Hunt at World's End (20 page)
It took a moment before they could see at all. When their eyes adjusted, there were only the stars that dotted the night sky, and the moon hanging over the horizon. The obelisk was dark, its once clear crystal smoky and cracked.
“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked Joyce.
She nodded. “What happened? Where’s the priest?”
Gabriel looked toward the spot where he had stood, but there was no sign of him—not his robes, not his staff, not his body. Only the trail of blood, leading up to a point beneath the forked stand.
“Killed by the Spearhead,” Daniel said. “Vaporized.”
“It really was a weapon,” Gabriel said.
“At that moment it was, yes. Who’s to say what it could have been in the right hands?”
“There are no hands I’d trust with a power like this,” Gabriel said.
A loud cracking sound drew their attention back to the obelisk. Deep fissures spread across the crystal like spiderwebs. The crystal broke apart, sliding out of its iron supports and coming down with a crash amid the rubble from the statue.
“Well, it looks like you won’t have to,” Daniel said. He shook his head. “What a terrible loss.”
Gabriel heard the approaching helicopter’s rotors before he saw it overhead. He looked up. The wind blew back his hair and rustled his shirt. The helicopter descended, landing close enough for him to see the emergency foam patches sealing the bullet holes in its
tail. The side door slid open, and four men in flight suits, helmets and goggles jumped out. Three of them held machine guns and stood in formation, looking out at the bodies scattered across the battlefield, watching for movement. The question Gabriel had posed earlier came back to him: Which army’s side were these men on?
But he only wondered it until the fourth man pulled off his helmet and goggles.
“Noboru?” Gabriel said, amazed.
Noboru rushed over to his side. He looked down at Joyce, stroked one hand across her hair. “I couldn’t just leave the two of you. Not when I still had something I could offer.”
“Does Michiko know?” Joyce asked.
“Sh,” Noboru said.
“You know this man?” Daniel asked.
“How did you find us?” Gabriel said.
“You can thank your brother,” Noboru said. “Michael told me where you were headed from Turkey. He sounded worried, figured you might get yourself in trouble again. That seemed likely to me, too. I thought maybe you could use some backup.”
“How’d you get your hands on a helicopter like this?” Gabriel asked. “Never mind the missiles.”
“I called in a few favors from my Intelligence days,” Noboru said. “It took a bit of finagling, but I got the team and equipment I asked for.”
“I’m just…glad you found us,” Joyce whispered.
Noboru looked at the bodies and wreckage all around them. “You guys are hard to miss.”
Daniel stuck out his hand. “Daniel Wingard. Joyce’s uncle.”
Noboru shook Daniel’s hand. He looked across the stretch of fused sand at the broken shards that were
all that was left of the Spearhead. “We saw that thing’s light miles away, when we were patching the chopper. What the hell was it?”
“A test,” Daniel said. “After everything, it was just a test to see if mankind is ready to use something that powerful responsibly.”
“How’d we do?” Noboru asked.
Gabriel gave a thin smile. “We survived.”
Noboru nodded, then patted the side of the helicopter. “So. You guys need a lift?”
The bartender in the Discoverers League lounge, Wade Boland, slid two bottles of beer across the bar to Gabriel. “Women who like beer are something special,” he said. “You try to hold onto this one.”
Clyde Harris, sitting on his usual stool at the end at the bar, chuckled and ran a hand through his thinning white hair. “Reminds me of a woman I met in the Netherlands back in ‘43. She loved beer almost as much as she loved garroting spies.”
Wade shook his head. “Save it, old-timer. Can’t you see he’s busy?”
Gabriel took the bottles back to the table by the fireplace and sat down in the plush red chair across from Joyce. After dropping them off at the embassy in Botswana, Noboru had returned to Borneo. Daniel was back in Turkey, closing down his dig site, and had promised to join them in New York in a few days’ time. Gabriel looked at his watch. Michael would be coming over in a bit over an hour for a full debriefing. But until then, Gabriel and Joyce could finally relax. No bullets, no arrows, no explosions, just the two of them and some stress-free time alone.
