Hunt at World's End Read Online Free PDF

whatever when I caught him staring in my direction. Didn’t look Bornean, which made it kind of hard for him to disappear in the crowd. One of those bandits N warned about? But he didn’t look like that at all. Merpati’s opinion when I told her about it was just that “it’s dangerous for single women to wander around without a man.” Well there’s a newsflash. But I’m damned if I’m going to hide in my room.
    The Malawi River? What was she doing there? What was she doing anywhere but the university archives?
    Gabriel flipped ahead, scanning the pages for any more mentions of being followed, but didn’t find anything until the final entry. It was dated Wednesday, the same day Michael had gotten his last e-mail from her. Joyce’s handwriting was noticeably different, more uneven and hurried:
Another guy following me today at the marketplace in Tarakan. Definitely not the same man, though same type—white guy, maybe five-eight, five-nine, and too damn interested in everything else around him anytime I turned to look at him. This one had curly hair and a beard. White shirt, brown pants. He followed me for a good ten minutes, before I finally lost him in the crowd. Damn it. Could this have something to do with SOA?
    Gabriel looked up from the page. “SOA. Any idea what that might be?”
    “School of the Arts? Society of Actuaries? State of Alert?”
    Gabriel walked back to where Merpati stood wringing her hands in the doorway and showed her the page in the book. He pointed to the letters “SOA.” She shook her head and started talking loudly, gesturing back toward the stairs.
    “She wants us out,” Noboru said, unnecessarily.
    Taking Joyce’s passport and journal, Gabriel followed Noboru out of the room. Merpati escorted them downstairs and all the way back outside, as if she didn’t trust them to leave on their own. She loudly locked the door behind them.
    Night had settled over the village, barely cooling the sticky, humid air. A full moon glowed over the treetops, its round face covered briefly by a passing cloud. All around them, light seeped out of the windows of the village houses, bright and steady from those with generators, dim and flickering from the ones that used oil lamps. As Gabriel walked to the jeep, a man across the way finished hammering a post topped with a goat skull into the ground in front of his house, then spat, touched his forehead twice and went inside. The door slammed, and Gabriel heard a heavy bolt slide into place. He glanced around and noticed goat skulls hadbeen posted in front of every house he could see. Not a great place to be a goat.
    Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat, unzipped his suitcase and slid Joyce’s passport and journal inside.
    “So now what?” Noboru asked, coming up behind him.
    “They took Joyce into the jungle,” Gabriel replied. “So that’s where we’re going.”
    “It’d be safer to wait until morning.”
    Gabriel reached into the suitcase again and pulled out a flashlight. “For us. Not for Joyce.”
    Noboru puffed out his cheeks and blew air. Then he nodded.
    Gabriel reached into the suitcase again. “That knife of yours looks handy, but…” He pulled out a second revolver and passed it to Noboru. “Maybe you’d better carry one of these, too.”

Chapter 4
    Noboru had his own flashlight in the glove compartment of the jeep, and together they entered the jungle at the edge of the village, twin beams of light bouncing in front of them. Moonlight filtered through the trees and glistened on the thick leaves all around. They moved forward, the blanket of undergrowth on the jungle floor clinging to their feet as they went. Where the foliage was too thickly knotted to pass, Noboru cut away the vines and creepers with his knife, swinging the keen blade machete-style, the revolver jammed in his belt.
    The high whine of insects filled the night air, and the rustling of leaves; the beam of Gabriel’s flashlight revealed tree frogs and