Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

by Gabriel Hunt

  “I said, enough.” Arif was breathing heavily. “You people don’t listen, do you?”

  “Will somebody tell me what’s happening?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s happening, Michael,” Arif said, and jabbed the gun violently against Gabriel’s skull. “I am pointing a gun at your brother’s head and in a moment I am going to blow his brains out. After which I’ll decide just what to do with your sister. How do you like that?”

  “Don’t—”

  Lucy unbuckled her seat belt and stood, swaying a bit as she did.

  Arif and Gabriel both spoke at the same instant. “Sit down!”

  She shook her head.

  And from behind her back pulled Charlie’s Browning.

  Sammi looked down, surprised to see the gun gone from where she’d stowed it before boarding, in the shoulder bag under her seat.

  “Ah,” Arif said, “so the little sister is armed. I wouldn’t trust her to shoot straight, though, not drugged the way she is—would you, Gabriel?”

  Gabriel looked at his sister, looked at the tip of the gun, wavering slightly in her unsteady hands. His head and Arif’s were side by side. A miss by an inch would kill the wrong man.

  “She’s a Hunt, you son of a bitch,” Gabriel said. “I’d trust her with my life.” And he nodded slightly.

  Lucy pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 28

  Arif’s grip slackened.

  Gabriel released himself from it, throwing the dead man’s arm to one side. Arif slumped in the aisle as Gabriel stood.

  Lucy’s hands dropped, the gun sliding from them to the floor. Her whole body was shaking. Gabriel took her in his arms. As he did, she started to cry.

  “Damn it,” Michael said, “somebody tell me what’s going on!”

  “It’s okay,” Sammi said. “Everything’s okay.”

  Gabriel finished carrying out the last bags of garbage from Lucy’s apartment and sat down on the couch. They had been in Nice for twenty-four hours, doing nothing but restoring her home to its original condition. Practically everything had to be junked. She needed a new computer, new furniture, a new paint job. There was a lot of work still to be done.

  “Maybe I should just leave,” she said, dropping down on the couch beside him. “I never stay in one place too long, and this one . . . let’s just say the memories here aren’t the best.”

  “I’ll try not to take that personally,” Sammi called from the other room.

  Gabriel shrugged. “I can’t tell you whether to stay, Lucy. You’ve always done what you wanted to do. Is there anything keeping you here?”

  She rubbed her chin. “I don’t know. Not really. My work I can do anywhere. There’s Sammi . . . but you’d come with me if I decided to move to Spain, right? Or Denmark?”

  “Maybe Spain,” Sammi said, appearing in the doorway. She was wiping her hands on a rag. “Denmark’s too cold.”

  “Or maybe you’d like to go back to New York with Gabriel,” Lucy said. “I’ve seen the way you two have been looking at each other.”

  Gabriel and Sammi did look at each other then. Gabriel couldn’t have said what the look in Sammi’s eyes meant, or what the one in his own eyes did. He didn’t plan to settle down in New York any time soon, with Sammi or anyone else—but spending some more time with her wasn’t at all an unappealing notion.

  A ringing coming from Gabriel’s pocket broke the moment. He reached into it for the new cell phone Michael had overnighted to him. It had at least twice as many buttons on it as the last one, and no doubt had reception even if you were in outer space.

  “Hello,” Gabriel said, flipping it open.

  “Ah, Gabriel,” Michael said. “Glad to see you got the phone.”

  “That’s sort of a funny thing to call me to check. I mean, if I hadn’t gotten it and you tried calling—”

  “I didn’t call you to check,” Michael said. “I called you to say I’m on my way.”

  “To Nice?” Gabriel said.

  “To the third floor,” Michael said. A moment later footsteps sounded on the other side of the front door. A fist knocked briskly.

  Gabriel turned to Lucy.

  “You set this up,” she accused.

  “Not me,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t—”

  Another knock.

  Gabriel closed the cell phone. “I bet he has a way of tracking this thing.”

  “You think?” Lucy said.

