Hunt at World's End Read online

  “Ah, there you are,” Grissom said. “Mr. Hunt, I believe you’ve already met my son Julian.”

  Chapter 8

  Julian shoved Noboru forward, sending him stumbling toward Gabriel and Joyce. Gabriel reached out and caught him before he could fall.

  “They came up behind me,” Noboru began.

  “It’s all right,” Gabriel said. He glanced at Grissom’s men. With so many guns drawn and pointed their way, there was no chance of running. Certainly Noboru couldn’t, not with his arms tied behind his back.

  Gabriel watched Julian walk over to his father. At six feet, he towered over the elder Grissom.

  “It was in one of the suitcases,” Julian said. He reached inside his cargo vest and pulled out the Star.

  Grissom snatched it out of his son’s hand and held it up so that it gleamed in the sunlight. “The Star of Arnuwanda,” he murmured. “Oh, you have saved me a great deal of time and effort indeed.”

  “How did you find us?” Joyce demanded.

  Grissom handed the Star back to Julian. “It wasn’t difficult. We knew where you were staying, but you’d already left the guesthouse by the time we got there. The old woman there was distinctly unhelpful, but in spite of that we were able to follow your trail here.”

  Joyce blanched. “Merpati…”

  “Was that her name?” Edgar Grissom said. “Remarkable woman, really. Took three bullets before she finally stopped swinging that damned shovel.”

  Joyce took a step toward Grissom, but suddenly five guns were aimed at her. Gabriel stuck out his arm to block her, shaking his head. Joyce clenched her jaw and stepped back.

  Grissom walked toward them, flanked by his men. “Tie them up,” he ordered.

  The four gunmen came forward, surrounding them. One reached into Gabriel’s holster and pulled out his Colt, while the others yanked his and Joyce’s arms behind their backs and knotted lengths of rope around their wrists.

  Julian and his father inspected the door excavated from the hillside. Grissom ran a hand over the metal. “Iron,” he said. “The Hittite Empire was always ahead of its time. They were working with iron as early as the fourteenth century B.C., almost two hundred years before the rest of the ancient world.” He turned to Joyce. “But that wasn’t all that set them apart, eh, Ms. Wingard? There is also the little matter of the Spearhead. The power of the storm, harnessed and ready to be wielded like a broom to sweep their enemies from the face of the earth.”

  “So that’s what you’re after,” Joyce said. “Destruction.”

  “A weapon so powerful no army can stand against it?” Grissom replied. “Oh yes, Ms. Wingard, I want that very, very much. Julian, the key.”

  Julian reached into his collar and lifted the Death’s Head Key, still on its leather strap, from around his neck. He passed it to Grissom, who bent forward to inspect the lock in the door. He blew at it, picked out the dirt that clogged it and lined up the three blades of the Death’s Head Key with the lock’s triple keyway. Before he could slide it in, the key jumped out of his hand and sank by itself into the lock. Grissom looked at Julian. “Magnetized?” He gripped the key’s skull-shaped bow and struggled to turn it in the ancient lock, his face turning red with effort. As he completed a single rotation, a loud click echoed from the door, and it began to scrape open on its hinges, swinging toward Grissom. He stepped back to give it room. Dirt rained from the seams between the door and its frame. The old, rusty hinges groaned, squeaked and cracked under the pressure of being pushed open again by some ancient mechanism after thousands of years.

  “The first Eye of Teshub,” Grissom said. “Thrown with its brothers into the wind by the storm god himself, separated from the others and given to the earth. Isn’t that how the legend goes, Ms. Wingard?”

  Joyce glared at him.

  “Bring them forward,” Grissom ordered his men. “They should see this. After all, it was their hard work that led us to this glorious moment.”

  The gunmen shoved Gabriel, Joyce and Noboru up to the doorway. Julian caught Gabriel by the shoulder as he passed. “Nice scar,” he said, nodding toward the mark of stitches on Gabriel’s cheek.

  From inside the doorway, dusty, stale air swirled out of the darkness. Grissom coughed, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose and mouth with it. He gestured impatiently at Julian, who handed him a flashlight. Grissom switched it on as the opening door finally ground to a halt. He pointed the beam into the darkness, illuminating the cobwebs that hung in the corners of the doorway. Beyond was only empty space, until Grissom lowered the beam and revealed a flight of stone steps leading down. He folded the handkerchief back into his pocket and walked toward the doorway.

