City of the Lost

I

Georges Bejjani walked Iain Black to the SUV. He thanked him for coming then told Sami to drive him to his hotel or wherever he wanted to go. He smiled broadly until they were out of sight then he whirled around and marched back on board to where his father and brother were waiting. ‘Artefacts?’ he asked incredulously. ‘All this for artefacts?’

Butros gave Georges a sour look then beckoned him and Michel to join him in his cabin. ‘To start with,’ he said, closing the door, ‘our recent guest confirmed he was in Daphne yesterday because of our meeting. That he didn’t know who it was with strongly implies that the leak is on our end. Our security is therefore compromised. So please think in future before you speak loudly enough for the whole world to hear. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Father,’ said Georges. ‘I’m sorry. But I still can’t believe you thought it worth risking your life for—’

‘Michel,’ interjected his father. ‘Perhaps you might get the search for our leak underway.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Now. I’d also like to know more about this man Nathan Coates. And please arrange to have our recent guest watched too. He’s seen our faces so you’ll need to hire someone new, someone local. But make sure they can be discreet. We don’t want them spotted too.’

‘What should I have them watch for?’

‘Anything. Everything. What he does, where he goes, who he talks to. If we’re very lucky, he might even steer us to his source.’ He waited until Michel had closed the door behind him then turned to his younger son. ‘What is it with you?’ he asked. ‘Can you possibly be unaware of the opportunity I’m offering you right now? I thought that’s what you wanted: to lead the Group.’

‘I do, Father. But I don’t see—’

‘Because you don’t think. Or, at least, you think like a corporal rather than a general. You see the world as a series of skirmishes to be won. Forget skirmishes. Skirmishes don’t matter. What matters is the war.’

‘What do artefacts have to do with war?’

Butros sighed. ‘Do you know why history bores you, Georges?’ he asked. ‘It bores you because you think it is about the past.’

Georges laughed, thinking his father had made a joke. Then he realized he was serious. ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Clearly. Which is precisely why I can talk to your brother of these things, and not you.’

‘Give me a chance. I’ll try, I promise.’

‘Very well.’ He went to his wall-safe, punched in a code. He swung open the door and took out a blue box that he passed to his son. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’

George pulled back tissue paper to reveal a curved shard of charred pottery beneath, inscribed with faded ideograms. He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Part of a storage jar or cooking pot.’

‘And it’s significant somehow?’

‘These characters are Phoenician,’ replied Butros, running the tip of his little finger across them. ‘Early Phoenician. As you can see, these characters are difficult to read, but this symbol here is a signifier of royalty; and these other characters appear to comprise the name Ishbaal, or something similar, meaning “child of Baal” or “servant of Baal” or the like.’

‘Ishbaal,’ frowned Georges. ‘Who was he?’

‘There are several plausible candidates. According to Jewish history, their first king, Saul, was succeeded briefly by his son before David seized the throne. This son was called Ishbaal, though later Bible editors refused to countenance a king of Baal as king of Israel, so they retrospectively changed his name to Ishbosheth — man of shame. But I think this piece is later than that. There was a very small quantity of organic residue on this shard that I had carbon-dated. Almost exactly twenty-eight hundred years old, they tell me. Think of that.’

‘I don’t…’

‘There was a king of Tyre called Eshbaal who died in around 860 BC. That’s a little early. His daughter was the notorious Jezebel, the one who married the Jewish King Ahab. Many think her name is a corruption of the feminized version of Ishbaal. And there’d have been no need for the Jews to change her name, after all, as it was precisely for worshipping her different god that they put her to death and fed her to the dogs.’

‘You think this piece once belonged to Jezebel?’

‘I think it’s possible. But the carbon residue was from later still. So it’s possible that the piece was passed on to one of her heirs. Her niece, say.’

‘Her niece?’

Butros looked up. ‘I meant what I said over lunch,’ he told him. ‘We have Phoenician blood, you and I. And not just any Phoenician blood, but the blood of Tyre. Our ancestors showed Solomon how to build his temple. They devised the alphabet and shared it with the world. They circumnavigated Africa and were first across the oceans. They led the Mediterranean out of its centuries of darkness, and founded many of its greatest cities. Yet does the world honour us for this? No. Egypt and Greece get all the credit instead. Do you know why?’

‘Why, Father?’

‘Because our past is invisible, that’s why. Because our ancient cities have become our modern cities. Tyre is Tyre. Sidon is Sidon. Beritus is Beirut. We’ve built over ourselves so often that we have nothing left to show for it. No Petra, no Giza, no Troy, no Ephesus. And what little we do have is Roman. Roman! Nor do we have any great icons to make up the loss. No Rosetta Stone. No Phaistos Disc. No Mask of Agamemnon. We’re a nation without a visual narrative, without an image of ourselves. That’s why we’re always divided, because in our heads we see our differences before we see our common heritage. We see Christian against Muslim, north against south, coast against mountain. This division makes us weak, and weakness makes us ripe for conquest. But if we could find our narrative again, if we could find our identity…’

Georges looked doubtfully down at the shard. ‘And you think this could do that?’

