“The basement storage area. There are five rooms down here. Few people in the museum even know this place exists. That’s why we thought the collection was safe. We were wrong, as you can see.”
He moved the candle in an arc. Its yellow light fell upon dozens of plastic fishing boxes thrown willy-nilly around the room.
“I’ve never seen such absolute chaos,” Carina whispered.
“The boxes held cylinder seals, beads, coins, glass bottles, amulets, and jewelry. Thousands of items are missing.” He brought the candle over to dozens of larger plastic boxes that lined the walls. “They didn’t bother with these. Apparently, they knew they were empty.”
Corporal O’Leary surveyed the wreckage with a street fighter’s eye for entrances and exits. “If you don’t mind my asking sir, how’d they know how to find this place?”
Nasir’s heavy features drooped and he gave a glum nod of his head. “You Americans aren’t the only ones who have reason to be embarrassed. We suspect someone on our staff with intimate knowledge of the museum alerted the thieves to this room. We have fingerprinted our staff, except for the head of security, who has not come back to reclaim his job.”
“I was wondering why I didn’t see any evidence of the door being forced,” Carina said.
“The thieves came into the basement the same way we did, but they had forgotten torches or never expected they would need them.” He picked up a piece of burned rubber foam. “They used this material from upstairs for torchlight. The stuff burns quickly and the fumes would have been terrible. We found a set of keys on the floor. They probably dropped the keys and couldn’t find them. They missed thirty cabinets with our best cylinder seals and tens of thousands of gold and silver coins. I’d guess about ten thousand excavated artifacts are missing. Hundreds of boxes were left intact, praise Allah.”
They filed through a doorway into a larger space filled with antiquities of every size and shape. “These are objects that were given a preliminary identification and were to be absorbed into the main collection as work allowed. Some have been stored here for years.”
“The footprints lead in here,” Carina said.
“The thieves evidently thought there was something of value in this room. We would have no way of knowing until we go over our inventory. We are far too busy trying to retrieve more precious items.”
“I heard there was an amnesty,” she said.
“That’s right. It has somewhat restored some of my faith in human nature. People have brought in thousands of items, including the mask of Warka. I expect that objects will continue to be returned, but, as you know, the most valuable ones are probably in the possession of some wealthy collector in New York or London.”
Carina sighed in agreement. The thefts had been carefully planned. The invasion took weeks to gear up. Unscrupulous dealers in Europe and the United States could take advance orders for specific objects from rich clients.
The antiquities business had become almost as lucrative as drug trafficking. London and New York were the main markets. Stolen antiquities from illegal excavations in Greece, Italy, and South America were often laundered through Switzerland, where objects can gain legal title after only five years in the country.
Carina stood in silence amid the empty boxes, apparently lost in thought. After a moment, she said, “Perhaps I can speed up the amnesty process.”
“But
She turned to the marine. “I’ll need your help, Corporal O’Leary.”
“I was ordered to comply with any request you asked for, ma’am.”
Carina spread her lips in a mysterious smile. “I was
Chapter 2
THE PAVEMENT SHOOK UNDER the treads of the twenty-five-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle, warning of the troop carrier’s approach long before it rumbled into view. By the time the vehicle had turned the corner and rolled down the boulevard, the man who’d been making his way along the deserted storefronts had slipped into an alley. He ducked into a doorway, where he would be invisible to the vehicle’s night vision scope.
The man watched the vehicle until it disappeared around another corner before he ventured from the alley. The thud of bombs that had presaged the advance of the American-led forces had stopped. The rattle of small-arms fire was constant but sporadic. Except for the firefights that ensued as the invaders mopped up pockets of resistance, there had been a pause in the battle as the coalition and the remnants of the defenders considered their next step.
He passed a defaced statue of Saddam Hussein, and walked another ten minutes until he came to a side street. Using a penlight that cast a thin red beam, he studied a city map, then he tucked the map and light back into his pocket and turned down the street.
Although he was a big man, several inches over six feet, he moved through the pitch-dark city as silently as a shadow. His stealth was a skill he had developed through weeks of training at a camp run by former members of the French Foreign Legion, U.S. Delta Force, and British Special Ops. He could infiltrate the most heavily guarded installation to carry out his mission. Although he was adept in the use of a dozen different methods of assassination, his weapon of choice was the crushing strength in his large, thick-fingered hands.
He had come a long way from his humble beginnings. His family had been living in a small town in the south of Spain when his benefactor found him. He’d been in his late teens and working in a slaughterhouse. He enjoyed the work of dispatching everything from chickens to cows and tried to bring some creativity to the task whenever he could, but something in him yearned for greater things.
It almost hadn’t happened. He had strangled an annoying coworker to death over a petty argument. Charged with murder, he had languished in jail while headlines made much of the fact that he was the son of the man who had been Spain’s official garroter back in the days when strangulation was the state-approved method of execution.
One day, the man who would become his benefactor arrived at the jailhouse in a chauffeur-driven car. He sat in the cell and told the young man, “You have a proud and glorious past and a great future.”
The youth listened with rapt attention as the stranger talked about the family’s service to the state. He knew that the youth’s father had been put out of work after the garrote machine was retired in 1974, how he had changed his name and retreated to a small farm, where the family pursued a pitiful, subsistence living, and died, penniless and brokenhearted, leaving a widow and child.
His benefactor wanted the young man to work for him. He paid off the jailers and the judge, gave the grieving family more money than the dead chicken plucker could have earned in a hundred lifetimes, and the charges against the young man disappeared. He was sent to a private school, where he learned several languages, and, after he graduated, he was trained in military skills. The professional killers who took him under their wing recognized, as had his benefactor, that he was a talented student. Soon he was being sent on solo missions to remove those who were selected by his benefactor. The phone call would come with instructions, the mission would be carried out, and money would be deposited in his Swiss bank account.
Before coming to Baghdad, he had murdered an activist priest who was stirring up opposition to one of his benefactor’s mines in Peru. He’d been on his way back to Spain to meet his benefactor when he got the message to slip into Iraq ahead of the American invasion, and there he had taken up residence in a small hotel and made the necessary contacts.
He had been disappointed to learn that his assignment was not to kill but to arrange for the removal of an object from the BaghdadMuseum. On the positive side, however, he had virtually a front-row seat to the invasion, with its resultant death and destruction.
He studied the map again and grunted with satisfaction. He was minutes away from his destination.
Chapter 3
WITH ELECTRICAL POWER OUT in the city, Carina had a hard time finding the squat concrete building in the older section of Baghdad. She had been there once before, in daylight, and not in the middle of a war. The building’s windows had been boarded over, giving it the aspect of a fortress. As she strode up to the thick wooden door, she could hear the pop of small-arms fire in the distance.
