House of War

by Scott Mariani

  While pleased with his killing of the unclean whore, he was annoyed with himself for having failed on other counts. The wiretap that had been placed on her landline phone had indicated that soon after her return from Tripoli she had attempted to make contact with a woman called Françoise. That was all the information they had on her, no surname. But the phone message that Romy Juneau had left for her suggested that the woman was someone with whom she was keen to share information. A reporter or journalist, maybe. Which made her potentially highly dangerous to their plans, if their suspicions about Romy Juneau were correct. The wiretap on the landline have yielded nothing more, which implied that Juneau might since have been in contact with this Françoise by mobile phone, whether spoken or texted.

  Hence Nazim’s intention, while inside Romy Juneau’s apartment that morning, had been to obtain her mobile phone in the hope that it might lead them to Françoise. Who would then, naturally, need to be eliminated too. But to Nazim’s deep annoyance, he’d been unable to find her mobile anywhere in her apartment. It wasn’t in her handbag, or any of the other places he’d searched. The dirty infidel bitch must have hidden it. Nazim knew he had made a tactical mistake in killing her without first forcing her to hand it over.

  That wasn’t the only troubling matter on Nazim’s mind. Of even more concern to him than the missing phone was the issue of the man he’d seen at her window immediately after the killing, as he stepped out into the street.

  Nazim was absolutely certain that nobody else had been inside the apartment during the few minutes of his visit. He had carefully checked every room, not just in search of her mobile phone but also in case he needed to kill anyone else he found there. There was no doubt in his mind that the man at the window could only have entered the apartment after the Juneau woman was already dead and he, Nazim, had left. But the time gap had been very close, no more than a couple of minutes while Nazim rode the lift from the top floor and exited the building.

  Thinking back, Nazim recalled the person he’d crossed on the stairs on his way down. He had deliberately kept his back turned, just in case, so as to avoid any potential witness giving his description to the police. Another mistake, one Nazim couldn’t entirely blame himself for. Others, however, might be less forgiving.

  But what perplexed and bewildered Nazim far more – left him so stunned that he’d hesitated to get into the getaway car and been virtually unable to speak all the way back to his hotel – was that he knew this man. He was sure of it. Rock-solid positive. Unquestionably, they had met before, in another country, far, far away and long, long ago.

  Nazim had often thought about this man over the years. He still sometimes had vivid dreams when he relived the moment of his capture by the commander of the enemy Special Forces assault team who had raided the village near Tikrit that day, September 20, 2003. The one time in Nazim’s career when he’d come perilously close to being defeated. On escaping, he’d made two vows to himself: the first, that he would never let himself be taken again; the second, that he would one day find this man who had so humiliated him and almost been his downfall.

  He had tried, in vain, to find out the man’s name. He’d learned that the operation had been a joint British and American venture, but the identities of SF soldiers were an impenetrable secret even for top ISIL spies.

  Nazim had always believed that he would one day meet up again with the man without a name who haunted his dreams. He would never forget his face, not even if fifty more years went by before their next encounter. From the way their eye contact had locked and held tight for those few instants that seemed like minutes, he was convinced that the man remembered him, too.

  Nazim now deeply regretted not having made Muhammad wait at the kerb while he returned upstairs to confront him. A third mistake, even more painful than the first two.

  The burning question was, what was the man doing there? Why would he, an enemy soldier Nazim had encountered on the battlefields of Iraq all those years ago, suddenly reappear in this way? To Nazim, the answer was clear. The foreigner must be working as an agent. Like so many of his kind, who, after fulfilling their evil service in the cause of murdering the faithful to Allah, joined the military intelligence services in order to carry on their nefarious scheme by other means.

  Which, in turn, had to mean that the plans being hatched by Nazim and his associates might be known, or at least partly known, to the enemy. And now Nazim was certain why he’d been unable to find the Juneau woman’s phone. She must have given it to the foreigner, along with whatever information it contained, and whatever else she might have passed to him. It was a deeply worrying development. Something had to be done about it, before the whole plan came apart.

