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Gabriel couldn’t guess. In any event, both kept moving, and within minutes all the crates were on trucks and tearing along a road that seemed paved but just barely so—Gabriel felt every pit and gully in the surface as they passed over it.
    But at least they were on their way. Gabriel settled back for the ride.
    They unloaded him, along with the other crates, a bit more than an hour later—Gabriel’s cellphone may have died and its clock with it, but the luminous dial of his wristwatch, made in 1945 and only repaired once since, was still giving off its pale glow. Sometimes, he thought, the old technologies were better.
    The texture of the ground under the wheels of his crate changed after a minute, from solid to…something less than solid, almost as though they’d left pavement for dirt, or not even dirt—it seemed looser, somehow. And the sound was different as they passed over it.
    After a time, they came to a stop. All around him, Gabriel heard men walking rapidly, but barely any conversation, only the occasional order issued in a low bark. His crate was jostled once by another and then shifted to a new location a few yards away. A peek outside showed more crates around him, some stacked two or three high—he at least could be grateful that so far nothing had been stacked on top of his.
    A car pulled up then, not in his sight, but in his hearing. The door opened and slammed shut, and a new set of footsteps approached. A set with three beats to it rather than two: slap, slap, click; slap, slap, click. Gabriel tensed at the sound.
    “Well, well,” Lajos DeGroet’s voice came, from perhaps twenty feet away. “Well, well, well. My dear girl. So good to see you again.”
    “Who the hell do you think you are,” Sheba said, sounding far more measured and reasonable than Gabriel thought he would in her place, “that you can kidnap a woman off the streets of New York City, fly her halfway around the world, and, and…”
    “That’s all right, my dear. Let it out. You are angry and I don’t blame you.”
    “You don’t blame me? You don’t blame me?”
    “No, don’t hold her back,” DeGroet said, apparently to one of his men, perhaps Andras, “let her go. She won’t attack me. She knows better than that.” Gabriel heard a click followed by the sound of metal sliding against metal, and he knew DeGroet had turned the grip of his iron walking stick and drawn from within the modified fencing saber it hid. “Don’t you, my dear?”
    Lajos DeGroet, son of a Dutch father and a Hungarian mother, both from artistocratic families with wealth and property to burn, had led the unproductive life his parentage entitled him to—with one exception. In his youth he’d gravitated toward the sport of fencing and at age twenty he’d competed for Hungary in the summer Olympics in Rome. He’d won a silver medal that year but famously refused to accept it; four years later, after intensive training under the great Hungarian fencing master Rudolf Kárpáti, himself a six-time gold medalist, DeGroet had returned from Tokyo with a gold.
    After that, DeGroet had largely vanished from the public eye, returning to his family’s customary pastimes of accumulating and squandering money in spectacular but private fashion. Gabriel had crossed paths with him more than once, since the man was an inveterate collector—the acquisitive sort who can’t stop raising his paddle atan auction and, because of the resources at his command, never has to. Which was fine if you were on the selling end of a transaction, as Gabriel had been more than once—there’d been the gilt ceremonial bowl from Myanmar and the skull fragment from central Africa. But if you were competing with DeGroet to buy something, you might as well pack up and go home, and Gabriel had discovered that as well. The trust that underlaid the Hunt Foundation was considerable, containing as it did all the many millions of dollars his parents’ bestselling books had brought