Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

by Gabriel Hunt

  He took another step closer, flat black shark eyes absorbing the crimson firelight and reflecting nothing. “I hope we can understand each other, Mr. Hunt. Maybe you will be more reasonable than our mutual lady-friend. I daresay you owe me something in any event, given the…damage you’ve done to my other transaction.” He gestured toward the ceiling with his head. “I feel that it is the least you can do to make amends.”

  “He doesn’t know where the kindjal is, you bastard,” Fiona said, twisting viciously against her bonds. “He was lying. I’m the only one who knows.”

  “I like a brave woman,” Shevchenko said, stretching the edges of his mouth upward in an expression that had little in common with a smile. “Don’t you, Mr. Hunt?” He shot a look in Fiona’s direction. “I promise, my dear, you will have an opportunity to show your bravery soon enough, for what is braver than facing pain with—”

  Gabriel didn’t give Shevchenko time to finish his sentence. He threw the shovel as hard as he could at the dapper Ukrainian and dove to the cold stone floor, rolling swiftly behind one of the wooden pillars. He heard the shovel connect with its target, followed by another throaty exclamation from the Desert Eagle. Sharp chips of stone flew upward from the ancient floor to pepper Gabriel’s shins.

  “Really, Mr. Hunt,” Shevchenko said, “hiding like a child. You should face your fate like a man.” There was a pause, followed by a yelp of pain and a curse from Fiona. “But if you prefer to listen to the torture of Dr. Rush first, please be my guest. You may come out whenever you are ready.”

  From his vantage point behind the pillar, Gabriel swiftly scanned the room. The stone stairs. The other pillars. Bare floors. The sputtering flames from the bone-tallow candles in stone bowls, supplemented by a few torches clamped into rusted metal holders. Nothing within reach that would make an adequate weapon. Djordji was bleeding out, Fiona was about to be tortured, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing Gabriel could do about it. Then he looked back at the stairs and spotted the first knife the man in the fur hat had thrown at him. It stuck out of the ground at a 45-degree angle. But it was too far away—if he went for it, he’d be shot before he made it halfway there.

  “Please stop,” Fiona said, her voice ragged and out of breath. “Please. I’ll tell you anything.” Her voice fell to a whisper Gabriel could barely hear. “Anything. Just stop.”

  “I will be glad to, Fiona,” Shevchenko said, “provided that you tell me what I want to know.”

  She said something Gabriel couldn’t make out.

  “Speak up,” Shevchenko said.

  “I can’t,” Fiona said, a trace louder, but then her voice fell again. “I can’t. But come here, I’ll…I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in…”

  There was a beat of silence and Gabriel risked a glance around the pillar just in time to see Shevchenko lean close to hear what she was saying. Fiona leaned in, caught Shevchenko’s earlobe in her teeth and bit deeply. The Ukrainian let out a furious, almost feminine scream.

  Gabriel ran for the stairs. Halfway across, he launched himself through the air and, coming down, slid till he fetched up against the bottom step, like a runner stealing third base. He grabbed the knife, wrenching it from the ground. He didn’t let himself think about how sweaty his hands were, or how close Shevchenko was to Fiona, or what would happen to her if he missed. He just let the knife fly.

  The blade flashed across the room and buried itself in the back of Shevchenko’s neck. The Ukrainian spun to face Gabriel, his formerly expressionless face contorting into a horrible grimace. He tried to raise the heavy automatic in Gabriel’s direction, but it tumbled from his shaking hand and he swiftly followed his gun to the stone floor.

  “Christ, Gabriel,” Fiona said as he got up and ran to her. “You couldn’t have cut it any closer, could you? I thought for sure…”

  Gabriel snatched up one of the blades the knife thrower had dropped when he’d fallen. He used it to slice through the bonds at her wrists.

  “From now on,” Gabriel said, slashing the ropes at her waist and ankles, “you don’t get to be snide about my charmingly anachronistic sense of right and wrong. It’s the only reason you’re alive right now.”

  Freed from her bondage, Fiona collapsed into Gabriel’s arms.

