Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (15 page)

They were better preserved than the paws of the Great Sphinx in Egypt—but as Dayani had warned, the well-preserved paws were all that remained. The steep stone stairs between the paws led only to a rock ledge that in turn led to more stairs winding further up the mountain—the monumental head the stairs must once have passed through was completely gone.

Gabriel walked over to what would have been the figure’s left paw and crouched beside it. Rainwater ran down its sides and pooled at his feet. He shone the flashlight on the wet surface and felt along it with one hand, inching his fingertips from the base of the claw all the way back to the rock wall the paw emerged from. Then he did the same thing again, a few inches lower.

“What are you doing?” Sheba said.

He didn’t answer, just kept feeling along the surface for any irregularity in texture, any indication of a seam. He stopped about halfway down. “The men of Taprobane,” he said, pulling from his belt the other tool he’d hung there on the way off the plane, a spring-loaded emergency window punch, “were creatures of habit.” He set the tip of the punch to the section of the stone where his finger had halted and triggered its action. The point shot out, chiseling into the stone. “Two temples, separated by hundreds of miles and hundreds of years, but they had matching maps and matching statues inside,
matching inscriptions.” He pried the punch out, reset it, moved it a few inches away, and triggered it again. “I figure if they built a secret entrance into the Sphinx’s left paw in Giza, they’d probably—” He moved the punch once more, triggered it again. “—do the same thing here.”

After a few more shots, the outline of a seam began to emerge. “Here, hold this,” he said, and Sheba took the flashlight from him, aiming it down to illuminate the surface. “A little higher.” The beam moved. “That’s it.” He drew the point of the punch along the seam, clearing it of the compacted stone dust that had filled it in for so long. The rain was helping, by washing particles away as he dug them out.

Yes, there was definitely a separate block here, no question about it. The question was how he could get it out. In Giza it had taken two strong men to lever the stone slowly out of its hole—and that had been a smaller block that had already been removed and replaced several times. This one had probably never been moved since first being sealed up who knew how many centuries ago. Even if Sheba helped, they’d be at a disadvantage. And they didn’t have an unlimited amount of time. Hunching over to protect it from getting wet, he looked once more at the device Lucy had given him.
40SW,
it said. Forty miles—it meant DeGroet was in Kurunegala already. Even in the rain it wouldn’t take him long to cover the remaining distance…

Gabriel froze.

He’d heard a sound, faintly, from the direction of the stairs, one that chilled him in a way that an hour spent out in the rain and wind had not. Or had he just imagined it? He looked down at Lucy’s device again. It couldn’t be—

Slap, slap, click.

He looked up—and, noticing him do so, Sheba did,
too. She was still aiming the flashlight down at the stone of the lion’s paw, but enough light leaked past to outline the figures at the top of the steps. The man in front was small and slender and stood stiff-backed with a walking stick in one hand.

Lajos DeGroet.

DeGroet switched on a small flashlight in his other hand. There was a bigger man standing behind him, holding an umbrella over DeGroet’s head. To one side of DeGroet and one step back, holding his own umbrella, was Karoly, a cigarette smoldering in a corner of his mouth, a pistol in his hand.

The man behind DeGroet, Gabriel saw, had a gun on them as well.

“You look surprised,” DeGroet said.

He walked slowly down the steps, clipping the flashlight to his belt as he went.

“Do you think I am an idiot, Hunt? Did you think I wouldn’t notice that Andras’ cell phone was gone? Or that maybe it wouldn’t occur to me that you could use it to track mine?” DeGroet stopped a foot away, flanked by his men. “Have you never played chess, Hunt? I know you’re not the intellectual your brother is, but I would have thought you might have picked up some of the basic principles over the years. One of which is lulling your opponent into a false sense of security.”

He extended his free hand, palm up.

“Your gun, if you please.”

Gabriel unsnapped his holster and handed over the gun he’d taken from DeGroet’s man in Istanbul, butt first.

“Where’s your Colt, Hunt? I hope you haven’t lost it. That was a fine piece. A fine piece.” He turned the gun over in his hand a few times, then tossed it off the side of the mountain.

“How did you beat us here?” Gabriel said.

