Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (21 page)

“How did you get down here?” Gabriel said.

“Why, we followed you, of course. You left a fine trail. Even left that rope attached for us. Most helpful.”

“But the first trap, the room with the echo—”

“Yes, that,” Arif said. “Quite an intricate contraption,
I am sure. But nothing several pounds of dynamite couldn’t deal with, now that the Corsicans were no longer around to interfere.”

“They’re all . . . ?”

“Dead, yes, every one of them,” Arif said. “It is just us now, Gabriel. You and I and these gentlemen here. There is no one to protect the Stone now. But never fear. The Alliance will see that it returns to its rightful home.”

“Don’t give it to him, Gabriel!”

“If you prefer, Miss Ficatier, I’m sure Kemnebi here would be happy to take it from him.”

“No,” Gabriel said. There were five men, four with guns drawn, against the two of them, Sammi armed with a flashlight and Gabriel with his hands full. “You win,” he said. “Take it.”

“Gabriel!”

“I just want your word that Lucy will be released unharmed, as Amun promised.”

“My word?” Arif clucked and sadly shook his head. “You know what my word is worth, Gabriel.”

“And you know you can name your price,” Gabriel said. “Michael will pay it.”

“Now, that I will have to think about most seriously.” He stepped forward. “The Stone, please.”

Gabriel handed it to him. Arif bent under the weight and Gabriel leaped forward, swinging his arm up and around the smaller man’s throat—but Arif ducked and darted backward out of reach. Two of the other men stepped forward to flank him.

“Now, now. That wasn’t sporting.” Arif passed the stone to one of the men, who carried it from the chamber.

“As for your sister, Gabriel . . . I am afraid Khufu has grown quite fond of her. I seriously doubt he will let her
leave his side. He has wanted an heir for some time. Do you happen to know if she is fertile?”

Gabriel rushed at him. But before he could reach Arif, Kemnebi stepped between them. He blocked Gabriel’s charge with one arm, lifting him off his feet and hurling him to the side. Gabriel landed on one of the skeletons in a clatter of breaking bones. He only hoped that none of them were his.

“Good-bye, Gabriel; Miss Ficatier.” Arif backed out of the chamber, followed by Kemnebi and the others. “The Alliance thanks you once again for your service,” he called from the other room. “Your contribution will not be forgotten.”

Gabriel jumped to his feet as he saw the wall begin rotating shut. But before he could reach it, Kemnebi gave the blocks of stone a huge shove—and kicked the two rucksacks out of the way. The wall slammed closed with a sound like a kettle drum booming.

Gabriel raced to the wall and began hammering against it with his fists. He pushed at it, kicked it. Nothing. It was locked firmly in place.

“Hey, Arif,”
he shouted,
“why don’t you pick up some treasure on the way out?”

He listened for the sound of a spear being triggered, but heard nothing. He wasn’t sure he would—with the wall as thick as it was, they probably hadn’t heard him shouting, either.

He returned to where Sammi stood, in the center of the room.

Was her flashlight dimmer than it had been? It was probably just an illusion, he knew; but before much longer it wouldn’t be. Darkness would come, and then thirst, and hunger, all steps along the path to becoming the two freshest skeletons on the chamber floor.

“I’m sorry, Sammi,” Gabriel said. “I wish I hadn’t dragged you into this.”

“You didn’t drag me anywhere. I made up my own mind every step of the way.” She laughed ruefully. “I wish I hadn’t come, but that doesn’t make it your fault.”

She began walking around the perimeter of the room, peering at each wall, then examining the floor, then looking up at the ceiling. She searched around the base of the cage and the track on which the pedestal had swung.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel said.

“What I do best,” she said. “Finding a way out.”

“We know the way out,” he said. “It’s the way we came in.”

“We know
one
way out. Since that way is no longer available to us, I am finding another.”

“Here’s the other,” Gabriel said, and pulled the compact pickax out of one of the rucksacks Kemnebi had kicked out of the way of the closing door. “It may take a while, but—”

“It’ll go faster if you bring that over here,” Sammi said.

She’d reached into the cage and pulled out the rotting fragments of cloth on which the Second Stone had rested. Pushing down on the bottom of the cage showed some give in the surface, like the bottom of a wrestling ring or a gymnastics mat. It wasn’t solid stone.