  “I’m so sorry, Gabriel,” she said, pressing her body against him, her lips inches from his. “Can you forgive me?”

  Gabriel took her by the shoulders and pushed her back and away, his expression stern.

  “I’ll forgive you once the kindjal has been safely delivered to the Royal Museum,” he said.

  She wrapped her bruised arms protectively around her body. They both looked up suddenly as a loud, rhythmic pounding commenced overhead. Clearly the soldiers were trying a new technique to break down the barred door at the top of the stairs. That door had been holding back angry soldiers for over five hundred years, Gabriel thought; it would probably last at least a few more minutes. But what would they do when it fell?

  “Gabriel,” a hoarse voice said.

  It was Djordji. Gabriel knelt beside him. The Gypsy gripped Gabriel’s shirt with a bloody hand.

  “You must escape,” Djordji said, his voice weak. “There is secret tunnel. On right, trap door. It take you out to other side of hill. Go.”

  “We’ll all go,” Gabriel said. “Come on, Djo, get up.”

  “I cannot,” Djordji said. “You go now.”

  The banging on the door above grew louder. Fiona grabbed at Gabriel’s arm.

  “He’s right,” she said, her eyes dark and serious. “We have to go now.”

  He turned back to Djordji. “Your wife would put some kind of curse on me if I left you here to die.” He grabbed the Gypsy’s good arm and hauled him up across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Djordji made a stifled airless sound of pain but did not protest.

  “Now where’s this tunnel,” Gabriel said. “And Fiona—don’t even think of trying to give me the slip again.”

  “No offense, Gabriel,” she said as she grabbed a torch off the wall, “but right now you’re not the one I’m most worried about.”

  “Where’s this trap door, Djordji?” Gabriel said, looking around desperately.

  “You’re standing on it,” Djordji whispered, and looking down Gabriel could just barely make out a rectangular outline in the dirt-covered stone and a well-concealed pull-ring at its center. If he hadn’t been told about it, he could’ve searched for hours and never noticed it.

  They drew the trap door shut behind them just as the soldiers finally broke through above and started barreling down the stairs.

  Inside, the tunnel was dark, damp and claustrophobic. The guttering torch provided the only light. Gabriel had to walk in a crouch to prevent Djordji from banging repeatedly into the low ceiling as he lay, stoic and bleeding, across Gabriel’s shoulders. They passed broken bottles and small moldering piles of skin magazines; the flickering orange torchlight revealed a vast quantity of crude graffiti on the stone walls. There was a smell of urine and stale beer. The tunnel twisted and turned, seeming to go on forever.

  “How did you know about this tunnel?” Gabriel asked, keeping his voice low.

  Djordji answered in a whisper. “I played here as a boy. With other Roma—we hide from police, or just come at night to share a bottle, smoke cigarettes.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you smoking is hazardous to your health?” Gabriel said, and he felt Djordji’s injured body wracked with silent laughter.

  It was the better part of an hour before the air freshened and a faint gleam of moonlight became visible at the far end of the tunnel. A sudden gust of night wind killed the sputtering torch in Fiona’s hand, leaving them in near total blackness. Gabriel instinctively reached out in the dark to grab Fiona’s hand, to prevent her from making a run for it. He wound up with a soft handful of an entirely different body part.

  “Why, Gabriel,” Fiona said. “I was sure you’d lost all interest by now.”

  Gabrie
l shifted his grip to her upper arm.

  “Come on,” he said, as he led her toward the crooked metal doors at the far end of the tunnel.

  When they reached the doors, Gabriel found them chained closed, but luckily the lock had been smashed by the latest generation of Roma teenagers. At his direction, Fiona unwrapped the chain and shoved the doors open. Gabriel gently let Djordji down off his shoulders to rest against a pile of large smooth stones. The Gypsy sighed heavily. He seemed to be doing better now that the initial shock had passed, but he was still pale and wincing with pain.

  “So,” Gabriel said, to Fiona. “Where is it?”

  She pushed her tangled hair back off her forehead and winked, then began to unzip her dress.