“How do I beat everyone at everything? I just do. It is my gift.” He turned to Sheba. “I am sorry we didn’t meet under better circumstances, my dear. You are a very lovely girl and I can be most generous to my friends.” He gestured at the man holding the umbrella over him. “Istvan, help Mr. Hunt get that stone out, will you? Here, I’ll take that.” He took the umbrella in his free hand. “Go on.”

Istvan slipped his gun into a shoulder holster under his jacket and knelt on the ground beside the paw. Both DeGroet’s light and Sheba’s shone on the block. Istvan felt around the edges of the seam Gabriel had uncovered, tried to slip his thick fingers inside. It was impossible—the groove was too narrow. He looked back at his boss somewhat helplessly. “How am I supposed to get it out?”

“Well, Hunt? How were you going to do it?”

“Frankly,” Gabriel said, “I hadn’t figured that out yet myself.”

“Well, figure it out now, or your lovely friend goes where your gun just did.”

Karoly took the bag off Sheba’s shoulder, transferred it to his own, and pressed the nose of his revolver into her back. Gabriel could see that his hand was bandaged. “Did that hurt,” Gabriel said, “when I shot the gun out of your hand?”

“Quit stalling,” Karoly said, his voice a low rasp.

“Oh, good,” Gabriel said. “It did.” He turned back to the block, thought about the options for getting it out. With a drill and some anchored screws it might be possible to gain purchase on the stone and draw it out; with an explosive, of course, you could blast it out. But with neither…

“Lie down,” he told Istvan. “On your back.”

“What?” the big man asked.

“On your back, next to me,” Gabriel said, and demonstrated, lying down with the soles of his boots up against the stone block.

“What are you doing, Hunt?” DeGroet wanted to know.

“We’re not going to be able to pull it out—we don’t have the tools. That means we’ll have to push it in.”

DeGroet thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Do it,” he told Istvan.

The big man lay down, braced his feet against the stone. Gabriel briefly considered the possibility of rolling over on top of him, trying to get to the gun in his holster, but he discarded the idea. Even if he succeeded in taking Istvan by surprise and could overpower him and get to his gun—none of which was a sure thing—doing so would take time, and with Karoly’s pistol millimeters from Sheba’s spine, it was time they didn’t have.

Gabriel said, “Count of three, push. Okay?” Istvan spat to clear rainwater from his mouth, then nodded. “One,” Gabriel said. “Two…”

He saw Sheba move. She spun and broke free of Karoly’s grip and started running for the stairs. DeGroet reacted swiftly: He swung his walking stick out, slipping it between her legs in midstride and, with a snap of his wrist, sweeping her ankle from under her. Sheba fell to the ground with a crash.

Gabriel jumped to his feet, but Karoly stepped forward with his gun aimed squarely between Gabriel’s eyes. “Just give me a reason,” he growled.

DeGroet stood over Sheba where she lay sprawled, her breath knocked out of her, her hair a wet heap against the stone. He put the tip of his walking stick against her throat. “Don’t do that again. Next time it’ll be my sword you’ll feel. Get up.”

Sheba climbed unsteadily to her feet. Karoly grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her to him.

“Where were we,” DeGroet said. “Ah, yes. You were counting to three?”

Gabriel looked from DeGroet to Karoly and then to Sheba. Her eyes shone apologetically. “Don’t,” he told her. “It’s all right.” He resumed his position on the ground, steadied his feet against the stone.

“One,” he said. “Two…” He looked over at Istvan, who nodded. “Three—”

He pushed with all the strength in his legs, and beside him he saw Istvan doing the same. Judging by the size of the man’s legs, he had no shortage of strength in them. The block moved—but only infinitesimally. “Again,” Gabriel said, and counted. It moved a bit more this time, sliding inward by a few inches. “One more. Kick this time.”

They both brought their knees to their chest and, when Gabriel called “Three,” kicked out, their soles landing sharply against the stone. The block slid in by half a foot or more—and then, after teetering for a second, fell inwards. There was silence for several seconds, then a large, reverberating thud that sounded like it had come from a long way below them.

