by Gabriel Hunt
“That doesn’t sound good,” Joyce said. “How exactly did things end between you two?”
“Could’ve gone better,” Gabriel said. “The last time I saw her, she came at me with a meat cleaver.”
He followed the signs for Anamur, sticking to side streets, the darker and emptier the better. The detours made the trip longer than if he’d taken the highway, but he figured it was better not to risk being out in the open.
He didn’t know if Veda Sarafian still lived in her house by the sea, or how she’d feel about seeing him again after so many years, but he couldn’t think of anyone else he could call on—not in this part of Turkey, anyway. He drove all night, watching the stars fade and the sky gradually grow lighter. Joyce fell asleep in the back, her head tilted against the window, her hair hiding her face. In the passenger seat, Daniel’s head was turned away. Gabriel couldn’t tell if he was asleep or just unwilling to face him.
By the time the sun started to peek over the horizon, he had turned onto the winding coastal road that led to Veda’s house. The ground dropped off steeply to his right, and past the safety railing there he saw the dawn’s light glittering across the Mediterranean. In the distance he could make out the northern, Turkish half of Cyprus and, past it, a hazy sliver of Syria on the horizon.
He turned onto a narrow gravel drive, and there it was, the house, just as he remembered it. A low, two-story wooden home with dark shingles and white painted frames around the curtained windows.
“We’re here,” he said, setting the hand brake as the car slid to a stop. Joyce stirred in the back, and Daniel stretched, rubbing his neck. They exited the car and walked up the small flight of steps to the door. Gabriel could hear the gentle slosh of the surf from the other side of the house, where Veda had—or at least used to have—a low wooden dock that bobbed on the waves. He knocked.
A few moments later it opened, and a tall, slender woman with olive skin and deep brown eyes appeared. She didn’t look a day older than when he’d seen her last, or an iota less enraged. She brushed her black hair out of her eyes and regarded him with a look that could have ignited a fire in a rainstorm. “Gabriel Hunt?” She spoke with a smooth British accent, but that didn’t mask the emotion behind the words. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He raised both hands, palms out, placating. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t important, Veda. I need your help.”
“You need what?”
“A place to stay for a couple of hours,” Gabriel said. “A phone we can use. Some water. That’s all. I promise, it won’t happen again, but I do need your help now.”
One of her hands curled into a fist against the door. “And we both know what your promises are worth.”
“You know that’s not fair,” Gabriel said. “I thought you were dead, Veda. I saw the plane blow up—”
“Oh, and remind me, which ancient culture’s mourning rituals involve sleeping with the deceased’s sister?”
Joyce and Daniel both looked at him. Joyce especially.
“And who are you, sweetheart?” Veda said, turning to Joyce. “His latest?” She looked Joyce up and down, like she was measuring her for a coffin. “Well, Gabriel, I guess you are maturing. At least this one’s not eighteen. Are you, honey?”
“Excuse me,” Joyce said, her eyes sparking every bit as much as Veda’s. “We just barely escaped being shot at and blown up and chased off a hotel roof, we climbed down thirty stories and stole a car, and all this is after we very nearly got buried alive twice—and I spent five days hanging in a goddamn cage—and we’re asking you for what, a lousy glass of water and a place to sit down? Lady, maybe he did screw your sister, but right this moment I honestly don’t give a damn!”
“Well, now,” Veda said. “Little spitfire, aren’t you? I’d watch out for this one, Gabriel. She might actually use the cleaver when the time comes.”
“The time won’t come,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry it ever did with you. Honestly, Veda, I never meant to hurt you.”
Veda blew a raspberry. “No, you just meant to deflower my sister. You know the worst part? She still talks about you. Says she never had another man who could measure up to you.”
Daniel and Joyce looked at him again. Especially Joyce.
“Do you think, maybe,” Gabriel said, in a small voice, “we could have this conversation inside? And maybe also in private? No reason Joyce and Daniel need to hear this. They’re tired—”
“I’m not too tired,” Joyce said. “And I’m finding this fascinating.”
“Well, take notes, love, because with this one you can’t be too careful.”