She took one of the bottles from him with the arm that wasn’t in a cast, clinked it against his bottle, and took a sip. “It’s a shame about the Spearhead.”
“Your uncle seems to think everything played out the way it was meant to.”
“That’s not what I mean, though,” she said. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to study it, find out what it was. How it worked. How a civilization thousands of years in the past could have created something that channeled and contained so much energy. It was like some kind of reactor, built long before there should have been anything close to that kind of technology.” She took another sip. “Now we’ll never know. It’s gone, all of it. The Spearhead, the gemstones.”
“Not all of it.” Gabriel reached into his shirt and pulled out the Death’s Head Key dangling from the leather strap around his neck. “We still have this.”
Joyce smiled. “True. What are you going to do with it?”
Gabriel pulled the strap over his head and looked at the key. “There are plenty of museums that I’m sure would love to have it for their collections. A few universities would love to study it, publish papers about it. I’m sure
National Geographic
and
Discovery
would love some photographs.”
Joyce nodded. “I suppose.”
“But I wasn’t planning on doing any of that,” Gabriel said. He held it out to her. “I was thinking you should have it.”
“Me? Why?”
“You earned it,” he said. “The Three Eyes of Teshub, the Spearhead, they were your finds, not mine. You should have it.”
She took the Death’s Head Key from him and hung it around her neck. Her eyes sparkled. “I don’t know what to say.” Then she laughed. “It’s so silly. Some
women get all choked up over jewelry, but with me it’s a rusty old key.”
Gabriel laughed. “Just one of your many endearing qualities. So what are you going to do now? Are you going to take Daniel’s advice and apply for an academic job, or are you going to keep hitting the field to see what else is out there?”
“We’ll see,” she said. Then she smiled mischievously. “I like to keep people guessing.”
“Like I said, what would the world do without Joyce Wingard to keep things interesting?”
She leaned across the table, pulled him close with her good arm, and kissed him. “Is that interesting enough?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “This may require further study.”
Behind the bar, Wade turned to Clyde and said, “We had a bet, old-timer. Pay up.”
Muttering under his breath, Clyde slid a twenty-dollar bill across the bar.
And now—a
sneak preview of
the next Gabriel Hunt adventure:
H
UNT
B
EYOND THE
F
ROZEN
F
IRE
“I’d ask what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this,” Gabriel told the brunette sitting at the bar with her back to him, “but I already know exactly what you’re doing.”
The brunette spun, reaching for the revolver beside her glass, but Gabriel grabbed her wrist before she could raise it to draw a bead between his eyes.
“I also know you’re not a very nice girl,” Gabriel said, tightening his grip and meeting her furious gaze without flinching.
The bar was a murky, nameless Moldovan hole-in-the-wall, spitting distance from the Transdniestrian border. The angry brunette was Dr. Fiona Rush, professor in Cambridge University’s prestigious archeology department and partner in Gabriel Hunt’s latest Eastern European expedition. She had also been Gabriel’s lover, which made it all the worse when she’d double-crossed him and run off with the legendary jewel-encrusted Cossack dagger they’d come here to find. There were some who claimed that the
kindjal
was cursed, that it would bring sorrow and strife to anyone who possessed it. After everything he’d been through in the past few days, Gabriel was inclined to agree.
When Gabriel grabbed Fiona’s wrist, all conversation around them abruptly ceased. Several men nearby, taller even than Gabriel and twice as wide, raised weapons and cold, hostile glares and aimed both in Gabriel’s direction. For a tense stretch of seconds, nothing happened. A Romanian melody fought its way through the static on a cheap transistor radio behind the bar. The ancient, toothless bartender suddenly remembered something critical that needed to be done right away in the storeroom in the back. Gabriel silently tried to decide which of the armed men posed the most serious threat and to measure where they were located in relation to both the front and back doors. He did not let go of Fiona’s wrist.
Fiona shook her head, offering a few curt words in Romanian. The thugs pocketed their various weapons, some more reluctantly than others. They all continued to stare at Gabriel with undisguised hostility. It was clear it wouldn’t take much for the weapons to reappear. Gabriel let Fiona go, but stayed alert and wary.