Gabriel rolled over and approached the opening. Istvan was right behind him, gun in hand once more. Gabriel took his Zippo from his pocket, lit it. Inside, a corridor led along the length of the paw and deep into the rock behind it—but first there was a gaping pit, beginning an inch from the opening, and it was into this pit that the stone block had fallen. If they’d managed to pull the block out rather than push it, whoever had been the first to step into the opening would have fallen similarly.

“I need more light,” Gabriel said. He picked up the flashlight Sheba had been carrying from where it had fallen when she’d taken her spill. Shining it at the corridor’s ceiling, Gabriel saw a series of crossbeams stretch
ing from wall to wall as well as columns supporting the ceiling. It looked almost like a tunnel in a mine, propped up to ensure stability.

The first of the crossbeams was directly above the pit.

Gabriel walked up to Karoly. “I need something from that bag. You can get it for me or you can let me get it myself—your choice.”

“What is it?”

“A coil of rope.”

“Get him the rope,” Karoly said to Sheba. “Nothing else. I see anything else come out of that bag, you’re a dead woman.”

“Understood,” Sheba said. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a hank of nylon rope.

Gabriel carried it back to the opening. It took three tries to get the end of the rope over the crossbeam and then much fishing with the middle portion of the rope to snag the far end and pull it far enough back across the pit for him to grab it. When he did, he tied a quick six-loop hangman’s knot and drew the rope tight around the beam, like a noose. He tested it with a few strong tugs. The beam held.

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Who goes first?”

They all looked at each other. Gabriel pictured DeGroet running scenarios in his head along the lines of the old missionaries-and-cannibals puzzle: If he sent Gabriel first, Gabriel could keep the rope on the far side and escape along the corridor, if he were willing to sacrifice Sheba, and DeGroet couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t; on the other hand, if DeGroet sent one of his men across first, he’d no longer have the advantage in terms of numbers back on this side of the pit…

“Ladies first,” DeGroet said, and he pulled Sheba toward the opening. She took hold of the rope, wrapped it several times around one fist, then grabbed it with her other hand as well. She gave Gabriel a concerned look,
then lifted her feet and swung across. She staggered a bit when she landed and for a moment Gabriel thought she might slip backwards—but she steadied herself and remained upright. When she’d regained her balance, she threw the end of the rope back. Karoly caught it and, after pocketing his gun, followed her across.

Next came Gabriel. He tossed the flashlight across to Sheba, who shone the beam downward so it wouldn’t get in his eyes. Gabriel gripped the rope firmly and pushed off. He noticed as he swung that the crossbeam didn’t seem quite as stable as it had when he’d first tested it. But he made it safely across. When he landed, Karoly made a point of showing him that he had his gun out again and his finger tight against the trigger. “I see it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t have to wave it around.”

“Just as long as you don’t get any bright ideas,” Karoly said.

“If I were the type to get bright ideas,” Gabriel said, “I wouldn’t be here, would I?” He swung the rope back across the pit.

DeGroet caught it, handed his walking stick to Istvan, moved his grip around a bit till he got comfortable with it, and then swung across, the light hanging from his hip brushing a reflected arc against the stone wall. When he had landed, he had Istvan throw the walking stick to him. He snatched it one-handed out of the air.

Then he sent the rope back. Istvan took hold of it and walked up to the edge. He tugged on the rope a couple of times, wrapped it around one hand as Sheba had, held on with the other hand, and launched himself across.

When he’d made it halfway, the crossbeam snapped.

He vanished in a split second, plummeting into the pit. He screamed all the way down.

It took him as long to hit bottom as it had taken the stone block to fall. The sound of his impact, when it came, was quieter. That made it no less painful to hear.

“Unfortunate,” DeGroet said, after a moment. He aimed his stick down the corridor. “Now get moving.”

Karoly had taken the flashlight back from Sheba and was shining it between them, lighting the path a few feet ahead. They were walking two abreast, Gabriel and Sheba in front, DeGroet and Karoly in the rear, the clicks of the old man’s stick against the stone floor punctuating their progress as they went.

The main corridor ended at an archway that led into a circular chamber, though there were other, smaller archways branching off to the left and right as well. Prodded by Karoly’s gun in his back, Gabriel walked forward.

