“Sit, gentlemen, sit,” Tigranes said, gesturing to their captors, Greek men all, ranging in age from their late twenties to a few in what looked like their late fifties. “We will be here for a while, you may as well be comfortable.” Some of the men sat; some remained standing. Tigranes smiled at them. “You know that Homer himself was once a captive, a hostage—it is from this experience that he got his name, homeros. He had another name at birth. You did not know this?” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You should be ashamed to know so little of your own heritage.”
“Stop talking and begin reciting,” the man with the knife said. “We don’t want to be here all night.”
Tigranes shrugged. “As you wish.”
His fingers plucked at the strings.
Two hours later, Tigranes had reached the bedroom of Helen of Troy and all the men sat at rapt attention. Their eyes were on Tigranes as he sang of her treachery and sadness, of her lover, Paris, and his cowardice, of their dalliance between the sheets while men were dying for them by the score on the battlefield below. His hands alternated between plucking the strings of his lyre and waving in midair to accompany the vivid word pictures he was painting. His voice grew quiet during moments of grieving and loud for the bloody battles, sped up when events took an unexpected turn and lingered painfully when a hero’s fatal wounds bled into the Trojan soil.
Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw that Christos was mesmerized as welclass="underline" he didn’t seem anxious for himself any longer, only for the fate of Hector and Ajax and Odysseus. As Gabriel himself might have been—Tigranes was an oddly compelling performer, and there might never be another opportunity to hear the Iliad recited in this way, as it was originally meant to be heard. But he had other priorities. He nudged Christos’ leg gently with his knee.
It took two more nudges to break the spell. Then Christos looked over. Gabriel jerked his head back very slightly and cast his eyes downward, toward Christos’ hands. The man with the knife had retied them behind his back, but he’d done it swiftly—Tigranes’ tale had been underway and he’d been half listening to it already. Perhaps he’d done slightly less thorough a job the second time, had left a bit more slack.
Gabriel’s arms were also tied behind his back, and he strained now, stretching as far as the ropes would permit over toward Christos. And after a moment or two Christos got the message and started straining back the other way. Gabriel felt the skin of the younger man’s knuckles brush against his own, then they were gone. He redoubled his efforts. He could feel it painfully in his shoulders and elbows, stretched almost to the point of dislocation, and he could see the boy beside him wincing as he tried to meet him more than halfway.
Then Gabriel felt a knot beneath his fingertips.
He seized it, pinched it between forefinger and thumb, grabbed hold and pulled the rope toward him, and Christos’ hands with it. Christos took in a sharp breath, bit down on his lower lip. Gabriel saw sweat bead on Christos’ forehead, saw the pain in his eyes, but Gabriel held on and mouthed two words: Untie me.
Christos blinked tears out of his eyes and nodded, and then his fingers began moving, his nails picking at the rope binding Gabriel’s wrists. Gabriel, meanwhile, concentrated on not letting the rope out of his increasingly sweaty grip—if he lost his hold and Christos’ hands swung away, Christos might not have the strength to get them back over here again.
Facing them across the room, Tigranes saw what they were doing, or suspected, anyway, and he redoubled his efforts. He stood up, braced the phorminx against his chest with one arm and swept the other in grand theatrical gestures, miming the swing of a sword, a man warding off blows, a wife wiping her husband’s battle-weary brow. His beard shook with passion, and the Greeks seated in double rows on the floor and benches before him never looked away.
Half a minute more, a minute—and then finally the rope came free. It slipped from Gabriel’s wrists to the floor and he felt blood rush back in where the circulation had been cut off. He flexed his fingers, one hand at a time, then went to work on the rope around Christos’ wrists. When that fell to the ground he cautiously reached down to work on the knots at his ankles.
He’d gotten one leg free when heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs outside the door. He and Christos looked at each other. Sitting upright again, they slid their hands behind them, doing their best to look as though they were still tied down.
“Sphinx yet?” Andras asked, barging into the room.
The men all roused, as if from sleep, looking around with a slightly embarrassed expression. Tigranes stopped his song, the last of his notes hanging still in the air. “Not yet,” he said. “Now go, before you make me lose my place.”
Andras’ huge fist rose and he advanced on Tigranes for a step or two, forgetting himself—he was not used to being talked back to by a man twice his age and half his size. But the buzzing of the cell phone in his pocket reminded him of the fate in store for him if he lost his temper. All eyes were on him as he took the phone out and flipped it open, held it to his ear. “No, not yet,” he said. “I will. I will. Yes, sir.” He jabbed the “END” button with his thumb—and then Gabriel smashed him across the back with the chair.
Chapter 15
Andras fell forward onto two of the other men as Gabriel leapt for the bench with his gun on it. He slid across the surface on his belly and snapped the revolver up in one fist, spinning to face Andras as he went off the end of the bench and landed in a crouch.
Christos had taken off the rope around his ankles as well. He ran over to Tigranes and began shepherding him toward Gabriel. He put the old man behind him, protecting him from the blows two of the other Greeks began raining down, getting in a punch of his own whenever one of the midsections before him was unprotected.
“Step back,” Gabriel ordered Andras, who’d climbed to his feet once more. The cell phone was still in his hand, its screen broken now, its top half hanging at a crooked angle. He threw it at Gabriel and reached for the gun at his hip.
“Uh-uh,” Gabriel said, catching the ruined phone in his free hand and pulling the Colt’s hammer back. “Hands up by your shoulders.”
Andras sneered, disgusted—but he put his hands up.
Gabriel moved toward the room’s one window, inching along the wall so no man could get behind him. He fanned the Colt left and right in tight arcs, sending each man who’d dared to venture a step forward shrinking back. He saw Christos inching toward him from the other direction, Tigranes shielded behind his broad shoulders. “Let him through,” Gabriel said, and the men pressing around Christos fell back a step or two, their hands up, as Gabriel’s gun swept over to cover them.
“You’re a fool,” Andras said as Gabriel and Christos closed in from either side on the window, a narrow arched opening in the tower wall that looked out over a rear courtyard. “Where are you going to go?” They were on the ground floor, so even Tigranes could go out the window here—but ten yards away was the cliff where they’d been captured, and past it, nothing but open sky.
“What, are you going to jump,” Andras said, “like those old Greeks did? Kill yourself to get away?”
“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Like someone once told me, what I do or don’t do is my problem, not yours.”
“Kill yourself if you want, Hunt—I don’t care. But if you take the old man, that makes it my problem. My boss is not the sort of man you want to disappoint. He can be very nasty when someone disappoints him.”