When Lucy began unpacking the satchel, Gabriel felt a bit like a surgical trainee on his first day in the OR, watching the doctors lay out instruments of which he didn’t even know the names, much less the functions. He sipped from the fat-bellied goblet of wine Devrim had brought and watched Lucy hook cables from this device to that, looked on as a little screen flickered to life and text began racing across it. “Spill that wine on anything you see and you’re a dead man,” Lucy said, her fingers darting nimbly over a keyboard.
“Not a problem,” Gabriel said, and drained the glass.
It was good wine. Devrim always managed to get his hands on the best.
“So Michael says you need a phone number traced,” Lucy said. “You’ve got what, a cell phone that called the number?”
“I’ve got a broken cell phone,” Gabriel said, “that was called by the number.” He took Andras’ phone from his pocket, set it down, and slid it across the scarred wooden surface of the table. Lucy looked at it. The screen had a jagged crack down its center and the phone’s hinged top half hung lopsidedly from the bottom. Lucy pressed the power button a couple of times and nothing happened.
“You don’t make things easy, do you?”
“Rarely,” Gabriel said.
Lucy pried open a panel at the back of the phone, popped out the battery, and dug around inside the body of the phone. She slapped it twice, hard, against the heel of her hand, as though trying to jar something loose, then went digging again.
“Go talk to your friend,” she said, not looking at him as she poked at the phone’s innards. “I’m going to be a while.”
“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Take your time.”
He found Devrim at the top of the stairs, smoking a long, thin, brown cigarette, the heavy smell of Turkish tobacco hanging in the corridor.
“Your sister, huh?” Devrim said. Gabriel nodded. “Looks nothing like you.”
“She takes after our mother,” he said.
“And you look like your father?”
“I look like the milkman,” Gabriel said, and Devrim gave him a confused look. Then he laughed, a single loud bark. “The milkman! Hah! You are a devil, Gabriel.”
Gabriel rotated his shoulder and flexed his arm, which was getting stiff where the blade had gone in. His palms were still raw from hanging onto the roots in Anavatos and his cheek ached every time he opened his mouth. “I must be,” he muttered. “I feel like hell.”
“Hey,” Lucy’s voice floated in from the other room, “I’ve got it. Wanna see?”
Gabriel levered himself to his feet again and returned to the table. “I thought you said it would take a while.”
“It did,” Lucy said. “Just not a long while. Sit.” He sat, stared at the screen she was pointing to proudly. It showed a Mercator map of the world with two blinking white symbols, one an X, the other an O. The X was sitting, pulsing, on the northern coastline of Turkey. The O was just off the eastern coast of Chios—and moving, slowly, one tick at a time, toward the X.
“That’s us?” Gabriel asked, pointing at the X.
“Right,” Lucy said. “And that’s the person you’re looking for. Though it looks more like he’s looking for you.” They both watched as the O came another tiny notch closer to the X.
Chapter 20
DeGroet was coming.
It was hardly a surprise—he needed to get to Sri Lanka as well, and Istanbul was the nearest major international hub. But Gabriel couldn’t help the feeling that there was more to it, that DeGroet had been briefed by the man they’d left behind on the pier, that he was coming via Turkey in part because he knew this was where they’d fled. Hell, maybe they’d somehow been followed into Turkey by one of DeGroet’s agents or their trail had been picked up once they arrived by someone he already had in place. There could be men closing in as they sat here—on Gabriel and Lucy in Devrim’s, or on Sheba in the hostel where he’d left her to arrange a room for Christos and Tigranes.
“We’ve got to go,” Gabriel said.
“What?” Lucy said. “This instant?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just not safe. Devrim,” he called, “you’ll take care of my sister another night, right?”
“Any night,” Devrim called back. “Every night. Till she weighs as much as my own daughter.”
“Thank you.” Gabriel shot a lingering look at the screen with its handy little map as Lucy began disconnecting her machinery and stuffing it back in her bag. This was exactly the sort of technology he hated—and yet…it wouldn’t hurt to know where DeGroet was at any given time. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could take this with me,” he said, lifting the unit.
“No,” Lucy said and plucked it out of his hands. “The way you carry on? It’d be smashed in five minutes.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right. Well—”
“This on the other hand,” Lucy said, holding up a black plastic box the size of a pack of playing cards, “you can bang around till the cows come home and you won’t break it. Doesn’t have the fancy map on it, but what it’s got’s just as good.” She flicked a switch on the bottom of the box and a single row of red digits lit up along one of its shorter sides:
178SW
Then after a second the display changed:
177SW
“Miles?” Gabriel said.
“You prefer kilometers?”
“No,” Gabriel said, “I prefer miles.”
He slipped the box into his pocket beside his Zippo. “How long will the battery—”
“A week. If you keep it on the whole time, maybe a little less.” She finished packing, looked around for anything she’d missed. “You want me to show you how to change it?”
Gabriel shook his head. “This’ll all be over in a lot less than a week. One way or another.”
An anxious look crossed her face. She reached up a hand and stroked the side of his jaw, avoiding the raw slash that was just beginning to heal. “Just how much trouble are you in?”
“Oh, nothing too serious,” Gabriel said, and he worked up a smile he hoped didn’t look too phony. “You know better than to worry about me.”
She nodded, and the trust in her eyes took him back fifteen years, to when he was twenty-three and she was eleven and he’d keep her up past her bedtime with stories about the places he’d been and the dangers he’d faced. But there was a measure of concern in her expression, too. “I know you can take care of yourself. But—”
“But what?”
“I follow what you do, Gabriel. Newspaper articles, the things you publish, people posting online that they saw you one place or another—”
“Computers are powerful things,” Gabriel said.
“Yeah. Well. Any time your name pops up on my screen, there’s part of me that’s excited, but there’s part of me that’s sure each time it’s your obituary I’m going to read.” Her voice fell. “The famous Gabriel Hunt, clawed to death by wild dogs in Zambia. The famous Gabriel Hunt falls from the wing of an airplane. Something.”
“I always wear my seat belt on airplanes,” Gabriel said. “And dogs love me.”
“Well that’s a relief,” she said. “But I’m just talking the law of averages. You can be the best in the world at what you do and there’ll still come a day when you get unlucky.”
“Is that why you agreed to see me when Michael sent his note?” Gabriel said. “After all this time? Because you thought it might be your last chance?”
“Of course not,” she said. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I was just thinking, how many times are you and I going to be in the same place. The way you move around. The way I do.”