by Gabriel Hunt
Rappelling to Lucy’s window only took him onto the second of the two sheets. The bedspread still extended below, not quite reaching to the second floor.
Looking down, he saw the pavement far below. The broken remnants of the boards were a fine reminder of how much damage a fall from this height could do.
Speaking of which—
He released the sheet with one hand and worked his fingers under the edge of the board outside Lucy’s window that he had loosened earlier. He pried it off the rest of the way and let it fall. Now he could see in through the window. The room was dark—but he could make out Lucy’s shape, curled up in the bed. He tapped lightly against the glass. No movement. Rapped again, a little louder. Still nothing.
Wake up!
The drugs, he figured; even if they hadn’t dosed her again, whatever was still in her system was probably making her sleep more soundly than usual. And if they had dosed her again . . .
He knocked as loudly as he dared. This time it elicited a response. The humped shape moved on the bed, turning over. He knocked again. She sat up.
Holding on to the sheet-rope with one arm and his twined ankles, Gabriel pried another board off the soft sandstone. He tapped once more. She turned toward the sound, saw him, and ran to the window, flinging it open. She was dressed in a long T-shirt, her legs and feet bare. She seemed fairly alert, though still a bit muzzy—or perhaps just bewildered at having been awakened by the sight of her brother dangling on bedsheets outside her window.
“Gabriel! How did you get out there?”
“They put me in the room above you. Come on.” He pried the remaining board loose and let it fall. “I’ll need your help to get these bars off. My leverage isn’t so good from here.”
He passed her the metal bar from his pocket and instructed her to use it as a lever. She wedged it between two of the bars, gripped the free end in both hands, and pulled. She may have been small and she may have been thin—but she wasn’t weak. The bar she was trying to loosen shifted with a groan of metal against stone. Gabriel helped her with his free hand. Soft sandstone powder spilled out of the holes around the screws. He held onto the bar as it came free so it wouldn’t fall, and Lucy carefully brought it inside. They repeated the performance with the others.
In five minutes it was done. Gabriel threw a leg over the sill and climbed inside, leaving the sheet-rope dangling behind him.
“Come on, help me take the sheets off your bed,” he said. Then he changed his mind. “No, I’ll do it. You get dressed. Hurry.”
Gabriel removed the sheets and bedspread, tied them together, and then pulled his line in from the window. He tied the new set onto the old and then threw the entire assembly outside. Gabriel looked down and saw that the end was just above the top of the first floor. That was good enough. The drop to the ground from there shouldn’t be too dangerous.
Lucy was dressed and ready to go.
“How do you feel? Did they drug you again?”
She shook her head. “Not since yesterday.”
Gabriel gestured to the window. “You think you can climb down?”
“With my eyes cl—”
She was interrupted by a knock on the door. They froze. “Hey,” came a voice. “What’s going on in there?” They heard the sound of a key in the lock. Turning.
Gabriel bolted for the bathroom and flattened himself against the wall. Lucy moved quickly to the door and stood beside it with one hand on the knob, preventing it from opening too widely.
The face at the door belonged to Chigaru.
“Wait!” Lucy said, pushing back on the door so that there was only a narrow opening. She stuck her head around the edge. “I’m not dressed!”
“I heard something,” Chigaru said.
“I fell out of bed,” Lucy said.
“It sounded like voices,” he said.
“Yeah, that was me cursing,” Lucy said, “when I fell out of bed. Would you please leave me alone, Chigaru?”
Chigaru put one hand on the door, forced his thick fingers inside. “I’m going to take a look around.”
“I told you, I’m not dressed. Stay out!”
But he shoved his way in. And the first thing he saw was that she was completely dressed.
“What’s going on?” he said, his voice loud, angry. “I’ll make you tell me—” He raised an arm to backhand her across the face. But he found himself unable to lower it.
He looked over at the man who’d seized his wrist in a steel grip.
