Authors: Graham Brown
Bidding began on the next item, and Najir offered the iPad back to Danielle.
“Want to finish me off?”
Danielle smiled. Despite Najir’s dour expression, she had no doubt that a U.S. government check would be forthcoming to replenish his bank account.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got what we came for.”
She turned to where the guards were boxing up the scroll. They placed it in the case and moved to seal it, but as one of the guards poured the wax, a minor vibration shook the room.
It was very slight, almost unfelt, but enough to make the filaments in the track lighting dim for an instant and a few glasses clink almost inaudibly together.
Danielle glanced around the room. The burning candles moved sideways for a second, as if air had been sucked from the room.
No one else seemed to notice. Bidding on the hoplite’s staff was still going strong; the sounds of whispers and quiet murmurs from the other alcoves continued. But the hair on Danielle’s neck stood up.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
Najir nodded.
“Let’s get out of here.”
She put the champagne glass down and stepped forward just as a heavier boom sounded.
Still distant, this one shook things more visibly. Dust snowed down from the rafters; bottles clinked together on the wet bar. A glass fell to the floor.
This time everyone noticed.
Danielle and Najir moved first, pushing toward the exit, but another explosion rocked the building, blowing the door open and sending a wave of dust barreling toward them.
D
anielle crouched down and covered her nose in an attempt to keep from choking on the dust.
Najir gave her a handkerchief, which helped a little.
“Do you think we should go?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure. The explosion had sounded like a stun grenade used somewhere down the hall. She thought of the armed men they’d passed there.
Listening through the open door, she heard shouting, and then one of the guards stumbled into the main room, bleeding.
The thin man rushed up to him, and the two of them tried to close and bar the door; but just then it was smashed inward. Both the thin man and the Arab were flung away from it.
One of the auction guards fired a weapon and bullets began flying through the chamber. Danielle dove back into the alcove.
Lebanese words were shouted through the chamber.
“We are under arrest,” Najir said, putting his hands up.
“Arrest?” she asked.
“It seems this is a raid.”
“You guys own the police,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Someone here must owe a bigger chit,” he said.
The thin man backed into the alcove with them, hands
above his head. The uniformed troopers moved in, pointing guns in each alcove, taking positions near the center of the room. Fifteen feet away, too far to lunge for. Another figure walked by slowly, inspecting the situation. He seemed to be their commander. He looked briefly at Najir and Danielle and then moved on, examining the remaining artifacts.
Danielle’s mind flashed back to what had happened in Paris. The men who killed Ranga posing as police. She thought about his statement,
They are everywhere and they are nowhere
. That could only be if they constantly seemed like others until revealing their plans.
“Something’s wrong here,” Danielle said.
“Yes, but it will be remedied,” the thin man said.
“No, it won’t,” she whispered, quietly enough so the trooper facing them could not hear. “This isn’t a raid—it’s a theft.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We have to do something or they’re going to kill us all,” she explained.
The thin man turned. “Are you insane?” he said. “Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I know who you are. You’re the number two here. That Arab guy who just took the door in the face, he’s your boss. He’s an Iraqi. Just low enough on the totem pole not to get his own playing card, but I’m guessing you’re one, too, and now you’re his lieutenant.”
“We are equal partners,” he said.
“Great, didn’t mean to insult you,” she said. “But either one of you should be able to tell what you’re seeing,” she said, then elaborated. “Look at their shoes. Do those look like soldiers’ shoes to you?”
The thin man glanced at the guards’ footwear: They were hiking boots, not polished soldiers’ boots like those of the men upstairs.
The leader walked by again, counting. He seemed to
be looking for something. His shoes were more professional, but they were a businessman’s shoes, not combat boots.
“Imposters,” the thin man whispered. “But what can we do?”
The leader of the faux troops stopped to speak with the two guards at the center of the room. Whispering in their own right, probably discussing execution orders.
“How did you get down here?” she asked.
“These are the catacombs. There are many ways.”
Before she could make an additional statement, the leader stepped toward their alcove. Without a word he grabbed Danielle by the hand and dragged her from the spot. She did not resist much. But that was to the man’s detriment, for he kept his grip halfheartedly.
As he glanced away toward the front door, Danielle flipped her hand, reversing the grip by grabbing the man’s arm under his elbow and twisting it. Her other arm came down like a hammer and shattered his elbow.
At almost the same moment Najir shoved the thin man toward one guard and lunged forward, tackling a third.
Danielle whipped around, grabbing the hoplite’s dory. She came up swinging, jamming the silver butt into the first guard’s neck and swinging the spear end around, smashing it across the temple of the other guard.
Four of the men who’d broken in were down or occupied, but the others had begun firing.
Danielle and Najir ducked into separate alcoves as gunfire erupted. From the rear of the chamber the auctioneer’s remaining security members returned fire.
The thin man scrambled to her side, crowding her.
“Get behind me,” she said, shoving him farther into the alcove. She needed room to swing the spear.
“Faisal!” she shouted.
“I’m all right,” a call came back. “Get out if you can!”
She turned to the thin man. “Where’s the exit? The one you came in through?”
The thin man pointed toward the back of the room, but there was no way to make it without getting shredded from one or both sides. Shells cut close to the wall, blasting bits of the stone out.
She glanced forward. The men were dragging their injured comrades toward the front door, but they had something else with them. And from the size and shape of the box, Danielle guessed what it was.
“They have the scroll!” she shouted.
“Then I’d better get my money back!” Najir yelled.
The last of the men stepped near to the door, and then Danielle smelled something far worse than smoke. Gasoline.
As she looked around the edge, a book of lit matches was tossed through the closing door. It landed on a pool of liquid that could only be petroleum. In an instant the front of the room was ablaze.
