Mia was finding it hard to draw her eyes away from the image. “The relics aren’t important. Whoever’s got her is after that book.”
“Possibly. This might tell us more.” He tapped a finger on Evelyn’s file. “I haven’t yet had time to go through it properly. Either way, it’s not really the issue. It’s only relevant in that it’s why she was kidnapped. And right now, the best lead we have for finding her is the guy who I think brought these to her, this man from her past, the Iraqi fixer you said she mentioned. He knows more about what’s going on and about who else is involved in this. We don’t know anything about him, but…” Corben paused, hesitating. Mia could see that something in him didn’t want to continue, but, after a brief moment, he said, “You could well be right in that he was the same guy who was with her when she was kidnapped. And if he was, well, you saw him. You can identify him. And I’m hoping that if he’s the same guy, then maybe”—he turned the file so it was now facing her the right way—“just maybe, there’s a picture of him in here somewhere. And that would help us a lot.”
She looked at him uncertainly, feeling somewhat shortchanged by his answer, then nodded and opened up the file again. Much as she felt drawn to the materials in it—the sheets of notes, handwritten in ink with a graceful, classic penmanship that she knew well from the letters her mom had sent her when she was growing up; the photocopies of documents and pages of books, in English, Arabic, a few in French, with sentences underlined and notes scribbled in the margins; the maps of Iraq and of the broader Levant, with markings and arrows and circled notes; all of it with many, many question marks—she flicked through them after no more than a cursory glance, looking for the photographs she needed to examine.
She came across a batch of old snapshots, scattered between the pages, and studied them closely. She recognized a younger, slimmer Evelyn in some of them, decked out in khaki field pants, mesh hats, and big tortoiseshell sunglasses, and found herself imagining the exciting, unconventional life her mother must have led at the time: a single woman, a Westerner, traveling to exotic, sun-drenched locations, meeting different peoples, immersing herself in their cultures, working with them to explore the hidden treasures of their past. A driven life, to be sure, and more than likely a fulfilling one, but one that had to come at a price, which in Evelyn’s case seemed to be a wistful loneliness, a guarded solitude.
Her fingers paused at a shot of Evelyn standing alone with a man. His features were too obscured by the sunglasses, the shade of his hat, and the downward, slightly turned angle of his face. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. She knew that shot. She’d been given a copy of it when she was seven, which she kept safely tucked into her wallet, always close. The man in the photograph was her father. Evelyn had told her it was the only picture of him she had. They’d only spent a few weeks together. It saddened Mia that she didn’t even know what he really looked like.
She stared wistfully at the photograph, then a troubling realization crept into her mind. Her father was there. He had been with Evelyn when she’d found the underground chambers.
And he’d died a month later. In a car crash.
A sharp pain spiked inside her heart. For a second, it felt as if it stopped beating altogether, and she felt the blood draining from her face.
Corben seemed to spot it. “What is it?”
She handed him the picture. “The man in the picture.” Her words came out as if emerging from a fog. “He was my father. He was there.”
Corben studied her, waiting for more.
“He died a month later. In a car crash.” Her eyes were alight with questions. “What if he was killed? Murdered. Because of this.”
An uncertain look crossed Corben’s features. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s nothing here that indicates that Evelyn had any trouble over this before. If his death was related to all this, then she would have been under threat too. Which doesn’t seem to be the case, I mean, she lived a pretty open life.”
He handed her back the picture. She took another lingering look at it, then nodded. “I guess you’re right,” she conceded.
“I’ll take a look anyway, just to cover all the bases. What was his name?” Corben asked.
“Webster,” Mia said. “Tom Webster.”
THE NAME PUMMELED Corben like a shotgun blast.
Tom Webster.
Evelyn had tried to reach Tom Webster last night. And mediums didn’t usually call the switchboards of academic institutions to reach the deceased.
He wasn’t dead. At least, Evelyn didn’t think so. He was alive. And she’d lied to her daughter all these years.
Adrenaline surged through Corben. This was important. He had to put a high-priority trace on the name. He needed more information from Mia about where he had supposedly died, what else Evelyn had told her about him, although, given that she’d lied to her about his death, Corben didn’t think anything Mia could tell him about her long-lost father would turn out to be true.
It could wait.
He watched Mia as she put the shot to one side and moved on, checking out a few more shots until her eyes fell on something that seemed to snare her interest.
“The man from the alley. I think that’s him,” she said.
Chapter 28
T he hakeem adjusted the glass slide under the microscope and tapped a few buttons on his keyboard. Another magnified image came up on the flat screen. He studied it carefully, as he had done with all the data that the tests had thrown up.
She’s clean, he thought. Evelyn’s blood work hadn’t flagged anything unusual. No foreign substances, no tampering. Her readings were in line with what he would expect to find in a reasonably healthy woman of her age.
He stared through the cells on the screen and revisited her words. There was no doubt in his mind that she had told him everything she knew. He was working off a solid base.
Tom Webster. He couldn’t get the name out of his mind.