The room was large enough that it took them some time to explore it all. There was no map on any of the walls, Gabriel noted, and no sculptures, of sphinxes or otherwise. What they did find was cages, their bars extending all the way from the rough-hewn floor to a ceiling some fourteen or fifteen feet overhead. In each there were metal shackles attached to the walls by heavy chains, the circular bands lying open and empty on the ground. Some cages had just one pair, some had two. One had three. And the walls were covered with the intricate swoops and whorls of the Sinhala alphabet, the faded ink showing dimly in the yellow beams of the flashlights.

“Please do us the kindness of translating this…this scribbling,” DeGroet said to Sheba.

“I’m no expert—” Sheba began

“Come now,” DeGroet said. “We both know that an expert is precisely what you are. I seem to recall seeing a paper of yours on Sri Lankan vowel variants in the
Journal of Phonetics,
and though I didn’t understand two words of it, I trust the peer reviewers wouldn’t have accepted it if its author had been illiterate in the languages it purported to analyze. Now—what does that say?” And he swung his stick to point at a passage inscribed beside the largest of the cages.

Sheba read it over twice. “It’s a…a feeding guide. It specifies a diet of one whole cow and two goat flanks daily, to be provided freshly slaughtered but not prepared in any other way.”

“Provided to
what
?” DeGroet said.

“It doesn’t say.”

“All right. How about this one?” DeGroet pointed out a bit of text a few cages down.

“Same thing. Only this one got goats and sheep, one of each in the morning and then again at night.”

“That’s all?” DeGroet said.

“It says they’re to be brought to the cage alive,” Sheba said.

“Not a word about what it was that would eat all these goats and sheep?”

Sheba shook her head.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“I’m not lying,” Sheba said. “That’s what it says.”

DeGroet looked around at the rows of empty cages. His face betrayed a strange mix of elation and disappointment. “It’s proof,” he muttered, half to himself. “It’s proof enough.”

“Of what?” Gabriel said. “That thousands of years ago, they bred sphinxes here? I don’t think so.”

“It’s proof they bred something, Hunt. Something big. Look at the size of those shackles. Something
carnivorous, too—we know that, thanks to Miss McCoy. What do
you
suppose it was they were breeding?”

“I don’t suppose anything,” Gabriel said. “If I had to guess, I’d say maybe lions. Or maybe they brought some tigers over from South India. Or jackals—they have those in India as well.”

“You ever see a jackal eat a cow?”

“Actually, yes,” Gabriel said. “I have.”

“By itself? One jackal, a whole cow?”

“No,” Gabriel said, “there were a few of them, but—”

“You wouldn’t build a cage like this to house a jackal,” DeGroet said, and silently Gabriel had to admit he agreed. “And you couldn’t sell a jackal for much at all. No prince would come across the sea to buy one. No, the inhabitants of these cages were far rarer than that.”

“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “But they were not monsters. Terrible creatures, perhaps. Fierce ones trained to attack or to guard. But not crossbreeds between animals and men.”

“You are so very sure of yourself,” DeGroet said. “It must be comforting at a time like this.” He gestured toward Karoly. “Let’s go on.”

Karoly prodded Gabriel into the next room. This one seemed to have once been an antechamber of some sort, smaller than the previous room and with stone benches where the other room had cages. Between each bench and its neighbor a metal rack stood, covered thickly with dust and cobwebs and crammed with various tools and implements. In the brief glance he got as the flashlights’ beams swept past, Gabriel spotted a sort of halberd or poleax in one, with both a blade and a point at the end—the sort of thing you might use to keep a large animal at bay. He also saw what looked like a branding iron, and something else that resembled a long-armed pair of pincers, and—was that a rack of swords and ar
mor pieces? But DeGroet and Karoly pressed them onward and the narrow shafts of light moved on as well.

In the center of the room there was a circular platform made from what looked like a single thickly varnished slab of wood, with vertical chains attached to the perimeter at regular intervals. Karoly angled his flashlight up to see what the other ends of the chains were attached to, but they receded into darkness too far above for the light to reach.

