Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  “A lot of Western media jumped on our backs for not safeguarding those artifacts. But there wasn’t a lot of sensitivity about objects when people’s lives were on the line. Save a vase or save a girl? It was no-brainer for me.”

  Sophia listened quietly. It sounded like a confession, maybe he was hoping for absolution from his sins. Maybe his eighteen-year-old self, fresh out of boot camp, needed the archaeologist in her ivory tower to understand what it had been like on the ground. In 2003, when she was livid and indignant over the looting, who had she been but a pimply teen who liked to play in the dirt? What had she done in her life that would in any way compare to the sacrifices of those who fought in the war?

  “That first day, we went in and chased a bunch of looters out. We knew they’d be back as soon as we left. We probably were there all of thirty minutes. The Iraqi military was gathering up women and children and forcing them to be human shields to protect their arms caches and other points of concern, like water and electricity.”

  Sophia reached for the ring on her bracelet and twisted it with her finger. She understood what Brian was telling her. Certainly, her work with the AACP taught her about the very real dangers and the very real pain of the Syrian people. That they risked themselves to save history—that was something she was willing to do from the comfort of a DC office. She was sure that she wouldn’t spit directly in the face of ISIS, knowing that her head would be removed by the blade of a sword, then placed between her feet to rot in the desert sun. She wasn’t that kind of a hero.

  “They said that about fifteen thousand pieces—ritual vessels, amulets, ivory, and more than five thousand cylinder seals were dispersed across the countryside. I’ve always wondered if there was some way I could have done more.” He glanced up at her, then handed her back the camera.

  “I think everyone understands that lives are the priority. Always.”

  “We reported what we saw. Our reports made it through the chain of command. A guy, Colonel Bogawrath was his name—went to the US Central Command and got a ‘Monuments’ team together.”

  “Wait. Like the Monuments Men of World War II? Antiquities experts heading into the fray to save what art they could?”

  “Well, they were fourteen men with investigative experience. They weren’t really from the museum and preservation crowd.” Brian chuckled. “That would be a stretch.”

  “You were one of them?”

  “I was assigned as part of their support and security team. I helped establish a perimeter at the museum, and I helped them take an inventory of missing items. We sent the descriptions to everyone we could think of—border agents, Interpol, archaeologists. I remember Nadia’s father’s name and your father’s name, because they were still trying to function in Syria. They’d answer questions for us. Well, for the colonel, not me. I was just some dumb grunt fresh off an Idaho farm for the first time in my life. I’d never been to an art museum before. It was my first taste of culture that didn’t revolve around football and potlucks at church. It was mind-blowing.”

  Idaho. Sophia hadn’t considered where Brian was raised. His body, the way he moved, every aspect of this man projected “rough and ready.” He had impeccable manners. An intelligent, educated mind, and a palpable goodness about him. Maybe that’s what he carried away from his Idaho upbringing—deep roots that gave him stability.

  “I honestly can’t imagine what jumping from rural America to a Middle Eastern desert was like for you—my life was always a smorgasbord of languages, new places, beautiful and very old things. And of course, camel spit.” She smiled. “I’m sure your parents gave you a great many gifts—it seems to me you’re pretty comfortable in your own skin. That you have an internal compass pointing toward what’s right and wrong. That, in my experience, comes from being well-loved in your growing years. And by that, I mean you could experience hardship, knowing the ground you stood on was solid.”

  “Yeah. My family, we were hard working from dawn to dusk. Good times came and bad times followed, but our family was always solid.” He sat quietly for a long moment. Then looked her in the eye. “Interesting that it shows.”

  Sophia pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, laying her head on her knees. “What happened next with your fourteen museum men?”

  “We started finding things. Sometimes people brought them back. There was this one, the Sacred Vase of Warka, sounds like something in a sci-fi B-movie. They said it was from over three-thousand BC.”

  “BCE.”

  “What?”

  “BCE—before the common era. It’s the way scientists are saying it now. They’ve replaced the before Christ.”

  “Is it still AD?”

  “No—it’s CE now. Common era.”

  “Huh. Well one day this little old granny came with a plate of cookies. A couple of us were trying them. We thanked her and handed her back the plate. She gave us what we thought was a garbage bag. We almost threw it in the trash. But my buddy Ben opened it up and there was a pot. One of the museum’s oldest pieces. From 6000 BCE.” He raised his eyebrows and let them drop, emphasizing that he’d used the term correctly.

  Sophia sent him a smile as a reward.

  “We found stuff in car trunks and buried in vegetable gardens. Sometimes we’d lock up to hit the racks and come back to find pieces had been put on the shelves overnight. We couldn’t figure out how they were getting in. As we kept looking and investigating, we figured out that hundreds of the best pieces we thought had been gone since the Gulf War had been hidden for safekeeping in the Central Bank. I got to carry Nimrud’s jewels back to the museum in a box on my lap with my AK resting on top.”

  “Wow.” In Sophia’s mind, she was making all kinds of inappropriate jokes about family jewels, but managed to stay straight-faced to say, “That’s incredible.”

