Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

apartment one floor overhead. Michael looked Gabriel up and down and opened his mouth as if about to speak. Gabriel held up one weary hand.
    “Look, I don’t want to hear another I told you so.” Gabriel said. Michael had never liked Fiona. “You were right.”
    “Gabriel,” Michael said. “I…”
    “All that matters,” Gabriel said, cutting his brother off as he removed his battered bomber jacket and unbuttoned the rumpled khaki work shirt he’d been wearing for nearly forty-eight hours of delayed and endlessly rescheduled travel, “is that the kindjal is safe at the Royal Museum where it belongs.” He peeled the shirt off and twisted his stiff shoulders like a boxer warming up for a fight. “But I could sure use a long hot shower. And a cold drink.”
    That was when Gabriel noticed that there were two ice-filled glasses sitting on dark marble coasters on the antique cherrywood reading table. One of the glasses had a crescent of red lipstick on the rim.
    “Gabriel,” Michael said. “Allow me to introduce Ms. Velda Silver.”
    “Hello, Mr. Hunt,” said a warm, silken voice behind him.
    Gabriel turned to face a tall, auburn-haired beauty. She sized up his shirtless chest with an arched eyebrow and a look of amusement in her wide-set hazel eyes. She looked to be in her middle twenties, conservatively dressed in a dark suit and simple heels, but the body beneath the drab professional exterior was anything but drab. Strong and athletic yet still distinctly feminine, with a generous, natural bust and graceful, rounded hips. She seemed way too tan and healthy to be a native New Yorker—but then so did Gabriel. She looked, he thought, like the kind of woman who held down an executive position during the week but went white-water rafting or mountain climbing when Saturday came around. Her legs in particular were breathtaking.
    Gabriel casually tossed his shirt over the back of a chair as if he routinely greeted guests bare-chested, smiled and extended his hand to her.
    “What can I do for you, Ms. Silver?” he asked.
    She took Gabriel’s hand with a warm, strong grip. Her nails were short and unpainted. Her gaze, a challenge.
    “I have a proposal for you,” she replied. “I’m organizing an important expedition and I’d very much like to have you head it up.”
    Gabriel looked over at Michael, whose expression told Gabriel that he had already heard her pitch and thought the woman was off her rocker. Gabriel shrugged.
    “Okay, shoot,” he said.
    “My father,” she said, “Dr. Lawrence Silver, has been working for seven years at a remote research station near the South Pole, studying the effects of global warming. I’ve visited him there twice, the last time just six months ago. Things seemed to be going fine. Then a few days ago I got word that he disappeared during a routine trip to sample core ice from the site of an unusual formation. He’s been missing for over two weeks.”
    Gabriel looked at Michael again and then back at Velda. Even during what passed for summer at the South Pole, two weeks lost without food or shelter was as good as dead.
    “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ms. Silver,” Gabriel said. “But I’m no expert in polar search and rescue. IfI’m known for anything, it’s finding lost artifacts, not lost people.”
    “I’m well aware of your field of expertise,” Velda said. “That’s why I came to you. Every reasonable rescue effort to save my father has already been made by a highly qualified search and rescue team. Tragically, to no avail.” She paused, pressed her lips into a tight, anxious line. “But there’s more. May I have another drink, please?”
    Michael refilled her glass from a crystal decanter of fifteen-year-old single malt scotch and then poured a glass for Gabriel as well.
    “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip of the scotch and then sucking a small piece of ice between her even white teeth. “I think my father found something truly extraordinary