House of War - Scott Mariani

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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

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