Hunt at World's End Read online

  “You should see the mark a saw-toothed Aztec dagger left on my thigh. It’s a beauty.”

  “Maybe some other time,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Gabriel sighed. “I’m getting a lot of that today.”

  When Gabriel left the hospital, his brother Michael was waiting for him outside, pacing on the sidewalk, his straight, sandy hair blowing in the breeze. He pushed his round, wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Well, well, well. I guess I am my brother’s keeper after all.”

  “You didn’t have to pick me up,” Gabriel said. He touched the bandage on his cheek. It protected the four stitches Dr. Barrow had given him. She’d told him he was lucky his jaw hadn’t fractured. Then she’d recommended rest, aspirin for the soreness and, if possible, significantly fewer gun butts to the face.

  “Come on,” Michael said. He put a hand on Gabriel’s back and led him to the shiny black town car waiting at the curb. He opened the door for Gabriel, then slid into the backseat next to him.

  Up front, an older man with a salt and pepper mustache looked at Michael in the rearview mirror and asked, “Home?”

  “Yes. Thanks, Stefan.” The driver nodded and pulled out into traffic. “I hope you don’t mind coming back with me,” Michael said, turning to Gabriel. “It’s just that I feel better about our security at the Foundation than what they’ve got at the Discoverers League. Those men might come back for you.”

  “They already have what they came for,” Gabriel said. “I’m sure they’re long gone by now. Back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Michael said, “but better safe than sorry.” He looked out the window. “You know I really wish you’d stop all this and just come work with me at the Foundation.”

  “Doing what?” Gabriel asked. “Answering mail? Reading grant applications? I’d go stir crazy within a week.”

  “You’d get fewer guns pointed at you. Not the worst trade-off, Gabriel.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” Gabriel said.

  The car pulled up in front of the marble entryway of the Hunt Foundation’s five-story brownstone on 55th Street and York Avenue, in the heart of Sutton Place. They got out, and as Stefan drove the car off, Michael fished his keys out of the pocket of his tweed jacket and opened the door. Inside, he pressed a code into an alarm panel on the wall, which beeped in response. Satisfied, he led the way up the stairs, past the offices on the first two floors of the building and up to his triplex apartment.

  He turned on the lights, big hanging chandeliers that illuminated an enormous library lined with bookcase after bookcase. Beginning with the numerous volumes their parents had amassed, Michael had compiled the largest collection of obscure and ancient texts since the Library of Alexandria, a collection Gabriel himself had made use of many times. A red leather couch sat in the middle of the room, with a wrought iron, granite-topped coffee table in front of it and a long polished oak desk off to one side. The pages of a manuscript lay stacked on the table: the Oedipodea of Homer, translated by Sheba McCoy. Good for her, Gabriel thought, remembering how close they’d both come to getting themselves killed after discovering the lost epic in Greece. Have to read it one of these days, find out how it ends.

  At the far end of the library, an enormous stuffed polar bear, rearing with its mouth open and its teeth bared, towered above a small breakfront bar. “Would you like a drink?” Michael asked, opening the breakfront and pulling out a bottle of Glenfiddich.

  “Definitely.”

  Gabriel sat on the couch. Beside Sheba’s manuscript, there was an open cardboard box with the Hunt Foundation’s address written on one of the flaps in black marker. He reached inside and dug through shredded paper until he felt something dry and brittle. He pulled the object out. It was a shrunken, mummified human hand. With six fingers.

  “Gloves, gloves, gloves!” Michael yelled. He nodded anxiously toward the box of disposable latex gloves sitting on his desk. “You know better.”

  Gabriel dropped the hand back in the box. “Sorry.”

  Michael carried over a glass, handed it to him.

  “None for you?” Gabriel said, sipping.

  “In a moment.” Michael went over to his desk and opened his laptop. “I just need to check on something.” He clicked the mouse a few times, and then a cloud of disappointment darkened his features.

  “What is it?”

