Hunt Through Napoleon's Web Read online

  “How is she in danger?”

  “It looks . . . it looks like she’s been kidnapped.”

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard Michael correctly. “Say that again?”

  “She’s been kidnapped.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. And there’s a ransom demand.”

  “How much do they want?”

  “They don’t want money, Gabriel. They want you.”

  Chapter 2

  Gabriel tapped the intercom button outside the Hunt Foundation to announce his arrival, unlocked the front door, pocketed his key, and stepped into the foyer. The room was full of artwork, antiquities displayed in glass cases, and brochures about the organization for the rare occasions when some museum curator or endowment representative might visit the building. The rest of the ground floor consisted of a dining room and kitchen, a small library (the larger one was on the second floor), and one of Michael’s offices, where Gabriel was headed.

  The brownstone, located on East 55th Street and York Avenue, overlooked the East River and was designated as a landmark. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had lived and worked there, raised three children there, and left it in trust to the Foundation in their wills, which had been triggered when they’d vanished at sea at the turn of the millennium. Michael, being the responsible one in the family, was legally appointed the manager of both the trust and the Foundation. That was perfectly fine with Gabriel. The less he had to deal with paperwork, taxes, endowments, grants, bills, and bureaucracy, the happier he was. He did find it handy to have money—you couldn’t mount international expeditions the way he did without it—but he had no interest in the management of the various accounts and funds. Michael was a superb administrator and Gabriel knew such things were better off in his hands.

  “There you are,” Michael said as his brother stepped through the office door. The room was spacious, containing a pair of antique trestle tables, a gorgeous nineteenth-century mahogany desk, one wall lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets, and two more lined similarly with packed bookshelves. What generally irritated Gabriel was how organized and uncluttered it was. And normally Michael’s appearance matched the room’s: tidy, neat, unruffled. At thirty-two he was quite the opposite of his older brother. Where Gabriel was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, ropy, and apt to show up with stains from smoke or grease or blood on his clothing, Michael was slight and bookish, wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and was never seen with a strand of his thinning, sandy hair out of place. Except for the thinning hair, he hadn’t changed much since he was a boy. Gabriel had spent a fair portion of their childhood protecting Michael from neighborhood bullies, in neighborhoods all over the world, and not one of the encounters had discomposed Michael in the slightest.

  But he was discomposed now.

  “Talk to me,” Gabriel said as he dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

  Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t look good. I received an e-mail from an anonymous account. I printed it out.” Michael handed it across the desk. Gabriel took it.

  TO: MICHAEL HUNT—HUNT FOUNDATION

  THE ALLIANCE OF THE PHARAOHS INFORMS YOU

  THAT WE HAVE LUCIFER HUNT. DO NOT CONTACT

  POLICE. DO NOT CONTACT FBI. YOUR SISTER WILL

  DIE IF YOU DO. WE REQUIRE THE SERVICES OF

  GABRIEL HUNT. HE SHALL MEET OUR REPRESENTATIVE

  ALONE, REPEAT ALONE, IN CAIRO.

  The message went on to designate the time and place of a rendezvous three days in the future. At a stall in a public bazaar.

  “After nine years, Gabriel!” Michael snatched the paper from Gabriel’s hand and waved it in the air. “Nine years we don’t hear from her, we don’t know if she’s alive or dead, and then this.”

  Actually, Gabriel knew, Michael had heard from her a few times—but only over the Internet, under her “Cifer” pseudonym, which Michael assumed belonged to a thuggish, unsavory male who eked out a living skulking around the alleyways of the online underworld. It was an impression Gabriel had not disabused him of, even after learning the truth himself.

  “My god, Gabriel. If they hurt her—”

  “Do we know anything about this Alliance of the Pharaohs?” Gabriel asked.

  “I spent the last twenty-four hours going through everything we have on Egypt. There’s no mention of the group in any of the books we have, nothing in any of our files. The best I could do was a few hits on the Internet.”

  “And?”