  “Do you want me to tell him to go away?” Gabriel said. “I will if you want me to.”

  She stood. “No.”

  She walked to the door, swung it open.

  Michael was standing there in a suit and topcoat, hands in his coat pockets.

  “Hey, Michael,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  She walked back to the couch. “You can come in, but I’m warning you, the place is a mess.”

  Michael stepped inside. “That’s okay,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “For nine years.”

  Gabriel went over to Sammi. “Come on,” he said.

  “Let’s go back to the place with that awful red wine, and you can finally tell me how you managed to escape from this apartment the day we met.”

  “A good magician—” Sammi began, but Gabriel stopped her with a kiss. It went on for some time. When they finally separated they saw Lucy and Michael both staring at them.

  “Maybe we should go,” Lucy said, “and leave you two here.”

  “That’s okay,” Sammi said. “My apartment isn’t far.” She took Gabriel by the hand. “I think maybe you can get me to reveal a secret or two. If you ask very nicely.”

  Looking back at Michael and Lucy, seated side by side watching him, Gabriel was struck by a sudden memory of the last time he’d seen them sharing a couch. Michael had been twenty-three, Lucy seventeen. It had been nearly a decade since then, and so much had changed. And yet some things never would.

  “You guys talk,” he said, putting an arm around Sammi’s waist. “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

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  Gabriel Hunt tugged at the tight collar around his neck and grimaced as he failed to loosen it. He stuck the thumb of his other hand inside the cummerbund cinched around his waist and pulled it out a little.

  “I hate tuxedos,” he muttered.

  His brother Michael leaned closer to him. Without altering the beaming smile on his face, Michael said from the corner of his mouth, “Stop fidgeting.”

  “Easy for you to say, yours probably fits.”

  “You could have had one made as well,” Michael said. “Thomas would have been delighted. If instead you choose to rent from some off-the-rack dealer . . .”

  “Best part of wearing a tuxedo’s getting to give the damn thing back,” Gabriel said. Then he spotted something that interested him more than the collar’s constraints.

  Someone, actually.

  The loveliest woman he had seen in quite some time.

  She moved toward the Hunt brothers, her natural grace allowing her to glide with apparent ease through the crowd that thronged the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was as beautiful as any of the masterpieces hung on the walls in the museum’s many galleries.

  A mass of midnight black curls framed a compelling, high-cheekboned face dominated by dark, intense eyes. Those curls tumbled over honey-skinned shoulders left bare by the strapless evening gown of dark green silk that clung to the generous curves of her body. She possessed a timeless, natural beauty that was more attractive to Gabriel than anything the multitude of stick-thin, facelifted society women attending this reception could ever muster.

  And she appeared to be coming straight toward him.

  “Who’s that?” Gabriel asked his brothe
r.

  “I have no idea,” Michael replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before.”

  “You’d remember if you had,” Gabriel said. “I thought you knew everyone here.”

  Tonight’s reception was in honor of a new exhibit of Egyptian art and artifacts, many of which the Hunt Foundation had provided on loan to the museum. Gabriel had brought several of those artifacts back with him from a recent trip to Egypt—some of them even with the knowledge of the Egyptian government. The exhibit would open to the public the next day, but tonight was an advance showing for the museum’s wealthiest benefactors.

  Gabriel snagged a couple of glasses of champagne from a tray carried by a passing waiter. The beautiful young woman might be thirsty, and if she was, he was going to be ready.

  “What’s that she’s carrying?” Michael asked in an undertone.

  It was Gabriel’s turn to say, “I have no idea.” Instead of some glittery, fashionable purse, the young woman carried a cloth-wrapped bundle of some sort. The cloth was a faded red, and to Gabriel’s eye, it appeared old. The fabric looked distressed, the edges frayed.

  A waiter moved in front of her, offering her a drink. She shook her head and looked irritated that the man had interrupted her progress across the hall. When Gabriel saw that, he tossed back the champagne in one of the glasses he held, then pressed the other into Michael’s hand.

