Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (22 page)

“Stick to the plan,” Gabriel said. “You stay on the ground floor and watch the tunnel entrance. I’ll head upstairs. Lucy’s the first priority. When I’ve got her, I’ll bring her down and you can get her the hell out of there.”

“I wish you’d come with us.”

“If I don’t take care of the Alliance now, we’ll all be watching over our shoulders for them for the rest of our lives. Which may not be very long.”

“I know,” Sammi said. “But I hate leaving you alone in there.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Gabriel said. “The last thing I’ll be is alone.”

The couple crept toward Nizan’s. Keeping their backs to the wall and pistols in hand, they slipped in through the shop’s rear door.

Nizan’s eyes widened when he looked up and saw them. Gabriel’s Colt jabbed into his neck before he could set off any alarm.

“Not a sound,” Gabriel ordered.

Sammi picked up a spool of cord used to tie carpet rolls and swiftly bound Nizan’s wrists and ankles, her knots expert and tight. There’d be no working his way loose from these knots; even a seasoned escape artist would have had difficulty slipping them. Gabriel fashioned a gag out of a small strip of carpet and deposited Nizan on the washroom floor, then pushed two heavy
rolls of carpet in front of the door so it couldn’t be opened.

With Nizan secured, they walked to the back room where the trap door was located. Gabriel threw back the carpet and dragged the door open. They went down the steps and into the tunnel, moving quickly. They reached the other building’s basement in less than two minutes. Gabriel cocked his head to listen at the foot of the stairs. There were no sounds from above. He climbed the steps and slowly raised the door an inch or two. A glance told him no one was in the pantry—but now he did hear voices, from the next room over.

Gabriel mouthed the word, “Quiet,” and gestured for Sammi to follow. They climbed out of the tunnel, taking care to make no sound and leaving the trap door open for a quick retreat.

Gabriel peered around a corner into the living room, then jerked back. Kemnebi was standing there, his broad back to Gabriel, lecturing two other Alliance men in Arabic. One of the other men said something back in what sounded to Gabriel like an apologetic tone. Kemnebi responded with no sympathy in his voice at all. Gabriel heard footsteps receding as the men walked out of the room.

He gestured to Sammi to remain by the door, and stepped into the living room.

Where he walked right into Kemnebi.

The other men had gone—but not him.

Kemnebi was startled, but just for a moment. He reacted with lightning speed, seizing Gabriel’s gun hand before he could pull the trigger of his Colt. Gabriel punched him as hard as he could with his other hand, landing a blow to Kemnebi’s solar plexus that would have felled most men. Kemnebi felt it—Gabriel could see
it in his reaction—but he shook it off and kept squeezing Gabriel’s hand mercilessly.

Gabriel swung a knee up between Kemnebi’s legs, and that had more of an effect. The big man stumbled a few steps backward and bent over, struggling to catch his breath. Gabriel took the opportunity to deliver a second blow, this one a roundhouse to the side of his head. Kemnebi fell against a table, tipping it over and knocking all its contents to the ground.

Gabriel saw Sammi peer out from the pantry, a look of concern on her face. From upstairs came the sound of running footsteps.

“So much for stealth,” Gabriel said.

Sammi whipped out the Browning and took a bead on Kemnebi’s head. “Don’t move.”

“I’m going upstairs,” Gabriel said. “Can you handle him?”

“Yes,” she said, and pulled the trigger. A spray of blood stained the wall. Kemnebi slumped to the ground, dead.

“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Remind me never to make you mad.”

“They’re not playing around,” Sammi said. “We can’t either.” But her hands were shaking.

Three men in three days. Gabriel tried to push the thought out of his mind. There’d be time for that sort of thinking later. Or there wouldn’t, if he let himself be distracted by it now.

He sprinted to the staircase and took the steps two at a time. One of the guards met him coming down as he and Gabriel both reached the first landing. The guard delivered a haymaker to Gabriel’s chin, which stunned Gabriel for a moment, but he dropped into a defensive crouch and shook off the blow. As the man came in for
a second try, Gabriel blocked the punch with his forearm and gave one right back, slamming his knuckles into the man’s temple. The man collapsed against the staircase banister, which snapped under his weight. He fell screaming to the floor below.

