The recess led to a triangular stone cleft, almost a shallow cave, out of the cold wind and just about high enough to stand up in. Perfect, Groppione thought. He hauled her inside, dumped her on the hard ground, set down the lantern to shine on her, and stood at the mouth of the cleft to admire her for a moment before the party began. He took a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and flung it at her. ‘Bandage your hand up with this, bitch. I don’t want you pissing your dirty blood all over me.’
Blinking away the tears of pain, Anna spat at him like a cornered wildcat. ‘Murdering pig. You’re going to die.’
‘See, no, you’re getting that all back to front, babe. You’re the one going to die. But not just yet. First I’m gonna show you what a real man is. Then I’m gonna strangle you with your own panties. How’s that sound?’ He thought it sounded incredibly funny. As he started unbuckling his belt he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
So absolutely hilarious, in fact, that he was still cackling and chortling to himself when something thin and black dropped lightly from somewhere overhead and brushed his ear. He swatted at it as though it were a fly, too preoccupied with his imminent carnal prospects to fully register it. Less than a second later, when the slender rope noose jerked tight around his neck, it was already too late for Aldo Groppione to save himself. He boggled upwards in horror, and then his feet left the ground.
From where Anna lay sprawled on the floor of the rock crevice, it looked as though her would-be rapist was suddenly levitating in mid-air. His hands went to his throat, desperately clawing, legs kicking. His feet jerked another six inches higher, scrabbling like crazy and finding no purchase on the smooth rock. His tongue protruded from his gaping mouth. He tried to cry out, but produced only a dry, rattling croak.
On the ledge above him, Ben tied off the rope, then jumped down. The morphine was still working nicely and he barely felt the jolt in his injured leg. But his stomach twisted and he turned cold when he peered deeper into the rock crevice and saw Anna lying there in the pool of light from the lantern, her face streaked with pain, nursing her mutilated hand.
‘Ben!’ she cried out. He shouldered past Groppione, swinging the dying man like a carcass on a slaughterman’s hook, and fell to his knees next to her. ‘What did they do to you?’
Anna was trying to reply when she saw Janssens appear at the mouth of the cave and her eyes widened in horror. ‘It’s okay, he’s with us,’ Ben said.
Janssens stepped past the hanging, struggling, gasping Groppione, took out Bozza’s Glock and offered it to Ben. ‘I’d happily shoot this rapist scum myself, but I think you’d rather do the honours. One in the balls, then one in the head.’
‘I’m not shooting him,’ Ben said. ‘I’m keeping my promise to him.’
‘What promise?’
‘That I’d stretch his neck like a chicken. Maybe he’s taking it seriously now.’
‘He’s got a strong neck on him. Might take a while.’
‘Fine by me,’ Ben said. ‘In the meantime, run back to the jeep and get me the med kit. Hurry.’
While Janssens was gone, Ben heard the wheeze and rasp of a starter motor and the sound of an engine revving wildly as a truck sped off into the night. Anna heard it too, through the mist of her pain. ‘Usberti—’
‘Let him run. He’s on his own now.’
‘You’re hurt,’ she gasped as she saw his leg.
‘Don’t you worry about me. Let’s get you patched up, okay? Look at me. Breathe. You’re going to be fine. That’s another promise.’
Janssens came running back. ‘The other truck just took off.’
‘I know. We’ll catch up with him after,’ Ben said.
Janssens held up a submachine gun. ‘I found this.’
‘Keep it handy.’ Ben tore open the med kit and pulled out a syrette. He jabbed it into Anna’s arm. ‘This will dull the pain for a while. It’s pretty good stuff, let me tell you.’ Next he pulled out all the surgical dressing left over from binding his leg wound, and got to work. He taped the pressure bandage into place over the bleeding stump of her finger and then looped a thick wrap of gauze round and round her hand. Lastly, he helped her sit up so that he could place a makeshift sling around her neck to keep the arm supported at an upwards angle across her chest. ‘Everything will be all right now,’ he assured her.