‘No,’ said his father, taking back the box. ‘This is nothing. Just a fragment from an old pot. But if it leads us where I think it could lead us, then yes, it could be everything.’

II

Iain returned to the hotel to find Karin still out. He bolted the door then checked his laptop. Recovery complete, it told him. He dismantled and packed away the peripherals then ran a search of video files. A list appeared on his new laptop’s screen. He ordered them by date, clicked on the most recent. The screen went black. He feared it had suffered an aneurysm of some kind. Then footage began to play. It was from the laptop’s integrated camera, so the resolution was relatively poor and the hotel entrance looked further distant than it had in truth been. It was also corrupted in patches, as was the audio of him chatting cheerfully away with Mustafa. Yet, all in all, it was better than he had any right to expect.

The hotel’s main car park had been to its rear, but several bays were marked out either side of the front steps, for taxis, delivery vans and the like. The blast crater suggested the bomb had been to the left of the steps as he looked at it, so that was what he watched. Time passed. Vehicles came and went. He fast-forwarded until he saw Karin approaching. She walked up the front steps then paused to let a helmeted, black-clad motorcycle courier in ahead of her. Several minutes went by. Karin came back out. Her day-pack was now bulky with its package. She stopped on the steps to check its label, while Iain and Mustafa bantered about her. Then she looked around and walked briskly out of shot.

On the recording, he offered Mustafa more tea. Glasses clinked as he picked them up. The café door opened and then banged closed again. On screen, meanwhile, the leather-clad and still helmeted motorcyclist came back out. To judge from their build and gait, it looked like a woman. She walked along the front of the hotel, looking up at balconies. She stopped beneath one, took two paces backwards, then turned and beckoned to someone out of shot. A plain white truck now drove past the camera then reversed up against the hotel. Iain sat forwards. This was surely it: the bomb being delivered. The low resolution and the glare from the windscreen obscured the driver’s face. The door opened and a man jumped down. His jacket was zipped to his chin, its collar was up, and he was wearing a plain black baseball cap and mirror sunglasses. He had leather driving gloves on, too, and was carrying a dark blue motorcycle helmet. He slammed the door behind him, walked briskly around the front of his truck and vanished from view. A bang as the café door shut again. The motorcycle nosed out onto the road. The leather-clad woman leaned forwards, looking both ways before pulling out. The man was riding pillion, his helmet now on, tapping at a phone in his left hand. They vanished out of shot.

Iain braced himself. The seconds ticked by. The truck seemed suddenly to bulge and lift. The screen went topsy-turvy and then black. The file ended. He replayed the last few minutes again, stopping and starting in hope of getting a better look at one or other of their faces. Without reward.

He opened the second file. This one had footage from a camera Mustafa had planted beneath an armchair inside the hotel’s lobby. It had been to plant it, and others on the floors above, that Mustafa had booked himself into the Daphne International, despite the slight risk that the Bejjanis, or whoever they were meeting, would take their security seriously enough to have the hotel’s guests checked out. Which was also why Iain had opted to stay in Antioch instead of Daphne, for his presence would have been far more likely than Mustafa’s to set off alarms. Those other cameras had relayed their footage to a server in Mustafa’s room that had, of course, been obliterated in the blast; but they’d had this particular stream sent to his laptop as well, so that they’d have at least some advance warning when Bejjani came to leave.

The cameras had no microphones. They were too easy to check for, and might have given their surveillance away. The video was therefore synchronized with his laptop audio. Unfortunately, all he saw was Karin, the motorcyclist and various other staff and guests walking to and fro. The third camera had been set up on the main Antioch road, because that was the direction from which they’d expected the Bejjanis to arrive. But neither the motorcyclist nor the truck had come that way. Now for the fourth and final camera, attached to a telephone pole across the road from the hotel. The motorcyclist arrived, parked, went inside. Time passed. She came back out, walked along the front of the hotel, then turned and guided in the truck. The driver got out, shoulders hunched and head bowed. The woman straddled her bike and rocked it off its stand. The man had his back to the camera. He took off his cap and sunglasses and stuffed them in his pockets. Then he made to put on his helmet.

‘Look around, you bastard,’ muttered Iain, leaning closer. ‘Look around.’

The café door banged at that moment. The man couldn’t help himself, he glanced over his right shoulder. Iain stared at the screen almost in disbelief. ‘Got you,’ he said.