‘Hello, Thierry. I have a message from Abby.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ Pierrot gasped. He was about the same age as Thierry, with receding greasy hair, close-set eyes and a weaselly way about him. To Ben’s eye the guy had the look of a small-time drug dealer. He would happily have left Pierrot for Fraticelli’s boys, under different circumstances.
Thierry shook his head in amazement. ‘I can’t believe it’s you, man,’ he said in the whispery voice. ‘Christ, you haven’t aged a day.’
‘Wish I could say the same about you, Thierry. You look like shit.’ Which was harsh, but true. Time had not been too kind to the forger since Ben had last seen him. He looked weary and worn down and gaunt, and the bush of hair had mostly disappeared.
‘Abby sent you?’ Thierry asked ruefully.
Ben picked up Fraticelli’s sabre and ran his thumb lightly along the edge of the blade. It was razor-sharp. He moved around behind Thierry’s chair and started cutting him free. ‘She says she’s going to burn all the junk you left at her place. She also seemed to think you might have got into a little trouble. Wonder how she got that idea.’
‘We’re in a shitload more of it now. I was handling things just fine before you turned up.’
Gratitude was a wonderful thing. Ben said, ‘Oh, I could see that.’ The rope holding Thierry’s wrists fell loose. He slashed his ankles free and then started working on Pierrot.
Thierry stood up stiffly and rubbed his wrists, frowning anxiously at the unconscious bodies on the floor. ‘I’m serious. We’re totally fucked, man. Do you know who you just worked over? These guys are Unione Corse. Fraticelli’s a made guy. Now there’ll be a thousand of the bastards looking for us. And you, too.’
Unione Corse was the Corsican mafia. The kind of guys who’ll break your arms and fuck your knees up with hammers. And then some. Abby had no idea of the kind of nasty characters her boyfriend had been borrowing money from. This bunch had moved on from breaking arms and legs well before they got into their teens.
‘Then maybe it’s time to get out of town,’ Ben said. ‘Your buddy here as well. But first, there’s something I need you to do for me.’
Thierry brightened a little. ‘You mean, like, a job?’
‘You look as though you could do with one.’
‘It’s been a while. Work’s kind of thin on the ground lately.’
‘Are you up for it?’
‘You bet. Just like old times, huh?’
Ben said, ‘Then let’s talk. But not here.’ He finished freeing Pierrot and told him, ‘Pack your stuff. One small suitcase. Leave the rest.’
‘This is my place,’ Pierrot whined.
‘Not any more, it isn’t. When your downstairs neighbours see the blood coming through the ceiling and call the cops, it’s going to get a little crowded around here. You can’t come back any time soon. So hurry it up.’
Pierrot didn’t look too thrilled about abandoning his rathole apartment, but Thierry was looking more pleased by the second. ‘Oh, Ben?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thanks for, uh, you know, saving us.’
‘I needed the exercise. Now let’s go.’
The fat guard outside in the corridor was showing signs of recovery, so Ben knocked him out properly and dragged his corpulent bulk inside the apartment by the ankles. Then they pulled the door shut against the shattered frame and hurried downstairs, out of the building, past the Corsican boys’ Audi and up the street to where the Alpina was parked. Ben tossed Pierrot’s case in the boot, and they took off.
Thirty minutes later they were back at the safehouse. Pierrot was still sulking and hadn’t spoken another word. Ben ignored him, brewed up more coffee, then sat Thierry down at the table in the living room and told him what he needed.
‘Whose is it?’ Thierry asked, frowning at Romy’s phone.
‘You don’t need to know,’ Ben said. ‘You just need to unlock that video file. Think you can do that for me?’
Thierry spent a few moments fiddling with the phone, deep in concentration. ‘Yeah, I reckon I can.’
‘How long?’
‘Twenty minutes, give or take.’
‘You’re still my guy,’ Ben said.