  Michael slumped in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands. “I was hoping I’d have an e-mail from Joyce Wingard. We gave her a grant for a research trip to Borneo and she’s been there since August. She was checking in with me every day, and then three days ago the e-mails stopped.”

  “How well do you know her? Maybe she just ran off with the grant money.”

  Michael stared at him. “You don’t recognize the name? Joyce Wingard. Gabriel, she’s Daniel Wingard’s niece.”

  Daniel Wingard. There was a name he hadn’t heard in years. Wingard had been a professor of archeology and cultural anthropology at the University of Maryland and a good friend of their parents. And Joyce Wingard…now it came back to him. The last time he’d seen Joyce he’d been fifteen, and she’d been, what, seven? Their parents had taken them to spend the weekend with the professor and his niece at Wingard’s home on the shore of the Potomac. Gabriel remembered an impatient little girl with blonde pigtails. During dinner, she’d called him stupid and dumped a bowl of potato salad in his lap.

  “Joyce Wingard,” Gabriel said. “What the hell is that little girl doing in Borneo?”

  “Working toward her Ph.D., Gabriel. She’s thirty years old.”

  “I guess she would be, at that,” he said. Thirty years old and probably still a terror. “Does she have any field experience?”

  “She didn’t need any. This was just supposed to be a research trip.”

  “What was she researching?”

  Michael got up and walked to a bookcase. He scanned the spines, pulled a weathered tome off the shelf, and brought it back to the couch. He sat next to Gabriel and opened the book. The title page said ANATOLIAN RELIGION AND CULTURE.

  “Have you heard of the Three Eyes of Teshub?” Michael asked.

  “I’ve heard of Teshub. Storm god of the Hittites, right?”

  Michael turned the pages until he found the photograph he was looking for: a stone carving of a bearded man with a conical headdress standing on an ox’s back. Beneath the photo was the caption TESHUB IDOL, 15TH-13TH CENTURY B.C.E. “According to legend, Teshub gave the Hittites a powerful weapon called the Spearhead to protect them from their enemies. But the Spearhead was so powerful that Teshub had second thoughts. He came to believe that even his beloved Hittites lacked the wisdom to use such a weapon responsibly, so he took it away from them and hid it until some unspecified future date when three armies would meet in battle to decide its fate.” He flipped the page and handed the book to Gabriel.

  On the next page was an illustration of three enormous jewels. “Looks like an ad for DeBeers,” Gabriel said.

  Michael shook his head. “Those are the Three Eyes of Teshub. Supposedly, they were three gemstones that together were the key to using the Spearhead—or possibly to locating it, or perhaps to retrieving it from where it was hidden. The stories varied.”

  “Don’t they always,” Gabriel said. He downed the rest of his scotch.

  “Documents from the period say that when Teshub hid the Spearhead away, he called up three winds to blow the gemstones in three different directions, scattering them as far apart as possible, so that they would never be found. People have looked for them, of course. No one has found any evidence that the Three Eyes of Teshub actually existed.”

  “But Joyce…?”

  “Joyce discovered incomplete rubbings from a pair of tablets she thought might shed some light on the legend. The original tablets are buried away in the archives of Borneo University. She applied to us for a grant to cover the cost of her trip.” Michael returned the book to its spot on the sh
elf. “Her application might not have leapt to the top of the stack otherwise, but…” He went back to his desk, checked for new e-mail once more. Nothing. “But how could I say no to Daniel Wingard’s niece? And it wasn’t much money. I figured no harm could come of it, a trip to a university library.” He dropped into his chair. “And now she’s missing. I’ve tried calling her, I’ve called our man down there, I’ve asked people at the university if they’ve seen her—nothing. Who knows what sort of trouble she might have gotten herself into? I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything had happened to her because of me.”

  Gabriel set his glass down on the table, pushed the box containing the mummy’s hand to one side. “If you’re really worried about her, Michael, I can go down there and look around a bit. Shouldn’t be too hard to find her.”

  Michael shook his head firmly. “No. Bad enough that she’s missing, think how I’d feel putting you in danger as well.”

