by Rob Jones
“Pretty, aren’t they?” Gates said.
“I see what you mean, boss,” Lewis said. “I have never in my life seen anything like these before. What about you, Quinn?”
She shook her head, eyes fixed on the daggers. “Nu-huh.”
“Amy?”
“Not really, but they look similar to some of the ancient Egyptian daggers we’ve retrieved.”
“I agree,” Gates said. “But right now, we’re more interested in the missing statue in the Nazi photograph. There’s very little information on the daggers, but we think there’s an inscription running around the base of the statue that might tell us more about where all these artifacts come from.”
“So where do we go from here?” Lewis said.
“In the raid, we also found a shipping manifest that detailed the names of various high-profile antiquities collectors, some clean, others not so clean. We can’t tell who got the winged statue, but from some of the information on the manifest we believe Oskar Rorschach is very interested in buying it.”
A new, fresh silence fell over the room. They all new about Rorschach, too.
“How do we know this?” Blanco asked.
“Because Rorschach is an insane collector of antiquities and would sell his own mother if it meant getting a rare piece?” Lewis said.
Gates smirked. “Better than that. We found a laptop in the raid and went through the emails. Rorschach is dealing with a third party anonymous dealer who was also buying from Cavallo. We found data going to Rorschach saying that the winged statue is in the possession of another collector and Rorschach wants to buy it.”
“Which is more than we’ve been able to get on Rorschach after months of surveillance,” Amy said. “Damn it! I should have been able to get hold of this information by now. It’s not like it’s a small operation – he has a staff of dozens, including several Americans. I should have gotten hold of this. I feel like I’ve let everyone down.”
Gates gave her a reassuring smile. “Take it easy, Amy. This is tricky stuff. As we all know, someone is trying to buy up and control the entire antiquities market, and it looks like Rorschach is either a serious part of the operation or maybe even running it. He’s going to play his cards close to his chest.”
Amy shuddered. “And we all know who you mean when you say someone.”
“Let’s not get into conspiracy theories just yet,” Gates said. “Jodie, you look worried.”
“It’s just what you said earlier about Nazis and nothing like the statue existing anywhere on earth. Now you’re talking about them being behind this. It’s making me nervous.”
“That freaked me out, too,” Lewis said. “Just being honest.”
Quinn turned her mouth into a mock-pout. “A rough tough marine like you?”
“Hey,” Lewis said sarcastically. “I’m a very emotional person.”
Amy fixed her eyes on Gates. “Presuming we can locate the statue and intercept Rorschach’s purchase of it, I’m guessing we’re getting an expert in to authenticate all this stuff?”
“We’re looking into it, but it’s going to have to be someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of archaeology and with top secret military clearance.”
“They must be a dime a dozen,” Quinn said. “I’ll call 1936 and get Indiana Jones to come over.”
A low laugh filled the room, but the tense atmosphere soon returned. Amy turned away from the daggers and looked at her boss. “You can’t be thinking about sending this material off site?”
Gates gave a low, nervous chuckle. “Hell no. I doubt these things will ever leave the FBI’s dark and dingy vaults for the rest of eternity.”
“So, what then?” Lewis asked.
“It means getting someone to come in, doofus,” Quinn said. “Right?”
Gates nodded. “Right.”
Any felt a twinge of anxiety. Already, she was starting to get a bad feeling about all of this. “You have someone in mind?”
“Sure.”
“Who?”
“Just a guy.”
“Just a guy?”
“Sure.”
“A Yale guy?”
Gates shook his head.
“A Harvard guy?”
Another shake, this time accompanied by a smile. “Oxford. His name is Dr Max Hunter and he’s at the top of the pile. He’s the lead field archaeologist at UNESCO and a former military man.”
“Wait – Oxford, as in England,” Lewis said. “As in what the hell happened to Top Secret classified stuff being seen by American eyes only?”
Gates raised an eyebrow. “Not really. More as in, the world’s leading authority on ancient ceremonial weapons and religious statues. We need to get to him first because if Rorschach is after the winged statue he’s also going to be trying to get hold of Hunter.”
“But what about the Top Secret classified stuff being seen by American eyes only?” Lewis repeated.
“He already has the necessary clearance to look at the daggers, Ben, so you can climb back into your crib and calm down.”
“And don’t forget the pacifier,” Quinn said.
More laughter took some of the tension out of the room, and as her initial fears began to mellow, Amy suddenly felt a flash of excitement. “How quickly can we organize this?”
“Usually pretty fast, but not this time.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“We’re not one hundred percent on this, but we think Hunter just got kidnapped in Iraq.”
Lewis shook his head and sighed. “Holy crap, by ISIS?”
“We don’t know. I spoke with Adil al-Amari. As some of you know, he is the head of the Heritage Department at Nineveh Antiquities, which is part of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. He’s had a ton to deal with over the last couple of years, including ISIS and ISIL attacks on heritage sites and even looters digging tunnels beneath Jonah’s Tomb in an attempt to steal various artifacts thought to be buried there. He thinks maybe looters snatched Hunter.”