  The man with no name must die, and soon.

  Nazim al-Kassar dressed, returned downstairs to the hotel lobby and rejoined Muhammad, and the two of them walked to the silver Mercedes to meet with Ibrahim al-Rashid.

  Chapter 16

  Next, Ben had some expensive shopping to do. To fulfil his requirements Thierry had asked for a high-spec laptop computer, a laser printer and a laminating machine. The specialised sound editing software for cleaning up Romy’s audio recording could be downloaded online.

  Ben set off with his list, and returned to the safehouse two hours later with boxes that Thierry helped him bring inside and set about unpacking, along with some junk food and soft drinks for his temporary houseguests. He had additionally purchased some extra items he would need for himself, namely a charcoal-grey single-breasted suit, a white cotton shirt, a plain, sober navy-blue tie and a pair of black patent leather shoes not unlike the ones that the Corsicans had been wearing earlier that day. He went into the bedroom to change, and scrutinised himself in the mirror. By no means his usual attire, but he looked the part reasonably well enough to carry out the next phase of his plan. He changed back into his civvies and set the new clothes aside for later.

  While Thierry finished setting up his equipment and got down to work, Ben took the opportunity to fill in the time with a little tourist sightseeing. His destination was the Louvre Museum, where his instincts told him he might find out more about the kinds of ancient art treasures he’d glimpsed in Romy’s video clip.

  Despite the light rain pattering from a slate-grey sky, the usual crowds of tourists thronged the entrance to the vast, palatial museum. After having to wait in line for a ticket, Ben made his way inside through the inverted glass pyramid, which he still thought was a hideous blot on the landscape, whatever anyone said. From there he cut a path through the exhibits, not pausing every few steps like the dawdling crowds of other visitors to drink in the magnificence of the collections, but instead following the guidebook and map he’d bought at the ticket desk to head briskly towards the Near Eastern Antiquities section on the ground floor. Those were housed in the Richelieu Wing, one of the museum’s three main sections, and the least congested as it contained fewer of the big-name crowd pullers like the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo.

  Ben skirted without a second glance the wondrous apartments of Napoleon III, not one but two beautiful sculpture gardens, centuries of French, Dutch, Flemish and German paintings, and arts of Islam, until he found what he was looking for in the Mesopotamia section.

  Mesopotamia: literally, ‘the land between two rivers’, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Soil that Ben had set foot on personally, as the ancient country had once covered most of what was now Iraq and Kuwait, as well as parts of Saudi Arabia and Syria. Known as the cradle of civilisation, through its long history it had been home to the Babylonian, Assyrian and Akkadian empires among other ancient kingdoms, been the scene of countless epic battles and seen its territories change hands through conquest after conquest as entire civilisations rose and flourished, then were invaded and put to the sword.

  Some of that history Ben had studied as a young theology scholar at Oxford, in another life, before any notion of a military career had ever formed in his mind. It had been during that period, many years ago, th
at he’d first come here to the Louvre to visit the exhibits along with some college pal whose name he’d long since forgotten. On that first ever trip to Paris as a kid of nineteen he could never have dreamed he would later return under such different circumstances. Then again, most things about the course his life had taken could not have been easily predicted.

  He made his way through the Mesopotamia section, passing ancient and priceless relics to his left and right. There was the seven-foot-high Babylonian stone tablet called the Code of Hammurabi. A lion frieze from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Everything but old King Neb’s fabled golden idol. All highly impressive, but not what he’d come here to see.

  Soon afterwards, Ben found what he was looking for.

