Gabriel sat on the table in an examining room at Lenox Hill Hospital with the noise from the emergency room seeping in through the closed door. He fidgeted, the stiff paper that covered the table crinkling under his weight. The police officer standing by the door fidgeted too. He tapped his pencil against his notepad like he was marking time.
“This is ridiculous,” Gabriel said. “I told you I’m fine.”
“It’s standard procedure following an assault,” the officer said. He was a few inches shorter than Gabriel, maybe five-nine, with curly, close-cropped hair and a thin mustache. The nametag above his badge read jackson. “Most people appreciate being taken to the hospital after they’ve been beaten, slashed and pistol-whipped.”
Gabriel hated hospitals, especially the strong, antiseptic smell of ammonia that seemed to permeate every square inch of them. It was the same smell he remembered from the hospital in Gibraltar when he’d gone there in the early weeks of 2000 in the hopes of identifying his parents’ remains. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had been on a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean when their ship disappeared. No visuals, nothing on the radar, just gone. Three days later it
had appeared again out of nowhere, not a living soul on board, only the dead bodies of three crew members. Soon after, more bodies began washing ashore—crewmen, passengers, more than three hundred in all—but a dozen or so never did. It had been a bad few weeks, looking at corpse after corpse and not knowing each time whether to hope he wouldn’t recognize it or that he would. In any event, he never did. And nearly a decade later, the smell still got to him, still gave him an uncomfortable feeling of bad news and unfinished business.
“So this man,” Officer Jackson said, looking at his notes. “About your height, six feet, blond hair, slim build, gray blazer and slacks. And you say he was in charge of the others, the three other men?”
“That’s right. He gave the orders. The others didn’t talk at all.”
“Have you ever seen him before?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. Never.”
“Are you sure? It’s easy to forget a face.”
“I tend to remember the men who hit me.”
“Have there been a lot?”
Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “One or two.”
“Well, you say this one knew your name, knew where to find you and knew you were in possession of this…this
key
he took from you.”
“That’s right.”
“So you think he’s been following you, or what?” “I’ve been out of the country for the past several weeks. I doubt he could have followed me where I was. But someone must have gotten word to him about what I brought back—one of the locals, possibly, or someone on the expedition.”
Jackson nodded and scribbled in his notepad, though
that answer put it well out of his jurisdiction. “There anybody you can think of who might have it in for you?”
Gabriel sighed. “How much time do you have?”
The officer flipped his book shut, capped his pen. “Not enough,” he said. “You ever think of changing professions, Mr. Hunt? Maybe something a little safer, like firefighter or undercover narcotics officer?”
“I’d miss the flexible hours,” Gabriel said.
The door opened then, and a woman in green scrubs stepped in. She had straight black hair tied back in a ponytail, deep brown eyes and smooth skin the color of caramel. She clutched a clipboard to her chest and nodded at Officer Jackson. “Can you give us some privacy?”
Jackson said, “All right. Mr. Hunt, we’re going to put your assailant’s description out there and try to get a lead on him.” He didn’t sound too optimistic. “If you think of anything that might help, call the precinct, okay?”
“Of course,” Gabriel said.
Officer Jackson left, closing the door behind him.
“I’m Dr. Barrow.” The woman scanned the papers on her clipboard. “Gabriel Hunt, is it? Okay, Mr. Hunt, let’s take a look at you. Would you mind taking off your shirt?”
Gabriel frowned. “Really, Doc, I’m fine. This isn’t necessary.”
“That’s what they all say. Then one day they collapse in a grocery store and it’s our fault. So. Your shirt.”
Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off and tossed it onto the empty chair by the door. “I got hit in the face, nowhere else,” he said.
“You think that can’t put stress on your neck, your
windpipe, your heart?” Dr. Barrow took the stethoscope from around her neck, put the buds in her ears and placed the metal disk against his chest. “Breathe for me.”
Gabriel breathed.
“Again.” She moved to his other side and he felt the cold metal press against his back. “Once more.”
He kept breathing and she kept shifting the stethoscope around. Then the metal went away and he felt her finger tracing a line along his shoulder blade. “This looks like a scar from a knife wound,” she said.
“Yes, well, there’s a reason for that,” Gabriel said.