Could he be one of them?
The possibility electrified him. He ran it through his mind, again and again. It seemed too far-fetched. So many years had passed…. But what other explanation was there? Every time he tried to dismiss the idea, to put another spin on it, his initial suspicion came back, slicing through his doubts with Occam-like sharpness and implanting itself firmly in his consciousness. Why else would he appear like that, unannounced, at the first sign of the discovery, and then disappear when the trail seemed to die out? No, there was no other rational explanation.
He had to be one of them.
Tasked with protecting their secret.
Keeping an eye on archaeological digs in the region, making sure that no one stumbled across something that they had gone to great lengths to suppress. Something they’d kept—something they’d hoarded greedily, he scowled—to themselves for centuries.
His pulse quickened.
He thought back to her pathetic tale of lost love and replayed her story in his mind. The man—Tom Webster, the name was branded onto his consciousness, not that he believed it to be his true name—had swooped in and out of her life with clinical efficiency. The discovery had led nowhere, or so he’d led her to believe. What had he really uncovered, what hadn’t he shared with her? He’d then pulled a disappearing act, leaving her with an unborn child and a numbing spiel about why he couldn’t be with her, for reasons he couldn’t share with her.
Déjà vu.
He’d heard—read, actually—something along those lines before.
Many years ago. Back home, in Italy.
In Naples.
It was part of what had triggered his journey.
Yes, of course, he knew it was something some men said. When they lost interest. When they wanted to move on to new conquests. Chapter one of the idiot’s guide to dating. A he’s-just-not-that-into-you kind of thing. Normally, his cynical, jaded view of humanity would have supported that take on it.
Not this time. This felt different.
It fit.
And
the very idea that this Tom Webster could actually be part of something he wasn’t sure even existed, something he doggedly wanted to believe, against all rationale, was out there…He smiled inwardly.
This is real. Just as I always suspected.
The principe was right.
A wave of exhilaration coursed through him, coupled with an anger at the way fate dealt its hand. Evelyn had discovered the chamber in 1977 and left the country three years later. He’d arrived in Iraq a couple of years after that.
He cursed his misfortune.
If he’d been there at the time of the discovery of the chambers, he might have heard about it. He might have met this Tom Webster. And he might already possess what he was searching for.
Fate. Timing. The right place at the wrong time. But maybe this was a chance to make up for it.
He needed to find this Webster. The number Evelyn had for him was in her organizer, in her apartment. Omar and his men should have brought that back from the woman’s apartment, but that effort had been thwarted—he’d have to have a serious talk to someone about that. He knew he could easily find the number using the Internet, but he didn’t expect it to yield much. Webster probably didn’t want to be found. He’d surely covered his tracks.
The hakeem also needed to get his hands on that slippery antiques dealer. He had to get his hands on the book, which he knew could be the key to everything. But this woman and her story…she was, indeed, a godsend. Not that he actually believed in such inanities.
But there were complications he needed to better understand.
The woman’s daughter, for one. She’d risked her life by interrupting his men and allowed the dealer to escape. Then there was the issue of the man who was with her at the archaeologist’s apartment. The hakeem had dispatched Omar and his men to go over it and bring back anything of interest—and anything bearing the sign of the snake. Not only had her daughter been there too, but the man she was with was clearly a professional. A well-trained player who’d outgunned Omar—who wasn’t exactly a slouch when it came to that kind of wet work—and killed one of his men. From what Omar had told him, he was American. Who was he, and what was he doing there with her? Was he a new player in this game—another one? Was he also one of them? Was it all suddenly coming alive? Or was he there for other, more trivial reasons, without knowledge of what the game was really about?
The hakeem tried to rein in his exhilaration. He’d waited for so long, tried so hard. He had devoted his life to this pursuit. And now, he felt with growing certainty, it was all coming together.
Finally.
He had to know who these new players were.
But until then, he had to tread carefully.
He would use his contacts to check up on Webster, though he suspected the man would be difficult to trace. Omar would call his contacts in the Lebanese police and intelligence services. Find out what he could about the American. Most pressing, the hakeem had to find the antiques dealer. He couldn’t lose sight of that. He glumly realized that there were no guarantees that the man would be found. Omar had really screwed up on that front, though the hakeem knew his man would do everything necessary to make up for his mistake.
His spirits rose as a realization broke through the questions swamping his mind. If the archaeologist wasn’t just another deluded victim, if this Webster did really harbor strong feelings for her…The hakeem might just be able to use her to draw him out.
The lure of the damsel in distress.
It always worked in the movies.
He just had to make sure that her cry for help was loud enough.
Chapter 29
M ia pulled the shot closer.
The face belonged to a man who was standing aloofly, slightly apart from a group of sweaty, smiling workers. She concentrated, trying to marry it to the terror-stricken man who had been moments away from being stuffed into a car and carted off—along with her mother—to some unknown fate.
She held it up. “This guy here.” She handed it to Corben and pointed out the man she thought she recognized.