Her eyelids began to flutter. ‘I feel strange,’ she murmured.
‘That’s just the morphine kicking in,’ he said. ‘Go with it. Close your eyes and sleep. I’ll take care of you. You haven’t a worry in the world.’
Anna was getting faint. Before she passed out, she whispered, ‘Ben … I … I love you, Ben.’
Which Ben attributed to the effect of the drug on her brain. He gazed sadly at her as she fell unconscious. ‘We need to get her to a hospital,’ he said.
‘What hospital?’ Janssens said.
Ben stood and turned to check on Groppione.
‘Still hanging in there,’ Janssens said. The thin rope was cutting deeper into Groppione’s neck and his eyes looked about to pop out. His tongue was stretched grotesquely out from his mouth. His movements were becoming less and less as his brain was starved of blood and oxygen.
‘That’ll more or less do it,’ Ben said. He patted Groppione’s pockets, found the clasp knife in one of them, and a soft-pack of Italian Nazionali cigarettes and a brass Zippo lighter in the other. ‘Well, well, look what we have here.’ He put the cigarettes and lighter in his own pocket and snapped the knife open. It was still sticky with Anna’s blood. He reached up and sliced the rope, and Groppione flopped to the ground like a sack of dirty laundry.
‘That’ll more or less do what?’ Janssens said, looking down at the crumpled heap.
Ben took out the pack of Nazionalis, drew one from the wrapper, screwed it between his lips, clanged the Zippo and took in a deep pull of sweet smoke. He felt better already.
‘Cerebral hypoxia,’ he said. ‘He’ll lie here in a coma until his body starves to death, or something eats him. Maybe someday I’ll get to tell Jeff all about it.’
‘Your friend? The guy he shot, right?’
‘What goes around comes around,’ Ben said. ‘And he had this coming from the moment he pulled the trigger.’
‘What about Usberti?’
Ben took another long, silent drag on the cigarette.
Then replied, ‘Let’s go get him.’
Chapter 63
The first crimson-hued streaks of dawn were breaking over the horizon behind him as Usberti sped due west with the GPS device on the seat beside him, guiding him on. The snow had resumed, whirling down in gusts from the grey sky and making the flat desert appear even more featureless.
It had been so long since he’d driven any kind of motor vehicle, let alone a primitive militarised four-wheel-drive truck, that he’d barely remembered how to operate one. Similarly – even if he’d been able to grab one as he made his hasty escape earlier – he’d never used any sort of firearm in his life and would have had no idea about its functioning. Leadership and power had rendered him aloof from the realities of the world and utterly dependent on the men who had followed him, out of loyalty or out of fear.
Now, for the first time in his life, more so even than when he’d lost everything in his fall from grace years before, he felt utterly alone, defenceless and frightened.
Lord, keep me safe and protected.
He had another cause to feel afraid, and it wasn’t just the prospect of running into more Syrian troops, or even Ben Hope. It was the private terror he’d harboured for months and confessed to nobody, whose existence he’d tried hard to deny even to himself. The tremors were back, and they were growing worse. So was the nausea that plagued him day and night, and the dull ache he could feel burning sometimes in his shoulder, spreading down his arm. Feeling it now, he reached for his pills as he drove, shook one out and swallowed it dry.
How, how, how had that pestilential man Hope been able to thwart him
yet again? Why had Silvano been there with him? Usberti had scarcely been able to believe it when, secretly spying on Groppione in the hopes of catching an eyeful of what he was getting up to with the Manzini woman, he’d spotted Hope and Bellini suddenly appearing from nowhere, looking for all the world as though they belonged on the same team.
Had Silvano betrayed him? Had the insidious Hope somehow persuaded him to go over to his side? Or paid him to do so? Which would mean that Hope must be working for Them. Perhaps he had been all along: an enemy agent, sent to do Their evil work. Usberti knew all about Them. They were the Darkness, the powers of Satan, gaining control of the world step by step. Dark times indeed, if God’s chosen few failed to stand and fight.