  “Putting me in danger? You’re kidding, right?” Gabriel said. “I don’t think a week’s gone by since Joyce Wingard was in pigtails when I wasn’t in danger. It’s what I do.”

  “And you know I’ve never been comfortable with it,” Michael said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be the cause of it.”

  “You wouldn’t be the cause,” Gabriel said. “Joyce Wingard would. Besides, I haven’t been to Borneo in ages. About time for a trip back.”

  “You might not recognize it,” Michael said in a quiet voice. “Half the rain forest’s gone.”

  “All the more reason to go now, before they cut down the other half.”

  “Gabriel…”

  “She’s probably fine, Michael. I’ll probably find her in the museum archives, elbow deep in notes and files, with her phone turned off and no idea how long it’s been since she last e-mailed you.”

  “But what if you don’t?” Michael said.

  Gabriel thought of the headstrong, impish, pigtailed girl chasing him around her uncle’s picnic table, squealing with laughter as she tried to catch him. He remembered her showing him her toys, how she took special pride in one in particular, a Barbie dressed in safari gear and an explorer’s pith helmet. He remembered her playing tag in the woods with Michael, who’d been only a couple years older than her. Joyce had fallen, skinned her knee on a rock, and wouldn’t let anyone pick her up and carry her back to the house. She’d insisted on walking, even with blood trickling down her leg, and shouting that she could do it herself, didn’t need anyone’s help.

  But this time maybe she did.

  “Then you’ll be glad I went,” Gabriel said. “How soon can you have the plane ready?”

  Chapter 3

  It was Monday afternoon local time when the Hunt Foundation’s jet touched down at Sepinggan International Airport in Balikpapan, on the southern coast of Borneo. In the airport’s waiting area, small suitcase in hand, he scanned the crowd. Michael had arranged for a man named Noboru to meet him here. Formerly Japanese Intelligence, now employed by the Hunt Foundation, he’d been Joyce’s contact on the tropical island. If anyone was in a position to turn up any clues as to what had happened to her, it would be Noboru—though he hadn’t found any yet when Michael had spoken to him from New York.

  The waiting area was crowded with people holding signs written in Indonesian and Malaysian Bahasa, Kadazandusun, Iban, Bidayuh, Arabic and a dozen other scripts. Despite the air-conditioning, the room smelled of sweat and spices. Small vendor huts were set up along the walls, selling dumplings, pork buns and bowls of noodles.

  A hand fell on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Mr. Hunt?”

  He turned. A man of about fifty stood behind him. He had long, shaggy black hair, Asian features, a jawline spotted with dark stubble and a face deeply wrinkled from the sun.

  “Mr. Noboru?”

  The man nodded and shook Gabriel’s hand. “Your brother told me you were coming. Welcome to Borneo. I just wish your visit were under better circumstances. Here, let me get that for you.” He took Gabriel’s suitcase and led the way outside. The moment Gabriel passed through the sliding glass doors into the open air, an oppressive humidity pressed down on him like a heavy, moist blanket. He followed Noboru to the parking lot, where hundreds of cars gleamed in the sweltering sun. Noboru threw the suitcase into the backseat of a mud-spattered, topless jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Gabriel joined him up front. “Where are we headed?”

  “Inland, toward Central Kalamitan,” Noboru said. “Where I dropped Joyce when she first arrived. It’s a long drive, but we ought to be there before nightfall, Mr. Hunt.”

  “Mr. Hunt was my father,” he said. “And these days it’s my brother. I just go by Gabriel.”

  Noboru nodded. “Make yourself comfortable.” He started the engine, stepped on the gas, and the jeep lurched out of the parking lot with a great roar and a plume of black exhaust. Gabriel grabbed the roll bar as Noboru sped through a series of hairpin turns to get them onto the highway.

