She let the clip play through to the end, then turned off the phone and laid it back on the table. ‘Okay, you have my attention. Am I to assume that Romy Juneau filmed this?’
‘She was in Tripoli with Segal when she witnessed this conversation. I’m pretty sure this is Segal’s own warehouse, used to store artifacts for export back to Europe or elsewhere. As you can see, they didn’t know she was in there. She must have sneaked in after them.’
‘The other man, did she know who he was?’
‘The fact that she was hiding suggests that maybe she had a pretty good idea of the kind of people her employer is mixed up with. Once the audio is cleaned up, it might tell us what she overheard them talking about.’
‘Why do you have her phone?’
Ben replied, ‘I came into this situation by accident. Literally. We bumped into each other in the street, she dropped her phone and I was trying to return it.’
‘Do you actually expect me to believe that?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘And yet it just so happens that you had a prior acquaintance with the man who killed her.’
‘Coincidence.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘Then maybe it was fate,’ Ben said. ‘He and I have unfinished business, going back.’
‘Going back to when and where?’ She studied him for a moment. ‘I get it. We’re talking about Daesh here. Radical Islam is to war and conflict what whipped cream is to strawberries. So you’re some kind of military person on the other side. You certainly have the look. And you speak Arabic pretty well, which makes you no ordinary soldier type. So maybe you’re from military intelligence. There’s an oxymoron if ever there was one.’
‘You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine,’ Ben said.
She smiled another of her cynical smiles. ‘That sounds like a fun game.’
‘Meaning, tell me what Romy said in her message, and I’ll tell you all about my acquaintance with the charming Mr Nazim al-Kassar.’
‘That’s his name? Al-Kassar?’
‘Don’t bother looking him up. You won’t find anything on him. Now, the message?’
She studied him for a moment longer, still not trusting him. Then replied, ‘All right. Let’s play.’ She reached into the tiny crocodile leather handbag next to her, took out her phone and spent a moment twiddling and scrolling to bring up her voice messages. She held the phone out to Ben.
‘Here. Listen.’
Chapter 24
Romy Juneau’s voice in her phone message sounded nervous and flustered, and she was talking so fast that she was almost tripping over her words.
‘Hello, my name is Jane Dieulafoy and I’m reaching out to you because I read an article you wrote and I have information. I work in the antiquities business and I have evidence of something bad happening within my company. A criminal enterprise. A conspiracy. I don’t even know what to call it.’
Then there was a pause before she went on, sounding even more agitated: ‘What they’re planning is terrible. I don’t know what to do, and I’m desperately hoping that you can help me. Something has to be done to stop the shipment. Please call me as soon as you can. I believe I’m in a lot of danger. I think they know. Please, I’m desperate for your help.’ Romy finished the message by giving her landline and mobile numbers.
‘I tried the landline first,’ Françoise Schell said. ‘That was the phone she called me on. But there was no reply. Now I know why, of course. So then I called the mobile, and you answered. But I still don’t get it. Why didn’t she go to the police? Why come to me?’
‘You heard her,’ Ben said. ‘She didn’t know what to do. She was scared and confused. Maybe she felt she needed to gather more information before making any move. Maybe she wasn’t completely sure that her suspicions were right. Maybe she respected her boss too much to want to believe he was capable of trafficking with criminals. She saw you as someone with knowledge and connections that might be able to help.’
‘Maybe. But that doesn’t tell us what she overheard.’
‘A shipment,’ Ben said. ‘That’s the key to understanding this.’
She nodded. ‘That was the thing that caught my attention, too. The rest of it is just run-of-the-mill stuff that I hear all the time, conspiracies, paranoia, people convincing themselves of all kinds of crazy delusions. But crazy people rarely mention anything this specific.’
‘It has to have come out of the conversation she witnessed. Or else it was what made her suspicious enough to sneak into the warehouse to listen in. Either way it’s obviously part of this criminal conspiracy she’s talking about. A shipment of what?’