“Have a drink,” Fiona said, casually, as if she’d just happened to run into an old friend. She took an extra glass from the rack above the bar and poured a generous knock of the rich Moldovan brandy known as
divin.
“You must be thirsty.”
“I don’t want a drink,” Gabriel said, pushing the glass away. “I want the
kindjal.
”
“You’re not still cross about that, are you?” Fiona smiled and topped off her own glass from the dusty bottle. “Honestly, it was nothing personal.”
“Did you think you could just cut me out and sell to the highest bidder?” Gabriel asked. “That dagger is a significant historical artifact. It should be on display in a museum, not locked up by some rich collector. You of all people ought to know that.”
“You know what your problem is, Gabriel?” Fiona arched a dark eyebrow. “You’re still laboring under this charmingly anachronistic sense of right and wrong. This is the 21st century. You need to be more…” She took a sip of her
divin
and looked up at Gabriel with the sultry gaze that had gotten him into this trouble in the first place. “More flexible.”
“No more games, Fiona,” Gabriel said. “I know you’re planning on meeting your buyer in this bar, but I also know you’re too smart to have the
kindjal
on hand for the negotiation. So where is it?”
“We could split the money,” Fiona said, dropping a hand to Gabriel’s thigh. “We can just claim the
kindjal
was stolen. That sort of thing happens all the time in this part of the world. No one will ever be the wiser.”
“Where is it?” Gabriel asked again, pushing her hand away. “I’m asking nicely. Next time I ask, it won’t be so nice.”
“You really are going to be tedious about this, aren’t you?” Fiona sighed and emptied her glass, but when she tried for another refill, she found the bottle empty. “Fine, I’ll take you to it. But first let’s have one more drink, shall we? For old times’ sake.”
She gestured to the bartender, who had tentatively crept back to his post when it appeared there would be no violence after all. Holding her glass up high, she called out something in Romanian that caused the entire bar to turn her way. Amazingly, the chilly scowls all melted into broad, gap-toothed smiles. Glasses were raised all around and suddenly Gabriel was surrounded by thick, strapping men slapping him on the back and shaking his hand.
“What the hell did you say to them?” Gabriel asked, searching for Fiona between the moving mountain range of giant shoulders and flushed, grinning faces.
“I told them drinks were on you,” Fiona said with a smirk as the bartender obligingly opened a bottle of vodka and began filling upraised glasses. “I also said that you were a big American movie director from Hollywood looking for Moldavans to cast in your new picture.”
An enormous ox with a blond beard suddenly pulled Gabriel into an aromatic bear hug as if he were a longlost brother. Someone began singing a patriotic song loud and off-key and the ox enthusiastically joined in, slapping Gabriel’s back so hard it nearly knocked him off his feet. Another equally large but beardless thug tapped Gabriel on the shoulder and began demonstrating a terrifyingly drunken knife trick on the bar, weaving the blade back and forth between fat sausage fingers.
Gabriel tried to keep Fiona in view, but she vanished between two of the bar’s larger patrons.
Gabriel pressed far too many Moldovan
lei
into the astonished bartender’s hand and bulled his way through the crowd toward the open back door. He was almost waylaid by a pair of eager Moldavians clamoring for their free drink, but he managed to break free and make it to the door. When he burst through, he found himself in a narrow alley barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. He heard the clatter of horses’ hooves approaching. There was only one streetlight in this remote village and, in typical Moldovan fashion, it had been turned off to save money. The only illumination came from the large, nearly full moon behind swift-moving clouds.
As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he spotted Fiona’s distinctive silhouette at the mouth of the alley and called out her name. She turned toward him just as the moon slipped out from behind the clouds, pale silvery light glinting off the steel barrel of her pistol.
Gabriel dove for cover, tasting brick dust as a bullet smashed into the wall inches from where his head had been. He unholstered his Colt Peacemaker and risked a glance at the mouth of the alley just in time to see a massive white horse thunder into view. The rider reached effortlessly down and grabbed Fiona’s narrow waist, hauling her up and across the saddle. She let out a breathless shriek and before Gabriel could blink, the horse, its rider and Fiona were gone.
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