  Either the lady didn’t drink, or she had something else on her mind at the moment.

  Gabriel set the empty glass on a pedestal supporting a clay vase, then turned to greet the young woman with a smile as she finally reached the spot where he and Michael were standing, near one of the pillars that ran along the sides of the hall.

  “Señor Hunt?” she said. He caught a hint of a South American accent, but only a hint.

  “That’s right,” Gabriel said, but before he could ask her who she was, she spoke again.

  “Señor Michael Hunt?”

  Gabriel shot a sidelong glance Michael’s way and Michael stepped forward, smiling. Shorter, younger, and studious-looking rather than ruggedly handsome, he was accustomed to paling into insignificance next to his more dynamic older brother. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “I’m Michael Hunt,” he said. “And you are . . . ?”

  “My name is Mariella Montez,” she told him.

  “And what can I do for you, Miss Montez?”

  Before she could reply, the waiter who had stopped her on her way across the hall appeared behind her sleek, bare left shoulder. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I believe you dropped this.”

  With an annoyed look again on her face, she turned toward the red-jacketed man and said, “I didn’t drop anything—”

  But what the waiter was extending toward her was a pistol, aimed directly between her ample breasts. He reached out with his other hand to snatch the bundle she was carrying.

  Mariella jerked back and said, “No!”

  Incredulous and instantly tensed for trouble, Gabriel stepped between Mariella and the waiter. “Hey, buddy, put that thing down. This is a museum, not a firing range.”

  “This is not your concern,” the waiter said, and swung the pistol at Gabriel’s head.

  Instinct brought Gabriel’s left arm up to block the blow. His right fist shot up and out in a short, sharp punch that rocked the waiter’s head back and bloodied his nose.

  With his now crimson-smeared face contorted with anger, the waiter swung again. This time he slashed at Gabriel’s throat. Gabriel leaped backward and collided with the young woman.

  Such a collision might have been pleasurable under other circumstances, but not now. Not with a madman of a waiter swinging a gun that he could just as easily start firing at any moment.

  Gabriel felt Mariella push him away, then say, “Señor Hunt, you must take this!” But she wasn’t talking to him. He heard Michael, behind him, saying, “What is it?” She was probably trying to give Michael the cloth-wrapped bundle, whatever it was. Gabriel didn’t have the time to check whether the hand-off had been successful. Instead, he lowered his head and tackled the waiter around the waist, driving the man off his feet. The gun went off as they fell, the bullet shattering a pane of glass in the ceiling twenty feet overhead.

  Commotion filled the Great Hall as shards of glass rained down. Some men yelled and pushed forward, demanding to know what was going on. Others scurried out of the way, trampling on the trailing edges of their dates’ expensive gowns in their rush to steer clear of the fray. Security guards ran toward the scene of the struggle.

  Gabriel knocked the gun out of the waiter’s hand, but the waiter darted in under Gabriel’s guard, wrapped his fists around Gabriel’s throat, and squeezed with a grip like a dockworker’s. Gabriel heaved himself off the marble-tiled floor and rolled over in an attempt to break the man’s hold. The waiter hung on stubbornly.

  Rolling over and then over again, the two men crashed into a pedestal—the same pedestal, in fact, where Gabriel had placed his empty champagne glass a few minutes earlier. It fell to the ground and shattered, spraying shrapnel.

  The Egyptian vase that stood on the pedestal was heavier and didn’t fall immediately—but Gabriel noted with a surge of concern as it started to topple.

  It wasn’t fabulously rare or valuable—otherwise it would have been safely behind glass or at least velvet ropes. But it was old, and Gabriel watched its growing tilt with alarm.

  As the vase tipped over, he let go of the waiter’s forearms and shot out a hand to catch it. It landed in his palm, just an inch above the stone floor. One more inch and it would have been a pile of worthless shards, like the shattered window overhead. He lowered it gently.

