by James Becker
‘Today, if possible. It may be necessary to place a contract on her and, if so, our client will want it done within twenty-four hours.’
25
France
When Bronson woke with a grunt and a snort it was early afternoon, the sunshine bright on his face. For an instant, he had no idea where he was, though he did know that he was extremely uncomfortable, with a crick in his neck that felt like it would be with him for most of the day.
Then realization dawned, and he looked over to his right to see Angela lying flat out on the reclined passenger seat, looking at him with a single blue eye through a tangle of blonde hair.
‘You’re awake,’ Bronson said, stating the obvious.
‘Yes, I am,’ his former wife said somewhat testily. ‘In fact, I’ve been awake for most of the morning, thanks to your snoring. It was a somewhat unpleasant reminder of our brief married life.’
‘I do recall you complaining about my snoring then. What’s the time?’
‘Just after one thirty. I know we should get back on the road quickly, but before we do I absolutely insist on a coffee at least. And ideally a croissant or something to nibble. I’m not that nice to be around when I’m hungry, and I’m hungry right now.’
Bronson nodded and reached for the door handle.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Angela asked, as they sat at a corner table in the autoroute restaurant, two coffees and a plate of pastries in front of them.
Bronson glanced at her and shrugged.
‘I don’t really have one,’ he replied. ‘I’m sort of making it up as I go along. Random decisions are going to make our movements as unpredictable as possible, and hopefully keep us one step ahead. What I wanted to do was get you out of danger, which meant getting you out of Iraq and away from Kuwait as quickly as possible. Even if those terrorists have access to the most sophisticated surveillance and tracking facilities, they can’t possibly know where you are right now. The trail would have stopped at Milan. They probably don’t even know which country you’re in.’
‘I know all that,’ Angela said. ‘But if they want to track me down in Britain – and there was plenty of information about all of the team at the camp – they certainly could.’
Bronson nodded.
‘I hadn’t expected the trail to stop in London,’ he said, ‘because the fact that they were prepared to slaughter an entire archaeological team just to stop anyone seeing that inscription shows they’re completely ruthless and dedicated to the cause. It’s the inscription that’s the core of this whole mess. That’s why I suggested publishing your photographs of it online, because once it’s out there and anyone can see it, their attempt to keep it quiet will obviously have failed and there would be no point in targeting you any more.’
‘Unless those bastards have long memories and decide I should die just because I was involved. Simple revenge. What little we know about them suggests that their philosophy is the exact opposite of the forgiving kind. Let’s face it, we were really lucky to get out of Iraq. A few seconds more or less, the guy behind the machine gun aiming with a bit more care and those vultures would be feasting on us by now.’
‘And there was me thinking it was all down to my skill behind the wheel,’ Bronson said with a slight smile. ‘But they didn’t just turn up at the encampment on the off-chance that you’d found that temple and there was an inscription inside it, did they? It was targeted and premeditated.’
‘God, I never thought of it like that. How could they have known? It had to have come from an insider.’
‘Yes. As far as I can see there are only two possibilities,’ Bronson said. ‘Most probably somebody told them, though it’s just about possible that they hacked into an email account belonging to one of the archaeologists. I mean, presumably finding the inscription wasn’t a secret, so it’s likely that one of the team might have told his wife or a work colleague or somebody what they’d found.’
‘But that means—’ Angela began, but Bronson interrupted her.
‘Unless we’re way off beam, it means somebody definitely expected the inscription to be found. Not necessarily by your team, and not necessarily at that location, but somebody knew it was out there in the desert somewhere. Whoever it was must have been waiting for some sign that it had been found, and then he sent in the men with the guns. This wasn’t some off-the-cuff operation, this was a deliberate attempt to obliterate the inscription and murder everyone unfortunate enough to know anything about it. It was carefully planned. And if you and Stephen had been there when they arrived, it would have been entirely successful.’
‘Yes,’ Angela said, ‘it would. Even if one of us had mentioned the inscription in an email, Mohammed had told us not to send out any pictures of it, or of the temple. That information would have been released as a part of our report on the expedition, the official document detailing everything we’d found.’
She shook her head angrily.
‘What gets me is that it’s so bloody unfair. Archaeology isn’t supposed to be dangerous – unless a trench collapses on top of you or something – and this expedition was meant to be a bit of gentle digging in a site that looked mildly interesting. The only reason I was there was to help out with the conservation of any ceramics we found and to give my opinion on the dating of the relics. And now I’m on the run from a gang of murdering thugs who want to kill me not because of what I know, but because of something that I’ve seen.’
‘We’ve been here before, Angela my love, and we’ve proved on several occasions that archaeology can be extremely hazardous to your health. This is just another situation where we’re on the side of the righteous and facing a bunch of people who have our worst interests at heart. Don’t worry. We’ll get through this. We make a good team. Now, let’s get back on the road.’
26
Baghdad, Iraq
To say Khaled was unhappy barely even hinted at the degree of his irritation.