  One of Grissom’s men pushed Gabriel again, the gun pressed to his spine. He stepped into the darkness, watching Grissom’s flashlight beam bob down the steps ahead of him. Gabriel carefully descended the stairs. The air inside the crypt was stifling and oppressive. The stone steps were covered in loose dirt and grit, making it tricky to find his footing. Cobwebs hung everywhere, tickling his face and sticking to his hair. Behind him, he heard Joyce stumble and one of the gunmen bark angrily at her to keep moving.

  At the bottom of the steps was a long corridor. Grissom had stopped in the middle and was shining his flashlight along the walls. Six alcoves had been carved into the walls, and inside each was a skeleton, the bones brown with rot and age. Their jaws hung open—the ones that still had their jaws attached—and their bodies were twisted into frightful positions, their hands curled into claws. Hittite warriors, Gabriel guessed from the rusted, crumbling armor hanging off the bones. They’d been buried alive with the Eye to stand as eternal guardians, most likely dying from asphyxiation long before starvation set in. While the door wasn’t a perfect airtight seal, the fact that these millennia-old skeletons weren’t piles of dust was evidence enough of how little air had gotten inside once it was closed.

  A cemetery in the jungle, Gabriel thought. Joyce had been on the right track. Only the cemetery in question was two stories underground.

  The corridor ended in a large archway that was draped with a gossamer film of long-abandoned webs. Beyond, Gabriel could just make out a shimmering green light playing along the stone wall of the next chamber. Grissom led the way with Julian at his side, tearing the webs open as if he were parting curtains. The gunman behind Gabriel prodded him to follow. He glanced back at Joyce and Noboru to make sure they were all right. Noboru looked stoic, unwilling to show their captors any emotion: no fear, no anger. Joyce, however, did look angry. Furious. Gabriel knew what she was feeling. This was supposed to be her find, her moment of triumph. She’d worked hard for it, put her life on the line for it, only to see it snatched away by a couple of thugs with guns. Gabriel glared at the back of Julian’s head. Oh yes, he knew exactly what she was feeling.

  As they filed into the chamber beyond the arch, Gabriel took in their surroundings. To one side of the chamber was a stone pedestal that looked like a natural formation, a stalagmite with its sides and top smoothed flat by ancient tools. On top of the pedestal was a stone carving of a hand, rising up on a thick wrist. Nestled in the grip of its fingers was an enormous, octagonal emerald. The jewel was flat and wide like a saucer, with a circumference roughly the size of a softball. Where everything around it was corroded, rotted or covered in dust, the emerald looked as clean and polished as the day it had been cut. It seemed to be lit from within by a natural iridescence, sending green light gleaming against the walls and illuminating the paintings there. Gabriel recognized the faded art as scenes from the myths of Teshub: the storm god riding a chariot pulled by two bulls, wrestling the sea serpent Hedammu, slaying the dragon Illuyanka, battling the stone god Ulikummis, sitting on a throne beside the sun goddess Arinna and their son Sarruma. And one final image: Teshub hurling what appeared to be three separate thunderbolts away from a horde of angry-looking men in traditional Hittite armor. The scattering of the Three Eyes.

  A low hum rea
ched his ears. He glanced around the chamber, trying to find the source, until he realized it was coming from the emerald itself.

  Grissom stepped up to the pedestal. His whole body seemed to tremble in anticipation. His flashlight beam struck the wall behind the pedestal and revealed large cuneiform symbols etched across the stone. It was the same alphabet as on the Star and the map.

  Grissom swept his beam slowly across the symbols. “‘The fire at world’s end,’” he translated. “The end of the world! An apocalyptic prophecy. How perfect.”

  “Light,” Joyce said.

  Grissom turned to her. “What?”

  “It’s doesn’t say the fire at world’s end, it says the light at world’s end,” Joyce replied. “The Nesili cuneiforms for light and fire are close, but they’re not the same. It’s an easy mistake to make, for an amateur.”