“And is this—” she probed a little lower “—from a bullet?”
“Grapeshot.”
“And this?” Her finger pressed lightly at the base of his spine.
“Spear,” Gabriel said.
“Good lord,” Dr. Barrow said. “I’d say the cut on your cheek is the least of your worries.”
“You should see the mark a saw-toothed Aztec dagger left on my thigh. It’s a beauty.”
“Maybe some other time,” she said.
“Yeah,” Gabriel sighed. “I’m getting a lot of that today.”
When Gabriel left the hospital, his brother Michael was waiting for him outside, pacing on the sidewalk, his straight, sandy hair blowing in the breeze. He pushed his round, wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Well, well, well. I guess I am my brother’s keeper after all.”
“You didn’t have to pick me up,” Gabriel said. He touched the bandage on his cheek. It protected the four stitches Dr. Barrow had given him. She’d told him he
was lucky his jaw hadn’t fractured. Then she’d recommended rest, aspirin for the soreness and, if possible, significantly fewer gun butts to the face.
“Come on,” Michael said. He put a hand on Gabriel’s back and led him to the shiny black town car waiting at the curb. He opened the door for Gabriel, then slid into the backseat next to him.
Up front, an older man with a salt and pepper mustache looked at Michael in the rearview mirror and asked, “Home?”
“Yes. Thanks, Stefan.” The driver nodded and pulled out into traffic. “I hope you don’t mind coming back with me,” Michael said, turning to Gabriel. “It’s just that I feel better about our security at the Foundation than what they’ve got at the Discoverers League. Those men might come back for you.”
“They already have what they came for,” Gabriel said. “I’m sure they’re long gone by now. Back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said, “but better safe than sorry.” He looked out the window. “You know I really wish you’d stop all this and just come work with me at the Foundation.”
“Doing what?” Gabriel asked. “Answering mail? Reading grant applications? I’d go stir crazy within a week.”
“You’d get fewer guns pointed at you. Not the worst trade-off, Gabriel.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Gabriel said.
The car pulled up in front of the marble entryway of the Hunt Foundation’s five-story brownstone on 55th Street and York Avenue, in the heart of Sutton Place. They got out, and as Stefan drove the car off, Michael fished his keys out of the pocket of his tweed jacket and opened the door. Inside, he pressed a code into an
alarm panel on the wall, which beeped in response. Satisfied, he led the way up the stairs, past the offices on the first two floors of the building and up to his triplex apartment.
He turned on the lights, big hanging chandeliers that illuminated an enormous library lined with bookcase after bookcase. Beginning with the numerous volumes their parents had amassed, Michael had compiled the largest collection of obscure and ancient texts since the Library of Alexandria, a collection Gabriel himself had made use of many times. A red leather couch sat in the middle of the room, with a wrought iron, granite-topped coffee table in front of it and a long polished oak desk off to one side. The pages of a manuscript lay stacked on the table: the
Oedipodea
of Homer, translated by Sheba McCoy.
Good for her
, Gabriel thought, remembering how close they’d both come to getting themselves killed after discovering the lost epic in Greece.
Have to read it one of these days, find out how it ends.
At the far end of the library, an enormous stuffed polar bear, rearing with its mouth open and its teeth bared, towered above a small breakfront bar. “Would you like a drink?” Michael asked, opening the breakfront and pulling out a bottle of Glenfiddich.
“Definitely.”
Gabriel sat on the couch. Beside Sheba’s manuscript, there was an open cardboard box with the Hunt Foundation’s address written on one of the flaps in black marker. He reached inside and dug through shredded paper until he felt something dry and brittle. He pulled the object out. It was a shrunken, mummified human hand. With six fingers.
“Gloves, gloves, gloves!” Michael yelled. He nodded anxiously toward the box of disposable latex gloves sitting on his desk. “You know better.”
Gabriel dropped the hand back in the box. “Sorry.”
Michael carried over a glass, handed it to him.
“None for you?” Gabriel said, sipping.
“In a moment.” Michael went over to his desk and opened his laptop. “I just need to check on something.” He clicked the mouse a few times, and then a cloud of disappointment darkened his features.
“What is it?”