  Flanking each side of a tall archway stood a pair of massive statues that looked very similar to the biggest of the artifacts Romy Juneau had caught on camera while spying on her boss’s conversation with Nazim al-Kassar. Ben had been sure he’d seen something like them before. His guess had been right: it had been right here in this very spot, all those years ago. They were giant winged bulls with the heads of men, over four metres in height and length. According to the exhibit label the huge sculptures, called ‘Lamassu’, had been carved from solid blocks of alabaster more than two and a half thousand years ago, during the reign of Sargon II. They had been excavated from the remains of the Assyrian king’s citadel at Dur Sharrukin, now Khorsabad in Nineveh Province, northern Iraq.

  Ben spent a moment in reflection. He had never seen Khorsabad itself, but nearby Mosul, just fifteen kilometres away, had been a site of strategic bombings and Special Forces ops prior to its capture by Coalition troops in April 2003. Later it had become the scene of multiple suicide attacks and assassinations as the militants refused to be defeated. Persecution of Assyrian Christians by the Islamics had lasted for years, and eventually ISIL had taken over the city in their Northern Iraq Offensive, with disastrous consequences for its inhabitants.

  Returning to the present, Ben had to marvel at the craftsmanship of the two Lamassu. The expressions on their human faces were benevolent, almost kindly, with eyes that seemed to return his gaze. Each had curly beards cut off square at the ends, and prominent noses below thick eyebrows. On top of their heads each wore a crown or tiara, either side of which sprouted bull’s horns. Their huge bodies seemed to ripple with living muscle, and had been cleverly sculpted with five legs instead of four, creating an optical illusion that made them look as though they were standing to attention when viewed from the front, but walking when seen from the side. Ben’s guidebook explained that such androcephalic, or human-headed, bulls were a characteristic feature of the decoration of Assyrian palaces.

  Having seen all he needed to see, he left the museum wondering how many more Lamassu must remain hidden among the ruins of ancient undiscovered palaces beneath the sands of Iraq and its neighbouring countries, waiting for archaeologists to come and unearth them. Not to mention their cultural value, their monetary worth must be inestimable. It was little wonder that people like Julien Segal spent entire careers scouring some of the world’s most dangerous places in search of such treasures.

  Except members of Julien Segal’s profession didn’t, as a rule, frequent known terrorists, nor do mysterious deals with them that somehow resulted in the deaths of innocent employees.

  Ben returned to his car deep in thought about the warehouse in the video clip. Was this Segal’s own storage facility? It made sense for someone in his position to own or rent secure spaces where artifacts could be kept protected while in transit from their home countries to wherever they were destined to end up. More than ever, Ben wished he’d managed to find out from Jeanne at the Institute where Romy’s recent field trip abroad had taken her. Then he might be able to discover where Segal’s meeting with Nazim al-Kassar had taken place. Which might not tell him much, but right now a little knowledge was worth a lot to him.

  Perhaps Bernard Dubois could have another go at finding out. Getting into the car, Ben pulled out his burner phone and dialled the Institute’s number again, but the offices were now closed and all he got was a voicemail message asking him to leave his name and number. He put the burner away and checked his other phone, with a pang of annoyance that Ken Keegan in London hadn’t yet been in touch with a contact for Tyler Roth. Blocked at every damned turn.

  He was about to put that phone away too when it started burring in his hand. It was Thierry, calling from the safehouse.

  ‘Got something here to show you, chief.’

  Ben was surprised. ‘You finished working on the audio already?’

  ‘Not quite done there. I’ve uploaded the video file to the laptop and grabbed the software I need from the web. The audio cleanup might take me a while. But the other thing you asked for is ready to rock.’

  ‘Fast work.’

  ‘That’s why you pay me the big bucks.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  Chapter 17

  Back at the safehouse, Thierry proudly showed Ben what he’d cooked up for him. And as far as Ben could tell, it was indistinguishable from the real thing. The master forger had proved his worth yet again.

  The laminated ID card featured a red, white and blue diagonal stripe across one corner, across its centre the official header of the French Ministry of the Interior and the words DIRECTION GENERALE DE LA POLICE NATIONALE. The mugshot of Ben in suit, tie and slicked-back hair had been snapped earlier with a phone camera and artfully fiddled to look like a passport photo. For the purposes of the fake police ID his new name was Inspector Jacques Dardenne. Ben had come up with the name off the top of his head and wasn’t sure that he liked it, but it would do fine.