  “Before I got transferred we thought we got about half of the pieces back. I’m damned proud of helping with that. And I’m equally proud to try to protect the antiquities from Syria. This isn’t just an assignment to me. My hearts in it, for sure.” Brian’s eyes flickered with something poignant as he looked at her.

  Sophia thought she saw a flash of deep pain and wondered at it. She almost asked what he was thinking, but Brian had obviously stuffed those emotions away, so she moved their conversation along. “I remember vividly my outrage that people had stolen the Iraqi museum pieces. I loved the museum as a kid. My dad would take me. He worked for the Smithsonian during my childhood, along with Nadia’s father. Can you imagine what a loss it would be if the Smithsonian was destroyed? That’s why I wanted to do this work when the opportunity came up. I wanted to protect our world heritage.”

  “You don’t talk much about your family. Why is that?”

  “What’s to say? Dad planned to be a professor of antiquities in his retirement. He got sick in Turkey and the fever cooked his brain. He has functioned very much like an Alzheimer’s patient ever since. Mom is busy trying to keep him home and not put him in a nursing facility. He doesn’t recognize me anymore. My brother—he’s living out west with his own problems. I’m pretty invisible to them all.” Her gaze rested on the portrait of her boys. Why the heck did I say that? I sound pathetic. She blinked her eyes hard and waited until she could form a smile again before she looked back at Brian.

  His eyes were on her. His gaze too intense to hold. “You’re not invisible to me, Sophie. I see you.”

  Sophia looked past his shoulder and out the window for respite. This conversation was headed into dangerous territory. “You have siblings?” she asked, forcing herself to look his way.

  “I’m the seventh son of a seventh son.” He grinned broadly. “But there are ten kids in my family, all told.”

  Sophia shook her head. “You’re teasing me.”

  “I would never do that. It’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Still dangerous territory. They had a professional relationship. Period. They shouldn’t be talking about personal stuff. “About th
e cameras.”

  Brian’s look told her he thought she was a chicken, and he was right.

  “It won’t surprise you to learn that we have a loose-knit group of academics fighting back against the antique thefts. Many of them I knew as a child and young teen. I haven’t been in the Middle East since the summer of 2011. One of my tasks is to find key sites and get the information to my team, so they can document what’s there and what’s possibly already missing. They also have another huge task. They need to hide artifacts that are at risk of being looted.”

  “How do they hide them?”

  “One way is to dig a big hole, put in a storage container—like an old truck, or something—and bury it. Then they file the GPS coordinates with me—well, the AACP. The braver ones, usually older men who look like grandfathers, will pose as antiques dealers, trying to lure looters to them so they can photograph what they have.”

  “That’s dangerous work.”

  “Too dangerous right now. Too difficult as well. The looting, since ISIS made it systematic, is happening at such a pace that our people can’t possibly keep up. And the death toll is massive. More than three hundred thousand people have been killed there since my last trip. Our team hasn’t gone unscathed. We’re losing people every day. And Aleppo. I loved Aleppo. I loved the people.” She swiped at a tear that broke through her barriers.

  “I can’t watch the news anymore. I can’t bear what’s happening. Just the other day, Sadiq Bikar was beheaded for trying to save antiquities.” Sophia blinked furiously, trying for control. “He was my father’s mentor.” She finally got the words out, then cleared her throat. She looked at the camera. “It is so damned easy for me to sit here in my living room and order cameras. To send an email that has a coordinate. To make suggestions from the distant safety of a satellite image. But every time I do anything, ask anything, people on the other end risk their lives.”

  Brian turned his head as a car parked in front of her house. “Nadia’s here.”

  Good timing, Sophia thought, needing a minute to clear her head before she said something that could put everything at risk. The next few days were crucial.

  18

  Brian

  Friday a.m.

  When Sophia came back with a tea tray and cookies, Nadia was lifting the second prototype from the box. “This one’s only twenty-seven dollars?” she asked. She looked through the lens. “Oh, I see the difference. We need the one that includes the plane. This one isn’t going to give us the level of detail they’ll need in court.” She worked to re-wrap it. “The Institute of Digital Archaeology and Preservation came up with some grant money, so I don’t think we’re going to have to compromise.”

  “I’m not willing to put people at risk for data that’s not strong enough to protect the artifacts.” Sophia set the tray down and poured a cup of tea to pass to her partner.

  “Sophia was telling me why you’re going to disseminate these, they seem like a pretty amazing forensics tool. I’d like to get the specs on these and get that information to Iniquus. We have 3-D cameras to help us process crime scenes, but this camera’s ability to demark plane’s distinctions isn’t something I’ve come across.”

  “And it’s a good price,” Nadia said.

  “There is that,” Brian agreed. He wanted to get the women chatting about their objectives, to see what was on their minds, and what they were working on now. Maybe, just maybe, one of them would mention the artifact from the FBI sting. “What are the projected uses?”

  “Our goal is to get five thousand cameras to Syria by the end of the year,” Sophia said, then looked up at him. “Tea?”

  Brian held up a hand to indicate no.

  Sophia passed a cup to Nadia. “The cameras have memory cards that can be brought to America for Nadia and me to work with. We’ll curate the images and make them searchable. The teams will have rechargeable batteries, and we’re sending solar panels for them.”

