“Gabriel!” Sheba screamed.
Then the gunman kicked something with one foot, and it fell, unfurling as it came, dangling below the belly of the copter, and Gabriel let go of the camel’s reins to reach up and grab hold as it passed overhead. A rope ladder—and as Gabriel held tight with one good arm and one wounded one to the lowest rung, they were swiftly lifted off the camel’s back, Gabriel clinging to the ladder and Sheba clinging onto him, legs wrapping tightly around his waist.
The gunman overhead cut loose with a flurry of bullets that brought the cars behind them to a screaming halt. A few of the drivers reached out through their open windows and fired up at them, but they were firing blind and the bullets missed by a mile.
The copter sped off, rapidly gaining altitude. Looking up, Gabriel saw the man above them toss his smoking gun into the cockpit and begin hauling the rope ladder back aboard.
Gabriel concentrated on holding onto the ladder until the skid was in reach, then carefully shifted his grip over. The man above him helped Sheba into the cabin, then stuck out a hand to help Gabriel.
“Michael send you?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper’s blades and engine, he said, “Told me to give you a message. Said keep your cell phone charged next time. We had a hell of a time locating you.”
Gabriel hauled himself up and inside. He fell back against the padded seat, breathing heavily.
The gunman pulled the cabin door shut and Gabriel saw in reverse on the glass the same thing he’d spotted painted on the chopper’s belly from camelback below: the Hunt Foundation crest.
The pilot called back over his shoulder. “Where we going now?”
“You need a hospital?” the gunman asked, pointing to Gabriel’s bloody face and injured arm.
“No,” Gabriel said. “I can take care of that myself.” He dug into his pocket, passed the ancient coin to Sheba. Her eyes widened as she recognized the symbol on it.
“We’re going to Chios,” Gabriel said.
Chapter 10
Sheba stood on the balcony and looked out over the cove with its beach of tiny volcanic pebbles worn smooth by the rolling surf. There was no one on the beach; no one within half a mile of the beach, in fact, other than her and Gabriel. The chopper had let them off in a nearby clearing and they’d walked the rest of the way. The first thing she’d done when they reached the house was strip off the satin dress, fill the tub with warm water, and soak her feet. They’d been filthy and scraped and bruised and sore and she’d kept soaking them till at least they weren’t filthy anymore.
Gabriel had explored the house, meanwhile, doing what he could to shore up the security of the place, which wasn’t much—it was a beach house on a Greek island, after all, not a fortress. Then he’d returned to the bathroom, where he’d taken off his shirt tenderly, wincing as the fabric pulled away from where it had stuck to the wound in his arm. He was for putting on a bandage and leaving it at that, but Sheba had insisted on dragging him into the tub and washing the wound, and the rest of him, too, while she was at it, and before either of them quite knew what was happening, her aching feet and his bruised and torn flesh were temporarily forgotten.
Now she was standing in the salt breeze wafting off the Aegean, naked as Aphrodite, long hair lying in a damp tangle between her shoulder blades, and Gabriel was seated at a glass-topped table beside her, dressed once again from the waist down, waiting while his shirt dried on the balcony’s railing. He was flipping the ancient coin and catching it in his palm.
“It’s impossible, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “You know that.”
“You know it. You’re the Ph.D. All I know is that this coin was in the statue’s mouth.”
“Chios was populated that early, but the Greeks didn’t start minting coins until the seventh century BC. The Great Sphinx is almost two thousand years older than that.”
“Well, maybe it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe someone in Chios started making coins earlier than anyone thinks. Or maybe whoever dug that passageway and chamber did it two thousand years after the Sphinx was carved. There’s only one thing we know for sure.”
She turned to face him. It was distracting to say the least. “What’s that?” she said.
“I found this coin,” Gabriel said, “in the statue’s mouth.”
She came over and took it from him. The design depicted a seated sphinx facing to the left beside a narrow wine jug—an amphora—overhung by a bunch of grapes. The sphinx’s face was in profile and clearly meant to be female. Her feathered wings coiled up from her shoulders. It was one of the most familiar images of ancient numismatics, the sphinx emblem of Chios.
“What do you think, how did a Greek coin get into a hidden room deep inside the Great Sphinx in Egypt?” Gabriel said.
“There was plenty of contact between their cultures,” Sheba said. “As soon as the Greeks started coming over by boat, you see influences from each civilization on the other.”
“But a coin in a statue’s mouth—is that a ritual you’ve ever heard of?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Me, neither,” Gabriel said. He got up, grabbed his shirt, and headed inside. Sheba followed.
“What about the map on the wall?” Sheba asked. He’d told her about the map during the flight over, while the gunman had been radioing ahead, trying to find an empty house the Foundation could rent on four hours’ notice.
“No question about it,” Gabriel said, “it was crude, but it was clearly a drawing of the southern coastline of India with Sri Lanka below it.”
“The dates are off there as well,” Sheba said. “We know there was trade between Egypt and Sri Lanka as early as 1500 BC, but not a thousand years earlier.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gabriel said, “but I’ve found when you’re dealing with ancient history, plus or minus a thousand years can be well within the margin of error.”
“Spoken like a man who flunked history.”
“I aced math, though.”
“Gabriel,” Sheba said, “you can’t deny there’s something funny going on here. A statue of a sphinx that’s carved in a realistic style that wouldn’t be developed till thousands of years later…a map of a place the Egyptians wouldn’t make it to for centuries…a coin that wouldn’t be minted for centuries…”
“Yeah. Well, we’re not going to find an explanation sitting around here.” He pulled his shirt on over the thick pad of gauze tapped to his upper arm. Stitches would’ve been better, but stitches would have to wait. “We need to find someone who can tell us something about this coin. A local expert.”
“Where are you going to look for one?”
“Closest town’s probably Avgonyma,” he said. “Figured I’d head over there, scout around.”
“Be careful,” Sheba said. “DeGroet might have men here.”
Gabriel shook his head. “He never saw the coin. And no one followed us in the chopper.”
“DeGroet’s even richer than you are, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “He could have men on every island in the Mediterranean.”
“I’ll be careful,” Gabriel said. He buckled on his holster and put his jacket on over it. Ninety degrees outside and he was wearing a leather jacket.
“Don’t act like you’re doing me a favor,” Sheba said. “Though actually you could do me one if you wanted to. While you’re in town.”
Gabriel paused in the doorway. “What’s that?”
“You could get me a pair of shoes,” Sheba said.
Leather jacket or not, there were worse ways to spend an hour than on a two-mile walk through the sand and scrub of a Greek island, the midday sun shining down on you, no living soul in sight but a pair of goats, the iron bells around their necks clanking as they grazed. Chios lay in the Aegean Sea like a muscled forearm, its elbow jutting toward Turkey, its fist toward the Cyclades. Gabriel’s destination was just below the bicep, where a tattoo of an anchor or a mermaid might go if the arm in question belonged to a sailor—or of a sphinx if it belonged to one of the island’s traditionalists. The sphinx had been a symbol of Chios dating back to the island’s prehistory, when its rocky shores had been inhabited by primitive communities of fishermen and winemakers and farmers. Many amphorae from the period had survived, the clay surfaces of the vessels bearing the same sphinx-and-grapes design as the coin now in his pocket, scrapings of their interiors revealing the ancient residue of wine or olive oil or the peculiar mastic resin native to Chios.