  Grissom frowned. “If you’re expecting to get a rise out of me, Ms. Wingard, you’re sorely mistaken.” He turned back to the gemstone. They barely heard him mutter, “My son, on the other hand…”

  Julian whirled around and punched Joyce in the stomach so quickly Gabriel didn’t even see it coming. Joyce doubled over, coughing and trying to catch her breath.

  “Leave her alone!” Gabriel shouted. He struggled against his bonds, but the barrel of the gun behind him dug deeper into his back, a reminder to behave himself.

  “What kind of a coward do you have to be,” Noboru said, “to hit a defenseless woman?”

  Julian stepped up to Noboru and pulled back his fist, this time the one with the silver stag’s head ring. Without even turning around to see what his son was doing, Grissom said, “That’s enough, Julian.” Glowering at Noboru, the blond man lowered his hand and returned to his father’s side.

  The gunman behind Joyce pulled on the ropes around her wrists, yanking her upright. She coughed again, her face red with exertion, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Gabriel asked.

  She nodded and spat on the ground. “He just caught me off guard.” She shouted at Julian, “Next time try that when my hands aren’t tied!”

  “Hold your tongue, Ms. Wingard, or I will remove it,” Grissom said. He reached for the gemstone. As his hands moved closer to it, the humming seemed to grow higher in pitch. “An energy field,” he marveled. “Given off by the stone itself. There can be no doubt it’s just as the legend describes. Not only a key to Teshub’s weapon, but a kind of battery that powers it.” He lifted the emerald out of the stone hand’s grasp and laughed with excitement. “I can feel it. Like the pulse of the storm god himself!”

  Julian pulled a black velvet sack out of a pocket in his vest. Grissom deposited the emerald into it. Julian pulled the strings around the sack’s mouth tight and returned it to his pocket.

  A strange grinding sound came from the pedestal. The fingers of the stone hand suddenly bent inward on hidden hinges, forming a fist around the space where the emerald had been. Above, the ceiling rumbled and started to pull back from where it met the wall. Thick brown clods of dirt rained down over the pedestal. The ceiling continued to slide away on ancient tracks, dumping more dirt into the chamber. Gears within the walls groaned, and a thick stone slab started slowly descending in front of the archway, gradually sealing off the way they’d come in.

  Grissom, Julian and the four gunmen all made a dash for the archway. Gabriel glanced around quickly, desperate to find another way out of the chamber. But there was no other exit, only the arch, and that was rapidly vanishing behind the descending slab. The dirt, meanwhile, was already up to his shins, with more raining down as the ceiling continued to withdraw.

  Joyce and Noboru hurried toward the archway, their steps uneven. Joyce stumbled and dropped to one knee. Gabriel came up behind her and tried to help her to her feet again. It wasn’t easy with his hands tied behind him. He nudged his shoulder under her arm, and she leaned back against him, levering herself upright. The level of dirt was rising higher, with some piles already at waist height. More rained down continuously, making it harder to move. By the time they reached the archway, only a narrow opening remained between the growing pile of dirt on the floor and the slab of stone dropping from above.

  Joyce plunged through, tumbling forward headfirst, her feet kicking as she fell. Then Noboru slid through, his back scraping the underside of the stone slab. Gabriel struggled forward. He threw himself at the shrinking hole, ducking under the slab and eeling out into the corridor on his belly. A moment later, the bottom of the slab hit the top of the dirt mound below it, closing off the chamber.

  Pushing himself back onto his feet, he could hear the dirt, tons of it, pouring against the other side of the stone slab. If they’d been trapped inside, they would shortly have joined the six Hittites in being buried alive.

  Grissom and his men were standing around them in a half-circle, their guns drawn.

  “Well,” Grissom said, brushing dirt from his legs. “That’s one down, two to go.”

  Gabriel shook the dirt from his hair. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “Never fear. I have uses for you and your friends yet, Mr. Hunt,” Grissom replied. He started back along the corridor toward the steps to the surface.

  As they were marched along behind Grissom, Gabriel tried to loosen the knot around his wrists, but the ropes wouldn’t budge.