She shrugged. ‘Ancient artifacts, I suppose. The objects you could see in the background. I can’t see what else it could refer to, can you? If we had a consignment number I could probably run a trace on it. I know some people.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Segal doesn’t need Nazim and his connections for that. Exporting recovered historic art treasures from those parts of the world is what he’s been doing for years. That’s his whole business. And in any case, what could be less threatening and sinister than a cargo of old bits of stone? Museums are full of them.’
‘Then what makes this shipment so special?’ she asked. ‘Why would it have to be stopped, according to her?’
‘You’re the one who’s researched all this,’ Ben says. ‘You tell me.’
‘All I’ve researched is what’s in my article. I expect you’ve already read it?’
‘It’s been a busy day.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt for you to have a basic grounding in what we’re dealing with here.’
‘Walk me through the main points.’
Across the other side of Boulevard du Montparnasse, the three men were watching from their black Mercedes parked a little further up the street, a few cars behind the metallic blue BMW Alpina they had followed there. Mohammed sat at the wheel, Muhammad in the back and Sarfaraz in the front passenger seat holding a camera with a telephoto lens, through which he’d observed the man Nazim had described get out of the Beemer, cross the street to the café and go inside. It was just after five in the afternoon.
‘It’s definitely our guy,’ Sarfaraz was saying. ‘He’s not alone. Turned up a few minutes ago to meet a woman.’
Nazim al-Kassar was on the other end of the hands-free phone plumbed through the car’s stereo system. ‘Describe the woman.’
‘White bitch, blonde, fortyish, kind of skinny but still worth raping if she had a bag over her head. She’s sitting right by the window. He’s sitting across the other side of the table. Doesn’t look like they know each other well, from the way they’re acting. They shook hands when he arrived. Like business colleagues who just met.’
‘She must be the same one the Juneau woman called,’ Nazim’s voice said over the car speakers. ‘The reporter, or whatever she is. What are they doing now?’
‘He showed her something on a phone. Photos, or a video. She seemed to be looking at it with a lot of interest. Then they talked, and then she showed him something on her phone. Now they’re back to talking again. Looks like an intense conversation.’
‘They’re swapping information,’ Nazim said. ‘It’s these phones. I knew it. We need to stop them, right now, before it goes any further. Take them out. Immediately.’
There was no hesitation about obeying the order. ‘We’re on it.’
‘I want a picture of them dead, and don’t forget to get those phones. Got it? Call me when it’s done.’ Nazim ended the call.
Sarfaraz put down the camera. He turned around to look at Mohammed at the wheel, then Muhammad in the back. They both nodded. Muhammad had a large attaché case next to him on the back seat. He popped open the catches and raised the lid. Nestling inside were three Škorpion submachine pistols. Czech weapons, the professional badman’s weapon of choice for messy, up-close-and-personal hit-and-run assassinations ever since they were invented in 1959. Muhamma
d handed one to each of his companions and took the third for himself.
There was silence in the car for a few moments, except for the metallic sounds of magazines being checked and slammed back into place, actions being cocked, folding stocks being extended, selector switches being set to fully automatic fire, safety catches being clicked off.
‘Allahu Akbar,’ Sarfaraz said. Mohammed and Muhammad repeated the same holy words in reply.
Then they looped their weapons’ black fabric slings around their necks and shoulders, stepped out of the car, looked left and right, waited for a gap in the traffic and began walking across Boulevard du Montparnasse in the direction of the café.
Chapter 25
Françoise Schell leaned her elbows on the table. ‘Muslim terror groups, in particular Daesh, or the Islamic State, ISIL or ISIS or whatever you want to call them, have been taking an unhealthy interest in ancient antiquities for years,’ she explained. ‘It started for purely ideological and religious reasons, a quest to destroy the relics of pre-Islamic cultures as being something idolatrous, meaning the worship of supposedly false gods.’
‘I do know what idolatrous means.’
