Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

by Gabriel Hunt

  Gabriel groped around beneath him, felt the cardboard boxes of varying sizes, slipped his fingers under one flap after another. He couldn’t see a thing, of course, and though he had the Zippo lighter with him that he always carried, he could hardly light it here—even if the sudden appearance of a glow from inside the crate wouldn’t give him away, the explosion it could easily set off would make the whole thing moot. But he’d handled enough guns in his day to be able to tell by feel a rifle cartridge from one for a semiautomatic pistol, a .32 from a .45. Telling a .44 Remington from a .45 Winchester was a bit harder, but not impossible. He ran the selection he found between his fingertips, comparing length and grooving. Wrong caliber was not so much of a worry—a cartridge too wide wouldn’t chamber and one too narrow would announce the fact by the too-roomy fit. Too long, same thing. But slightly too short would be easy to miss, and could lead to a shot that either didn’t go off when the time came or went off in a spectacularly bad way. So care was called for, and he exercised as much as he reasonably could, lying in the dark in a crate in the belly of a plane in the middle of god-only-knew-where.

  He finished loading the cylinder just as the crate next to his was loudly pushed aside, smacking into the inner wall of the plane’s hull with a jolt that made Gabriel hope it contained something less explosive than the one he was in. His was the next to move, and he lay still when it did, not wanting to draw any attention.

  Once they were down the ramp, Gabriel gently raised the cover of the crate again, hoping for some glimpse that would tell him where they were, but beyond a blinding ring of magnesium vapor lights he could see nothing at all, just solid black. It was nighttime wherever they were, and except in your major cities, nighttime tended to look much the same from place to place—especially when you could only see a sliver of it.

  Then a streak of red satin passed in front of him. He craned his neck to keep it in view as long as he could, but it was gone in an instant, followed close behind by the rougher folds of a long overcoat. “Keep moving,” came Andras’ voice, though whether he was talking to Sheba or the men loading the crates, Gabriel couldn’t guess. In any event, both kept moving, and within minutes all the crates were on trucks and tearing along a road that seemed paved but just barely so—Gabriel felt every pit and gully in the surface as they passed over it.

  But at least they were on their way. Gabriel settled back for the ride.

  They unloaded him, along with the other crates, a bit more than an hour later—Gabriel’s cellphone may have died and its clock with it, but the luminous dial of his wristwatch, made in 1945 and only repaired once since, was still giving off its pale glow. Sometimes, he thought, the old technologies were better.

  The texture of the ground under the wheels of his crate changed after a minute, from solid to…something less than solid, almost as though they’d left pavement for dirt, or not even dirt—it seemed looser, somehow. And the sound was different as they passed over it.

  After a time, they came to a stop. All around him, Gabriel heard men walking rapidly, but barely any conversation, only the occasional order issued in a low bark. His crate was jostled once by another and then shifted to a new location a few yards away. A peek outside showed more crates around him, some stacked two or three high—he at least could be grateful that so far nothing had been stacked on top of his.

  A car pulled up then, not in his sight, but in his hearing. The door opened and slammed shut, and a new set of footsteps approached. A set with three beats to it rather than two: slap, slap, click; slap, slap, click. Gabriel tensed at the sound.

  “Well, well,” Lajos DeGroet’s voice came, from perhaps twenty feet away. “Well, well, well. My dear girl. So good to see you again.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are,” Sheba said, sounding far more measured and reasonable than Gabriel thought he would in her place, “that you can kidnap a woman off the streets of New York City, fly her halfway around the world, and, and…”

  “That’s all right, my dear. Let it out. You are angry and I don’t blame you.”

  “You don’t blame me? You don’t blame me?”

  “No, don’t hold her back,” DeGroet said, apparently to one of his men, perhaps Andras, “let her go. She won’t attack me. She knows better than that.” Gabriel heard a click followed by the sound of metal sliding against metal, and he knew DeGroet had turned the grip of his iron walking stick and drawn from within the modified fencing saber it hid. “Don’t you, my dear?”