  When they emerged into the sunlight, Grissom kept walking toward the forest. Julian stayed behind, hovering by the door of the crypt. Gabriel kept his eyes on him even as the gunman behind him shoved him forward, watching intently as Julian pulled the Death’s Head Key out of the lock of the still-open iron door and hung it around his neck again.

  By this point, Grissom had reached the tree line. He turned to face them. “We’re done here,” he called to Julian. “Destroy the crypt.”

  “What?” Gabriel said. He turned around to see one of Grissom’s men passing Julian a bundle of dynamite.

  “You can’t!” Joyce cried. “Do you have any idea how old that crypt is? Who knows what else can be learned from it?”

  Grissom shrugged. “Undoubtedly. But I don’t want anyone to know where we’ve been, or what we have found. I’m afraid certain sacrifices must be made.” He turned his back on them and kept walking into the trees.

  Gabriel watched as Julian flicked a lighter under the long fuse attached to the dynamite. Julian threw the lit bundle into the open door and began tearing across the clearing toward the spot where his father had vanished. “Move!” the gunman behind Gabriel shouted. “Now!”

  They had just reached the edge of the clearing when a loud explosion rocked the trees. Birds screamed and flew out of the canopy, soaring away from the cloud of dark smoke that billowed into the sky.

  From his vantage point amid the trees on the opposite side, Vassily Platonov saw the blond man toss the dynamite into the doorway, then watched him and the others run off, the armed men and their three bound captives. The blond man was not one of those who had deprived Ulikummis of his sacrifice the night before, but it hardly mattered. In following the interlopers who had dared come to their sacred ground and free the American girl, Vassily now saw there were even more trespassers to be dealt with. The ground shook suddenly with an enormous subterranean explosion. Black smoke erupted from the doorway as the structure collapsed, taking half the hillside with it.

  In the jungle beyond, Vassily’s followers slipped silently to the ground from their places in the trees, like ghosts emerging from the darkness. Vassily gestured at them with his staff, and they lowered the skull masks over their faces.

  The interlopers had destroyed a holy site, surely a tomb of their ancestors. Just as surely, they had found and taken the gemstone that he as the high priest of Ulikummis had vowed to find himself. The time for merely watching and following was over. He would make them pay for the affronts they had committed. Then he would locate the second and third Eyes of Teshub, secure the Spearhead and use it to wipe the followers of al
l false gods from the face of the earth.

  Vassily motioned to his followers, and together they disappeared into the jungle.

  Chapter 9

  A heavy, warm rain had begun to fall in sheets by the time Grissom’s men marched Gabriel and the others out of the jungle and onto the road. Noboru’s jeep stood wet and muddy where they’d left it. Parked right beside it was Grissom’s much larger one, military-style with three rows of seats. Gabriel, Joyce and Noboru were shoved into Grissom’s jeep, Gabriel and Joyce in the middle, and Noboru in the back with two of Grissom’s men. Grissom took the wheel, and Julian sat in the passenger seat. The other two men got into Noboru’s jeep.

  The engines roared to life and the jeeps pulled out. The bumpy, unpaved road jostled Gabriel and Joyce into each other. The ropes around his wrists bit into his skin. The rain soaked through his clothes.

  Joyce shook a wet strand of hair out of her face and shouted over the downpour, “Where are you taking us?”

  Grissom smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “Patience, Ms. Wingard. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Julian glanced into the rearview too. Gabriel stared at him in the reflection, not breaking eye contact. Julian’s gaze returned to the road, then flitted back to the mirror a moment later. Gabriel didn’t blink. Memories of Julian pistol-whipping him back at the Discoverers League and stealing the Death’s Head Key replayed in his head and it must have shown in his eyes, since Julian looked away quickly.

  Joyce leaned against him, her sopping wet hair falling in thick ropes across her face. “I’m sorry you got involved in all this,” she said.

  “Funny,” he replied. “That’s usually my line.”

  She leaned closer until a wet strand of hair touched his cheek, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “If we get out of this—”

  “We will,” he said. “I just need to think.”

  “If we get out of this,” she continued, her voice insistent, “we can’t let Grissom keep the Star. We can’t let him find the other two Eyes. Whatever it is they activate, what ever the Spearhead turns out to be…it would definitely be a weapon in his hands.”