  “For crying out loud, what are you doing…”

  She shucked off the dress. It pooled at her feet. Beneath it, between a filmy, transparent bra and tiny silk pan ties, she wore an ornate corset with gold stitching. She unfastened a compartment in the side of the thickly boned corset. To Gabriel’s astonishment, the golden kindjal slid out of the lining. She held it up in the moonlight.

  “You had it on you the whole time?” Gabriel said.

  “Unlike you, Gabriel, I don’t trust other people,” she said. “Or hiding places I can’t feel against my skin.” She handed him the dagger after a moment’s hesitation. Then she favored him with a slow, sultry smile. “No hard feelings, then?”

  Gabriel had plenty of hard feelings at that moment, looking at her standing there with the moonlight on her pale skin, shivering slightly in the cool night breeze. He was having a tough time remembering how she’d betrayed and tried to kill him. Lucky for him, Djordji picked that moment to speak up.

  “I would like hospital now, please,” he said.

  “Well,” Fiona said, picking up her dress and wriggling back into it, “that’s that, then. You should be happy, Gabriel. I know how badly you hate to lose.”

  She gestured for Gabriel to zip her up. When he had, she turned to face him, looking up into his eyes.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” she said. “Next time I may just end up on top.” She was close enough to kiss him, but didn’t. She just spun on her heel and strode away.

  Gabriel reached out a hand to help Djordji up. “Think you can walk?” Gabriel said.

  With a groan, Djordji heaved himself to his feet. Gabriel steadied him. “I think so.”

  Gabriel watched Fiona walk away across the moonlit steppe. He knew he ought to go after her, bring her in to the police of any of the three countries he’d chased her through—she’d broken no shortage of laws. But Djordji’s injury was more pressing, and even if it hadn’t been…somehow Gabriel just didn’t think he could have brought himself to do it. He looked down at the kindjal, which Djordji was staring at like he couldn’t quite believe it was real, then back up at Fiona’s retreating figure. Why had she done it, he wondered. Any of it—seducing him, betraying him, handing over the kindjal in the end. One thing he knew: No matter how far he traveled, or how much he learned, or how many extraordinary things he witnessed, he’d never be able to understand women.

  Chapter 5

  Gabriel was tired, cranky and stiff by the time he arrived at the Sutton Place brownstone that housed the offices of the Hunt Foundation. His younger brother Michael had left him an urgent message to come over as soon as his plane touched down at JFK, so he’d sent his minimal baggage on to his rooms on the top floor of the Discoverers League building and told the driver to bring him directly here. When Stefan pulled the long black town car away, Gabriel stood for a moment on the steps before going inside. As was frequently the case after a particularly arduous mission, he felt a strange kind of melancholy settle in upon his return to the city of his birth. There was part of him that was glad to be home—but another part was already itching to head off again.

  He had no idea how quickly he would get his wish.

  Michael was, as usual, in the library, head buried in a leather-bound volume so large it threatened to topple the mahogany bookstand on which he’d precariously balanced it. His sandy hair, or what remained of it, was neatly combed, and when he looked up Gabriel saw from the dark circles under his eyes that he’d been spending too many late hours in this room and too few asleep in the apartment one floor overhead. Michael looked Gabriel up and down and opened his mouth as if about to speak. Gabriel held up one weary hand.

  “Look, I don’t want to hear another I told you so.” Gabriel said. Michael had never liked Fiona. “You were right.”

  “Gabriel,” Michael said. “I…”

  “All that matters,” Gabriel said, cutting his brother off as he removed his battered bomber jacket and unbuttoned the rumpled khaki work shirt he’d been wearing for nearly forty-eight hours of delayed and endlessly rescheduled travel, “is that the kindjal is safe at the Royal Museum where it belongs.” He peeled the shirt off and twisted his stiff shoulders like a boxer warming up for a fight. “But I could sure use a long hot shower. And a cold drink.”

  That was when Gabriel noticed that there were two ice-filled glasses sitting on dark marble coasters on the antique cherrywood reading table. One of the glasses had a crescent of red lipstick on the rim.

  “Gabriel,” Michael said. “Allow me to introduce Ms. Velda Silver.”