Corben examined it, then flipped it over. Names were written on the back of the photograph in pencil, in the same elegant hand as the notes in the file. He flipped it over again and back, assigning the names to the faces. “Looks like his name’s Farouk.”
“Just Farouk?”
“That’s it.” Corben pulled out his notebook and wrote it down. “No family name.”
Mia looked at him, deflated. “Is that enough?”
Corben put down his notebook. “It’s something.” He studied the face in the photograph, as if committing it to memory. “Go through the rest of them, will you? Maybe there’s another shot of him in there.”
She did so, without success. Still, at least they had a face and a name, which, presumably, Corben’s people could build on.
Mia set the photos down. Her thoughts kept getting drawn back to Evelyn. She’d been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Mia had heard the cliché about the first forty-eight hours being the most critical in any missing person’s investigation—not from anyone actually in law enforcement, but from countless TV shows and movies. Still, it didn’t seem counterintuitive—clichés became clichés for a reason—and if it was true, half the window of opportunity to finding Evelyn was already shuttered.
“How are you going to find him?” she asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t have much to go on. There’s her organizer, although there’s nothing listed in this week’s diary entries. Now that we have a name, I need to go through it again, see if there are any contact details for him. We have her cell phone. We need to go through its log, see if any of the numbers on it are his. Same with her laptop, although it’s password-protected, so it could take a little while to break into.”
She nodded soberly and picked up Farouk’s picture again. She swept her eyes over it, frustrated and feeling helpless, then a conflicted thought blossomed in her mind.
“He saw me, I’m sure of it,” she said in a tentative voice, still looking through the picture, remembering that night. “He saw me when I got to that alley.”
Corben glanced at her uncertainly. He knew that already.
“He’ll recognize me. Which means he’ll trust me if he sees me again. Maybe we can use that. Maybe there’s some way we can lure him out.”
“What, with you as bait?” Corben asked somewhat incredulously. “We’re trying to keep you out of the spotlight, remember?”
Mia nodded. Still, she felt it was a strand she wanted to pull at some more. He’d seen her, and he should trust her. That had to be useful, in some way. Her mind traversed back to her conversation with Evelyn. What had her mom said? Her colleague. He was with her.
“There’s an archaeology professor. Ramez. He works with my mom. A young guy. He’s the one who took her down south yesterday, to check out that crypt. She said he was with her when this man—Farouk—showed up.”
“You didn’t mention him back at the hotel,” Corben noted.
She scrunched her face apologetically. “I’m sorry, I should have. But I was thinking, maybe he knows something. Maybe Evelyn told him something about what was going on.”
Corben processed it for a beat. “You know this guy?”
“I met him once when I went to her office, on campus.”
“Okay, good.” Corben logged the name into his notebook. He checked his watch and frowned. It was past nine. “He won’t be at the university this late.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out Evelyn’s organizer, then had another idea, picked up his phone, and hit a speed-dial key. He got up and crossed to the glass doors leading out to the balcony. Mia heard him connect with someone and ask him to check Evelyn’s cell phone for a “Ramez.” He waited a few moments, then said, “Hold on,” and crossed back to the table. He scribbled a number down in his notebook, shot a quick “Got it” to whoever it was he had called, and redialed quickly. Mia could hear it ringing, but no one seemed to be answering. Corben let
it ring a few more times—cell phones in Beirut, annoyingly, hardly ever had a voice-mail service—then put the phone down with a frustrated look. “He’s not picking up,” he informed Mia.
“You don’t think he’s also been…?” She hesitated to vocalize the rest of her question, suddenly sensing she was letting her imagination loose again.
Worryingly, his look didn’t dismiss the suggestion outright. “No, I think I would have heard something. He’s probably just tired of fielding calls from people who will have heard about your mom’s kidnapping and know he works in the same department.”
She frowned with concern. “Can you get his home address?” she asked, surprising herself with her tenacity before wondering if her question had an irksome teaching-your-grandma-to-suck-eggs ring to it.
Corben didn’t seem to mind and checked his watch again. “I don’t want to flag him to the local cops, not at this hour. And there’s no reason he’d be on our database for us to have that kind of information on tap ourselves. I’ll try calling him again in a few minutes.”
Mia studied him as he processed the information. His face was still almost hermetically unreadable, but she could definitely sense some concern there. She flashed back to standing with him outside her mom’s front door and raised her eyes to meet his. With a slight hardening in her voice, she ventured another question.
“Outside Mom’s apartment. You said I already knew this was serious. And of course, it was, I know that, but the way you said it…” She paused for a moment. She knew she was right, and the conviction within her came through with blinding clarity. “You still haven’t told me everything. There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
He sat back and ran a hand through his hair, giving the back of his neck a small rub, then looked at her and seemed to reach a verdict. He leaned in, reached into his case, and pulled out his laptop. He flipped it open and powered it up, then placed his index finger on the small finger-print scanner before tapping some keys. The screen lit up. He navigated through it in silence, found the folder he needed, and turned to her.