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the activation of the plane’s deafening jet engines minutes later hadn’t been enough of a clue, the view of the land dropping out of sight would have told him they were on their way.
    Gabriel did his best to get comfortable in the cramped space. He took his phone from his pocket and glanced at the display. New York to Hungary was a nine-hour flight with good tailwinds.
    As he watched, the battery portion of the phone’s readout silently dropped from four bars to three.

Chapter 5
    Gabriel hadn’t intended to sleep, but he found himself waking with a start as the plane’s landing gear touched down. They skipped once, twice, then settled on the tarmac, the big plane’s momentum carrying them forward along the runway as the power to the engines cut out. Gabriel chanced a peek outside through the seam, but the window was dark—and so, when he tried it, was his phone. He pressed all the buttons. Nothing.
    Had something kept them in the air longer than expected? Or had they landed somewhere farther away than Budapest?
    Which led to the next question: For how long had Michael been able to track his location? Maybe only halfway there, maybe up until the moment before he tried his phone. There was no way to know.
    Gabriel heard the sound of seat belts unbuckling, heavy footsteps moving around the cabin. He did not hear any lighter steps he could identify as Sheba’s, and he didn’t hear her voice, but that didn’t mean anything—Andras could be carrying her, bound and gagged, or maybe she was being held in another part of the plane. They wouldn’t have hurt her or killed her, he was confident of that; not as long as DeGroet wanted her for some purpose of his own.
    Gabriel groped around beneath him, felt the cardboard boxes of varying sizes, slipped his fingers underone flap after another. He couldn’t see a thing, of course, and though he had the Zippo lighter with him that he always carried, he could hardly light it here—even if the sudden appearance of a glow from inside the crate wouldn’t give him away, the explosion it could easily set off would make the whole thing moot. But he’d handled enough guns in his day to be able to tell by feel a rifle cartridge from one for a semiautomatic pistol, a .32 from a .45. Telling a .44 Remington from a .45 Winchester was a bit harder, but not impossible. He ran the selection he found between his fingertips, comparing length and grooving. Wrong caliber was not so much of a worry—a cartridge too wide wouldn’t chamber and one too narrow would announce the fact by the too-roomy fit. Too long, same thing. But slightly too short would be easy to miss, and could lead to a shot that either didn’t go off when the time came or went off in a spectacularly bad way. So care was called for, and he exercised as much as he reasonably could, lying in the dark in a crate in the belly of a plane in the middle of god-only-knew-where.
    He finished loading the cylinder just as the crate next to his was loudly pushed aside, smacking into the inner wall of the plane’s hull with a jolt that made Gabriel hope it contained something less explosive than the one he was in. His was the next to move, and he lay still when it did, not wanting to draw any attention.
    Once they were down the ramp, Gabriel gently raised the cover of the crate again, hoping for some glimpse that would tell him where they were, but beyond a blinding ring of magnesium vapor lights he could see nothing at all, just solid black. It was nighttime wherever they were, and except in your major cities, nighttime tended to look much the same from place to place—especially when you could only see a sliver of it.
    Then a streak of red satin passed in front of him. Hecraned his neck to keep it in view as long as he could, but it was gone in an instant, followed close behind by the rougher folds of a long overcoat. “Keep moving,” came Andras’ voice, though whether he was talking to Sheba or the men loading the crates,