  Michael ran his fingers through his hair anxiously. “In the last two years, there have been two instances of Egyptian artifacts being stolen from major museums. The more recent was from the Louvre, in Paris. The French police attributed the crime to an ‘Alliance Pharaonique.’ Another theft occurred in Istanbul a year earlier; Interpol isn’t sure they’re related, but the items stolen in both cases were from the same period. We’re talking ancient Egypt—solid gold jewelry supposedly worn by Ramses II in Turkey, a goblet dating from Cleopatra’s reign at the Louvre.”

  “That’s all we’ve got?”

  Michael turned his hands palm up and the furrows on his forehead deepened.

  “Great,” Gabriel said. “So we know they like Egyptian artifacts, which we might have been able to guess from their name. And we know they were able to find Lucy, despite her best efforts to stay hidden.” Gabriel didn’t mention that he’d met with Lucy a handful of times over the past few years himself, once in this very building—no reason to make Michael feel worse than he already did. Besides, in each of those cases it had been Lucy who had found Gabriel, not the other way around. “What I don’t understand is why they’d kidnap her just to get me to meet with them. Couldn’t they just make a phone call? We take appointments, don’t we?”

  “They’re criminals,” Michael said. “I mean, if these are the same people responsible for those museum thefts. And if you’re the sort of person who does that, you’re probably perfectly comfortable kidnapping young women and probably don’t like to do things through ordinary channels . . . Gabriel, what are you doing?”

  Gabriel stopped stretching his arms. He’d been doing it unconsciously. “Sorry. I pulled some muscles yesterday in that cave. It’s nothing. Just a little sore.”

  “I can imagine,” Michael said, a censorious note creeping into his voice. “All I can say is thank goodness I was able to reach you down there. If you’d been out of range . . .”

  “I thought I was,” Gabriel said.

  “Well,” Michael said, “when you pay thirty thousand dollars for a cell phone, you do get something for your money.”

  “Thirty thousand? Really?” Gabriel said. “I’ll try not to leave it in a cab.”

  “Gabriel, what are we going to do?” Michael threw the printout onto the desk, where it slid off onto the floor. He didn’t pick it up. “I could never live with myself if they hurt her.”

  “Lucy’s a tough customer,” Gabriel said. “She can handle herself. She’s probably giving them orders already.”

  “She’s twenty-six years old,” Michael said. “These men are killers.”

  “You didn’t say anything about killing,” Gabriel said.

  “Two guards at the Louvre,” Michael said. “One in Turkey.” He paused, took a deep breath, let it out. “Decapitated.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “So I guess I’m going to Cairo,” Gabriel said.

  Michael nodded miserably.

  “I’ll get her back,” Gabriel said.

  “She may be dead already,” Michael said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  Gabriel picked the sheet of paper up from the floor. “They pulled this stunt because they want something from me,” he said. “As long as that’s the case, she’s alive.”

  The Discoverers League was empty and quiet that night.

  Gabriel had calmed his brother by taking him to Andrei’s place for a bite (Michael had protested that he wasn’t hungry, but after his third glass of divin he was able to put aw
ay a plate of Andrei’s parjoale). By the time Gabriel had seen Michael home and hopped a taxi to the building on East 70th Street, it was nearly midnight.

  Hank, the elderly doorman who’d been with the club seemingly since its founding, greeted Gabriel warmly and handed him a bundle of mail that had collected since the last time Gabriel had been home. Gabriel got into the elevator and took it to the top floor of the building, where he kept a suite of rooms. The League’s board of directors tolerated Gabriel’s presence in the building because of who he was—the Hunt Foundation contributed generously each year—and because some of his higher-profile finds brought the organization the sort of attention that helped with their other fund-raising. But their feelings about him were mixed. They’d had to spend a portion of the funds he donated on patching bullet holes in the walls and getting blood out of the upholstery, not to mention paying soaring insurance premiums, and some of the more staid directors complained that his exploits attracted less attention than notoriety. This discussion regularly consumed twenty or thirty minutes at the start of every board meeting; as the meeting room was directly below his apartment, Gabriel could sometimes hear the raised voices. But so far, no eviction notice had been slipped under the door, and the bullet holes kept getting repaired.