Another guard appeared on the landing, but a pair of bullets from Gabriel’s Colt sent him scurrying back upstairs. Gabriel followed, shooting one more time, and then turned off at the landing for the third floor. He raced down the hall to Lucy’s room. It was shut and locked. He banged loudly on the wood with his fist. “Lucy? You in there?”

“Gabriel?” She didn’t sound normal.

Gabriel lifted his boot and kicked the door in, snapping the lock off the jamb.

Lucy was there, dressed exactly as she had been in the airport, her eyes slightly glazed from the lingering effects of whatever drug they’d given her this time.

“You came back,” she said, her voice muzzy.

“Of course I did,” Gabriel said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Don’t think I can climb . . .” she said.

“You don’t have to. Just stay behind me and do what I say.”

“Okay . . . Gabriel?”

“What?” he said, and began pulling her toward the door.

“I don’t hate Michael,” she said sleepily. “I don’t.”

“That’s great. We’ll talk about it later.”

“I just . . . can’t live there, in their home, spending their money . . .”

“Later,” Gabriel said. Then he pressed her back against the wall and followed suit himself just as a spray of bullets came whizzing past.

“Gabriel!” Lucy exclaimed.

He poked the nose of the Colt around the doorframe and snapped off one shot. Then another—and this time he heard someone groan and collapse. “Come on.” He pulled Lucy with him toward the stairs.

They made it halfway down.

Two guards met them on the second-floor landing. One of them held a lit oil lamp, the other a long-barreled pistol. Both men attacked Gabriel as he pushed Lucy out of the way. Gabriel focused on the man with the gun. He feinted at the man’s face, then grabbed his forearm and used it as a lever to throw the man over his shoulder. The man fired his gun as he flew through the air and through the smashed stair railing, plummeting to join his colleague on the floor below. His bullet thunked solidly into the wooden wall.

By then, the second guard was swinging the oil lamp at Gabriel.

Gabriel ducked and slammed into the guard’s middle. The guard collapsed and the oil lamp went flying. It crashed onto the carpeted floor, spilling its contents and immediately igniting the area in flames.

Gabriel heard Sammi shouting from the first floor. A few seconds later, she appeared on the staircase, trying to see through the curtain of flame that had erupted.

“Cifer!” she called.

Lucy’s head jerked up. “Sammi?”

Sammi ran to her and wrapped Lucy in her arms. She helped her to her feet.

“You were supposed to stay downstairs,” Gabriel said.

“You sounded like you could use some help.” She looked at the smashed railing and the guard lying prone and moaning on the landing. “Guess not.”

“Just get her to safety,” Gabriel said. “You, too.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Sammi said, and led Lucy swiftly through the flames.

Gabriel took a moment to reload his gun, then ran down to the first floor himself. As he passed the pantry, he saw that the trap door was now closed. Good. He ran in the other direction, toward the corridor leading to Khufu’s temple.

One more guard stood in the corridor. As Gabriel ran toward him, the man raised his pistol to fire, but Gabriel beat him to the draw, and the man went over backward with a bullet in his chest.

Gabriel leaped over the guard’s body and rushed to the fake stone slab that served as a door. It swung open when he grabbed the hidden handholds and pushed.

As he stepped into the temple, Khufu’s back was to him. He was still in the ancient Egyptian garb, and he was placing items of value—statuettes and jewel-encrusted treasures—into a large steamer trunk. His scepter was leaning against the throne.

Gabriel aimed the Colt at the center of Khufu’s back and thumbed back the hammer. Khufu stiffened and slowly straightened, extending one arm toward the side.

“Reach for that scepter and you’re dead,” Gabriel said.

Khufu stopped moving. With his arm halfway extended and his back still turned, he spoke. “You are a very foolish man, Mister Hunt. You should never have returned here.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” Gabriel said.

“What do you want? Your sister? Very well. You can have her.”

“I already have her,” Gabriel said. “I want the Stone.”

“That you cannot have,” Khufu said.

“Your men are dead,” Gabriel said. “Kemnebi, the guards. I don’t know where Arif is, or Amun, but if they were in the building I think they’d have shown by now. You’re on your own.”

Khufu whirled and leaped for the scepter, snatching it up just ahead of the bullet Gabriel had sent speeding toward it. Khufu dived behind the throne.