A long metal lever abutted the platform and DeGroet approached it, struck it ringingly with the side of his walking stick. “Interesting,” he said. “Interesting.” He turned in a tight circle, the light on his belt traveling along the walls. “What do you think, Hunt? If you were going to hide an ancient treasure somewhere here, where would you put it?”

“Can I ask what it is you’re looking for?” Gabriel said. DeGroet didn’t answer him. “You don’t know, do you?” He felt a jab from Karoly’s gun but he went on anyway. “I don’t think you have the faintest idea.”

“Oh, I have as much of an idea as you have,” DeGroet said, “and that was enough to bring you halfway around the world, wasn’t it? It’s a treasure—we know that. Is it a mechanical device of some sort? A religious artifact? Some physical relic of a living sphinx? No one knows. But there is no question that a treasure of some sort was taken out of Egypt and brought back here—and apparently one from Greece, too. Something precious. And powerful—very, very powerful.”

“You believe that?” Gabriel said. “This business about the power to terrify with a glance?”

“I have what you might call an open mind,” DeGroet said.

“But what would you even want with it?” Gabriel said. “Did you suddenly wake up one morning and decide you wanted to rule the world?”

“Rule the world? Me?” DeGroet laughed, a sincere, full-throated laugh that echoed against the ancient stone walls. “I’d sooner hang myself. No, Mr. Hunt, I don’t want this power for myself. I’m quite content living a life of leisure. Ruling the world would be a terrible chore.”

“Then why…?”

“
I
don’t wish to rule the world,” DeGroet said, “but that doesn’t mean no one does. And while some of the men who do are penurious madmen living in squalid apartments in third-world slums, with no possibility of paying someone who could help them realize their ambition, others are quite wealthy and would give a large fraction of that wealth for a treasure of the ancient world that might confer upon them the power to terrify an army into immobility.”

“You want to sell it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t even know what it is or what it can do, but you’ve decided you’re going to sell the thing to some dictator to use against his enemies—”

“Did I say ‘dictator’? That is your word, not mine. I just said he had to be wealthy, not what his politics needed to be. And if there are two of these treasures to be found, as I believe there should be, I will gladly sell the other to his opponent—let them be locked forever in a stalemate of induced terror, I don’t care. Just as long as their payments clear.”

“And if this mythical power of the sphinx is just that—mythical?”

DeGroet smiled. “Then I’ll have a pair of relics that will still fetch an excellent price at auction, won’t I?”

“You’d kill nine men for that?”

“I’d kill ninety, Mr. Hunt,” DeGroet said.

Behind him, Gabriel felt the point of Karoly’s gun jab him again. But it was no longer poking squarely into the
small of his back; it was nearer to his side now—and to his elbow. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. He moved swiftly, pinning the barrel between his arm and his side. Then he wrenched his torso to the left, holding tight to his grip on the gun. Karoly howled as the metal twisted in his injured hand. The beam of the flashlight in his other hand swung wildly. The gun fired, then fired again, as Karoly desperately squeezed the trigger, but the bullets sped into darkness, hitting only the far wall. Gabriel felt the heat of the gun’s barrel through his jacket, smelled scorched leather beneath the stronger odor of gunpowder. He squeezed harder with his elbow and bent forward sharply. He heard the bones of Karoly’s wrist snap. The gun clattered to the floor.

“Run!” Gabriel shouted over Karoly’s screams and he saw Sheba dart out of sight, her footsteps speeding back toward the room with the cages. Behind him he heard the sound of DeGroet’s walking stick unlocking and the deadly saber sliding out of its metal sheath.

Gabriel raised his other arm and smashed his elbow backwards, connecting with Karoly’s face. The man fell, the flashlight tumbling from his hand and spinning across the floor, coming to a stop against the wooden platform. Gabriel bent forward and reached down for the gun—but his foot connected with it before his groping hand did, sending it skittering into some dark corner of the room.