Thierry Chevrolet might have seen better times and lost his sparkle, but the kinds of skills he possessed didn’t fade with age. Ben left him alone to work, and went over to smoke at the window while Thierry hunched over the smartphone at the table. Pierrot was still lurking, silent and morose, in the background. Ben would gladly have sent him out on some errand just to get rid of him, if he could have trusted the idiot wouldn’t return with half the Corsica mafia on his heels.
Eighteen minutes and three more cups of coffee later, Thierry leaned back in his chair, looked over at Ben with a sly grin and whispered, ‘We’re in.’
Chapter 14
‘Don’t get too excited, chief,’ Thierry said as Ben went over to see. ‘It isn’t exactly what you’d call cinema quality.’
Pierrot was suddenly all interested. ‘What is it? Porno?’
Ben gave him a look that made him stay in place and keep his mouth shut. Turning back to Thierry he asked, ‘Did you see any of it?’
‘You’re the client. It’s none of my business what’s on there. I only looked at the first few seconds. Long enough to see what it isn’t.’ Thierry handed over the phone. Ben took it and sat at the table to look.
The video was less than a minute long. That made each second of its duration seem all the more precious, assuming the clip was of any value at all. After the first five seconds, Ben’s heart was beginning to sink, because he could hardly make anything out. Everything was dark and jerky, just a confusion of shapes and shadows. All that was clearly visible was the purple time and date stamp in the bottom left corner of the screen, which just confirmed the date on the file label, from three days ago.
Seven seconds in, something appeared on the right-hand edge of the frame, and moved inwards to fill a third of the screen. It was the vertical edge of what appeared to be a concrete wall, pitted and craggy. The camera’s focus sharpened on that, making the background even more blurry and indistinct. All Ben could glean from what he was seeing was that the person doing the filming – presumably Romy herself, though he had no way to be certain – was shooting the video clip in a furtive, clandestine way from behind the wall, not wanting to be seen. She, if it was her, seemed to be trying to angle the camera past its edge, around the corner, to film something happening further away. But the lighting was just too dark to see what.
Ben said, ‘This is terrible.’
Thierry shrugged. ‘You get what you get, man.’
As bad as the visual quality was, the audio was even worse. All Ben could hear through the phone’s tinny speaker was a lot of white noise. The phone mic was picking up all kinds of background sounds. He was sure he could hear Romy’s breathing, which was restrained, like someone trying to remain undetected, but fast and urgent, like someone very afraid of getting caught. He thought back to the one and only time he’d seen her alive. She’d been frightened then, too. Clearly terrified of whoever she thought was following her.
Had Romy witnessed something, Ben wondered. What were you doing? What did you see?
Somewhere in the middle of the white noise, barely audible, was the sound of muffled voices. Two of them, Ben thought. Both men, judging from the low-range tones. He strained his ears to catch what was being said, but it was impossible to make out.
‘Is there anything you can do to make the sound clearer?’ he asked Thierry.
‘Hey, I’m a genius, not a bloody magician. You might be able to clean it up a little, but not without access to some decent audio editing software. Even then, no guarantees. You can’t bring out what isn’t there to start with.’
Ben said nothing, and went on watching what he couldn’t see and listening to what he couldn’t hear. Then, eighteen seconds in, Romy must have shifted position slightly because the vertical edge of the wall
suddenly slid out of shot towards the right. The camera’s autofocus was suddenly able to latch onto more of the background and suck more light from the murky shadows. The audio was still bad, but now Ben could make out more visual detail.
The scene had taken place inside some kind of warehouse or industrial building, or it could have been a cellar: a large, dimly-lit space with concrete pillars holding up the roof. Ben realised it was another of the same pillars, not a wall, that Romy was hiding behind to film the clip on her phone. She was doing her best to keep the camera steady, but the picture kept jerking and wandering and made it hard to see. Ben started freeze-framing the clip to get a better look.