  ‘If I’d had more time I might have been able to rustle you up a proper badge,’ Thierry said ruefully. ‘The card alone will only get you so far.’

  ‘This is excellent, Thierry. More than enough for what I need.’

  ‘I’m not even going to ask what you want it for.’

  ‘You never asked me before.’

  ‘And that’s the way I like it.’

  In truth, Ben wasn’t happy about what he had to do next. He’d mulled it over long and hard before coming to the reluctant decision that he had no choice. By mid-afternoon he was driving across the city to the commune of Fontenay-sous-Bois in the suburbs to the east. The ‘bois’, or woods, in the name referred to the nearby Bois de Vincennes, which was the two-thousand-acre park and former hunting grounds of the kings of France. But Ben wasn’t interested in taking a scenic tour of the famous botanical gardens or the Château de Vincennes. His purpose was grimmer and darker, and he was feeling like shit about it before he even got there.

  Romy Juneau’s parents lived in a modest middle-class home in a pleasant, tranquil street that felt like a million miles from any of the disturbances that had been affecting the city of late. All except one. Several hours would have gone by since the police had informed them of their daughter’s death. Their grief would be raw and Ben felt he had no business intruding on them at a time like this. He drove past the house twice, hating himself, and very nearly turned back, before he finally willed himself to park outside their front gate.

  The police had probably spent some time with the family that morning, but were gone now and the coast was clear. Ben straightened his tie in the rear-view mirror, anything to delay the moment. With a sigh he stepped out of the car and forced himself to push open the creaky garden gate, walk up the flower-lined path to the house and ring the doorbell. Facing a vicious and determined enemy with a gun in your hand was nothing next to this.

  The house was small but well cared for, with ivy growing around the front door and wooden shutters on the windows. He stood on the doorstep for nearly two long, uncomfortable minutes before he heard sounds of movement from inside, and the front door slowly opened a few inches wide on its security chain. The face that peered out at him through the gap was one he’d seen before, in the birthday photo on Romy’s phone. Madame Juneau hadn’t l
ooked especially great in the picture, but now she looked like death. She was in her late fifties but at this moment could have passed for fifteen years older. Her face was gaunt and streaked with tears, her dyed blond hair was a mess and her eyes were puffy and red from crying.

  Ben opened his wallet to show the police ID. ‘Madame Juneau? I’m Inspector Jacques Dardenne from the Prefecture of Police. I’m very sorry to disturb you, but may I have a moment, please?’

  Romy’s mother blinked several times and stared at him as though she didn’t understand. She barely glanced at the fake ID. Then she managed to croak, ‘What do you want? The police were already here earlier. Can’t you see we’re grieving? My only child died today.’

  Ben wasn’t being insincere as he repeated his deepest apologies for the intrusion. ‘I just need a couple of minutes of your time, Madame Juneau. Is Monsieur Juneau here?’

  ‘He’s in bed. My husband is not a well man. This will be the end of him, I’m sure. You can come in, as long as it’s quick.’

  ‘I promise.’

  She unlatched the chain and Ben, feeling like he was drowning puppies in a sack, stepped inside the hallway. The wallpaper was flowery, like the furniture inside the chintzy living room into which she showed him. The air was so thick with unspeakable grief that he could smell it. He could also smell the booze. Madame Juneau was halfway through a large gin and tonic. Not her first of the day, judging by the unsteadiness in her gait. He couldn’t blame her. If something like this had happened to his son Jude, he’d have been on the floor by now, surrounded by empty bottles.

  Madame Juneau was gamely holding it together, though. She offered him tea, which he courteously declined, and perched on the edge of the flowery armchair opposite his. ‘How can I help you, Inspector, ah—?’