“Veda,” Gabriel said, “you’ve got the wrong impression, we’re not involved—”
“Shush, you,” Veda said, and turned back to Joyce. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Joyce told her. “And that’s your father?”
“My uncle,” Joyce said.
“Your uncle. I’m sure you have a good reason for carting him around while people shoot at you. Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me and tell me all about it…”
Veda took Joyce by the elbow and led her off, leaving the front door open. It was as much of an invitation as he was going to get, Gabriel thought. And maybe more than he deserved.
“You really slept with her sister?” Daniel whispered as they stepped inside.
“Daniel,” Gabriel said, “I’d think twice before lecturing anyone else on the subject of betrayal.”
Sitting on the couch, Joyce held the Star of Arnuwanda and read off the Nesili symbols along the outer rim: spire, cattle, tilled field, ash, offering, manure, dune, killing, dread, tar pit, and on and on, dozens of them, like some sort of glossary of the Hittite world. Daniel, sitting beside her and holding a bag of ice on his swollen knee, periodically corrected her translations.
Veda came into the living room. “So that’s the Star you were telling me about?”
“The Star of Arnuwanda, that’s right,” Joyce said. “It’ll tell us where the third Eye of Teshub is hidden—but only if we can figure out what the third element is.”
“You mean element like hydrogen and helium and uranium?”
“More like earth, air, fire, and water,” Daniel said. “This was a very long time ago. And the Hittites made it even simpler: They divided their world into just three fundamental substances, earth, water, and something else, but no one knows what that third one actually was.”
“Why not?”
“Because the only tablet on which it was carved that survived the destruction of their civilization was lost nearly a hundred years ago and all we’ve got are translations that aren’t very clear. We don’t know which symbol the translator had in mind when he wrote about the third element. ‘Loose soil’—there are any number of symbols that could correspond to, especially when some symbols have multiple meanings. Tilled field, for instance, also meant ‘fertile land’—and fertile soil might be described as ‘loose.’ Or manure, as in ‘night soil.’ Even cattle, which is sometimes translated as ‘breakers of the soil.’”
“Or ash,” Veda said.
“I suppose,” Daniel said, thinking it over. “Ash is certainly loose, and that would at least push in the direction of ‘fire,’ which would be in keeping with the Greek model…”
“The problem is, there are too many possibilities,” Joyce said. “We need some way to narrow them down.”
“Well, there’s the map,” Daniel said. “It only covers the eastern hemisphere, so obviously that means all three gemstones were somewhere on these four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia.”
“It could be underwater, like the last one,” Gabriel pointed out. “The map also includes the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea…”
“No,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Only one of the elements was water. The other two were definitely solids. Earth and…” He trailed off.
“That’s the question,” Joyce said. “Earth, water and what?”
“Ma
ybe we’re approaching this from the wrong angle,” Gabriel said. “Rather than focusing on what the element is, maybe we should be thinking about what we know about the Eyes and how the Hittites hid them.”
“What do you mean?” Daniel said.
“I don’t know yet,” Gabriel said. “But we’ve seen two of the three hiding places—maybe there’s something there that will help us find the third.”
Daniel shifted on the couch, adjusting the bag of ice. “All right, let’s think it through. What have you seen in the crypts other than the jewels themselves?”
Joyce chewed her lip, thinking back to the underwater crypt in the Mediterranean and the one in Borneo. “They both had corpses stationed as guardians, men in armor who had been buried alive.”
“That’s generally what you find with the Hittites,” Daniel said. “Other cultures, too, for that matter—the Chinese at the Great Wall, even the British used to entomb workers in the foundation when they put up a bridge.”
“You’re kidding,” Veda said.
“No, no, it’s quite true,” Daniel said. “You know that verse of the song ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ that goes ‘Set a man to watch all night, watch all night, watch all night’? That’s a reference to burying a man in the bridge foundation, as a sort of guardian.”
“Learn something new every day,” Veda said.
“Come on, what else do we know?” Gabriel said.
Joyce’s eyes slid shut. “There were altars in both, with the jewels held in carved stone hands. The hands had hinged fingers that bent inward when the jewels were removed. In each case there was a panel overhead, a trap, that was released when the fingers moved. There was the light from the jewels, flickering on the walls…”
She opened her eyes. “The inscription,” she said.
