“I found a pair of sandals in the house,” Sheba said. “Pretty flimsy, but good enough to get me to Avgonyma.”
“Where you found…?”
“Everything you see. The boots were the hardest to come by, but I found a merchant who had hiking and climbing gear. The most interesting thing happened while I was there haggling with him, though—these two trucks drove up and a dozen men poured out with a story of having been through a gun battle and trapped ‘the American’ on the side of the mountain.”
“The American,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t think it might be some other American?”
“Trapped on the side of a mountain after a gun battle? Not for a moment.”
“And all this equipment—how did you get your hands on it? I would have expected the Greeks to grab whatever the guy had.”
“Oh, they did,” Sheba said. “They grabbed it and loaded it into one of the trucks.”
“And?”
“And I stole the truck,” Sheba said.
“You stole the truck,” Gabriel said.
“That’s right.”
“But didn’t you say they had another truck?” Gabriel said.
“They did,” Sheba said. “What they have now is a gas tank full of sand.”
Gabriel kissed her, hard, on the lips. “You’re something else,” he said when they finally came up for air. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me two,” Sheba whispered. “But who’s counting?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go up first? Christos and I can follow and then we can pull Tigranes up—”
“You don’t need to pull Tigranes anywhere,” Tigranes said. “I can climb a rope, young man.”
“All right,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go first, then.”
Tigranes clamped his weathered palms around the rope and was up it in a flash. Christos followed, more slowly, and then it was time for Sheba to go. She took care reattaching her safety harness.
“I appreciate what it meant for you to come here,” Gabriel told her, steadying the rope so she could climb on. “I know you’re no fan of heights.”
“Heights are okay,” Sheba said, her voice trembling again. “It’s just falling I can’t stand.” And she began the short climb, pulling herself up hand over hand.
Gabriel took one more look around, at the broken phorminx lying on the ground and the dark tunnel beyond. A more ruthless sort, he thought, might try to arrange some sort of rockfall, some way of closing up the opening forever so DeGroet’s men couldn’t find it. But DeGroet had been right, back in Giza. Even if there had been a way, he couldn’t bring himself to do it—not if it meant destroying something this precious and irreplaceable.
There’d be another way to stop DeGroet. There always was another way.
He grabbed hold of the rope with his hands and feet and climbed it to the top.
Chapter 18
The truck only had a quarter of a tank of gas and lousy brakes, but Gabriel figured the former would be enough to get them to the docks at Chios Town if the latter didn’t cause them to drive off the side of the mountain first.
Sheba was sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the two lengths of rope coiled in her lap. Tigranes and Christos were in the back of the truck, enjoying a bumpy ride. Gabriel kept the gas as close to the floor as he could while still making all the hairpin turns and switchbacks necessary to get to the bottom of the mountain. There was no telling how long they had before DeGroet’s men regrouped, found another truck and more supplies, and headed back up this narrow road. He really didn’t want to meet them head on.
As he drove, Gabriel filled Sheba in on what she’d missed. Her eyebrows rose quizzically when he came to the part about the living sphinxes.
“Really,” she said. “He told you there was a real sphinx.”
“Two of them. A boy sphinx in Egypt and a girl sphinx in Greece.”
“And they met.”
“Well, when Oedipus chased her out of Thebes, she had to go somewhere, didn’t she?” Gabriel slowed to take a particularly nasty turn, then sped up in the straightaway that followed.
“I thought the story was that she threw herself to her death off the side of a cliff after he answered her riddle,” Sheba said.
“She threw herself, but not to her death. Wings, remember?”
“Ah. Of course.”
“After a stop in Chios for, oh, a hundred years or so, she headed over to Egypt where she met her counterpart in Giza.”
“A hundred years? Just how long are these sphinxes supposed to live?”
“Oh, a few thousand years, give or take,” Gabriel said.
“According to the old man in the back of our truck,” Sheba said.
“According to Homer,” Gabriel said. He was silent for a moment. “If you ask the old man in the back of our truck.”
“All right, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I buy it. The lady sphinx spends a hundred years in Chios, then heads over to Giza, where the old Father of Fear wines and dines her, shows off the nifty statue of him they’ve got over there, and then what?”
“Back to Chios. She stays there for the rest of her life, from about 900 BC till about 250 or so, inspiring art and architecture and lending her face to the city’s coins. And somewhere in there she meets a young local boy and tells him her story…and he eventually tells it to the rest of the world when he grows up to become Homer.”
“I see,” Sheba said.
“Well, that makes one of us,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know what’s crazier, the idea of a three-thousand-year-old monster telling her story to a young Homer or the idea of a seventy-year-old monster chasing around after her lost treasure today.”
“Well, crazy or not, we know at least the second part’s true,” Sheba said.
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “And if we knew it was just some archaeological treasure he was after, maybe we could let him have it. But it’s not. Or maybe it’s not—nobody knows. But we can’t take the chance.”
“Of what, exactly?” Sheba said. “Letting DeGroet get his hands on something that would give him the power to terrify with a glance? It’s not like the man isn’t plenty scary as it is.”
“It’s not a question of being scary,” Gabriel said. “If you believe Tigranes, it’s the power literally to paralyze with fear. And not just one person—a hundred people, a thousand at once, however many the sphinx looked upon. And with modern technology at DeGroet’s disposal, the ability to broadcast to millions…”
Sheba laughed, then stopped when she noticed Gabriel wasn’t laughing along. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I grant you, it could all be nonsense—DeGroet could be chasing after a myth. But if it’s not and he’s not…we can’t let him find what he’s after.”
“And how are we supposed to stop him?”
“By finding it ourselves first,” Gabriel said. “And while we’re at it, by finding him.”
“Oh, yeah? Did that map on the wall show you where he is?”
“No,” Gabriel said. “But I’ve got something that will.”
He reached into his pocket and held up Andras’ cell phone.
The sun was hanging low behind the mountains when they pulled up to the ferry landing. The ferry was there, bobbing in the water and bumping against the row of old Goodyears lashed to the pilings as a cushion. Across the way, through the late afternoon haze, the coast of Turkey loomed. He could see the battlements of Çeşme Castle faintly in the distance.
“Book passage for four,” Gabriel said, passing Sheba a handful of money, all he had left except for a single hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll join you in a minute.”
“They’re coming with us?”