At the far end of the warehouse, or cellar, rows of strange whitish objects were lined up against a wall. Some seemed to be covered with shrouds or tarpaulins, others were more clearly visible. Ben realised that they were statues. Old ones, he guessed by the look of them. Some were human figures, others of animals and mythical beasts. Some smaller in size, others so tall and large that they loomed up towards the ceiling of the warehouse. Ben let the playback roll for a few more seconds, then paused it again to catch a clear view of a massive stone creature that appeared to have the head and face of a man, the body of an elephant. Or maybe a bull. Either way it was an enormous piece of sculpture that stood nearly as high as the rafter beams, several metres tall.
It looked oddly familiar to him. Where had he seen something like it before? He thought back, then flashed on a memory of the one time he’d ever visited the Louvre museum, right here in Paris, years ago, and seen similar exhibits on display. Those had dated back several millennia, he remembered. Brought to France within the last couple of centuries, from some ancient part of what was now the Middle East.
Then Ben recalled a more recent memory, of his conversation with Romy’s colleague Jeanne at the Institute, and Jeanne telling him that Romy had recently returned from a field trip overseas. He wished he knew more about where she’d gone. He could only guess that, since her work involved the preservation of ancient works of art like these, her field trips might take her to places where such objects were kept warehoused between being salvaged from their original homes and being relocated to museums in Europe and elsewhere. That much made sense – but what didn’t make sense was why she was filming this so secretively, as though she wasn’t supposed to be there. Who was she hiding from?
Ben unpaused the image and let the video play on. Nearly half a minute into the clip the image shifted again, panning a few degrees to the left. Ben realised that Romy was keeping so carefully hidden behind her pillar that she couldn’t actually see what she was trying to film, and was just taking pot luck at aiming the camera. The picture went wildly jerky for a few moments, then steadied again.
And that was when Ben saw the two men whose indistinct voices he could hear garbled in the background. It was just a brief glimpse, and he had to pause, rewind and pause again until he was able to freeze the frame just right. The pair were standing about midway between where Romy was hiding and the statues lined against the far wall. The angle of the shot captured them both in profile, side-on to the camera. From their body language it was clear that the conversation was intense and serious. One man was taller and darker than the other, but they were too small to make out their faces.
He asked Thierry, ‘Can I zoom in on this?’
Thierry tutted at Ben’s lack of expertise. ‘How can a guy be so damn good at some things, and so completely hopeless at others?’ He leaned over and showed Ben how to make the image bigger.
The zoomed-in shot of the two men was a little blurry, but clear enough.
The shorter man on the right was older, thicker around the middle and wearing the sort of light-coloured suit that well-to-do Europeans used to wear in tropical countries. He had a full head of silver hair and a craggy face, deeply tanned. Ben recognised him from his photo on the Institute website. It was Julien Segal, the archaeologist, Romy’s employer.
Which still didn’t explain why Romy was hiding from him and filming the conversation in secret. But the identity of the man on the left explained a great deal.
Taller, more powerfully built, dressed all in black and seemingly doing most of the talking, the man on the left was Nazim al-Kassar.
Chapter 15
Ben stared at the small, frozen image in his hands. And so now, at last, the first pieces of the puzzle were lining up together. What connection existed between a reputed antiquities conservation expert and a notorious terrorist, he couldn’t begin to understand. Just the fact that Segal was talking to Nazim at all was a glaring red alarm beacon. And here they were, caught on camera together, only days ago.
Little wonder Romy was hiding. She must have known what kind of trouble she’d have been in if they’d spotted her. What suspicions had alerted her to sneak into the warehouse and film their conversation?
Ben badly needed to know, just as he eagerly wanted to hear what they’d been talking about. He let the video run on once more, holding the phone close to his ear and straining as hard as he could to sift their dialogue from the mess of the audio track. Nearly all of it was just too garbled and muffled to catch. But here and there he was able to pick out a word. They were talking Arabic, which it made sense for Segal to be able to speak, in his line of work. Ben thought he caught the word ‘shuhna’, referring to a ‘shipment’. A moment later Nazim pointed towards the statues and Ben heard him say something about ‘humula’, which Ben recognised as the Arabic word for ‘cargo’. Then there were a couple of passes of dialogue that he couldn’t catch a word of, before he heard Segal mention ‘almakan almaqsud’, meaning ‘destination’.