“Close the door,” Gabriel told his sister.
As Lucy did, he squeezed tighter, his thumb on the inside of Chigaru’s wrist.
Chigaru’s face showed a mixture of pain and fear—like he wanted to cry out for help, but some last ounce of pride kept him from doing so.
“You are dead, Hunt. You and your whore sister.” He grimaced as Gabriel increased the pressure further. The pain drove him to his knees. “You won’t get away with this,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “Khufu will kill you.”
“Maybe so,” Gabriel said. “But not tonight.” Reaching over to the desk, he hefted one of the metal bars they’d removed from the window. Chigaru saw it and finally opened his mouth to scream—but Gabriel brought the bar down across his temple and Chigaru went out like a snuffed candle.
Gabriel dropped the bar and the man’s wrist. “Go,” he told Lucy. “I’ll be right behind you.”
While Lucy climbed onto the windowsill, Gabriel stooped to search Chigaru. He found a wallet and took out the few bills it contained in local currency. “Sorry, pal.” Patting him down further, Gabriel felt a bulky item in the man’s jacket pocket—a gun? He reached inside and almost shouted as he pulled the object out. It was his Colt .45! Gabriel gave it a kiss on the barrel and stuck it in his waistband.
He went to the window. Lucy had already gone eight feet or so, letting herself down hand over hand.
“When you get to the bottom,” Gabriel whispered, “drop and roll. Drop and roll, understand? I don’t want you to break your leg.”
Lucy didn’t answer; he didn’t know if she’d heard. But she kept going. All he could do was hope.
He looked back at the door, at Chigaru’s unconscious form on the floor beside the bed. How long would it be before one of the other guards wondered where he was? Or till someone else heard something?
He was tempted to climb out and start his descent, too—but he didn’t want to put any weight on the sheets until she was all the way down.
He watched her go, shimmying down the line like a pro. When she made it to the bottom, she let go, dropped, and rolled. Perfect.
He tugged on the sheets to test their strength again, then slipped out the window.
He started to rappel hastily—but he hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he heard a voice shouting above him.
Gabriel looked up. The head of one of Amun’s men was sticking out of the window on the top floor. The man shouted again, sounding the alarm. Then he whipped out a knife and began slicing at the sheets.
They wouldn’t hold—Gabriel knew a few strokes with a sharp blade would sever the fabric. And he was still too high up to fall safely. Gabriel thought fast. He reached into his sock and grabbed the kitchen knife he’d stolen in Cairo. Holding it firmly in one fist, he rammed the blade into the soft sandstone as hard as he could. The impact jarred his wrist and he had to bite down on a yelp of pain—but the knife stuck. At that very moment, the sheets cut loose. Gabriel held on to the knife handle with one clenched fist, clinging to the wall by this narrowest of handholds. By comparison, the rubber-clad pickax handle in Carlsbad Caverns had been a luxury.
As the sheet-rope tumbled past him, Gabriel managed to snag it with his other arm. He let it run through his fingers till he found the end, then swung it up and over, wrapping the twisted sheet as tightly as he could several times around the knife’s handle. It wasn’t pretty, and when he was done he didn’t have a knot. But the handle of the knife did have a decorative curve tha
t was enough to keep the coiled-up sheet from slipping off altogether. It would have to do—already he could feel the knife’s blade starting to come out of the widening crevice, and inside the building the sounds of shouts and clattering feet were multiplying. Gabriel took a deep breath and let go of the knife, sliding as fast as he dared down the sheet.
Looking up, he saw the knife handle slowly tilt downward.
Seconds later, the blade pulled out of the wall.
He fell the last dozen feet to the bottom, landing in a painful crouch.
“What happened to ‘drop and roll’?” Lucy demanded, bending close to him and helping him stand.
He grabbed her hand.
“Run,” he said.
Chapter 15
Dawn was breaking, and the Djemaa el Fna was already awake.