“Well, now, that’s interesting,” Gabriel said.

“Isn’t it?”

Gabriel leaned into the cage and started working at the bottom surface with the point of the ax. It was slow going, but after working through a layer of stone and a layer of some sort of dense batting below, he found what seemed to be a metal panel. The edges of the panel extended
a good two inches beyond the stone in which the cage’s bars were embedded, but by prying with the ax and using the handle as a lever—

The center of the panel bowed and bent, and then the edge came free.

Gabriel heaved, bending the metal farther back.

Beneath it, darkness beckoned.

Gabriel shined his light down, revealing a set of narrow stone rungs carved into the rock.

“How did you know . . . ? What made you think there might be something under the cage?”

“Two reasons,” Sammi said. “First, there had to be some other room connected to this one—if nothing else, a place where the mechanism for generating and propelling the poison gas was located. Perhaps also a back door through which the Corsicans could keep an eye on the Stone without having to navigate the three traps themselves.”

“And the second reason?”

“My father was a magician, Gabriel. He used plenty of cages. He escaped from them. He taught me to escape from them. One thing I learned was, if you ever see a cage? There’s a good chance there’s something hidden under it.”

Gabriel went down first. The crude ladder carved into the wall led to a chamber of roughly the same dimensions as the room above except that it was half the height. Gabriel crouched and shined his light up at the low ceiling. There was a rats’ nest of narrow metal pipes, one connected to each hole in the floor above, each tube winding its way back to a central unit that looked like an enormous cast-iron pot-bellied stove. The ceiling was reinforced by wooden beams, after the fashion of a mine shaft, and the air stank of sulfur, like a room in which a thousand matches had been struck.

Next to the foot of the ladder, Gabriel’s flashlight revealed a narrow tunnel leading off into the darkness. He called for Sammi to come.

The tunnel had a different smell, but no less unpleasant: it was dank and smelled of mildew and rot. And at every turn there were spiderwebs. Gabriel cut through them with the blade of the ax. Sammi shuddered as the torn edges of one brushed her cheek.

“So many webs,” she said.

“We’re underground,” Gabriel said. “It’s where spiders like to live.”

“Don’t tell me that,” she said.

“They’re generally harmless,” Gabriel said. “If you
don’t bother them.” He brushed away another web that stretched from top to bottom in the narrow tunnel. In the beam of their lights, a few dozen tiny spiders scattered.

“Is it normal for there to be that many?”

“They’re babies,” Gabriel said. “Probably freshly hatched.” He swung the flashlight around from wall to wall. Another few dozen were on either wall. “Nothing to worry about.” Then he swung the light up.

The underside of the tunnel’s roof was a solid mass of crawling spiders, a herd of thousands—maybe tens of thousands—crawling quickly along the ceiling over their heads. They were much larger than the babies. Many were the size of quarters, some as big as half-dollars. They were moving in a way that reminded Gabriel of fire ants, crawling over one another in a desperate chaotic frenzy. And where the light struck them—

They began to drop.

Sammi screamed.

Even Gabriel emitted a startled cry and began slapping at his chest to brush them off.

But they kept coming. They were swarming the tunnel walls, ceiling, and floor.

Gabriel pushed Sammi ahead of him.
“Run,”
he said through clenched teeth; and they did, batting at their clothes and hair as they went, frantically brushing the spiders away.

The tunnel forked and the branch they took began sloping upward as they ran. The angle increased until they were almost climbing. It took a tremendous amount of strength in their legs to keep ascending at this pace—but if they’d needed an extra incentive, they had one, as some of the spiders had by now worked themselves inside their clothes and begun biting.

Sammi yelped with pain. Gabriel cursed and slapped at his skin.

They continued to climb, as fast as they were able. Gabriel lost track of how far they’d gone; it took him by surprise when they suddenly fetched up against the end of the tunnel. A dead end, sloping directly upward. Packed earth above their heads.

Gabriel struck at the barrier with the pickax. Dirt and rocks crumbled down, covering them. But the material was soft and easy to break through. Sammi continued to brush the spiders off her body and his while Gabriel dug vertically, climbing on the accumulated dirt as it piled up.