Then the conversation was over. Ben watched as Nazim turned away from the older man and started walking towards an exit off-camera, with Segal sheepishly following. Their path was going to take them straight past Romy’s hiding place. The picture, already shaky, now scrambled into nothing as she darted back around the edge of the pillar to avoid being seen. Ben could hear the sharpness of her breathing, caught by the sensitive mic. He could almost smell her fear.
An instant later, the video clip ended. All fifty-two seconds of it.
Ben laid the phone down on the table and lit another Gauloise. Was Romy’s employer doing some kind of deals with Nazim al-Kassar? What was the shipment? From the little that Ben had understood of their conversation, it looked as though the cargo they’d been talking about consisted of the old statues stored inside the warehouse. Since when was a murdering fanatic like Nazim in the antiquities export and import business? It seemed insane. Especially considering that Segal’s business partner was supposed to be dead.
Romy must have thought it was insane, too. Ben tried to picture her movements after the two men left the warehouse. Waiting there, hidden, terrified, until the coast was clear. Sneaking out unseen, hoping she had left no trace that could bring suspicion on herself. He wondered what she must have been thinking as she travelled back to France, perhaps sitting on the plane right next to the man she’d covertly filmed and whose secret plans she’d somehow stumbled into learning. The fact that she’d kept the video clip encrypted on her phone had to mean that she was intending to use it somehow. As leverage against Segal? Blackmail? Or to expose him? Whatever her idea had been, she’d been too slow, or too careless. Somehow they’d found her out. And she’d paid the price for it.
Ben could answer none of the questions that buzzed in his mind, without knowing more.
‘If we can clean up the audio quality,’ he said to Thierry, ‘I’ll pay you two thousand euros. That’s on top of the thousand for what you’ve already done. Plus expenses. Make me a shopping list of whatever kit you need. I’ll see to it you have everything you want.’
Thierry shrugged. ‘I owe you for getting me out of the shit, but I won’t say I couldn’t use the cash. I’m flat broke and I’ve got to get out of Paris.’
‘We’ll take care of that. Meantime, you can lie low here. The Corsicans will never find you.’
‘I appreciate your help, chief.’
‘Just like old times,’ Ben said. ‘And there’s something else I need you to do for me.’
Across Paris, Nazim al-Kassar was preparing to meet with his elder superior, Ibrahim al-Rashid, in a few hours’ time when the old man’s plane landed. Nazim feared few things in this life, and even fewer people. But though he appeared outwardly calm, he was nervous about the meeting for which al-Rashid was flying in specially from his current base in Pakistan. It was a rare event for the venerable, wise Imam to leave his protected haven, underlining the critical importance of their plan. With so much at stake and the date of the shipment fast approaching, Nazim had a great deal on his mind.
Nazim’s driver in the silver Mercedes was an associate named Muhammad, as many were, in their different spellings. After leaving the woman’s apartment they had sped across the city to the expensive hotel where Nazim had a luxury suite under the false name of an Omani businessman called Khalil Alfazari.
Nazim had instructed Muhammad to wait downstairs in the lobby, and gone up to his room alone. The first thing he did upon entering the suite was to wash his hands very carefully and thoroughly. This was required after touching an infidel woman, for they were considered unclean in the sight of Allah and the dictates of Nazim’s faith strictly forbade him from taking part in prayer unless he were first cleansed.
Once that important duty was done, he had stripped off the tainted clothes that would not be worn again, and stepped into the marble shower. He’d washed himself all over and let the hot water pummel his broad, muscular shoulders as he reflected on his morning’s work. He was glad to have taken care of the Juneau woman personally. It would have taken only a snap of his fingers to have had one of his trusted associates do it for him, but Nazim believed strongly that cleansing the world of another filthy, shameless infidel whore would bring him closer to Allah. Moreover, she had posed a serious threat to their plans. Her elimination had been ordered without a second’s hesitation.
House of War Page 8