Michael slumped in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands. “I was hoping I’d have an e-mail from Joyce Wingard. We gave her a grant for a research trip to Borneo and she’s been there since August. She was checking in with me every day, and then three days ago the e-mails stopped.”
“How well do you know her? Maybe she just ran off with the grant money.”
Michael stared at him. “You don’t recognize the name? Joyce Wingard. Gabriel, she’s Daniel Wingard’s niece.”
Daniel Wingard. There was a name he hadn’t heard in years. Wingard had been a professor of archeology and cultural anthropology at the University of Maryland and a good friend of their parents. And Joyce Wingard…now it came back to him. The last time he’d seen Joyce he’d been fifteen, and she’d been, what, seven? Their parents had taken them to spend the weekend with the professor and his niece at Wingard’s home on the shore of the Potomac. Gabriel remembered an impatient little girl with blonde pigtails. During dinner, she’d called him stupid and dumped a bowl of potato salad in his lap.
“Joyce Wingard,” Gabriel said. “What the hell is that little girl doing in Borneo?”
“Working toward her Ph.D., Gabriel. She’s thirty years old.”
“I guess she would be, at that,” he said.
Thirty years old and probably still a terror.
“Does she have any field experience?”
“She didn’t need any. This was just supposed to be a research trip.”
“What was she researching?”
Michael got up and walked to a bookcase. He scanned the spines, pulled a weathered tome off the shelf, and brought it back to the couch. He sat next to Gabriel and opened the book. The title page said
ANATOLIAN RELIGION AND CULTURE
.
“Have you heard of the Three Eyes of Teshub?” Michael asked.
“I’ve heard of Teshub. Storm god of the Hittites, right?”
Michael turned the pages until he found the photograph he was looking for: a stone carving of a bearded man with a conical headdress standing on an ox’s back. Beneath the photo was the caption
TESHUB IDOL, 15TH-13TH CENTURY B.C.E.
“According to legend, Teshub gave the Hittites a powerful weapon called the Spearhead to protect them from their enemies. But the Spearhead was
so
powerful that Teshub had second thoughts. He came to believe that even his beloved Hittites lacked the wisdom to use such a weapon responsibly, so he took it away from them and hid it until some unspecified future date when three armies would meet in battle to decide its fate.” He flipped the page and handed the book to Gabriel.
On the next page was an illustration of three enormous jewels. “Looks like an ad for DeBeers,” Gabriel said.
Michael shook his head. “Those are the Three Eyes of Teshub. Supposedly, they were three gemstones that together were the key to using the Spearhead—or
possibly to locating it, or perhaps to retrieving it from where it was hidden. The stories varied.”
“Don’t they always,” Gabriel said. He downed the rest of his scotch.
“Documents from the period say that when Teshub hid the Spearhead away, he called up three winds to blow the gemstones in three different directions, scattering them as far apart as possible, so that they would never be found. People have looked for them, of course. No one has found any evidence that the Three Eyes of Teshub actually existed.”
“But Joyce…?”
“Joyce discovered incomplete rubbings from a pair of tablets she thought might shed some light on the legend. The original tablets are buried away in the archives of Borneo University. She applied to us for a grant to cover the cost of her trip.” Michael returned the book to its spot on the shelf. “Her application might not have leapt to the top of the stack otherwise, but…” He went back to his desk, checked for new e-mail once more. Nothing. “But how could I say no to Daniel Wingard’s niece? And it wasn’t much money. I figured no harm could come of it, a trip to a university library.” He dropped into his chair. “And now she’s missing. I’ve tried calling her, I’ve called our man down there, I’ve asked people at the university if they’ve seen her—nothing. Who knows what sort of trouble she might have gotten herself into? I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything had happened to her because of me.”
Gabriel set his glass down on the table, pushed the box containing the mummy’s hand to one side. “If you’re really worried about her, Michael, I can go down there and look around a bit. Shouldn’t be too hard to find her.”
Michael shook his head firmly. “No. Bad enough that she’s missing, think how I’d feel putting you in danger as well.”
“Putting me in danger? You’re kidding, right?” Gabriel said. “I don’t think a week’s gone by since Joyce Wingard was in pigtails when I wasn’t in danger. It’s what I do.”