He heard the swish of DeGroet’s blade then, flashing through the air where his head would have been if he hadn’t been bent double. He launched himself into a shoulder roll, coming up against one of the stone benches. He reached over to find the metal rack beside it. Was this the one with the halberd? No—his hand closed on one arm of the giant pincers. He saw DeGroet’s light coming near, bobbing as the man ran forward.
Gabriel yanked the pincers out of the rack and swung them at the light, but DeGroet stepped nimbly out of the way and they swept through empty air. A second later DeGroet’s blade struck from the side, slicing through one leg of Gabriel’s pants and the flesh of his thigh underneath. He felt the wound open, felt blood run warm and sticky down his skin. It was his injured leg, too. He limped out of range as fast as he could, pulling over the rack behind him with a huge clatter of metal against stone. Anything to slow DeGroet down.

He staggered to the end of the next bench over and felt for the rack that should be there. Which one was this? He felt a surge of relief as his hand closed not on the shaft of a branding iron or some other bit of paraphernalia but the hilt of a sword. He drew it quickly. Ancient steel and probably fragile, not the thing you wanted most when facing a former gold medalist in fencing—but it would have to do. For good measure, he grabbed a second sword in his other hand, swinging one overhead and the other at chest level.

DeGroet loomed suddenly out of the darkness, his blade striking mercilessly toward Gabriel’s face. Gabriel parried it at the last second, the saber’s narrower blade clashing noisily against the steel of the curved sword in his left hand. He feinted with the one in his right, aiming high at DeGroet’s shoulder, and then when DeGroet angled his torso to dodge it, Gabriel changed course, tilted the blade down, and used it to sweep the flashlight off his hip. It flew through the air and smashed against the floor, leaving them in darkness.

He heard DeGroet’s blade coming and reached up blindly to meet it. The blades struck with a clang of metal against metal, and DeGroet’s slid off. Two parries in a row—Gabriel congratulated himself. Some of the finest fencers in two Olympics hadn’t managed that against DeGroet. But the second time had just been
blind luck, Gabriel knew—and he couldn’t count on getting lucky again. He took several rapid steps backwards, heard DeGroet coming after him.

Neither of them could see, which negated DeGroet’s advantage in terms of pure swordsmanship. But fighting in the dark like this for any real length of time was no good. It left survival up to chance—and Gabriel had never been one to bet his life on the toss of a coin.

Orienting himself against the one light remaining in the room, he ran toward the flashlight lying against the wooden platform. If he could get hold of it, maybe use it to locate the gun…But as he got close, he saw DeGroet racing for the same spot. DeGroet saw him as well, and poured on extra speed Gabriel wouldn’t have thought the man was capable of. They stepped onto the wooden platform at the same instant.

Lit indirectly from below, the combat between the two men took on an almost dreamlike quality, their blades slashing in and out of visibility, cutting brief blazing arcs and vanishing again as they passed beyond the cone of light. DeGroet swept his sword down from above, an angled stroke of the cutting edge that could remove a man’s head; but Gabriel crossed his blades and caught DeGroet’s in the crook of the X they formed. DeGroet yanked the saber free and sent it darting at Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel sidestepped, parried with the flat of one blade and lunged with the other. The point streaked against DeGroet’s cheek and blood welled up.

“A touch,” DeGroet said grimly, raising a finger to his cheek. “It will be your last.” And he lashed out with his sword, spiraling it around the blade in Gabriel’s left fist once, twice, and suddenly the sword flew from Gabriel’s hand, yanked out of his grip by expert pressure against the blade in just the right spot.

Now it was down to one blade against one—a contest Gabriel knew he couldn’t win.

He kicked out with one foot, planting his boot in DeGroet’s midsection. DeGroet flew backwards, fetching up against one of the chains, grabbing onto it with his free hand to keep himself from falling off the platform. Before he could come back, Gabriel leaned out past the platform’s edge and took hold of the lever by its side. With a mighty heave, he pulled it toward him.

It didn’t want to move, but Gabriel left it no choice, dragging it along the channel in the floor in which it was lodged. It came, scraping with a horrendous squeal. DeGroet, meanwhile, had regained his footing and had his sword poised for another stroke—but a sound from overhead stopped them both. It was a loud grinding of stone against stone, not unlike the sound they’d heard in the chamber within the Great Sphinx, just before poor Rashidi had been chopped in half. They felt a tremor beneath their feet—and then suddenly the platform they were on lifted into the air, the chains rattling as they got forcefully yanked upwards.