  Lajos DeGroet, son of a Dutch father and a Hungarian mother, both from artistocratic families with wealth and property to burn, had led the unproductive life his parentage entitled him to—with one exception. In his youth he’d gravitated toward the sport of fencing and at age twenty he’d competed for Hungary in the summer Olympics in Rome. He’d won a silver medal that year but famously refused to accept it; four years later, after intensive training under the great Hungarian fencing master Rudolf Kárpáti, himself a six-time gold medalist, DeGroet had returned from Tokyo with a gold.

  After that, DeGroet had largely vanished from the public eye, returning to his family’s customary pastimes of accumulating and squandering money in spectacular but private fashion. Gabriel had crossed paths with him more than once, since the man was an inveterate collector—the acquisitive sort who can’t stop raising his paddle at an auction and, because of the resources at his command, never has to. Which was fine if you were on the selling end of a transaction, as Gabriel had been more than once—there’d been the gilt ceremonial bowl from Myanmar and the skull fragment from central Africa. But if you were competing with DeGroet to buy something, you might as well pack up and go home, and Gabriel had discovered that as well. The trust that underlaid the Hunt Foundation was considerable, containing as it did all the many millions of dollars his parents’ bestselling books had brought in over the years (a rich enough haul during their lives, but an absolute flood after their disappearance at sea in 2000 landed them on the front page of every newspaper in the world)—but there were fortunes and there were fortunes, and Gabriel could have bankrupted the Hunt family fortune twice over without making a dent in DeGroet’s.

  So: a collector, of gold medals and golden artifacts and gold itself, no doubt, as well as all the other forms in which wealth could be stored or expressed; also a fencer, one of the best Hungary had ever fielded, which was another way of saying one of the best the world had ever seen; and though the man was nearing seventy now and had lost some height and some hair over the years, he’d lost not a bit of his old quickness or his skill with a blade. Or his arrogance, or his bad temper. He didn’t walk with a stick because, being old, he needed help with his balance. He did it to ensure he could always keep a sword close at hand.

  “Now, my dear,” DeGroet said, in a voice whose attempt at sounding friendly was as unctuous as it was unconvincing, “as I had been about to tell you when your meddlesome friend insisted on seizing you from my care back at Balaton, I am a great admirer of your work. I have read all your papers. Your work on the iconography of the ancient world is not just accomplished, in my opinion it is groundbreaking.”

  “You didn’t bring me here at gunpoint,” Sheba said, through what sounded like clenched teeth, “to compliment my scholarship.”

  “On the contrary. That is precisely what I did. Andras, please, show her over here.” There was a brief flurry of footsteps and the voices, when they resumed, were further away. Gabriel thought this might be a good time to get out of the crate and quietly pressed upward with his knees until the latches popped. He climbed over the side, dropped lightly to the ground, looked around. But he was hemmed in by crates on all sides, so he couldn’t see a thing.

  “…you see, Miss McCoy,” DeGroet was saying, “I have need of someone with your particular expertise. Some light, please, Andras. No, here.” A faint orange glow lightened a portion of the dark sky in the direction the voices were coming from. “Can you read that, my dear?”

  “I don’t nee
d to read it,” Sheba said. “I know what it says.”

  “How foolish of me, of course you do. But just to humor me, could you perhaps tell us what it says.”

  “It’s the story of the prince’s dream,” Sheba said. “How he came here and fell asleep at noon, with the sun overhead, and a voice spoke to him from heaven saying, ‘I am your father and you are my son, I shall give you dominion over the land and all those who live within its borders, if you shall honor me and do my bidding.’ Roughly speaking.”

  “Very good,” DeGroet said. “But there is a specific instruction you omitted.”

  “What? The bit about unburying him?”

  “Yes,” DeGroet said. “That bit.”

  “‘The sands in which I lie have covered me. Swear to me that you will do what I ask of you, my son, that I may know you as my source of help, and I may be joined with you in eternal sovereignty.’”