  Meanwhile, though, the waiter had gone on with his attempt to squeeze what little air still remained in Gabriel’s lungs out of his body. A red haze was starting to form over Gabriel’s vision and rockets were exploding behind his eyes from lack of oxygen. There were people all around them, but no one was reaching in to help—they seemed to be distracted by something else that was going on. Gabriel tried to call out to them, but found himself unable to get a sound out through his constricted throat.

  If he hadn’t been wearing a goddamn tuxedo, he’d have had his Colt on him and maybe could have gotten to it. Or at least a knife—he’d have had something. As it is, he had nothing, except a cummerbund, a bow tie, and maybe a half minute of consciousness left.

  Ah, hell, Gabriel thought. Dust to dust.

  With a heave, he smashed the vase over the head of the man trying to kill him.

  The waiter slumped sideways, and his fingers slipped off Gabriel’s throat at last. Compared to their grip, the hated tuxedo collar suddenly felt luxurious. Gasping lungfuls of air, Gabriel sat up. He yanked his bow tie off and ripped his collar stud out, panting.

  Then he took stock of the chaos all around him.

  The waiter who’d attacked him wasn’t the only member of the service staff that seemed to have been overtaken by violent impulses. Several more red-jacketed men had pulled guns from under their jackets and now menaced the crowd, alternating between simply brandishing the weapons and firing them over everyone’s head. Smoke from their gunfire hung in the air, stinking of gunpowder and flame. Women screamed, men shouted curses, and vice versa. Everybody was scrambling to get out of the line of fire, though no two people seemed to agree on which direction was safest. As Gabriel leaped to his feet, he saw one man dive into an open stone sarcophagus. Then one of the waiters spotted a security guard leveling a gun at him and without hesitating shot the guard in the chest. Blood sprayed and the crowd screamed.

  The gunman swung his automatic toward another guard. Racing up behind him, Gabriel ripped the cummerbund from around his own waist and, holding both ends, dropped it over the gunman’s head from behind. He jerked back hard just as the man squeezed the trigger. The shot slammed upward toward the vaulted ceiling and another window high above them splintered.

  With the cummerbund forming a makeshif
t lasso around the gunman’s neck, Gabriel swung him face-first into one of the pillars. The crunching impact made the man go limp. Gabriel let go of one end of the cummerbund and allowed the unconscious man to fall to the floor.

  Gabriel spun around to look for Michael. He caught a glimpse of his brother and Mariella at the far end of the room, fear-stricken guests dashing back and forth between him and them. Michael had the cloth-wrapped bundle tucked under one arm now, and with his other hand he held the woman’s wrist, trying to guide her through the chaos.

  More gunshots blasted out, increasing the panic in the room. Gabriel didn’t know how many civilians had been hit so far, or whether any had been trampled in the stampede. But it was too optimistic to hope either number was zero.

  From the street outside, he heard the sounds of police sirens approaching—but they sounded far away.

  He started shouldering his way through the crowd in the direction of Michael and Mariella. He was still several yards away when one of the waiters appeared next to Michael and chopped at his head with a tightly held automatic. The blow landed with a hollow impact that Gabriel could hear even over the din in the vast room. Michael’s knees unhinged and he fell, letting go of the woman and dropping the bundle.

  “Michael!” Gabriel roared. He fought his way forward.

  Mariella screamed as another waiter grabbed her and started dragging her away. She twisted in his grip and punched him, a nice solid right hook. The blow was enough to knock her assailant back a step. She lunged toward the bundle Michael had dropped.

  Before she could reach it, a fleeing woman passing by kicked the bundle and sent it rolling across the floor. The cloth unwrapped as it rolled. Gabriel caught a glimpse of the object the cloth had been protecting.

  A whiskey bottle.

  Mariella threw herself after the bottle, grabbing for it. The waiter who had pistol-whipped Michael was after the bottle, too. He threw people aside to get them out of his way. The automatic rose and fell as he used it to batter a path through the crowd. Mariella was about to snatch the bottle from the floor as the man reached her, grabbed the back of her dress, and hauled her up and shoved her away.