  “Hello, Mr. Hunt,” said a warm, silken voice behind him.

  Gabriel turned to face a tall, auburn-haired beauty. She sized up his shirtless chest with an arched eyebrow and a look of amusement in her wide-set hazel eyes. She looked to be in her middle twenties, conservatively dressed in a dark suit and simple heels, but the body beneath the drab professional exterior was anything but drab. Strong and athletic yet still distinctly feminine, with a generous, natural bust and graceful, rounded hips. She seemed way too tan and healthy to be a native New Yorker—but then so did Gabriel. She looked, he thought, like the kind of woman who held down an executive position during the week but went white-water rafting or mountain climbing when Saturday came around. Her legs in particular were breathtaking.

  Gabriel casually tossed his shirt over the back of a chair as if he routinely greeted guests bare-chested, smiled and extended his hand to her.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Silver?” he asked.

  She took Gabriel’s hand with a warm, strong grip. Her nails were short and unpainted. Her gaze, a challenge.

  “I have a proposal for you,” she replied. “I’m organizing an important expedition and I’d very much like to have you head it up.”

  Gabriel looked over at Michael, whose expression told Gabriel that he had already heard her pitch and thought the woman was off her rocker. Gabriel shrugged.

  “Okay, shoot,” he said.

  “My father,” she said, “Dr. Lawrence Silver, has been working for seven years at a remote research station near the South Pole, studying the effects of global warming. I’ve visited him there twice, the last time just six months ago. Things seemed to be going fine. Then a few days ago I got word that he disappeared during a routine trip to sample core ice from the site of an unusual formation. He’s been missing for over two weeks.”

  Gabriel looked at Michael again and then back at Velda. Even during what passed for summer at the South Pole, two weeks lost without food or shelter was as good as dead.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ms. Silver,” Gabriel said. “But I’m no expert in polar search and rescue. If I’m known for anything, it’s finding lost artifacts, not lost people.”

  “I’m well aware of your field of expertise,” Velda said. “That’s why I came to you. Every reasonable rescue effort to save my father has already been made by a highly qualified search and rescue team. Tragically, to no avail.” She paused, pressed her lips into a tight, anxious line. “But there’s more. May I have another drink, please?”

  Michael refilled her glass from a crystal decanter of fifteen-year-old single malt scotch and then poured a glass for Gabriel as well.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip of
the scotch and then sucking a small piece of ice between her even white teeth. “I think my father found something truly extraordinary before he lost contact with the research station. You are one of the few people in the world I believe would be open-minded enough to help me track it down and comprehend it. I have a recording of my father’s last transmission. Would you be willing to listen to it?”

  “Sure,” Gabriel said, downing a healthy swallow of his scotch.

  Velda took a CD in an unmarked jewel case from her purse and handed it to Michael, who slipped it into the laptop computer sitting on the far side of the reading table.

  After a few seconds of silence, broken only by the tapping of Michael’s efficient keystrokes, a harsh cloud of static came out of the computer’s speaker, followed by a male voice, struggling to be heard over the background noise.

  “…a deep, vertical fissure…” The voice faded in and out; only disjointed fragments of sentences came through. “I am uninjured but unable to…” A burst of static drowned out what he was unable to do. “…suddenly quite warm…”

  There was a lengthy pause, nothing but a low soft hiss punctuated by occasional pops and crackles.

  “I don’t—” Gabriel started to say.

  “Sh,” Velda said. “Listen.” Then to Michael: “Could you please turn up the volume?”

  More hissing, only louder now. Gabriel was starting to suspect Michael was right about Velda; the Foundation certainly got its share of crazies, mostly by mail (or these days, e-mail), but once in a while showing up in person. Of course, most of them didn’t look as appealing as this one, but—

  As he was about to politely send her on her way, the male voice spoke again, a single distinct sentence rising above the ambient noise.

  “I see…trees,” the incredulous voice said.

  Then the recording abruptly ended, leaving the room hushed and its occupants thoughtful and silent.

  “Trees?” Gabriel repeated. “There are no trees in Antarctica.”