  “‘The sands in which I lie,’” DeGroet repeated. “The young prince had the best of intentions, but he never did manage to fulfill his promise. It took three millennia to do the job—longer, nearly three and a half. And then they stopped, because they thought they were done. The fools.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sheba said, and where he was crouching among the crates Gabriel thought the same thing. Three millennia? The Hungarian countryside boasted any number of ruins dating back to the time of the Romans, but those were only two thousand years old, not three or four thousand. There was nothing in the country that old.

  And sands? Hungary was landlocked, for heaven’s sake.

  Where the hell were they?

  Gabriel glanced around, peered between the crates, saw no one facing in his direction. Reaching back into the crate he’d just exited, he dug under the boxes of ammunition till he uncovered the long barrel of a rifle—he’d felt it beneath him on the plane, but couldn’t get at it while he was lying on top of it. Now he set it down on the ground, loaded it, and slung a bandolier of extra rifle shells over his head. Just in case the bullets he’d slipped into his Colt didn’t fire after all. Or, hell, even if they did. DeGroet had at least a dozen men here, maybe more—it was impossible for Gabriel to be too heavily armed.

  Gripping the rifle under one arm and unholstering the Colt, Gabriel crept cautiously out of his little enclosure and into the shadow of the truck that had brought him. Then he stood up for the first time in twelve hours. Once the pins and needles in his legs had subsided, he leaned around the rear corner of the truck to get his first good look at where he was—and his jaw fell open.

  Chapter 6

  It was the dead of night, two hours before the dawn, and except for the movement of DeGroet’s men, the Plateau of Giza was silent, still. In the distance, the Great Pyramid—Egypt’s towering mausoleum for the Pharaoh Khufu, the last surviving Wonder of the Ancient World—loomed darkly against the deeper black of the sky. Around it, the smaller pyramids built to house Khufu’s wives and mother, and farther out the ones for Khafre and Menkaure, his successors, gave the plain a jagged skyline, like a giant jaw full of pointed teeth. The men, by comparison, looked tiny, insignificant, lost.

  Immediately before them, facing them in its eternal crouch, blanketing them with its moon-cast shadow, was the Great Sphinx.

  DeGroet and Sheba stood between the lion’s paws, Andras shining his flashlight’s paltry beam at the stone stele erected there by Thutmose IV. Other men bustled about, Hungarians in western clothing mixing with locals whose garb ranged from turban to fez to coarse burnoose, wrapped tight against the late-night desert chill. Camels stood beside cars, shivering and ducking their heads to nose at the sand. Tilting his own head back to look up, Gabriel saw the great beast towering above them all, its sculpted head as high in the air as the roof of the Discoverers League building back in New York, its shoulders as broad as the building’s facade, and its torso stretching into the distance behind it for the better part of a football field’s length.

  Its body, though eroded by thousands of years of exposure both to the elements and to mistreatment by men, still showed the muscular form of a prone lion, facing east to greet the rising sun as it ascended above the Nile. It had lain like that since before the pyramids themselves all were built. Two thousand years before the birth of Alexander the Great, one thousand years before the birth of Moses, the Sphinx had already been meeting each sunrise with its majestic stare for a century or more. Today the stare emerged from the face of a pharaoh, framed on either side by the traditional Egyptian headdress of state, his stone lips cracked and ruined, the better part of his great carved nose shattered off. But this pharaonic head looked strangely small compared to the size of the body and it was commonly thought that the statue had originally borne the head as well as the body of a lion—that it had begun its existence as a monumental statue of a cat, symbol of the sun god, and that only later, under the guidance of a despot mad with vanity, had the feline head been recarved into a man’s, making what had once been a gorgeous animal into a hybrid, a monster.

  The Egyptians hadn’t called the monster “sphinx”—it had been the Greeks who’d given it this name when eventually they’d landed from across the northern seas, recognizing in its hybrid shape a resemblance to a local legend of their own, of a woman with a lion’s torso, an eagle’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. The word meant “strangler” or “one who chokes” in Greek, a reminder of how the Greek sphinx killed unlucky travelers who failed to answer her famous riddle. But the Great Sphinx of Giza had no such reputation for limiting himself to a single method of slaughtering his prey, and in Arabic he was called simply Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear.

