Hunt at World's End (15 page)

“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?”

“Maybe 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.

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 strange 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.

He heard the back door of Veda’s house open and close, but didn’t turn from the view until Joyce sat down next to him. She kicked off her shoes and let her feet touch the water beside his.

“Are you sure you want to come? You know you don’t have to, right?”

“I don’t think Veda would let me stay here,” Gabriel said.

“You know what I mean. You could fly home from Madagascar. You’ve done everything Michael asked you to. You don’t have to keep helping me.”

“And who would watch your back in the desert—Daniel? Even if he deserves the second chance you’re so keen on giving him, he can’t protect you the way…”

Joyce smiled. “The way you can?”

“The way you need,” Gabriel said.

She watched the sunset with him for a while. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“All this treasure hunting you do, all this exploring…it’s like you can’t sit still, you’re never happy where you are. It’s like you’re always looking for something, but you never find it.”

“And your question is…?”

“What are you really looking for, Gabriel?”

He watched the water lap against the side of the floating dock. He thought of the hospital in Gibraltar, the authorities telling him they had no idea what had
happened to the ship his parents were on during the three days it had apparently vanished from the Mediterranean Sea.

“People think it’s all been found,” Gabriel said, “that we live in a world that has no secrets anymore. The modern world, with every inch catalogued and mapped and photographed and recorded. They don’t know how wrong they are. There are still things in the world that no one’s seen in thousands of years or that no one’s ever seen, things no one can explain. Things that could have an enormous impact on people’s lives, for good or bad. Someone’s got to find them. And preferably not men like Grissom.”

Joyce nodded.

“You know,” Gabriel said, “your uncle wanted me to try to talk you out of pursuing a life like mine. He’d like to see you in a safe, comfortable university position, not running around in a jungle getting shot at.”

“He said that to you?” Joyce asked. Gabriel nodded. “Sorry, but my uncle doesn’t get to make my decisions for me. Neither do you.”

“Good,” Gabriel said. “Because you’re going to be great at this someday.” And he leaned over to kiss her.