“They got away,” he reported. “On a private jet.”
“Never mind,” Amun said. “He will go right where we want him to, and he won’t raise a finger against us. Not now that we have his sister again.”
Chapter 18
Gabriel was glad for the chance to take a proper shower and change his clothes. He apologized to Sammi for not having anything on board she could change into.
“That’s all right,” she said, tousling his wet hair. “I’ll make do.” She shut the door between them. Gabriel heard the sound of the shower’s spray going on, then a zipper sliding down and a pair of shoes being kicked off. Then he heard the spray interrupted as she got in, followed by a low growl of contentment.
She’d be a while. Gabriel went up front to talk with Charlie.
“All due respect, Mister Hunt,” Charlie said, “you can’t just come running and expect me to take off on a dime. Not at a busy airport. Took a miracle to make it out of there without hitting anything.”
It was the longest speech Gabriel had ever heard from the man. He patted Charlie’s shoulder. “Didn’t take a miracle, just a great pilot.”
Charlie grumbled. But it was true—he’d seen Gabriel out of many a tight spot.
“Still,” he said. “Your brother wouldn’t like you taking risks like that. Or me, with Foundation property.”
“He ever complains to you about it,” Gabriel said, “you just tell him to talk to me.”
He sat in the copilot’s seat for the next hundred miles, watching Africa’s northwest coast disappear behind them and the south of Spain come into view. In the distance he could just make out the small humps in the water that were the Balearic Islands.
He thought about the ordeal Lucy had been through, and the one Sammi had. At least Lucy was on her way to Paris—that was one less thing to worry about, a big one. But Sammi was with him now, and he knew there was no way she’d agree to stay behind with the plane when they landed. He could tell her that Lucy had gone to Paris and would be looking for her there, encourage her to let Charlie fly her there, too—but he had a feeling she wasn’t going to let him face the Alliance on his own in Corsica any more than she had in Cairo. And the truth was it might be good to have her along. She was the historian, after all, not him, and her store of knowledge about Napoleon seemed likely to be more than a little useful if he wanted to get his hands on the Second Stone.
From the main cabin he heard the sound of the bathroom door opening, then footsteps padding toward the rear of the plane and storage compartments opening, one after another. When Gabriel went back, he saw Sammi standing with a blanket clutched around her, the fabric bunched in one fist.
“You really don’t have anything a girl could wear,” she said, and swung the compartment door shut. “Not even a spare stewardess uniform.”
“No stewardesses,” Gabriel said, coming toward her.
“Oh? What do you do if you get thirsty in the middle of a flight?”
“I go to the galley,” Gabriel said, “and forage for myself.”
“And if you get lonely,” she said, “in the middle of a flight? Do you take care of that for yourself, too?”
He stopped an arm’s length from her and looked her up and down, from her bare feet to her dripping auburn hair. “Miss Ficatier, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were offering me an alternative.”
She smiled at him. “Who says you know better?”
When she woke, pleasantly sore and in need of another shower, Sammi saw Gabriel over by one of the windows, sketching on a piece of paper. She went over.
Gabriel looked up. “Your clothes are probably dry by now.” After her shower, she’d rinsed them in the bathroom sink and hung them on the towel rod.
“I’ll put them on in a bit,” she said. “Unless you mind—”
“Not in the slightest,” Gabriel said, kissing the side of her breast, “and Charlie’s too much of a gentleman to peek.”
Sammi stretched, heard her shoulders crack. “What are you working on?”
“A map,” Gabriel said. “Doing my best to reconstruct it from memory. Amun had it in his office—”
“Amun!” Sammi exclaimed, snapping her fingers. “I knew there was something I needed to tell you. I know who he is!”
“So do I,” Gabriel said. “He’s the second-in-command of the Alliance of the Pharaohs.”
“Maybe—but he’s also the professor I was telling you about, the one who taught the Mediterranean History course we took. Omar Amun. Did you get my text message?”
“Your text . . . ?”
Then Gabriel remembered. Back in Cairo.
THAT’S THE PRO
That’s the professor.
“I got part of it,” Gabriel said.
“Well, they grabbed me while I was typing it,” Sammi said. “I wasn’t sure I even pressed ‘Send.’ ”
“What the hell is a history professor from Nice doing high up in an organization like the Alliance?”
“I don’t know,” Sammi said. “He was just a visiting professor . . . and he did talk a lot about ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ and so forth, but . . .”
“But you didn’t think he’d cut anyone’s head off over it.”
“No,” Sammi said. Her face fell. “I feel . . . I feel terrible about the whole thing. I was the one who talked Cifer into taking his class—and I was the one who told him about you.”
Gabriel frowned. “What do you mean, told him about me?”
“There were only thirty seats in the class, and more than a hundred people applying. I thought it would help, that Cifer was the sister of the famous explorer, Gabriel Hunt . . .”
“I’m sure it did,” Gabriel said. “Especially once he realized he could get me to do the Alliance’s bidding by kidnapping her.”
“I didn’t know he would—” Sammi began, but Gabriel pressed a finger against her lips.
“You couldn’t have known,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
“Except that it is. And now she is god only knows where, suffering god only knows what—”
“Shh,” Gabriel said. “Lucy’s fine.”
“What?”
“I got her out. She’s on a plane to Paris right now.”
“She’s . . . ? Really?” Sammi’s voice betrayed her excitement and relief. “You wouldn’t say that just to make me feel better—”
“Of course not,” Gabriel said. “Lucy’s fine.”
Sammi was startled to feel tears running down her cheeks. Gabriel drew her to his chest and she buried her face in his shirt. “I was so worried—so worried . . .”
He put his pen down and stroked the back of her head.
After a moment she looked up. “But if she really is fine,” she said, “and on her way back to France . . . why did you tell Charlie to take us to Corsica?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Gabriel said.
Charlie touched down smoothly at Campo dell’Oro Airport, located on the east side of the Gulf of Ajaccio, just north of the mouth of the Gravona River. The capital of Corsica sat on the western side of the island, a little south of the halfway median that bisected the country. It was the largest and most modern city in Corsica, though that wasn’t saying much—none of the municipalities were particularly large, and most were simple villages. Ajaccio had perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants. Among its few claims to fame was that it was the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte.
In the airport Gabriel tore a map from a pad of them at the car rental counter and compared it to the one he’d sketched out on the plane. He’d marked as many of the pinned landmarks as he could recall, particularly the ones near the spot where “the web” had been written in Arabic. It was an area in Southern Corsica near Filitosa, in the rough wilderness that Corsicans called the “maquis.” The last time he’d been to Corsica, Gabriel had gone to that region, pursuing a legendary urn rumored to have been buried beneath one of the clusters of menhirs—large, upright standing stones that had been carved around 1,500 BC. The urn had turned out to be a myth, but Gabriel’s photographs of the strange and paganistic menhirs had been good for a feature article in National Geographic.