  “Five thousand cameras take up a lot of space. When you get them into Syria, along with all their paraphernalia, how do you get them distributed? And how do you get folks trained in their use?”

  “That’s a challenge.” Sophia took a nibble of cookie and put it back on her saucer. “We’re giving them to our network—people working on the ground, and asking them to do their best. It’s a fluid situation, and we don’t have a lot of information. Every time we receive a communication, it means someone is putting themselves and their families at risk of being tortured and killed. We can suggest sticking one in their glove compartment, driving it out to a village. But that might be lethal. We’ll let those in the know do what they can. You understand what I’m saying. You were talking earlier about decision making in Bagdad. Lives over art. Always.”

  Nadia sent Sophia a look asking for an explanation. When she didn’t get one, Nadia turned back to Brian. “We hope that the distributors can teach their contacts what to do. For example, there are a lot of ancient structures that are being demolished. If the rubble is left in place, and we had 3-D images pre-destruction, then historical restoration experts may be able to—after the conflict cools—go in and put the monuments and edifices back together. That’s a big if. A lot of big ifs. But right now, it’s all we have.”

  “Whoever designed the cameras did a good job,” Brian said. “They don’t look like anything special. It’ll make things a bit safer for your colleagues.”

  “Nadia, how big is the grant? What are they expecting in return for their money?”

  “Two point three million, and they want ten thousand images this year.”

  “What? How are we going to get anything else done?”

  “I haven’t a clue. But we can talk about it with Jael. He’s coming in on Monday.”

  “Oh, is he now?” Sophia winked at Nadia, and Nadia blushed fiercely in response. Sophia turned to Brian. “Nadia’s first crush is still squeezing her heart. Poor thing.” Sophia’s voice had the teasing lilt of a sister. She turned back to Nadia. “Do you want to see what he sent this morning?”

  “Yes.” Nadia set her mug on the floor and gathered the tray and walked it back to the kitchen. “Hey,” she called out. “What’s this thing?” Nadia came back with a sharp piece of metal in her hand.

  “Brian told me to walk around my car before I drove. That was wedged under my back tire. If I backed up, I would have been out changing the darned thing again.”

  “When did you drive this morning?” Brian asked.

  “I didn’t.” Sophia didn’t understand why he sounded so accusatory. She could drive her darned car without Brian Ackerman’s permission. “I was checking out the property to see what needed clearing up. I looked at the tires because—I don’t know, I just looked at the tires. I thought you wanted me to.”

  Brian picked up a piece of paper from her printer and held it out under the metal spike. “May I have that please, Nadia?”

  Nadia dropped it onto the paper, Brian folded it up and went to take it to his car.

  As he was slipping out the door, he heard Nadia say, “He’s going to find out who’s doing this. I know he is. This is a good thing. He’s protecting you. You’re safe.”

  He held the door for a moment to hear the rest, but shut it quietly when Nadia said, “Come on now, show me what Jael sent.”

  The three of them were huddled around the desk in a tight circle. Nadia was calling out GPS coordinates and Sophia was mapping. As the information populated the map, they saw clusters emerge. On another screen, Sophia had the same map overlaying a satellite image she had been investigating.

  “What are these numbers you’re inputting here?” Brian pointed at the red pin she’d just placed.

  “I’m indicating significance.”

  “What makes them more or less significant?”

  “Nadia and I have a scale that’s more feel than fact. We judge rarity, age, size, scale, beauty. The kinds of metrics that would be taken into consideration at auction houses and on the black market. Of course, it�
��s mostly a stab in the dark. With the images we’ve been getting from a normal digital camera, we have to hope that, for example, someone thought to include a marker—a coin, for example—that can help us understand the size.”

  “If you’re guessing, why do you do it? Give them a significance number, I mean.”

  “Sometimes our allies have to choose which areas to protect. They look to us for guidance. This system gives us a hierarchy. If we have a thousand examples of item x, but y is precious, unique, and amazing, then that’s where we should put our effort.”

  “Who asked you to do that?”

  “No one,” Sophia said a little too quickly, like a child who had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

  Someone most assuredly had asked for this data, Brian thought.

  “I agree with Sophia,” Nadia said. “If the Pentagon were to call and ask if there were areas that they shouldn’t bomb, and we only had a few minutes to get them the coordinates, then we can scan this map and make a good assessment based on a mathematical formula.”

  “Academically flawed as it may be,” Sophia said.

  “We can only do what we can do.”

  Brian felt the buzz of danger running from the back of his neck over his scalp. “Who has access to this data?”

  “Sophia and I, you, and we can show it to Thorn if you’d like. Since you’re part of the team that’s supposed to keep everything secure, you should know what we’re trying to protect.”

  “No one else knows about this?”

  Nadia put up another photo. “You seem a little intense, Brian. What are you thinking?”

  Brian pointed at the new image. “Can you zoom in on that?”

  Sophia adjusted the screen, letting her software fix the pixilation, making the image of the hand holding a small statue stand out.

  “Can you go left? I want to see that guy’s tattoo.”