Gabriel shrugged. He was leaning against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the second-story library of the Hunt Foundation building on Sutton Place. His younger brother’s desk was in one corner of the room with an elaborate computer setup on it and a fancy speakerphone the size of a dinner plate, and both pieces of equipment had lights blinking urgently, no doubt announcing the arrival of messages from all over the world, but Michael was ignoring them. “Explain that to me,” he said.
“I jumped,” Gabriel said. “Off the wall. What’s there to explain?”
“How you survived,” Michael said. “You didn’t have a parachute on under your jacket, did you?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Come on, Michael. A parachute? You’ve watched too many James Bond movies.”
“So then how…?”
“Please,” Gabriel said. “Do I ask you how you make your arrangements with museums and universities and what-have-you? To transfer objects from one to another, or whatever it is you do all day?”
“You could ask,” Michael said. “I’d be glad to tell you.”
“Well, I don’t. Professional courtesy. A man needs to have a trade secret or two.”
“But, Gabriel, a three-hundred-foot drop—”
“Yes, that is quite a lot, isn’t it?” Gabriel grinned. He knew it was driving Michael crazy and wasn’t about to let him off the hook a moment sooner than he had to.
“You said the castle overlooked Lake Balaton,” Michael said. “Is that it? You dropped three hundred feet into the lake, then swam away?”
“That would have been handy,” Gabriel said. “But no. The castle overlooks Lake Balaton from half a mile away. And before you ask, there was no donkey cart passing by at the foot of the mountain either, piled high with mattresses to cushion my fall.”
“Gabriel, please, you’re making a joke of it, and I’m quite serious. You know I don’t like your risking your life on these missions of yours—”
“I do, Michael. I do know that. I’m sorry.”
“Bad enough we lost Lucy,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”
Lucy was their younger sister; she wasn’t dead, as far as either of them knew, but neither of them had seen her since she’d struck off for parts unknown at the age of seventeen amid the chaos surrounding what had happened to their parents. Today she’d be twenty-six.
“You won’t lose me,” Gabriel said.
“So, then, tell me,” Michael said, “how did you do it?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Gabriel said. “You can keep guessing, and if you guess right, I’ll tell you that you did. In the meantime,” he said, glancing at his dented Bulova A-11 wristwatch (and fingering the dent gently—it had stopped a bullet once), “I have an appointment with a young lady.”
“Sheba?”
“Who else?” Gabriel reached into his pocket and dropped a crumpled wad of receipts on Michael’s desk. “You can reach me on the cell phone—but I’d really prefer you didn’t. At least for an hour or two.”
Michael followed him out into the hall and down the curving grand staircase to the first floor. “Did someone fly underneath you, with a plane or a glider or something of that sort, and catch you as you fell?”
“That’s very creative,” Gabriel said. “Extremely creative. I’ll have to try that next time.”
Michael thought for a bit. Finally he said, “You had a second cable, attached to the side of the mountain lower down. One you could grab hold of as you fell past it. A backup in case the first one got cut. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Gabriel stretched out one hand, took hold of the back of Michael’s neck and pulled him forward, planted a kiss on the top of the younger man’s head, where his sandy blond hair was starting to thin. “You see, Michael? I’m always careful.”
“If you call betting on being able to catch a narrow filament of wire as you fall past it at thirty-two feet per second squared being careful!”
“I do,” Gabriel said, and shut the door behind him.
Walking west on 55th Street and then uptown on Park Avenue, Gabriel thought about his escape from Hungary—his and Sheba’s, since they’d ridden out together, first hidden briefly under blankets in the bed of a truck, then stashed in the crew quarters on the lower deck of a Romanian trawler on the Danube, and then finally darting onto a commercial flight back to the States just as the jetway was detaching from the plane’s fuselage.
As they’d taken their seats, Gabriel had seen, through the closing door, two pursuers come skidding to a halt at the ticket counter. They were pointing furiously toward the jetway and for a moment he’d worried they might succeed in holding the flight back. But the door had slammed shut and the plane had pulled away from the terminal on schedule, taxied down the runway, and lifted off without incident. They’d landed without incident, too, though Gabriel had kept his eyes out for trouble all the way back to Manhattan. After all, it wasn’t as though DeGroet’s men couldn’t find out exactly when and where they’d be landing.
Rather than bring Sheba back to the Hunt Foundation building, he’d stashed her in his rooms on the top floor of the Discoverers League, a century-old gentlemen’s club devoted to exploration, cartography, mountaineering, and similar pursuits. It was widely known that Gabriel was a member—Michael was, too, and the Foundation had supplied part of the League’s funding for years—but only a handful of people knew he kept an apartment there. It would hardly be fair to call it his home since Gabriel spent so little time there, but he didn’t have any other home in New York, try as Michael might to convince him to leave at least a toothbrush and some pajamas at the ancestral manse, and it seemed the safest place to keep Sheba hidden from prying eyes.
And whose eyes, exactly, might be prying? Well, DeGroet hadn’t given up—that much was clear. The real question was what he’d wanted with her in the first place. Gabriel had questioned Sheba in an attempt to figure this out, but she claimed to have no clue. They’d grabbed her out of the lobby of Goldsmith Hall in Dublin, chloroformed her when she’d fought them, and when she’d woken up she’d been in the cell in Hungary where Gabriel had found her. It was just good luck that Jim Kellen had seen it happen from his office window and had thought first to write down the license number of the van they’d bundled her into and then to phone Gabriel.
But what had DeGroet wanted? Sheba shrugged. He hadn’t said.
Had he asked her to do anything? No—nothing. He’d asked her a few questions about her thesis—but for heaven’s sake, Gabriel (Sheba had demanded, fists on her hips and outrage in her expression), did it really make sense to kidnap a girl if you wanted to ask her about her thesis? Christ’s sake, buy her a drink, you won’t be able to shut her up.
Gabriel turned onto East 70th Street and returned the wave he got from Hank, the elderly doorman who’d been manning the League’s front entrance since well before Gabriel had been born. Hank handed him a cardboard shipping box as he entered and Gabriel recognized his own handwriting on the label. It was the cost of flying commercial. They made you take off your shoes, stow your liquids, pass through metal detectors—no way they’d have let him on board with this baby. He worked a thumbnail through the packing tape as he waited for the League’s creaky two-person elevator to descend. An elevator hadn’t been part of the building’s original design and when the time came to add it later, in the 1920s, the only space they could use for it was a dumbwaiter shaft—which meant riding in a space originally meant for stacks of dishes.
He finally got through the tape as the indicator above the elevator door rotated from “3” to “2” and he removed a crumpled ball of packing paper from the box as it went from “2” to “1.” A bell pinged then and the door slid open.