She shrugged. ‘These acts of deliberate cultural vandalism date right back to the earliest days of Islam. In fact it goes all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad himself, with his treatment of the pre-Islamic religious idols that were kept at the holy Kaaba in Mecca, in 630 AD. These represented ancient Arabian deities like Hubal, who were worshipped by the Quraysh tribe and others. Muhammad had decided to seize the Kaaba for his own purposes and turn Mecca into a place of Islamic worship. He could have asked the pagan worshippers to remove their idols to some other place where they could carry on their religion in peace. Instead he and his followers went in and violently smashed them to smithereens, all 360 of them, with the aim of wiping out the whole religion of the Qurayshi people. Later on he did all he could to wipe them out too, but that’s another story.’
Françoise Schell gave a dark smile and paused for a sip of coffee. ‘Anyhow, the Prophet of Islam’s destruction of the Kaaba idols established the precedent for countless similar acts of cultural destruction throughout their fourteen hundred years of supremacist conquest. As far as they were concerned, any and all artifacts of pre-Islamic civilisation were the products of jahiliyya, societies of unbelievers, and had no value whatsoever. When the first jihadist naval expedition into Europe conquered Rhodes in the mid-seventh century, they came across the site of one of the wonders of the ancient world, the giant statue called the Colossus of Rhodes that had been built in 280 BC to honour the sun god, Helios. Needless to say, there was no room for such blasphemous pagan idols in any new territory falling under Islamic rule. Muawiya, the expedition commander, who later became caliph, had its remains carted away and sold off as scrap metal.
‘The same treatment was dished out to victims of jihad wherever the Muslim armies went. As the conquest swept into India they spent centuries levelling Hindu temples and massacring thousands of Brahmin priests. They would break the idols, mix the fragments with the flesh of slaughtered sacred cows and hang them in nosebags around the necks of the Brahmins they kept alive as slaves. Then if anyone dared rebuild the temples, whole towns were put to the sword of Islam, women and children were taken as slaves and the chief culprits were crushed under the feet of elephants. In Keysin, Anatolia, in the early ninth century, they sacked and destroyed an ancient church said to have been constructed by the apostles of Christ themselves.
‘And on, and on. The ruin of the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 937. The razing to the ground of the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela and its famous shrine of St James, sixty years later. The desecration of the Hagia Sophia, the grandest church in Christendom when, in May 1453, after seven hundred years of trying, the jihadists finally got their chance to sack Constantinople, slaughter or enslave its inhabitants and overthrow what was left of the Byzantine Empire, as their prophet had vowed to do centuries earlier. Nothing outside Islam was safe as they pursued their quest to purify the whole world from idolatry.’
It was a grim historical account and it left her almost breathless. She shook her head as though she could hardly believe it herself.
‘This is all in your article?’
‘Are you kidding? I could write a book.’
Ben smiled. ‘Perhaps you should.’
‘Except nobody would publish it. They’d probably say it was “Islamophobic”.’ She made quote marks in the air with her fingers. ‘No matter that these are documented historical facts.’
Ben said, ‘I was in Iraq, during the war. I saw a lot of the ravages there.’
Françoise Schell looked pleased. ‘See, didn’t I guess you were the type? Well, if you were there, then you don’t need me to tell you how little has changed for these lunatics. They’re basically still living in the seventh century and, given the chance, will carry on exactly as always. As the Islamic State gained territory and occupied cities throughout the Middle East, killing and beheading as they went, they blew up every ancient church and synagogue they could find, as part of the same old attempt to erase Christian and Jewish heritage from history. The list includes the destruction of the Nineveh Wall in Mosul in 2015, and the lovely video footage they took of themselves merrily wrecking the Mosul museum the same year. The bulldozing of the ancient Assyrian relics of Raqqa. The attack on the ancient city of Palmyra, and all the irreplaceable art treasures they broke up there with sledgehammers. Not to mention the attacks on Shi’ite mosques like the Askariya Shrine in Iraq, or the Muslim shrines of Timbuktu that the Islamic Ansar Dine terror group were so keen to smash to bits in 2012, because the militant Sunnis despise the Shi’ites almost as much as they despise the Jews and Christians. There’s more, much more. The scale and atrocity of the vandalism are simply unbelievable. Even without taking into account the appalling bloodshed and human misery inflicted over fourteen hundred years, it’s without a doubt the worst litany of wanton destructiveness ever committed in the history of the world.’