The melodic, soulful morning prayers boomed over loudspeakers mounted high on poles throughout the square. It was standard procedure to broadcast them in nearly every major city in Morocco. Gabriel and Lucy ran past dozens of workers and tradesmen, shopkeepers and vendors and performers, all bowing close to the ground. A few looked up as they passed, more as the Alliance guards came running after them moments later.
There were no tourists in the square yet, and no workers at work. As soon as the prayers were completed it would be swarmed by people beginning their day, a crowd among which Gabriel and Lucy might lose themselves. But while the sacred ritual was taking place, they could be seen from blocks away.
“We need somewhere to hide,” he said, taking a corner and pulling Lucy after him. “We can’t stay out in the open.”
Lucy pointed to a side street where a number of carts, wagons, vans, and cars were parked. “Over there.”
They ran. But after his ordeal the previous day, Gabriel was finding himself short of breath and hurting, and he knew Lucy was probably feeling similar following her period of drugged captivity. Behind them, he heard running footsteps drawing near. He glanced back. Their pursuers weren’t in sight yet—but they weren’t going to be able to make it to the side street before they were.
Gabriel pulled Lucy into an alcove beside a shop whose window display showed bulging sacks of grain and cereal. Two Alliance men appeared an instant later, running at full speed. Gabriel and Lucy pressed themselves back against the stone wall. The men sprinted past without breaking stride.
Once they’d gone, Gabriel pulled the picks out of his belt and made quick work of the lock on the shop’s door. No alarm went off, thankfully, and he and Lucy entered, relocking the door behind them and walking quickly to the rear of the space. They crouched behind a tall stack of burlap bags. Gabriel held his finger to his lips. They heard the men returning, panting, talking to each other furiously in Arabic. He understood only every tenth word, but the general tenor of the conversation was easy enough to guess: Where did they go? They must be hiding!
They tried the door, rattling the knob. Then a muttered curse came from one of the men, followed by the sound of departing footsteps.
Gabriel waited a full two minutes before slowly raising his head over the grain sacks. He couldn’t see much from where they were, but the little he could see suggested that the men were at least not waiting for them directly outside. He motioned for Lucy to stay where she was and crept to the front of the store in a low crouch. He scanned the area from every angle the store’s front window permitted. Nothing. They seemed to be safe for the moment.
He returned to Lucy and dropped heavily to the floor beside her.
“They’re gone. For now.”
“So what do we do? You have a plan?”
“No,” he said.
Her brow wrinkled. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’ll think of something,” he said.
“At least we’re out of the Casa del Khufu,” she said. “I was getting pretty tired of that place.”
The loudspeakers went quiet. The morning prayers were over.
“There’ll be people all over the place in a few minutes,” Gabriel said. “We can stay in here till it’s crowded and then slip out and blend in.”
“Neither of us is exactly the blending type,” Lucy said.
Gabriel thought of Sammi, tucking her red hair under a headscarf at the bazaar in Cairo. “We’ll do the best we can.”
“We need to get out of the city,” Lucy said.
“And to a phone,” he said, scanning the area around the store’s front counter for one. There was none in sight. Apparently, like many people in this part of the world, the shopkeeper relied on his mobile. “If I can reach Michael, he can get us on a plane. I want to try Sammi again, too.”
“Sammi?” Lucy asked. “My Sammi? What are you talking about?”
Too late, he realized he hadn’t told her that part of the story before. “She came with me to Cairo, from Nice.”
“What were you doing in Nice?”
“I went to your apartment. Wanted to see if I could find any sign of where they’d taken you.”
“And Sammi . . . ?”
“She was doing the same thing,” Gabriel said. “She insisted on coming along.”
“So . . . what happened?” Gabriel could hear the fear in her voice.
“I don’t know. We agreed she’d follow me from a distance when I went to meet the Alliance. But we lost contact in Cairo.” He didn’t tell her that Amun had said she’d been captured, maybe killed. Even if it was true, Lucy didn’t need to hear it right now. “She’s probably still in Cairo, wondering what the hell happened to me.”