What should have been a simple operation had gone disastrously wrong. The woman and a man he now knew to be her former husband had escaped the best efforts of Farooq and his men, along with another archaeologist who Khaled hadn’t even known wasn’t at the camp.
The only piece of good news was that the contract he had placed with the Italian had been completed, and Taverner had been taken care of in Milan. But where Lewis and her husband were at that precise moment, he had only the vaguest idea. If Taverner had been telling the truth, they were probably somewhere in the middle of France driving towards the channel ports in a hire car, and trying to locate them in that vast country would be a complete waste of time. A hit at the channel ports would also be too problematic because of the security measures in place at border control. About the only option he had left, Khaled realized, was for a contractor in Britain to find out where the Lewis woman lived and then eliminate her. But that couldn’t be done for at least a couple of days. A wait, even that short, seemed interminable.
There was one piece of good news, though. At least the inscription that had been carved on the stone wall of the underground temple appeared to be precisely what he had expected and hoped for. He still hadn’t managed to decipher the encrypted text, but he was certain that he would soon work out the very basic cipher that had been used the better part of one millennium earlier by an unknown scribe.
And then, he would have all the clues that he needed to commence his search.
Khaled walked across his spacious office to the wall opposite his desk, where a large safe stood. He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, selected a butterfly key which he used to undo the main lock, then inserted another key into a different lock and gave it a half turn to the right. The door remained firmly closed, and he then entered a six-digit code on the keypad beside the locks. As he entered the final number, the internal bolts slid back and the door swung open.
Inside were four shelves, three of them containing boxes and packets holding particularly precious relics, while the top shelf held a number of ancient books and much
more modern folders. It was one of those, the cardboard a dull greenish colour, that he selected and carried back to his desk.
He released the elasticated bands that held the cover closed. Inside were several colour photographs showing dead bodies, men, women and children, the corpses twisted in the agony of their dying, the limbs and abdomens bloated and distended. But Khaled barely gave the pictures a second glance. What Saddam Hussein had done to the Marsh Arabs was old news, his bombing raids and the use of various lethal concoctions from his chemical warfare armoury just another fading memory in the consciousness of the world.
He put the photographs to one side and then slid out from the folder a sheet of parchment that was almost entirely covered in Arabic script. The ancient document was encased in a specially designed plastic folder that was fitted with a hermetic seal, allowing air to be sucked out of the interior and effectively store the parchment in a vacuum. He picked up the plastic folder and for a few moments just stared at the old leather and the faded script, then placed it reverently to one side. He picked up a high-resolution photocopy of the parchment text and studied that for a second or two.
But it was the next sheet in the green folder that he spent the longest time looking at, although he knew most of what was written there by heart. This was a page of modern writing paper on which he had carefully transcribed the writing from the parchment, allowing double spacing so that any ambiguities could be addressed in the blanks between the lines. There had been a few places where the meaning of the Arabic text was less than completely clear, and he had written alternative possible explanations for some of the words and phrases.
But no matter which interpretation of details of the text he considered, the meaning and thrust of the basic information was perfectly clear. The fact that the temple and the inscription had been found was sufficient proof of that. In fact, once he had read and understood the Arabic text on the parchment, which had come into his possession almost twenty years earlier, he had known beyond doubt that the structure existed, buried somewhere under the sands in the trackless wastes of the southern Iraqi desert. He’d also known it was inevitable that sooner or later somebody would find it.
It had turned out to be later, and obviously it would have been better if a smaller group of people had been involved in its discovery, but ultimately the death of a handful of archaeologists, several of them not even Iraqis, was insignificant compared to the importance of the find. The downside was going to be the very obvious publicity generated by the massacre when news about it finally broke internationally. That would make any activity in the southern part of Iraq difficult to achieve without coming under the unwelcome scrutiny of the media, but Khaled both hoped and expected that the trail he would be following would start a considerable distance away from the underground temple. Very probably, in fact, it would actually begin in a different country.
He spent a few more minutes looking at the contents of the folder, refreshing his memory, then replaced all the papers and photographs within the cover and put the document back in the safe.
He had barely sat down again at his desk when his private mobile phone, the number known to only a handful of people, rang. He glanced at the screen but saw only that the originator was a withheld number.
‘Hello,’ he said cautiously in English.
‘This is Filippo,’ the heavily accented voice at the other end said, and Khaled immediately recognized the codename the Italian contractor had selected. ‘The electronic equipment you asked us to source for you is already on its way by courier. It should arrive tomorrow.’
That, Khaled knew, was simply a reference to the laptop computer, camera and any other electronic gizmos that might have been in Taverner’s possession. Another loose end had been tied.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Any news on the other matter?’
The Italian sounded quite pleased with himself when he replied.
‘I have been in contact with a colleague in Britain and he has already discovered the home address of the woman. As soon as you decide the action you want to take I can issue him with appropriate instructions. Her companion’s address is proving more difficult to determine, but he is still investigating that and should have a result by the end of the day. Do you wish to issue any instructions at this stage?’