The gunfire ceased but the smoke and heat grew quickly in the unventilated room.
“We have to go now!” she shouted.
Najir emerged from his alcove, limping and bleeding.
Danielle grabbed him and supported him.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”
She looked at the thin man. “You’d better show us the way out now.”
“This way,” he said.
With the thin man leading the way and Danielle still carrying the dory in her hand, the group moved to the back, checking for survivors and dragging the wounded with them.
A stairwell opened beneath a trapdoor and the group took it down, arriving at a new level even with the water table of the city. A thin walkway ran beside a wide aqueduct filled with water.
The thin man pointed to a second stairwell he’d come down earlier.
It sounded like walking right back into trouble to Danielle. “They’ll probably be watching it,” she said. “What’s this way?”
“I don’t know,” the thin man said.
Danielle looked at the Iraqi.
He shook his head.
“Let’s find out,” she said.
Along the thin edge of the aqueduct, they traveled into absolute darkness. At one point the ledge disappeared completely and they were forced to wade in the storm drain for a half mile before spotting a shaft of light prying its way through the pitch dark. Another stairwell, poorly lit, but it seemed bright and cheery after the darkness of the tunnel.
They pushed through it and made their way to street level. Danielle and the thin man pushed the heavy grate up and over and the survivors of the incident began to drag their way out and disappear into the night.
The thin man and his boss remained behind, huddling with them in an alley lit only by blue moonlight.
“I must thank you,” the thin man said. “I should have known it wasn’t a raid. We bribe all the right people.”
“You can repay us with information,” Danielle said. “Starting with the names of the people who were at this party.”
“I cannot,” the man said. “Not if I wish to live.”
“What about addresses, where these people have their things delivered?” she asked. “Clearly no one walked out of here with a statue or a fifty-pound clay tablet or five-foot spear.”
“Banks in London, Cairo. Office buildings in Abu Dhabi,” he said. “They won’t do you much good.”
The man was afraid of blowback. “One name then,” she said. “Your bidder number four.”
“I told you, I cannot—”
“In case you missed it, he wasn’t around when the soldiers came in.”
The thin man hesitated, as if he was attempting to remember. He conferred in Arabic with the other Iraqi.
“He was angry about your last-minute infusion of cash,” the thin man said.
“And he took the scroll,” she said. “I didn’t see them carrying anything else out. Ten to one this was the backup plan,” Danielle said.
“I know him only as Marko,” the thin man said. “His account is here, his vetting was Greek, his delivery address is in Kuwait—Kuwait City.”
“And what about the copper scroll,” she said. “Where did it come from?”
“A private owner,” he said. “A man who buys and sells; he is not even a big player. I understand the scroll was found in the desert by Bedouins some years back. No one knows exactly where.”
“Why would anyone want something that bad?”
The thin man shook his head.
“Come on,” she demanded. “Half a dozen people have already been killed over it. It can’t just be art.”
“I have no idea what makes it so special to anyone. Until tonight, I expected few bids aside from Bashir. That is why it was originally paired with the statue.”
She glanced at Najir. He looked increasingly bad; blood continued to flow from his wound. They couldn’t wait much longer.
She looked back toward the thin man. “You have pictures of that scroll,” she said, looking back toward the thin man. “Better pictures than what I saw?”
The thin man nodded.
“I need them,” she said. “You get them to me, we’re square.”
The thin man spoke with the Iraqi for a second and then he nodded.
“Where do I send them?”
She pointed to her wounded host. “I’m getting Najir to the hospital. You get the pictures to him. He’ll know how to find me.”
O
n a day when the marine layer had burned off and the sun shone warmly over Southern California, Professor Michael McCarter sat on the rear porch of his son’s house, babysitting his five-year-old grandchild. The boy was attempting to hit an oversized plastic golf ball with an oversized plastic club. So far the little guy had hit almost everything else around him, including both of McCarter’s shins. But he hadn’t given up.
The sound of the phone ringing got McCarter’s attention. “You keep swinging,” he said. “Grandpa has to get the phone.”
The boy smiled with the type of gleam only a five-year-old could possess, and then whammed the head off one of the prize roses.
McCarter stepped inside, shaking his head and mumbling, “It’s a Cinderella story …”
He closed the screen door behind him and picked up the phone.
“Hello.”
“Professor,” a female voice said.
McCarter did not struggle to place it—they were too close for that—but his emotions were mixed. On the one hand, he cared greatly for the person on the other end of
that line. On the other hand, he now wished it had been a telemarketer.
“Please tell me you’re retired,” he said, “and you need a reference or a place to crash.”
“Afraid not,” she said. “Looking for some help. Knowledge really. Got a minute?”
McCarter felt his throat closing up. He’d worked with the NRI for the better part of two years, first as a consultant and then as an operative of some kind—he still wasn’t quite sure what his title had been. They’d turned out to be the two most thrilling, important, and mind-altering years of his life. They’d also been incredibly painful and dangerous. Having barely survived, he’d been damn glad when they were over.
Danielle and Hawker had been part of his world then, but he’d bid them farewell six months ago and hadn’t heard from them since. Not that he’d expected to, at least not until one or both came to their senses and gave up risking their necks around the world.
“I’m finally walking without a limp,” he said, thinking about the bullet wound that had almost cost him his leg.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not asking you to rejoin the team, just need your take on something.”
McCarter felt somewhat relieved by that statement. “Are you with Hawker?”
“He’s elsewhere right now. And I’m guessing he’s got his hands full, although probably in a much more interesting way than I do.”
McCarter wondered what she meant. He chose not to ask.
“So what have you gotten yourselves into now?” he said.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “But I have photographs of an ancient scroll that need to be looked at. Not a normal scroll, either. It’s made from pounded sheets of copper.”