Where, also, was Ugo? If the unthinkable had happened and Hope had managed to defeat and kill him, that was all the proof needed that he must surely be backed by devilish powers.
And if his loyal, devoted Ugo was gone, now he, Massimiliano, was completely alone. It was all up to him now.
‘So be it!’ he yelled out loud into the snow-dusted emptiness of the desert. ‘I will show them, Lord. I will not let you down!’
The GPS on the seat by his side was his last remaining ally, and proving extremely useful. Using the coordinates of Ashar the Babylonian’s cliff as his starting point, Usberti had calculated fresh coordinates of his new destination lying sixteen kilometres west of that location. The tank battle and chase with the rebels had driven his quest a long way off course, but he would soon make up the distance.
However, when he got there not long afterwards, Usberti could see nothing but bare terrain in all directions. Not a marker, scarcely a bush, in sight. Something was terribly wrong; and yet the technology was insisting they were exactly sixteen kilometres west of Ashar’s cliff.
Usberti was gripped by sudden doubts. Had that bitch Manzini lied to him after all? Given him a false translation, so that she and Hope could make their way to the right place and steal the treasure that was rightfully his?
The thought made his heart thump. He wiped the cold sweat from his brow. Calm, Massimiliano, calm. Steadying his mind, he remembered that the measurement of one and a half beru equated to a little over sixteen kilometres: a margin of error allowing for the inexact distance calibrations of the day, which could add as much as two, three hundred or more metres to the figure. That would take him over the crest of the rise he could see ahead, a long north–south ridge glowing crimson from the rising sun at his back.
Bolstered with renewed optimism, he gunned the truck towards the rise, reached its apex –
And there it was. Standing like a monolith in the middle of the emptiness, bathed red by the dawn, the tall solitary rock could be nothing if not some kind of manmade marker. X marks the spot. He’d found it at last!
Usberti went skidding down the slope towards it. He halted the truck and scrambled out, virtually babbling with excitement. The rock was more than twice his height, solidly planted in the ground. He hardly dared to touch it, in case it was some strange vision dreamed up by his fevered imagination – but, no, it was real. He ran his hands over its craggy face. As he wiped away the snow and dirt, he realised with a shock of pure joy that it was carved with markings that – once he’d examined them more closely through his half-moon spectacles – looked just like more of the same kind of cuneiform patterns as the cliff inscription. They were illegible to him, but he could imagine their meaning: ‘Here lies the fabled treasure of dear old King Nebuchadnezzar; congratulations, friend, you’ve hit the jackpot’.
‘Thank you, Lord!’ he shouted up to the sky. Almost weeping with happiness now, he ran back to the jeep and dragged out the bag he’d managed to salvage in his escape. He tore open the zip and pulled out the folding shovel.
Massimiliano Usberti had never performed any kind of manual labour in life, and so it took him a while to understand how to unfold the shovel. Finally, he picked a spot at the foot of the standing rock, stabbed the pointed end of the blade into the ground, and began to dig frantically. He soon scraped through the thin layer of snow to expose the sand underneath. It was harder work than he might have imagined, made even more frustrating by the way the sand and stones kept sliding back into the hole. But he would not be deterred from this glorious moment. He stabbed and dug as fast as he could, grunting like a wild man, sweating profusely despite the freezing wind.
The hole grew deeper and longer, until he’d excavated a trench large enough to bury the truck in. He paused, gasping for air, then went back at it even more ferociously. He had little sense of time, but it must have been another hour of frantic digging before the shovel blade hit something solid under the sand. A larger rock? No, it couldn’t be. It mustn’t be.
Lord, don’t let it be a rock.
Usberti hurled away the shovel and threw himself flat on his belly at the edge of the trench, using both hands to dig like a dog. As his fingers came into contact with the buried object he scraped more furiously still, expecting at any moment to see the magnificent glint of gold sparkling up at him in the dawn’s red glow. Gold! His gold!