  The farther they got from Balikpapan, the more it felt like they were traveling back in time. The highway devolved into an unpaved dirt road and the tall apartment buildings of the city were replaced by wooden shacks surrounded by dense jungle. They passed a line of women walking alongside the road, dressed in the brightly dyed linens of the indigenous Dayaks and balancing water jugs and baskets of rice on their shoulders. A few minutes later, Gabriel saw another woman kneeling beside the road and hammering something into the ground. As they drove past, he saw it was a wooden post with the skull of a goat lashed to the top.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Without slowing down, Noboru took both hands off the wheel to light a cigarette. “She’s warding off evil spirits,” he explained. He took a deep drag and gripped the wheel again. “The farther out you get from the cities, the more superstitious the people become. It’s beautiful here, loveliest place on earth—when I came here after I retired from the service, I never considered going anyplace else. But you wouldn’t believe how much people here cling to the old ways. They don’t trust anything new. Or anyone. It’s taken five years for them to start trusting me. Most of them think outsiders bring bad luck.”

  “Joyce was an outsider,” Gabriel said. “Did anyone give her any trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Noboru said. “I only saw her the one time, when I picked her up at the airport and dropped her off at the guesthouse we’re going to. It’s strange. I was supposed to drive her to the hotel your brother arranged for her, but she said she’d made her own arrangements to stay in this local hostel. She said she wanted to be closer to the jungle.”

  “Why?” Gabriel asked. “She was here to study some materials at the university.”

  “I know—that’s what was strange. I told her your brother had put me at her disposal, that I was supposed to take her wherever she needed to go, do whatever I could to help with her research, but after I dropped her off, she never called me. Not once. I guess she didn’t need any help.”

  Gabriel thought back to the incident with the skinned knee. “Or thought she didn’t,” he said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr.…Gabriel. She was a nice girl, very friendly, easy to get along with. Reminded me a lot of my daughter, actually. She’s in university in Singapore now—my daughter, I mean. I don’t get to see her very often; it was nice to see a girl her age, with the same sort of personality…” He fell silent for a moment. “I was upset when your brother told me that Joyce was missing. I hope you’ll be able to find her.”

  “Any idea what might have happened?”

  Noboru weighed his words carefully before speaking. “As beautiful as it is here, the country has a dark side. People get kidnapped all the time by bandits and held for ransom, especially out in the jungle.”

  “As far as we know, there hasn’t been any ransom demand,” Gabriel said.

  “That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Noboru said. “If they get someone they think no one will pay for, they kill them. Or w
orse, for women. It would be better if she’d broken her leg somewhere in the jungle—then at least she would die of starvation, or exposure. Much better than what the bandits would do to her.”

  Gabriel knew Noboru was right about the country’s bandits—but he couldn’t bring himself to hope she was lost in the jungle. Borneo was the third largest island in the world. He wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. “Michael told me he called the university to see if she showed up, and they said they never saw her. Did she tell you if she was planning to go anywhere else? Any particular part of the island?”

  “No, we only talked in general terms. She was very interested in the island’s history. She had a lot of questions.”

  Gabriel could picture her putting Noboru through the third degree, squeezing every bit of information out of him that a budding cultural anthropologist would find interesting.

  “The only thing she asked that was about a specific place,” Noboru continued, “was right before I dropped her off, she wanted to know if anyone had ever found an ancient cemetery in the jungle. I asked her if she was thinking of the Bukit Raya nature preserve—they have a cemetery nearby that’s fairly old. But she said no, she meant in the jungle itself. I told her unless the orangutans had started burying their dead, there weren’t any.” Noboru shook his head. “She didn’t look happy with the answer, but what could I say? There aren’t any cemeteries in the jungle. Not that I know of, anyway.”

  Gabriel reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheet of paper Michael had given him, a grainy color blowup of Joyce Wingard’s passport photo. She’d come a long way from the seven-year-old girl Gabriel had met in Maryland. The blonde pigtails were gone, replaced with shoulder-length hair she wore pulled back in a tight ponytail. She still had the same wide smile, but a little more jaded, a little more cynical. Her eyes were crystal blue, her chin and cheeks slender. She’d become a beautiful woman.

  What have you gotten yourself into? he thought.