  The two-bedroom suite was a little piece of paradise for Gabriel. Like most New York apartments, the place wasn’t large, but it was everything he needed. The master bedroom had a four-poster and a dresser, though barely enough room to walk between the two. The guest bedroom was more of a catchall; it contained a lot of his “stuff,” such as traveling gear and clothing. The living room was comfortably compact, dominated by a tiger skin rug (Gabriel had reluctantly been forced to shoot the animal when it had tried to eat him in India). The space had a lone couch, a desk, a few shelves of books. No computer, no television. Gabriel’s prized piece of furniture was an antique Baldwin upright grand piano, manufactured in 1924 and as near to mint condition as one could get after nearly ninety years. He took better care of it than he did his own body—his sore arms attested to that.

  Michael had arranged things so Gabriel could take the Foundation’s private jet the following day. It beat having to deal with commercial airlines, and it also meant Gabriel could bring his Colt .45 pistol in his carry-on without anyone batting an eye. He hated being out of the country without it—so whenever possible he took the jet.

  Michael had been delighted to put it at his disposal, but had been surprised when he’d insisted on flying into Nice, France, rather than directly to Cairo. “Why there, Gabriel? I’d understand if you wanted to stop in Paris, talk to the people at the Louvre, but—”

  “There’s an Egyptologist I know,” Gabriel had said vaguely, “in Nice.”

  “Really?” Michael had said. “Who? Bourgogne? But no, he hasn’t been at Antipolis since ’08 . . .”

  “It’s no one you know,” Gabriel had said.

  “An Egyptologist I don’t know?”

  “Yes, hard to believe, isn’t it,” Gabriel had said, and changed the topic as quickly as he could.

  There was no Egyptologist in Nice that Michael Hunt didn’t know. Nor was there one Gabriel was going to meet. What there was in Nice was the last address Gabriel knew of for his sister. She’d been under house arrest for a time in Arezzo, Italy, and then somehow the charges wound up being dropped, or anyway that’s what she’d claimed in her e-mail. The hasty change of countries was typical, and for all he knew she’d since abandoned the apartment in Nice. But since Nice was the last place he’d known her to be, Nice was the first place he had to go.

  Gabriel showered, toweled off, and studied himself in the bathroom mirror. His slightly curly, midnight black hair was in need of a cut, but that could wait. The various scars and bruises on his well-toned torso told many tales. He even remembered some of them.

  Barefoot and bare-chested, Gabriel went to his kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Remy Martin, and poured himself a shot. He then sat on the piano bench and let his fingers roam absently over the keys. After a moment a melody emerged—“In the Still of the Night,” one of his favorites. But somehow tonight it didn’t fit his mood.

  A framed photograph of the three Hunt children sat atop the piano. Gabriel had just turned sixteen when it was taken. That would make Michael ten and Lucy only four years old. She’d been an adorable little girl. Somewhere between four and fourteen, the adorable had faded and all sorts of simmering hostility had taken its place—but somehow never directed at Gabriel. Their parents, Michael, her classmates, her teachers . . . they’d all come in for their share of Lucy’s particular brand of resentment. But Gabriel had always been spared. Maybe, he thought, it’s because I wasn’t around much.

  By the time she’d run away—run away for good, Gabriel corrected himself; there’d been briefer disappearances before—she’d become quite the rebel, outspoken and independent and always looking for something to tear down. If she’d grown up in the sixties, he imagined Lucy would have found her way to Haight-Ashbury or onto Kesey’s bus; in the seventies, she’d have been into punk rock. In fact, she was into punk rock, or at least the trappings that went with it. She had so many tattoos and piercings now that Gabriel had stopped counting them the last time he’d seen her.

  He had to save her.

  It was that simple. They’d taken her because of him, and now he had to find a way to get her back.

