

Gabriel tried cranking the ignition, but the convertible’s engine had died. He shifted the revolver from his right hand to his left and thrust it out the window. He leveled the Colt at the oncoming SUV and squeezed off three rounds as he continued twisting the key in the ignition with his other hand.

All three slugs smacked into the SUV’s windshield, but they just starred the glass and didn’t even come close to shattering it. Still trying to start the car, Gabriel lowered his aim and put two shots into the SUV’s grille. That didn’t do any good, either. The damn thing had to be armored.

Just about what you would expect from professionals like the men who had raided the museum.

The engine finally caught. Gabriel slammed the convertible into reverse. Smoke rose from the tires as the car peeled backward. The SUV was practically on top of it already and clipped the front bumper as it rocketed past.

Gabriel dropped the Colt on the seat beside him and kept backing, twisting the wheel as he did so.

Now he was behind the SUV, which had screeched to a stop inches from the railing. He floored the accelerator and started crowding the other car’s right rear. Sparks flew in the night as metal clashed. The SUV’s rear end slewed to the left and clipped the railing. It began to drag against the metal beams. He considerer ramming the SUV, trying to push it off into the water, but the convertible was considerably lighter than the other vehicle—it wasn’t likely to work. And anyway, Gabriel had a plane to catch.

Gabriel whipped the wheel to the right and cut across several lanes. He kept the gas pedal pushed down as far as it would go and shot down the slope to the foot of the bridge.

The darkness of Queens Bridge Park loomed to his left. He sent the convertible skidding into a left turn on Vernon Boulevard and then almost immediately turned right on a smaller street. No lights appeared in his rearview mirror. Evidently the men who’d been trying to kill him weren’t prepared to follow him through the side streets of Queens.

He kept making turns for several minutes, just to throw off any possible pursuit, then cut back south toward the Long Island Expressway. His nerves were steady despite the attempt on his life. It wasn’t his first. But he heaved a sigh of relief anyway.

Then he reached for his cell phone.

“Everything’s quiet here,” Michael said. “Are you okay?”

“Just annoyed. Oh, and the convertible took some damage. I’ll leave it at the airfield and you can have somebody pick it up tomorrow.”

“Of course. What happened?”

“Somebody in an SUV just tried to push me off the Queensboro Bridge. Our friends from earlier in the evening, I’d guess.”

“How did they find you?”

Gabriel felt a pang of anxiety for Mariella. “I’m guessing they forced Señorita Montez to tell them who she was trying to give her package to. That’s why I told you to lock everything down at the brownstone. If they found me, they can find you.”

“Well, they can find me,” Michael said, “but no one’s getting in without my say-so.”

“Good,” Gabriel said. “Don’t give it to any men in a black SUV.”

“Or any waiters,” Michael said.

Gabriel grinned as he drove through the night. “That’s right. Or any waiters.” He shut the phone off. The airstrip was near.

Michael had shown him on a map where the Battle of Olustee had been fought in 1864. The nearest town with an airport was St. Augustine, “the oldest European settlement on the North American continent,” the guidebook entry Gabriel had consulted said, “founded by Spanish explorers more than five hundred years ago.” He had called ahead to have the Foundation’s private jet readied for takeoff, so as soon as he’d filed a flight plan for St. Augustine, Gabriel got in the air.

When he was at cruising altitude and had switched the autopilot on, he was finally able to sit back and think about everything that had happened over the past several hours. He had certainly never expected so much excitement when he’d struggled into that monkey suit for the reception at the museum. At most he had thought that he might find some willing female companionship for a late supper and a few drinks after the reception, followed by…

Well, things hadn’t gotten anywhere near that far, Gabriel reflected. The most attractive woman he had met tonight was Mariella Montez, and their relationship had been brief, hectic, and filled with mystery and danger.

Not the worst start to an evening, Gabriel reflected, but the ending could’ve been better. No man likes seeing his prospective date carried off by a linebacker in livery.

He had no idea where Mariella was and preferred not to think too much about what was happening to her. The men who had carried her off were clearly the sort to stop at nothing to get what they wanted.

And what, exactly, was that? A tattered battle flag and an antique whiskey bottle? What made those two items so special?

The flag and the piece of the bottle were in Gabriel’s bag. He went back into the jet’s passenger cabin, leaving the plane to fly itself, and got them out to study them. He looked at the bottle first.

There was nothing special about it that he could see. The printing on the label had faded with time, of course, but it was all still legible. He could still make out the two pine trees that flanked the name OLD PINEBARK. He turned the piece of glass over and peered through it at the back of the label, just in case something had been written or drawn on it before it was pasted on the bottle.

Nothing.

He set the piece aside and unfolded the flag, spreading it out on a table under a good light. The picture in the center of the flag had a lot of detail worked into it. Behind the cavalryman on the rearing horse was a large field of some sort.

A cotton field, of course. There were even tiny figures in the field. Slaves. Gabriel’s mouth tightened.

More men on horse back galloped over the hills to the right of the figure in the foreground, near the bullet hole. A hunt, perhaps? To the left was the plantation house, with more tiny figures in front of it. Southern belles in hoop skirts. It was like a scene out of
Gone With the Wind.

He sat down in one of the cushioned seats around the table and leaned back. How had these artifacts of the Old South wound up in the hands of the beautiful young woman who had brought them to the Metropolitan Museum to give to Michael Hunt?

He didn’t have an answer. And he had no idea if any answers would be waiting for him in Florida. It was just the only place he had to start looking.

Gabriel stared at the flag until his eyes hurt, feeling like there was something there he wasn’t seeing. After a while he shook his head and gave up. It might be better to come back to it later, he decided, and study the situation with fresher eyes…and a fresher brain, to boot. It had been a long night and he hadn’t had any sleep so far, not to mention having to fight for his life several times. And he still had miles to go.

Florida loomed up ahead in the darkness as hereturned to the cockpit and the jet continued to arrow southward. The Sunshine State.

Maybe it would shine some light on the ugly mystery that had already cost a dozen people their lives.