Gabriel raced forward, keeping the throne between him and Khufu—and between him and the deadly scepter. Behind him he heard the sound of crackling fire and smelled heavy, acrid smoke. The whole place was going up in flames.

“Come on out,” Gabriel called. “It’s over. Give up while you can.”

He expected some response—defiance, taunting, rage, an attack. But when he got no response at all, Gabriel ran around to the back of the throne. There was no sign of Khufu anywhere.

He spun in place, gun raised. Where could the man have gone?

He glanced back at the open doorway. The corridor beyond was completely engulfed now, the cast resin walls melting from the heat. Smoke was billowing into the room at an alarming pace.

He returned to the throne. He knew the man had been here; people didn’t just disappear. Khufu had to have gone
somewhere
. . .

He remembered what Sammi had said about cages. Maybe the same held true for thrones. He searched the elevated base of the throne carefully. Near the edge of
one of the six shallow steps on which the throne rested, he spotted a very narrow tile that was raised slightly above the ones on either side. He depressed it with one finger and the steps opened on a hidden hinge.

Gabriel stuck his gun inside and pulled the trigger twice, then lowered himself to the floor and slipped into the opening.

He dropped for about ten feet, landing in a crouch on the floor of a small room lit with hanging electric lights. There was a wooden crate on casters here, its top open, its interior packed with shreds of newspaper, through the uppermost layer of which Gabriel could see one corner of the Second Stone sticking out.

And on the floor—

On the floor Khufu lay facedown, blood pooling beneath him, the scepter still clutched in one hand. One of Gabriel’s gunshots must have hit him, either directly or on a ricochet. Gabriel went over quickly and kicked the scepter out of his grasp.

“Hunt . . .” Khufu was trying to speak, but his voice was ragged and weak, muffled by the falcon mask he still wore and fading from the blood loss he’d sustained.

Gabriel squatted beside him and turned him over onto his back. The bullet had torn through his abdomen. The man was dying.

“Hunt . . .” he said again, and then something Gabriel couldn’t make out. Gabriel reached down and pulled off the mask.

Beneath it, contorted with pain, was Amun’s face.

“Mister Hunt . . .” Amun breathed heavily and with evident pain. “You have not won . . . as long as any true Egyptian breathes, men like you will . . . answer for their crimes . . .”

His voice dropped away, and his body went limp.
Gabriel lifted one of Amun’s arms and let it fall. This was one true Egyptian whose breathing Gabriel didn’t have to worry about anymore.

Gabriel stood. Smoke was pouring into the room through the open panel in the steps of the throne, and the temperature was becoming very uncomfortable. Pretty soon it would be impossible to see, and soon after that to breathe. Gabriel looked around for an exit and spotted a door in the corner. He tried the knob and the door swung open. Gabriel went to the crate and wheeled it out.

The tunnel he found himself in looked similar to the one leading from Nizan’s to the Alliance’s building, and he wasn’t entirely surprised when, after angling upward steeply for about thirty yards toward the end, the tunnel let out (through a heavily barred wooden door) onto the rear loading platform of Nizan’s shop.

Gabriel pushed the crate onward until he found himself on the street. A few people were standing around, some in nightclothes and robes, some of them barefoot, each turning to the others in an attempt to learn what was going on. Sirens were converging on the building a block away, where Gabriel could see the orange glow of the fire in the sky over the rooftops. He made his way down the block, steering the crate behind a row of trucks and cars that had hastily been parked on the scene, disgorging police and firemen to combat the chaos. A larger crowd had gathered here, in front of the blazing building.

Sammi and Lucy were among them, their faces frozen in strained expressions of concern.

Gabriel approached them, pushing the crate before him. “Ladies.”

“Gabriel!”

“My god!”

They both rushed to him.

“We thought you were dead for sure,” Lucy said. Her voice sounded a little clearer, as if the combination of adrenaline and cool night air were combating the effects of the drug in her system.

“How did you get out?” Sammi asked.

“Gabriel,” Lucy exclaimed, looking at a seared patch on Gabriel’s sleeve he hadn’t even noticed himself, “you’re hurt!”

“Oh, she’s right—did you get burned?”