Khaled thought for a second or two before replying.
‘No, not yet,’ he said. ‘It is important that both are dealt with simultaneously, if possible at the same location and ideally in what appears to be an accident. The electronic equipment must be recovered at the same time. Call me when your contact has not only identified both addresses, but also knows where these two people are.’
‘As you wish. Our contract is now complete. Can you ensure the agreed funds will be sent as soon as you receive the goods?’
‘I’ve already prepared the transfer,’ Khaled replied.
‘Excellent. I will call you with news as soon as I have it.’
27
Milan
Stephen Taverner’s body was discovered a little after midday. The Englishman had failed to check out – he had only booked the room until noon – or to answer the telephone on three separate occasions, and this had concerned the reception staff because he had told them he was intending to catch an afternoon flight to London.
What’s more, one of the room service waiters had failed to return to the kitchen after delivering two room service breakfasts, and the manager was far more concerned about that minor mystery. After repeated knocking on Taverner’s door, he used his override key card to open the door and found himself looking at the breakfast trolley standing in the room close to the dead body of the Englishman.
It wasn’t the first time the manager had discovered a body in a hotel room, though it was the first time he’d encountered somebody who’d very clearly been murdered, and he knew the drill. There was not the slightest point in checking the corpse for a pulse – even to a layman and at a distance it was obvious that the man had been dead for some time – so, shocked as he was, he did what the training manual told him to do.
He had already touched the outside door handle with his bare hands, so he knew his own fingerprints would be on it, and if he touched the inside handle he would probably smudge any prints the departing killer might have left. So he didn’t do that. What he did do was use his internal communicator to contact the reception desk and tell them to call the police and an ambulance, and to explain that a man had been murdered, giving the room number.
The response from the carabinieri, relayed to the manager from reception desk, was exactly what he had expected. The room was to be sealed, nobody allowed in or out, and the police were on their way.
The manager had already used his handkerchief to close the door, and he then summoned a porter from the lobby to stand outside it until the police arrived. His mission to find the missing waiter then took on a new urgency. Unless the waiter himself had murdered the Englishman for some reason and then fled – which seemed extremely unlikely – then something else must have happened to that man.
The search didn’t take long. In a linen closet at one end of a corridor, the manager discovered the silent and unmoving body of the missing man, crouched down on the floor on his hands and knees, almost as if he was praying. The manager’s cursory examination showed a complete absence of blood, but a very obvious red mark around the dead man’s neck indicated that he had been either strangled or garrotted.
When the carabinieri arrived outside the hotel, to the inevitable accompaniment of a self-generated fanfare of sirens and squealing tyres, the manager was waiting for them in the lobby to explain that the body count had doubled since his staff had made the initial call.
‘Before we go up to the room,’ he said to the two senior detectives, ‘you need to know that I’ve just found a second body, a member of my staff, hidden in a linen closet, and it seems fairly clear to me that the two cases are related.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that, thank you,’ the
senior carabinieri officer snapped. ‘There could be any number of explanations for two bodies being found in the same hotel on the same day. There’s no need to look for a connection that isn’t necessarily there.’
‘Of course,’ the manager replied equably. ‘I’m just not entirely certain how many unconnected explanations there can be that will explain a dead waiter stuffed in a linen closet and missing his jacket, nametag and badge, and a man shot to death in a room down the corridor, a room in which I also found the waiter’s jacket and the breakfast trolley. But,’ he added with a smile, ‘you men are the experts, not me. Shall we go up, gentlemen?’
Two hours later, both bodies had been certified as dead, by far the easiest and shortest part of the entire proceedings, and had then been removed after dozens of photographs had been taken of the corpses in situ. The specialist investigators had then moved in to examine the two established crime scenes while another group searched for the third one. There was no doubt that the Englishman – his passport identified him as Stephen Taverner – had been murdered exactly where he was found, but the situation with the waiter was different. He could have been marched at gunpoint down the corridor and into the linen closet and strangled there, or he could have been attacked somewhere along the corridor itself. But the carpet and beige walls had so far revealed no signs of a struggle at any point.
A team of detectives was already looking at the hotel CCTV recordings, but without any particular expectation of finding anything, because the coverage was very limited, basically just a couple of cameras on each floor beside the lifts which provided a few shots of the corridors towards the bedrooms. Numerous people had been seen entering and leaving the building throughout the night – an entirely predictable characteristic of an airport hotel – and the vast majority looked like tourists or businessmen.
Inevitably, the unexpected arrival not only of several police vehicles but also of the vans and cars belonging to the crime scene investigators attracted the attention of the press, and the barter system immediately began to bear fruit for the reporters. They quickly found that chambermaids and cleaners, working for the minimum wage, were only too happy to share what they knew – or what they thought they might possibly have heard, in many cases – in exchange for folded high-denomination euro notes. News of the murder was broadcast on the local radio stations around lunchtime, and went out on the wires to other media outlets during the afternoon.