Relic_An Iniquus Romantic Suspense Mystery Thriller

by Fiona Quinn

  Lana caught Nadia’s eye and held it with as close to fierce conviction as he had ever seen on her face. “I think we’ve told too much of Sophia’s story already. That’s really her burden to share if she wants to.” Lana turned pleading eyes on Brian. “Please don’t tell her we told you about the Ouija game,” she whispered. “I don’t know that she’d forgive us.” She grabbed his arm. “It was an intensely private moment. A unique and dreadful experience. There aren’t words to explain the profound horror that we felt. We’ve never talked about it. Sophia refuses to let us. She says she doesn’t want to give it any more power than it already has.”

  Nadia explained, “Sophia believes that words, thoughts and deeds all have energetic properties.”

  “What does that mean? You said the entity spelled out ‘You desecrated my grave.’ Desecrated seems like a long word for a ghost to spell out.”

  “You’re probably joking,” Nadia said. “I can’t imagine that anyone in their right mind would believe a word my sister or I just said. But it’s crazy what’s happened to Sophia. Did she ever tell you we were kidnapped? Held tied up for days with bags over our heads?”

  Brian stalled, he couldn’t answer that truthfully. He wasn’t supposed to know that. It was interesting that Nadia’s mind was on being kidnapped. There must be a correlation. “Is that when bad things started to happen? Desecrating a grave—does this have something to do with an archaeological dig?”

  “A dig? No. That kidnapping, and every single other horrible thing that’s transpired over the last five years are because of what happened beforehand. And all Sophia wants to do now is turn back time, go back, and fix her mistake.”

  Brian reached down to pick up the candle. When he stood, Sophia, dressed in a thin white nightgown, slipped into their circle, skirting around the broken goblet.

  “I was having a nightmare.” She crouched down to lift the stem, just like Nadia had, and put it back in the pile. She stood up and looked from Nadia to Lana. “I thought it was the storm.” She shifted her hair out of her face, letting her gaze rest on the picture of her boys. “Bad things are about to happen.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sophia

  Friday a.m.

  The phone rang on her desk, pulling Sophia’s attention from the newest images that had uploaded overnight while the storm had raged. She waited until all five beeps sounded then placed the receiver back in its cradle. She opened the case on her keychain flashlight and waited for her cell phone to ring. Normally, the delay was less than a minute. Today though, Sophia finished half the chai tea Brian had brought her this morning when he ran out for coffee. Sophia didn’t have any coffee in the house, and Brian claimed it was his main food group. She had directed him over to the little shop near Willow Tree. Right now, Brian was outside hanging from the eaves, dealing with some storm damage. Sophia was simply too tired to say no to his offer.

  She was in her office alone. Nadia had gone home to shower and change, and Lana had gone back to her house to relieve her husband of kid duty. The tumble of boys was five deep when she and Lana mixed their broods. Good thing they piled together like puppies, no one making familial distinction when they were together.

  When the buzz came from the cellphone in her hand, it startled her. Sophia brought the phone to her ear and read out the alphanumeric code that told her contact that it was safe to speak.

  “You have information?”

  “I think I’ve found exactly what we’ve been looking for,” Sophia said. “There’s a tablet that needs a new home that some would consider museum quality.”

  “Some? You can give this piece a clean bill of health for shipping?”

  Sophia swallowed hard. “I can.”

  “Thank you. Forward the pertinent data through the normal channels, we’ll handle it from here.”

  “Okay. Moving forward with the other project.” Sophia picked up a book from her desk and turned to put it back on the shelf. “I can’t make an assessment from the picture you sent.”

  “You’ll see Jael on Monday. He’ll be travelling with the diplomatic corps through customs. You can figure it out then.”

  “Oh good.” Sophia paced over to the window and looked out at her leaf-strewn lawn. The flowers had been pounded into the ground by the relentless fury of the storm, but she could see that they were already pulling their faces up in search of sunlight. “Be aware that the location of our last conversation is no longer secure. I’m picking up unusual activity.”

  “I’ll make sure that information gets to the right ear.”

  The line went dead.

  If all went well, this was the deal they’d been looking for. Then this chapter of her life would be over. Wouldn’t that feel like victory? Sophia’s mind travelled to last night’s fiasco with the crystal goblet. Success was probably too much to hope for. She looked at the boys’ picture hanging on her wall. “I’m trying to do what’s best,” she told their smiling faces.

  Brian knocked three times in a tattoo he had created so he could go in and out without startling her. He had a box on his shoulder. Sophia was glad she’d made it through her call before he burst in.

  “Special delivery,” he said as the roar of the mail truck moved up the hill.

  Sophia clapped her hands as she hustled over to take the box. A smile lit her face.

  “You look like a kid on Christmas morning.” Brian grinned. “What’s in here?”

  She ran her finger over the tape sealing the box. “It’s pretty awesome. Got a knife? I’ll show you.”

  Sophia dug through the protective Styrofoam and pulled out the black object wedged inside. “This,” she announced like a new mother presenting her first child, “is a specialized 3-D digital camera with an integrated computer system to perform measurements, and map planes, developed with the help of archaeologists. Nadia and I are testing it out.” She held it up to her eye and focused on different objects around the room. She stalled on Brian’s face. “Imagine an FBI computer system that has pictures of people all over the United States, all over the world.”

  Brian leaned forward in his chair to accept the camera she held out for him.

  “Their computers can quickly search through their databanks to find people whose physical attributes match those of their unknown subject, thereby giving them a name and probably a file of information about that person, right?” Sophia’s smile faded when she saw an odd little something in Brian’s eyes.

  There and gone again as he held his typically impassive expression.

  “This camera is meant to gather data for a similar database. Only this one would be for artifacts. Our goal at AACP, as you well know, is to protect antiquities and keep them in their country of origin. With so many pieces flowing through the black markets and into private collections, how do we prove that the piece was taken illegally? We’ve had a hard time with that. From our discussions, and talking with people involved in CSI, we came up with the idea of equipping our teams in hot areas with these cameras. They’re cheap. Thirty-four dollars each. That was a main criterion—or we simply couldn’t get them widely distributed. Our volunteers will collect information and send it back to us.”

  Brian was looking over the camera he held, turning it this way and that. “Sophia, did I ever tell you why I was assigned to your team?”

  “No, you didn’t.” Sophia curled onto the couch and pulled the throw blanket over her feet.

  He leaned forward until his forearms rested on his knees, letting the camera dangle from his hands. He was eye to eye with her. There was a quality to him of earnestness. Solemnity, even. “I was in Bagdad in April 2003.” He stalled for a moment, then nodded his head, as if he’d made up his mind. “We went in fast and hard with our sights set on toppling Saddam Hussein. We were in the center of Bagdad in the blink of an eye. My platoon was in Sadr City and crossed over the Tigris. My squad was sent to the National Museum of Iraq. There were reports of looters, and we were supposed to clear them out. Which we did. T
he museum workers were there, old men with canes, young men with sticks. They had been trying, without much success, to protect the artifacts. They begged us to leave people in place there. To park some tanks in the yard. But we were on the move. We couldn’t stay put.” He drew his thumb down his jaw line. “To be perfectly honest, we knew all along that the museum was at risk.”

  Sophia was staring at her knotted hands. She was trying to absorb the story without jumping to conclusions. She had sat by her television set and screamed at the military to get themselves in there and protect the museum. Brian had been there. She had unknowingly sent waves of hostility toward him at that time. But Brian was a Marine following orders, not a decision maker.

  “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’s 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 anyone. 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 the 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.