Daniel looked at her. “What inscription?”
“There were the same words written on the wall,” Joyce said. “ ‘The light at world’s end.’ ”
Gabriel said, “Or possibly ‘The fire at world’s end.’ Your standard apocalyptic stuff—’the end of the world is coming,’ ‘the end is near,’ that sort of thing.”
Daniel pulled at his lower lip in concentration. “But Hittite mythology never had an apocalypse story like Ragnarok or Armageddon. They had no concept of the end of the world.”
“Hang on,” Veda said, “did it say ‘the end of the world’ or ‘world’s end’?”
“Why?” Joyce said. “Does it make a difference?”
“Look, I’m no archaeologist,” Veda said, “I’m just a linguist—but speaking as a linguist I’d say yes, word order does matter.” She folded her arms over her chest. “If you say ‘the end of the world,’ you’re generally referring to a time—the ‘end of days’ if you’re an evangelical Christian, Ragnarok for the Norse, and so forth. But ‘world’s end’ sounds more like a place to me—you know, the edge of the earth, the place past which you cannot venture, ‘here there be monsters,’ all that.”
Daniel snapped his fingers. “Of course! The Bushmen!”
“In Africa?” Gabriel said.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s got to be. The Bushmen—or the San, as they’re properly known—have lived in Africa for some twenty thousand years, since before the Ice Age, in fact. But in part due to the Ice Age, the San never left their territory to explore or become an empire the way so many other ancient cultures did. They stayed in one place and didn’t have any contact with other societies for thousands of years. Throughout that time, they believed there was nothing else out there, that they were alone in the world.” He tapped a finger on the landmass of Africa on the map. “There was a remote area at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in what’s now Botswana, where the ancient San wouldn’t go. They believed it was the boundary of all existence, occupied by spirits and demons. They called it…well, in their language you might translate it as ‘world’s end.’ ”
Gabriel shook his head. It was all so obvious. These things always were, once you figured them out. “Here, let me have the Star.”
“But we still don’t know what the element is,” Joyce said.
“Yes, we do,” Gabriel said, taking the ancient device from her and switching on his flashlight. Daniel limped over to the wall to draw the curtains. “The Kalahari Desert. It’s not loose soil. It’s sand.”
Gabriel turned the starburst at the center of the Star to the symbol for dune and, holding the flashlight above it, positioned the Star so the projected symbol lined up with its counterpart on the map below. The light shone through the small red jewel this time, casting a thin, scarlet beam of light.
It struck southern Africa, exactly where Daniel had been pointing.
“World’s End,” he said.
Chapter 19
Edgar Grissom pulled the truck to a stop by the side of the road. They were in the hills outside Antalya, nothing but trees and a narrow road extending into the distance. In the passenger seat, DeVoe, his electronics expert, held a small satellite-linked tracking device, the flashing light on the screen accompanied by a loud beeping that had grown faster and more insistent in the past few minutes. Grissom killed the engine and stepped out onto the road. The back door opened and three men climbed out, their handguns drawn. DeVoe came up beside Grissom, studying the device in his hand. His wide, angular face was pockmarked with acne scars. A black eyepatch covered his right eye.
“You’re sure they’re here?” Grissom asked.
“This way,” DeVoe said, pointing toward the forest beside the road.
Grissom let him lead the way. Just a few feet into the woods, the device’s beeping grew so rapid that it turned into a single high-pitched electronic trill. His men lifted their guns in preparation, but there was no one there. Just trees, shrubs and dirt.
“Sir,” DeVoe said. He pointed at the ground.
Lying on a bed of dead leaves was Daniel Wingard’s cell phone. Grissom stooped and picked it up. Its screen was cracked and the phone’s casing was scraped and dirty. He hurled the phone against a tree, where it smashed into bits of metal and plastic. The beeping from the tracking device stopped abruptly.
Grissom whirled on DeVoe like a snarling animal. “Find them. Do you understand me? I don’t care how you do it, I don’t care who you have to pay off or kill, but you are going to find them. I want to see the passenger manifests of every plane, train, bus and boat out of Turkey! If they’re riding goddamn donkeys across the border, I want to know about it!” He jabbed a finger into DeVoe’s chest. “You do that for me, DeVoe, or I’ll have your other eye. Do we understand each other?”