Ben had the impression that she could talk about this all day, impassioned as she was.
She said, ‘But somewhere along the line, something changed. The terrorists, whose leaders aren’t completely stupid, finally started cottoning on to the fact that these things they were smashing to pieces might seem worthless and idolatrous to them, but a lot of other people in the world actually regarded them as being rather valuable. That’s when they turned from simply destroying ancient art treasures to trading in them. Having bombed the crap out of a place they’d begin excavating the ruins to see what stuff they could salvage and put on the black market. After their destruction of the four-thousand-year-old Assyrian city of Tel Ajaja in Syria, 2016, it’s estimated that they hauled away at least forty per cent of the relics to sell off.’
‘I hadn’t realised it was such an orchestrated business.’
‘Oh, it certainly is that. And here’s the scary part. If they were just trying to enrich themselves like any other organised crime empire, that would be one thing. But Islamic law prohibits its warriors from waging jihad for personal gain. Despite the documented historical fact that their Prophet, may Peace be upon Him, used to happily share out among his victorious troops the trophies of war from all the Jews and Christians and other tribes he’d slaughtered and beheaded, back in the early days. Thanks to a bit of theological jiggery pokery the modern militant fundamentalists decided it was perfectly permissible to sell plundered artifacts to enrich their organisations, so long as it was done purely for the jihadist cause. Just as it’s allowed for them to make money from all kinds of other commodities forbidden to Muslims, like drugs, or alcohol, or improperly slaughtered meat, and so on, on condition that the loot is used exclusively for the purpose of funding holy war against the kuffar harbi. That is to say, the pigs, apes and other infidels who are the stated enemies of Islamic fundamentalist doctrine. People like you and me. Then Allah approves of
it. Am I getting Islamophobic yet?’
‘Maybe a little bit.’
‘Tough shit. I just report facts. I don’t deal in fiction, I don’t do phobias, and nobody’s gonna label me with some pseudo-psychiatric term that was invented to stifle free speech.’
‘I’d imagine that the trade in stolen antiquities is worth a bit more to them than hijacking truckloads of booze and corned beef,’ Ben said.
‘You have no idea. It’s not just millions. It’s hundreds upon hundreds of millions, year on year. Every penny of which gets reinvested straight into their fucked-up tireless ideological crusade. More money means more guns, more bombs, more sophisticated communications and recruiting networks, better infrastructure, enhanced power and influence, and so on. This thing turned out to be a goldmine for them. Most of the goods are brought to the West, via networks of crooked middlemen, smugglers and the like.’
‘And Julien Segal is one of those?’
‘Well, it looks that way, doesn’t it? He’s certainly got all the right contacts, knows how the system works. Just the man to slip the merchandise into Europe under the radar. Taking a hell of a risk, but I suppose the money’s good.’
‘And that would account for the shipment Romy talked about, if the antiquities in Segal’s Tripoli warehouse are contraband looted by ISIL,’ Ben said.
Françoise Schell frowned. ‘Except that still doesn’t explain all that’s in her message. She said they were planning something terrible. That sounds like more than just black marketeering.’
‘Unless the proceeds are intended to pay for explosives for suicide bombers to detonate in any number of major cities across Europe. That’s pretty terrible.’
‘Agreed. But I get the feeling that I’m missing something. My instinct is generally right on these things.’
‘Then we’ll just have to figure it out,’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘We?’
‘You’re an investigator, aren’t you? With sharp instincts and a strong knowledge of the subject. Sounds good to me.’
House of War Page 13