“I’m not liking the sound of this,” Blanco said. “Do we know what Hunter was doing out there in the first place?”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “What was he looking for?”
“We don’t know that either. Al-Amari wasn’t giving anything away.”
Jodie pulled a cigarette out of her pack and rolled it in her fingers. “Sounds like we don’t know anything.”
“Not true,” Gates said. “We know we need to locate this winged statue and we also know we have to get to Hunter before Rorschach. This means Amy has some serious work to do.”
Amy smiled grimly. “You can say that again.”
“So what are you waiting for?” Gates said.
“Leave it with me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
With moonlight streaking across the northern Iraqi desert, Hunter watched Brodie McCabe waft the fly sheet aside and step inside the big, military tent. Behind him, some sap inside a piece of wood on the campfire exploded. One of the archaeologists gasped and fell back off his portable folding chair. Another made a hearty joke in German and the rest of the small group fell about laughing as their friend dusted himself down and set his chair back up.
Time slowed, and Hunter started counting stars. The soldiers around him never lowered their rifles and kept a safe distance from him. After how he had fought in the tomb, they knew what was good for them. There was some small talk in Arabic, and then they passed a cigarette around. When McCabe came out of the tent, one of them threw it to the ground and crushed it with the heel of his army boot. Hunter saw McCabe was holding the canvas bag, but there was something much smaller in it now.
“What now?” Hunter said. “We wait here all night for the police?”
McCabe seemed distracted. “The police aren’t coming out here anymore.”
“What?”
“My employer has modified the plan.”
“What are you going on about, Brodie? Your employer seems to have had quite an effect on you. You’ve gon
e white.”
“You are to be executed tonight. Immediately, in fact.” He barked some orders at the soldiers and they grabbed him roughly by the shoulders. “I’m sorry to say, you were caught by these soldiers in the act of stealing a glorious winged bull dating from the neo-Assyrian period.”
He opened the bag up and showed the winged bull to Max. “I know you’ll appreciate such a wonderful piece. We found it not far from here while we were looking for the much more precious winged statue you found to the east. Unfortunately, when the soldiers ordered you to stop, you ignored them and they were forced to fire on you.”
“You can’t be serious, Brodie. I know you’re an arsehole, but this has to be a new low even for you. You’re talking about cold-blooded murder.”
“And defamation of character, Max. Just imagine what UNESCO will make of it all when they read about how naughty you’ve been, not to mention your old college in Oxford. The world-famous Max Hunter caught giving into temptation and selling stolen artifacts to ISIL.”
“You’re having a laugh.”
“No, I am not.” McCabe put the canvas bag over Max’s shoulder. He spoke in Arabic and dismissed the soldiers.
“Removing the witnesses?” Hunter said.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Max. One quick shot and it’s over. Painless. Now turn around.”
Hunter raised his chin and stared McCabe in the eye, not looking away or blinking once. When he spoke, his voice was steady and hard with defiance. “If you want to shoot me, then you can look me in the eye when you do it.”
“Very well, as you wish!”
McCabe reached down for his pistol and fumbled with the leather holster flap. It was the only break Hunter needed. He bent his knees and sprang forward into McCabe’s body, burying his shoulder in his enemy’s chest and bowling him over.
McCabe crashed onto the sand with a soft thud and brought his arms up to push Hunter away. The London archaeologist had one chance left, and that was the heavy-duty headbutt he now drove into McCabe’s nose, smacking his head into the ground. He cried out in pain, his smashed nose producing a thin, nasal, squealing sound.
Hunter eyed the knife on McCabe’s belt and now rolled to the side so his back was facing the other man’s body. Pulling the knife out, he manoeuvred it around until the blade was pointing upwards and then used the serrated edge to slash through the zip tie and free his hands.
McCabe was on his feet now, blood streaming down his pulped nose and rage in his bulging eyes. He scooped a thick river of blood coursing over his lips and chin and flicked it on the sand at his shoes. “You bastard, Hunter. I’m going to enjoy this.”
He moved his arm down to his holster, he flicked open the flap and reached for the gun, but it wasn’t there.
“Looking for this?” Hunter said.
McCabe stared open-mouthed at his old nemesis. “How the hell did you get that?”
“When I took the knife. I keep telling you, Brodie, I really am a very disarming sort of guy. Now, raise your hands to the heavens and pray for mercy.”
“You wouldn’t dare shoot me.”
“Why not?”
“Because every armed man in this camp will be over here in seconds.”
“That’s my problem,” Hunter said. “Yours is that when I’m finding a solution to it you’ll be lying on the sand with a bullet through your head.”
“Go ahead,” McCabe said. “Because thirty seconds later you’ll be lying next to me with a hundred bullets in you, not one.”
“You might be a lying, thieving, snivelling toerag, Brodie, but you do make a good point.”
Hunter didn’t wait for a reply, but spun on his heel with the gun in his hand and made a break for the tents. McCabe screamed for the soldiers to come back just as Hunter slipped out of sight and disappeared behind one of the tents. He was away, but he didn’t have long. He had to get back to Gaius’s tent, retrieve the statue and try and find a way out of the camp.