  The first step toward which was to find her, period.

  Which was not so simple.

  Thinking about Lucy in Nice—or was she now in North Africa?—put him in mind of Casablanca and he found himself picking out the melody line of the Marseillaise.

  Allons enfants de la Patrie

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  Speaking of rebels.

  Come, sons of France: the day of glory has arrived! Followed by: To arms, citizens! March! Music to shed blood by.

  They all were, anthems. Bombs bursting in air, and all that. Gabriel knew that at one point Napoleon Bonaparte, when he was emperor of France, had banned the Marseillaise—but what had he replaced it with? A cheery tune called Le Chant du Départ. Gabriel picked it out on the keys and sang softly to himself.

  La trompette guerrière

  A sonné l’heure des combats . . .

  The war trumpet has sounded the hour of battle.

  Gabriel pulled the cover shut over the piano keys, downed his drink, and stood up.

  Those bastards who took Lucy probably had an anthem of their own, some Egyptian version of the same bloody sentiments. War trumpets, battles, marching, marching.

  Well.

  They’d be singing a different tune soon.

  Chapter 3

  Though he wasn’t much for Paris, Gabriel was fond of the south of France and Nice was his favorite city in the country. Even under the present circumstances the sight of the countryside coming into view through the plane’s windows brought a smile to his face.

  Charlie dropped him off at Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur and then flew the custom-built Bombardier Challenger CL-X to a hangar where it, and he, would stay until Gabriel needed them again. A man in his fifties, Charlie had been with the Foundation for years. Never said much; Gabriel had given up trying to engage the pilot in conversation long ago. But the man did his job well and took care of the plane as if it were his own, and what else did you need? Better to be in silent, safe hands than talkative, careless ones.

  Gabriel made his way into the hilly, picturesque seaside town on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Lucy had taken an apartment near the port; as she’d once told him, she found flat horizons comforting. On a quiet evening like this, the sight of the Mediterranean receding into the distance would’ve given her all the comfort she wanted.

  The sun was setting as Gabriel located Lucy’s building in the section known as Vieux Nice, which consisted of narrow, winding streets and old-town structures. The building was a crumbling, brick affair on a dimly lit lane near the water and the farmers’ ma
rket. It figured that Lucy would be living in a ramshackle place like this. She’d never had a taste for luxury. It was one of the things she’d spent her life rebelling against.

  After checking to make sure there was no one around, Gabriel selected the thickest of a set of lock picks and used it to turn the heavy tumblers of the ground floor door lock. He replaced the pick inside the flat, leather money belt he wore beneath his shirt and let himself in. A set of creaking wooden stairs took him two flights up to the top floor. Number 303 was the door nearest the staircase. Gabriel reached for his picks again—but then he saw that the door was slightly ajar, the lock broken.

  Moving slowly, he silently pushed the door open. The place was dark, heavy drapes drawn across the windows.

  Except for one tiny spot of light moving on the other side of the room.

  Gabriel felt along the wall beside the door and, when he found it, flicked the light switch.

  A bare bulb went on overhead.

  The first thing Gabriel noticed was that the apartment had been ransacked. Sofa cushions sporting deep slashes lay on the floor beside a pair of wooden desk drawers. Papers and debris littered the place.

  The second thing he noticed was that the ransacking was still in progress. A woman with a penlight was standing by the desk, bent over its one remaining drawer. She looked up.

  Gabriel shouted, “Hey!”

  The woman quickly jumped away from the desk and darted through a doorway into the next room over. Gabriel leaped over the cushions in pursuit. The door to the other room slammed shut. Gabriel grabbed the knob—but as he did he heard the lock turn on the other side. He banged on the door with the side of his fist.

  “Hey, open up! Who are you?” He repeated the question in French, adding, “I won’t hurt you!”

  Silence.

  Well, he thought, would you believe it if you were her?

  Raising one leg, he brought the heel of his boot down on the metal knob. It took two blows before the knob smashed and the door swung open.