20
Angela stepped inside her apartment and closed the door behind her. She was carrying two bags of shopping, which she took into the kitchen, then walked through into her bedroom to get changed. She pulled on a pair of jeans and jumper, returned to the kitchen and put away her shopping, then made a coffee. She was on her way into the lounge when she heard a faint knock from outside the apartment.
Angela stopped and for a couple of seconds just stared at the door. It hadn't sounded like someone knocking, more like something knocking against it. She put down her drink on the hall table, walked across to the door and peered through the spy-hole.
Her view was distorted, but the bulky shapes of two men outside her door were clear enough. One of them was in the act of raising a jemmy or crowbar to insert between the door and the jamb. And the other man was holding what looked like a pistol.
'Dear God,' Angela muttered, and stepped back, feeling her pulse starting to race.
With fingers made clumsy by nerves, she slipped the security chain into place, though she knew that wouldn't hold up the burglars for very long. If they'd brought a crowbar, they would probably have a bolt-cutter as well.
Her drink and almost everything else forgotten, she ran down the hall and into her bedroom, scooping up her handbag en route. She grabbed a warm jacket from her wardrobe, slipped her feet into a pair of trainers, picked up her laptop bag, checked that she had her passport, mobile and purse in her handbag, stuffed the phone charger in as well, and unlocked the back door of her flat, which gave access to the fire escape that ran down the back of the building.
She glanced down, checking that nobody was waiting at the bottom of the steel staircase, and pulled the door closed behind her. As she did so, she heard a cracking sound from inside her apartment, then a sharp snap that she guessed was the security chain being cut.
She didn't hesitate, just started running down the fire escape as fast as she could, glancing back up towards her apartment door every few steps. She was barely halfway to the street when two figures emerged. She saw them look straight at her, and then one of them started pounding down the fire escape, the impacts of his shoes making the metal staircase ring and shudder.
'Dear God,' Angela murmured again, and moved even faster, jumping the last few steps to each of the steel platforms as she neared the ground. But she could almost feel that her pursuer was gaining on her.
She hit the ground running, dived around the side of the building and headed for the street, where she hoped desperately she'd find crowds of people.
As she reached the corner of her apartment block, a man stepped out from the front of the building, his arms stretched wide as he grabbed for her.
For one heart-stopping moment she felt his hand grasping at her jacket, then she span round, swinging her laptop bag with all her strength. The heavy bag smashed into the side of his face and the man grunted with pain and staggered backwards, almost losing his footing on the damp grass. Angela sprinted past him, through the open pedestrian gate and out on to the pavement.
A handful of people were walking down the street, and she immediately saw a single black cab cruising down the road, its light illuminated. Angela whistled and waved her arm frantically at the driver, then looked behind her. The two men were still running after her, now only about twenty yards back.
The cab pulled into the kerb and stopped. Angela sprinted the last few yards, wrenched open the door and climbed in the back.
The driver had been watching through his window, and the instant the back door closed he powered the vehicle out into the traffic, directly in front of an approaching car whose driver had to hit the brakes hard to avoid a collision, and sounded a long indignant blast on his horn.
Angela glanced back. Her pursuers had stopped on the pavement, staring towards the taxi.
'Friends of yours?' the driver asked.
'God, no. And thank you. Thank you so much.'
'Right, where to, love?'
'Heathrow airport,' Angela said, taking her mobile phone out of her handbag.
For a few moments she looked back through the rear window at her apartment building as the cab accelerated down the road, then she dialled 999. When the operator answered, she asked for the police and told them that her flat was being burgled.
21
Dexter drove away from his shop in Petworth that afternoon and met a man in a cafe on the outskirts of Crowborough. Once they'd finished their drinks, he slid a sealed envelope across the table. In the car park outside, he removed a cardboard box from the back of the man's small white van and transferred it to the boot of his BMW. Then he drove away.
In Petworth, he carried the box into his storeroom and lifted out the computer. He placed it on the bench that ran down the length of the room, plugged in the peripherals, and switched on. Fifteen minutes later, having connected one of his own printers, he was looking at half a dozen pictures that showed a greyish-brown oblong tablet, covered in a form of writing. They weren't particularly clear, and didn't show the inscription in anything like the detail he had hoped, but they were a lot better than the fuzzy image printed in the newspaper.
He had not the slightest idea what the text meant, or even which language it was written in. He slipped the pictures into a manila envelope, locked the storeroom and returned to his shop. In the office at the back he had a powerful computer of his own, with a massive hard disk that contained images and written descriptions of everything he'd bought and sold over the years through the shop and, in a hidden partition protected by an eight- digit alphanumeric password, full details of all his 'unofficial' private sales as well.
Minutes later, he was comparing the pictures he'd just printed with images of the clay tablet he'd sold to Charlie Hoxton two years before.
He leant back, satisfied. He'd been right. The tablet
22
'So what's the verdict?' Chris Bronson asked, as he recognized Angela's voice.
'It's a virtually worthless clay tablet that probably dates from around the start of the first millennium,' Angela said, 'but that's not why I'm calling.'
Something in her voice registered with Bronson. 'What's wrong?'
She took a deep breath. 'When I came back from lunch today I found someone had searched my office.'
'Are you sure?'
'Quite sure. It wasn't ransacked, nothing like that, but some of the papers and stuff on my desk had definitely been moved and another couple of the photographs you sent me were missing. And my computer screen was on, showing the screen-saver.'
'Which means?'
'The screen-saver starts after five minutes' inactivity and then runs for fifteen minutes. After that, the screen goes blank. I was out of the office for just over an hour.'
'So somebody must have used your computer between five and twenty minutes before you came back. What was on it? Anything confidential?'
'Nothing, as far as I know,' Angela said, 'but my screensaver's password-protected so whoever it was couldn't have accessed it anyway.' She paused, and when she spoke again Bronson could hear the tension in her voice. 'But that's not all.'
'What else?'