  “Why have you brought me here?” Sheba asked, when DeGroet’s silence had stretched on uncomfortably long. “What do you want from me?”

  “You see that, Karoly? I told you she would be cooperative once we got her here.” Gabriel saw the man beside DeGroet, a short, broad fellow in black with a cigarette at his lips, nod impatiently. He looked around, intently scanning the area, and Gabriel ducked back behind the truck before Karoly’s gaze made it to where Gabriel was standing. This was DeGroet’s right hand, clearly—Andras was muscle, nothing more, dangerous only if you got within arm’s reach, but this Karoly would be dangerous at any distance.

  “I didn’t say I would cooperate,” Sheba said. “I just asked—”

  “Enough,” DeGroet said. “You will cooperate or I will cut that lovely dress off your body with three strokes of my sword and instruct every man here to take his pleasure with you. Do we understand each other?” He waited for a response. “Speak up, my dear. Do we understand each other?”

  Sheba’s voice shook. “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “We understand each other.”

  “Do you believe I will do it or shall I give you a little taste to prove it?”

  “No, I believe you.”

  “Good,” DeGroet said, his voice softening again. “I regret the need to be so harsh with you, my dear, but we do have only a limited time here and there’s no telling how long it might take.”

  “How long what might take?” Sheba said.

  “Come here,” DeGroet said, and as they walked around the left paw of the Sphinx, their voices became quieter once more—enough so that Gabriel could no longer make out what was being said. He glanced around, picked a moment when no one was looking his way, then darted out from behind the truck to where a local stood with a shovel against one shoulder. Gabriel took aim carefully, then slugged him two-handed on the back of the head, catching him and the shovel both before either could land noisily on the ground. He dragged the man back to the truck, stripped him of his burnoose, and rolled him between the wheels, much as he had Stephen at the other end of the journey. Gabriel threw the burnoose on, slipped its hood over his head and crossed the layers of fabric over his chest to conceal the bandolier. He hefted the shovel and the rifle together and hastened off toward the long, low paw around which DeGroet and Sheba had disappeared.

&n
bsp; He almost stumbled over them. They were both squatting on the ground, looking at a cleared-off patch near the base of the paw. Gabriel stopped himself a step shy of kicking DeGroet in the side and spun swiftly to face the other way. As he turned, he saw an expression of annoyance on Karoly’s face—the short man had seen how close a thing it had been, the near collision, and clearly saw no need to conceal his contempt for a worker so clumsy. Gabriel bent his head forward humbly, apologetically, trying to expose as little of his face as possible.

  “When Thutmose found the Sphinx,” DeGroet was saying to Sheba, “only its head was visible—the rest was all covered by sand. He undertook to unearth it—to unbury it, as you say. But he only got as far as uncovering the figure’s chest and paws. The rest of the animal wasn’t completely uncovered until 1925.”

  “And…?”

  “And, my dear, once it was completely uncovered—that is, once the tons of sand had all been removed and the stone surface cleared—the men working at the restoration congratulated themselves on a job well done, took some photographs and went home. But the job was not done. There was more to be uncovered—below and within.”

  “What are you talking about, ‘below’? ‘Within’?”

  “Over the past dozen years, analysis with ground-penetrating radar has revealed open spaces deep within the body of the Sphinx.”

  “In a figure this large,” Sheba said, “carved from a single piece of stone, that’s almost inevitable. There are open spaces in any hill or mountain, too—they’re called caves. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, that’s your opinion,” DeGroet said, “and you’re in fine company, but your company is wrong and so are you. Most of the open spaces, it is true, are naturally occurring, irregular—but one is very clearly a man-made chamber. How do I know this? Simple: I was the one who commissioned the analysis, and I am the only one who possesses the full results.”