This was it.
This was the moment where everything would change for him.
He’d won.
It was a while after sunrise when they found him. Ben was the first to spot the empty truck parked at the foot of the rise. As they came closer they could see the trail of footprints in the thin snow, leading from the vehicle towards the tall standing rock. At the foot of the rock was a large trench some thirty yards long by four wide. Judging by the hills of freshly dug sand, dirt and stones that stood heaped all around its edges, it looked as though someone had been busy.
Janssens pulled up, killed the engine and yanked on the brake. He and Ben looked at each other and climbed out without a word. Ben had Bozza’s Glock, Janssens had Groppione’s Walther, and each man was ready to open fire as they advanced cautiously.
Ben’s leg wound was aching badly now that the painkiller was starting to wear off. Anna remained curled up in the truck with her eyes closed. Her system was still comfortably pumped with the effects of the morphine, along with the past-date antibiotics Ben had dosed her with out of the Syrian rebels’ med kit. She’d spent the drive drifting in and out of consciousness, making it hard to get coherent directions out of her. That, combined with the fresh snow gradually obscuring the tracks of Usberti’s truck, had slowed their pursuit.
But here they were. And so was Usberti.
He was lying still at the edge of the enormous trench, as though asleep. He didn’t stir at their approach. Janssens shot Ben a puzzled look as if to say, ‘What the hell—?’
As they stepped closer, Ben noticed the military-style metal folding shovel lying in the dug-up sand nearby. It looked new and relatively unworn, except for the blade which was all scuffs and paint chips. There were no other tracks on the ground. Usberti had clearly done all this digging himself.
And he’d evidently found something down there as a result.
Ben peered into the trench and became the second living person to bear witness to the ancient, historic object that had, until now, lain buried in this remote spot through most of recorded history.
Janssens looked down into the trench and whistled. ‘Wow. I think maybe Anna would want to see this.’
‘Yes, I think she would,’ Ben said.
Anna must have read their thoughts, because she’d already clambered gingerly out of the truck and was making her unsteady way towards them, pale and fragile and clutching her bandaged hand, but her eyes filled with wonder. She said, ‘Is it—? I mean, did he—?’
‘It is, and he did,’ Ben said. He put an arm round her shoulders to steady her, and led her to the edge of the trench.
‘There you have it,’ he said, pointing. ‘You were right, Anna. It did exist, all along. The lost golden idol of King Nebuchadnezzar, lost for thousands of years and now rediscovered in all its glory.’
Chapter 64
All three of them gazed down at the huge, anc
ient object that Usberti had excavated from the sand: a wizened, blackened stump of desiccated wood, like the remains of a prehistoric oak tree that had become hardened like iron with extreme age and preserved by the dryness of the desert climate.
Nobody spoke for a long time. ‘Well, so much for that,’ Janssens said at last.
Anna shook her head. ‘And so, my theory was correct. The idol was created on a modular system, out of gold plates that could be dismantled and packed away for transport. That’s how the Muranus were able to smuggle it away from Babylon.’
‘There’s not much left, is there?’ Ben said.
‘Only the wooden core of the structure,’ she replied sadly. ‘We’ll never know what became of the gold plates. Pillaged by robbers, or taken by the surviving members of Ashar’s rebel group after his death, either for their personal gain or to help fight a lost cause that nobody would ever remember. Maybe the plates were discovered by Persian soldiers and taken away as spoils of war. Or, perhaps the family treasure was reclaimed by the Muranu descendants and minted back into coins to support themselves in their exile from their homeland.’ She sighed, clutching her hand to her chest. ‘Who knows? Whatever happened to it, the gold is long gone. All that remains is worthless, except to an archaeologist. If they could prove what it was.’
‘What it is, is a big lump of firewood,’ Ben said.
‘Not a bad idea. We should chop it up and burn it,’ Janssens said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Get some warmth happening around here.’ Then he glanced over at Usberti. ‘What about him?’
‘He looks dead,’ Anna said.