House of War

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.

While pleased with his killing of the unclean whore, he was annoyed with himself for having failed on other counts. The wiretap that had been placed on her landline phone had indicated that soon after her return from Tripoli she had attempted to make contact with a woman called Françoise. That was all the information they had on her, no surname. But the phone message that Romy Juneau had left for her suggested that the woman was someone with whom she was keen to share information. A reporter or journalist, maybe. Which made her potentially highly dangerous to their plans, if their suspicions about Romy Juneau were correct. The wiretap on the landline have yielded nothing more, which implied that Juneau might since have been in contact with this Françoise by mobile phone, whether spoken or texted.

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