A large clod of earth came down, revealing an open hole—and sunlight.

He enlarged the hole with two more swings of the ax, then lifted Sammi bodily out of the hole. He followed and ripped off his shirt, panting from exertion and pain. She’d done the same, and he saw that her chest and back were covered with painful-looking welts and bites. The bugs they’d brought up with them dropped to the ground and fled back to the darkness of the hole.

“Madam! Are you all right?”

Gabriel turned to see the source of the voice—a middle-aged British matron in sandals and sunglasses, with a compact digital camera dangling from a strap around her wrist. A man stood beside her, goggling at Sammi, who grabbed up her shirt and held it in front of her.

“Yes . . . yes, I’m all right,” Sammi said, wincing. “Thank you.”

“Henry! Don’t stare!” The man stopped goggling, though he continued to sneak glances out of the corner of his eye.

Gabriel looked around. They were in the middle of the circle of menhirs—the Western Monument—at Filitosa.

“You were so right, sweetie,” he said, sweeping one arm around Sammi’s shoulders, “we were supposed to turn left. You two be careful—you do
not
want to get separated from your tour group.”

“Oh, dear,” the woman said as Gabriel led Sammi out of the circle. “Did you hear that, Henry?”

The staff at the Repository Museum dug out a first aid kit and used up two tubes of hydrocortisone cream on their bites. The spiders here were not poisonous, the agent assigned to them assured Gabriel. The bites would itch and be bothersome for a few days, but . . .

Where, the agent wanted to know, had they come across such a large nest of spiders?

Gabriel waved his hands and made up an answer that would send them off in the wrong direction entirely. Let them fumigate some other part of the grounds. Couldn’t hurt.

“Listen,” Gabriel said, “can I use your phone?”

“Of course,” the agent said. “Local call or long distance?”

“Long distance. New York.”

The agent handed over a cordless handset and pushed two buttons on it. The dial tone started buzzing.

Gabriel dialed the Foundation.

“Gabriel!” Michael said. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to—”

“Not now, Michael. I can’t talk. I’ll tell you more when I can.” He glanced over at the museum agent. She was looking the other way, but it was clear she was still listening. “The object we discussed . . . it’s not there anymore. It’s on its way back to Amun and his crew.”

“In Marrakesh?” Michael said.

“Presumably.”

“I’ll try to reach Arif again—”

“You might not want to do that,” Gabriel said. “He’s the one who took it.”

Michael was silent. “Arif?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “Arif. And if you want some even better news, he says Lucy’s about to become a pharaoh’s bride.”

“Gabriel . . . you’ve got to do something.”

“I will. I just need you to do something for me first.”

“Anything.”

“Have Charlie ready to fly at Ajaccio in thirty minutes. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

“And Michael?”

“Yes?”

“Tell him this one time it’s okay to take any risks he wants.”

It was after midnight. The streets of Marrakesh were dark and empty, although there were candles flickering in some windows, the illumination of a few modern street lamps, and the light of stars in the moonless sky to make their surroundings visible. As in all cities, a few homeless people were curled up in doorways and alcoves, trying to steal an hour or two of sleep. No one else was on the street at this hour.

From the outside, the building that housed the Alliance of the Pharaohs was darker than most—the windows had been boarded up again, and to a casual observer it would have looked completely deserted. But with his ear pressed to the planks nailed over the doorway, Gabriel could hear sounds of movement inside.

Well, it had been too much to hope that they’d all have been asleep. But at least they probably wouldn’t be going in and out of the building too much at one
AM
.

He led Sammi into the dormant square, where shuttered stands stood darkly against the blue-black sky, looming like the menhirs in Corsica. They found their way silently to the back entrance of Nizan’s shop. One light was burning inside, and through a half-closed set of blinds they could see Nizan himself, seated at a desk, poring over a ledger.

Gabriel rechecked his Colt unnecessarily; it was fully loaded with six rounds and he had plenty of extras in a pouch on his belt. Sammi was armed as well, having obtained a Browning 9mm semi-automatic from Charlie. It was Foundation property, but the message from Michael seemed to have gotten across. Charlie had given her the gun and two spare magazines and showed her how to load them.