He sprinted back to the military tent, diving to the ground and rolling up to the base of the canvas. Soldiers yelled and flashlight beams criss-crossed over the campsite. Spitting out a mouthful of sand, he darted his arm out and lifted the side of the canvas a few inches. There, on the table in the middle of the tent, the winged statue sat serenely in a shaft of moonlight coming in through a slit in the front flap.
“Come to daddy.” Hunter felt like laughing, but the sound of the soldiers shouting as they searched the camp for him, closer now, wiped the smile from his face. He slid beneath the side of the tent and crawled closer to the table. It was tight, with the rim of the canvas scraping against his shoulders as he went through.
He heard footsteps and quickly crawled back to the gap in the tent. Rolling back outside, he cursed how close he had come, but then his mind was concentrated further by the sight of Gaius. He was in the darkness to the side of the table, on his knees and mumbling some sort of mantra, hands clasped before his chest in sombre prayer.
“What the hell?”
Hunter was shocked, but not deterred. He could take Gaius if he had to, and now moved to crawl under the canvas to retrieve the statue. He slipped his right arm under the tent wall and began to crawl back inside when the desperate, terrified screams of a woman stopped him in his tracks.
CHAPTER FIVE
He continued crawling inside the tent when a second bloodcurdling scream froze him to the spot once again, but this time Gaius snapped out of his meditation and sprang to his feet.
“Bollocks,” Hunter said. “What now?”
Gaius called out for McCabe who now ran into the tent.
“What’s going on?”
“Another looter, sir,” McCabe said, nervously wringing his hat in his hands.
“Another one?”
“I’ve ordered her immediate execution.”
“A good precaution.”
Hunter felt his blood to turn ice in his veins.
“What about Hunter?”
“He’s still on the loose, but we have soldiers combing every inch of the camp. There’s no way he can get out into the desert without someone on the perimeter seeing him and alerting us.”
“Kill the looter and bring Hunter to me.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Hunter watched McCabe slap his hat back on and leave the tent. Gaius turned away and walked across to the statue. He picked it up and held it in the moonlight. “Not long now.”
Hunter knew this was his only chance. When McCabe had executed the woman, he would be next. If he was going to grab the statue and make a break for it, that time was now, while Gaius was alone. Now or never.
The woman screamed again, closer this time. Hunter turned and looked through the guy ropes to see two soldiers dragging her away from the camp. She was wearing male clothing and her head was covered in a man’s keffiyeh headdress. In her hands was a bag filled with whatever she had stolen from the camp.
McCabe ordered the soldiers in Arabic and they ripped the bag from her hands and emptied it out onto the ground. Two or three small figurines and some clay pots tumbled out and fell over the moonlit sand. He barked more orders and the soldiers dragged her screaming away from an army truck and up to the top of a dune. When they marched back down to the bottom and pulled their rifles from their shoulders, he knew what happened next.
He turned his head back and looked under the canvas at the statue. The ornate form of the strange peachy silver color, the outstretched arms, the angelic curved wings and the serene, passive face. It stared back at him in the silver light of the moon and he was only dimly aware of Gaius dropping to his knees and once again praying to it.
Now or never.
He reached toward it, but the looter’s screams stopped him in his tracks again.
Now or never, Max.
He moved toward the statue once again, silently crawling under the canvas until his hand was only inches away from the table. Then he heard the woman sobbing as the soldiers took up positio
n and slid cartridges into the chambers of their bolt-action rifles.
Damn it.
He slipped back out of the tent, sprang to his feet and ran down the gap between the two tents until he had a clear shot of the soldiers and McCabe. There was no time to take out McCabe because the soldiers were the ones about to kill the woman. He knew when he fired on them, McCabe would be gone and so would his chances of the getting the statue, but he had to do it to save the looter’s life.
He aimed his gun at one of the soldiers and fired, killing him swiftly with one professionally aimed bullet to the head. The other soldier spun around but he had anticipated the move and now fired on him, too. His body slumped to the floor a second after the first man’s and McCabe sprang out of sight like a gazelle, taking cover behind a tent and yelling for more soldiers.
The woman didn’t wait for another chance. She turned and fled down behind the dune and was out of sight a second later. Hunter figured if anyone knew which way to get out of here then it was her. He sprinted up after her but the soldiers opened fire on him.
He dropped to his belly and crawled under the chassis of the truck. It was cramped and hot; his shoulder blades rubbed against the exhaust as he wormed his way further beneath the military vehicle. Crawling out of the other side, he made a break for it. When he reached the brink of the dune, he stopped and scanned the area north of it where she had gone.
He found her easily in the moonlight and could hear her footfall as she ran into the night. He dived down the dune’s slipface and followed her. Looking behind at the top of the dune, he saw the silhouettes of McCabe and at least half a dozen more soldiers, plus some of the archaeologists as they scanned the bottom of the dune for the fleeing thieves.
“There!” McCabe yelled. “They’re over there!”
Hunter caught up with the woman, and the two of them ran side by side as the soldiers made their way down the sandy slope. One slipped and cartwheeled down the leeward slope all the way to the bottom and another opened fire on them in the moonlight.
