“You know that shooting a pistol in here wouldn’t be a very good idea,” Gabriel said. “Which makes your threat a little meaningless.”
“I don’t see you acting like it’s meaningless,” Arif said. “And that’s because you know the nonsense you see in the movies isn’t true—that business about plummeting cabin pressure and people being sucked out through the windows. It’s good for one of your James Bond pictures, but it doesn’t work that way in real life.
“You’re right, of course, that I don’t want to fire the gun in here. But I will if I have to. So please, none of you do anything stupid, all right? This will all be over in a few hours. We’ll land, I’ll take the Stone, and you lot can go off to wherever you like, unmolested.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “You give your word.”
Arif shrugged.
“I know you, Reza. You have no intention of letting us go. The Hunt Foundation’s jet is going to mysteriously disappear, isn’t that right? And its pilot and three passengers along with it.”
Arif waved the Luger. “That’s enough. If you want to live, I suggest you be quiet.”
A new voice spoke then, coming from unseen speakers around the plane’s cabin. Looking over, Gabriel saw Sammi’s finger resting on one of the buttons on her armrest. The one with a picture of a telephone on it.
“Reza,” Michael Hunt said, “if you touch any of them, I will personally see that you pay for it.”
“You?” Arif said, with a laugh. He looked up at the plane’s ceiling, as though that’s where the voice was coming from. “Michael Hunt, with your books and your scrolls and your ancient languages? What will you do, Michael, bore me to death?”
“Don’t underestimate me, Reza,” Michael said. “You’re not the only shady operator I know.”
“ ‘Shady operator.’ You wound me, Michael, you really do. I aspired at least to ‘nefarious.’ ” He swung the gun to point at Sammi. “Enough. Hang up on him.”
Gabriel didn’t need any more opportunity than that. He launched himself out of his seat and jumped at Arif, tackling him from the side. Together they tumbled into the cabin’s aisle, Arif clawing at Gabriel’s face, Gabriel slugging him in the neck with one hand and grabbing hold of Arif’s gun hand with the other.
“What’s going on?” Michael asked. “Sammi? Lucy? Somebody—”
Arif swung his free hand, connecting painfully with Gabriel’s ear. Gabriel’s grip on the gun loosened and Arif yanked it free. He scooted backward and got an arm around Gabriel’s throat. Gabriel grabbed hold of Arif’s arm, trying to pull it off him, but a moment later felt the barrel of the Luger pressing against his head.
“I said, enough.” Arif was breathing heavily. “You people don’t listen, do you?”
“Will somebody tell me what’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you what’s happening, Michael,” Arif said, and jabbed the gun violently against Gabriel’s skull. “I am pointing a gun at your brother’s head and in a moment I am going to blow his brains out. After which I’ll decide just what to do with your sister. How do you like that?”
“Don’t—”
Lucy unbuckled her seat belt and stood, swaying a bit as she did.
Arif and Gabriel both spoke at the same instant. “Sit down!”
She shook her head.
And from behind her back pulled Charlie’s Browning.
Sammi looked down, surprised to see the gun gone from where she’d stowed it before boarding, in the shoulder bag under her seat.
“Ah,” Arif said, “so the little sister is armed. I wouldn’t trust her to shoot straight, though, not drugged the way she is—would you, Gabriel?”
Gabriel looked at his sister, looked at the tip of the gun, wavering slightly in her unsteady hands. His head and Arif’s were side by side. A miss by an inch would kill the wrong man.
“She’s a Hunt, you son of a bitch,” Gabriel said. “I’d trust her with my life.” And he nodded slightly.
Lucy pulled the trigger.
Chapter 28
Arif’s grip slackened.
Gabriel released himself from it, throwing the dead man’s arm to one side. Arif slumped in the aisle as Gabriel stood.
Lucy’s hands dropped, the gun sliding from them to the floor. Her whole body was shaking. Gabriel took her in his arms. As he did, she started to cry.
“Damn it,” Michael said, “somebody tell me what’s going on!”
“It’s okay,” Sammi said. “Everything’s okay.”
Gabriel finished carrying out the last bags of garbage from Lucy’s apartment and sat down on the couch. They had been in Nice for twenty-four hours, doing nothing but restoring her home to its original condition. Practically everything had to be junked. She needed a new computer, new furniture, a new paint job. There was a lot of work still to be done.
“Maybe I should just leave,” she said, dropping down on the couch beside him. “I never stay in one place too long, and this one . . . let’s just say the memories here aren’t the best.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Sammi called from the other room.
Gabriel shrugged. “I can’t tell you whether to stay, Lucy. You’ve always done what you wanted to do. Is there anything keeping you here?”
She rubbed her chin. “I don’t know. Not really. My work I can do anywhere. There’s Sammi . . . but you’d come with me if I decided to move to Spain, right? Or Denmark?”
“Maybe Spain,” Sammi said, appearing in the doorway. She was wiping her hands on a rag. “Denmark’s too cold.”
“Or maybe you’d like to go back to New York with Gabriel,” Lucy said. “I’ve seen the way you two have been looking at each other.”
Gabriel and Sammi did look at each other then. Gabriel couldn’t have said what the look in Sammi’s eyes meant, or what the one in his own eyes did. He didn’t plan to settle down in New York any time soon, with Sammi or anyone else—but spending some more time with her wasn’t at all an unappealing notion.
A ringing coming from Gabriel’s pocket broke the moment. He reached into it for the new cell phone Michael had overnighted to him. It had at least twice as many buttons on it as the last one, and no doubt had reception even if you were in outer space.
“Hello,” Gabriel said, flipping it open.
“Ah, Gabriel,” Michael said. “Glad to see you got the phone.”
“That’s sort of a funny thing to call me to check. I mean, if I hadn’t gotten it and you tried calling—”
“I didn’t call you to check,” Michael said. “I called you to say I’m on my way.”
“To Nice?” Gabriel said.
“To the third floor,” Michael said. A moment later footsteps sounded on the other side of the front door. A fist knocked briskly.
Gabriel turned to Lucy.
“You set this up,” she accused.
“Not me,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t—”
Another knock.
Gabriel closed the cell phone. “I bet he has a way of tracking this thing.”
“You think?” Lucy said.
“Do you want me to tell him to go away?” Gabriel said. “I will if you want me to.”
She stood. “No.”
She walked to the door, swung it open.
Michael was standing there in a suit and topcoat, hands in his coat pockets.
“Hey, Michael,” she said.
“Hello.”
She walked back to the couch. “You can come in, but I’m warning you, the place is a mess.”