DeVoe’s reply was quiet, but immediate. “Yes, sir.”
Grissom stormed back to the van.
Gabriel Hunt would not escape again. He wouldn’t allow it.
Joyce sat in the living room only half watching CNN on Veda’s television. Daniel had been the one to turn it on, eager for some news of the outside world, but he’d fallen asleep on the couch shortly after.
Gabriel came in, Veda’s cordless phone in his hand. He replaced it in its cradle by the couch. “Michael’s gotten us passage on a ship to Madagascar leaving tomorrow,” he said quietly. “From there it’s a short flight to Botswana.”
“Why not just fly directly?” Joyce asked.
“Lower profile this way,” he said. “Slightly, anyway. He was able to book it under his name rather than ours.” He looked over at Daniel, who was stirring in his sleep.
“Don’t look at him like that,” Joyce said. “You know he was just trying to protect me.”
“I do know that,” Gabriel said. “I believe it. But it was a terrible decision. He nearly got you killed. And me.”
“And himself,” Joyce said. “I think he’s learned his lesson.”
“Maybe.”
“I wish you’d give him another chance.”
“We’ll see,” Gabriel said.
Vassily Platonov stood in Arkady’s apartment in Samarinda, on the eastern coast of Borneo. It felt strang
e to be wearing street clothes—dirty, heretical—but in order to get to Arkady’s apartment he’d had to blend in as best he could, and wearing his ceremonial tunic and headdress would have been a poor way to do that.
The meeting had to be here because this was where Arkady’s computer was, and Arkady had insisted that using the computer was the only way to track the movements of their prey. Vassily was skeptical, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. This was the modern world, and one had to accommodate oneself to its devices. For now. Until Ulikummis returned and melted every computer and every cellular telephone and every other modern instrument into so much slag.
But for now, the computer.
He watched Arkady press tiny buttons on the device.
“Look at this, High Priest.” He pointed at a line of characters on the device’s screen. HUNT, MICHAEL it said. 3 BERTHS, AFRICAN PRINCESS, SAILING 10AM.
“This Michael Hunt,” Vassily said, “he is the American?”
“No, High Priest,” Arkady said. “Our man at the airport says the American’s name is Gabriel Hunt. This Michael Hunt is his brother.”
“And you think if we seize his brother…?”
“No, High Priest. I believe he has had his brother make arrangements for him to travel, along with the woman and another—presumably the Japanese who killed Dmitri and Nikolas. He is trying to hide his movements, but he cannot hide from us.”
“From the wrath of Ulikummis, you mean,” Vassily said.
“Yes, of course, High Priest.”
“And this ship they will be on, it goes from where to where?”
“From Turkey to Madagascar, High Priest.”
“Madagascar,” Vassily said. “We do not have any brethren there.”
“No, High Priest,” Arkady replied. “But we do have brothers throughout Africa we can mobilize.”
“Contact them. Tell them we are coming.”
“Yes, High Priest,” Arkady said.
The setting sun shed a rippling orange band of light across the waters of the Mediterranean. Gabriel sat alone on the dock behind Veda’s house, letting the waves gently rock him while he dangled his bare feet in the warm water. Years had passed since he’d last sat in that spot. In the distance, past the sailboats and trawlers that dotted the sea, he could make out the blocky, turreted Fortress of Mamure winding along the shoreline. It was an impressive structure, considering its construction had been started by the Romans in the third century and finished some eight hundred years later by Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubat I. In the catacombs beneath the fortress, he and Veda had found secret storerooms filled with treasures hoarded by the Sultan, including a set of ornate chess pieces, one side made of solid gold, the other of platinum. A Japanese billionaire who called himself Hachiman had sent a hired team of former yakuza to steal it all, and they’d very nearly succeeded. But Hachiman was now serving a life sentence in a prison in Osaka, and the Sultan’s treasure had been divided among several Turkish museums and universities. A happy ending. He wished there were more of them in the world. Something told him things wouldn’t end quite so neatly this time. Hachiman seemed like a model of sanity and pacifism compared to Edgar Grissom.