“Why did you let her come with you?”
He held up his hands. “I tried to stop her. She’s a stubborn girl. Just like you.”
A thin smile appeared on Lucy’s face, but it didn’t stay there long. “I hope she’s okay.”
“Me, too,” Gabriel said. “I want you both somewhere safe while I take care of this business with the Alliance.”
“What ‘business’?”
“They found you in Nice—they won’t stop hunting just because you’ve gone somewhere else. Not now. They’ve got a score to settle now. Besides,” Gabriel said, “if that stone’s out there like they said, I can’t just let it fall into their hands.”
“Why? For god’s sake, Gabriel, what does it matter who’s got some old stone? Haven’t you got enough old stones already?”
“Not one like this,” Gabriel said. “Not if what they said about it is true.”
She shrugged, let her eyes slide shut. “All right. Do what you have to,” she said.
“What,” Gabriel said, “you’re not going to insist on coming with me?”
“Not a chance,” Lucy said. “I just want to get the hell out of here.”
It didn’t take long for people to start filling the square. Gabriel heard the first loud calls that indicated the water sellers had arrived. Sounds of shops opening and people greeting each other.
The door to the grain shop opened and, peeking up from behind the sacks, Gabriel saw the shopkeeper put down a bag and strap on an apron. The first customers entered directly behind him, a pair of women in Moroccan dress, followed by a gray-haired husband and wife with matching cameras around their necks. Gabriel and Lucy stood as the couple walked past and casually exited the store behind them.
The sun was bright now and the square was full. The same complement of acrobats, musicians, mendicants, and food sellers were in place and at work. A pair of early morning tour buses had parked nose-to-tail on the less populated side of the square and were disgorging passengers dressed in knee-length shorts and shirts with resort logos printed across the front. They fanned themselves with folded pamphlets, sweating already even though the real heat of the day was still hours away.
Lucy blinked in the glare and ran her fingers through her hair, which was standing up in spiky green clumps.
“You want me to blend in,” she muttered.
“Come on.”
They walked toward the group of tourists behind the nearer of the buses. A Moroccan guid
e was speaking to them through an electric megaphone.
“We are now going into the older portion of the Djemaa el Fna. Please to walk along this side of the square. We will stay another thirty minutes. Please to buy what beautiful souvenirs you find. Please to return to the bus by nine o’clock. As soon as everyone is back we will leave and travel to the beautiful Majorelle Garden.”
Gabriel and Lucy merged into the crowd, most of whom appeared to be American judging by their accents.
“Can’t we just get a taxi?” Lucy whispered
“I’m afraid all the money we’ve got is what your friend Chigaru had in his wallet. And the Alliance doesn’t seem to pay its people very well.” On the plane ride into Morocco, Amun had made Gabriel empty his pockets—less, Gabriel figured, as a matter of theft than to reduce his mobility if somehow he managed to get away. It was working.
The tour group stopped at a basket shop, a jewelry shop; they spent some time at a fruit stand. Then they walked toward a familiar street. At the far end Gabriel saw a sign that brought him up short—NIZAN’S CARPETS.
“Let’s slip away, Lucy. Slowly and quietly.”
But it was too late. Nizan stood in front of the shop, one hand raised to greet the morning’s customers. His eyes fell on Gabriel, and his smile abruptly vanished. He turned and shouted something in Arabic toward the back of the shop.
“Go. Go,” Gabriel said, pushing Lucy into motion. They took off across the square, threading between the knots of tourists and muttering apologies on the run for the occasional collision. The square was crowded enough already at this hour that it was difficult to move with any speed. The only good thing about the congestion was that it made things equally hard for their pursuers.
Gabriel looked back. Kemnebi and two other men had come out of the carpet shop. Nizan pointed in Gabriel’s direction.
