The two men hurried across to it and looked down. Inside the cabinet was a clear plastic plinth and beside it a card bearing a colour photograph of a small oblong grey object and a text in Arabic.
'No tablet,' Hammad whispered.
Zebari pulled out the photograph again and held it above the display case, flicking the beam of his torch from the image on the paper to that on the card in front of them.
'No, but I'll take that card anyway. Is there an alarm?' he asked.
Hammad carefully examined the back and sides of the display case. 'I can't see any wires apart from the power cable for the light.' He pointed at a short fluorescent tube mounted at the rear of the case. Then he turned his attention to the catch that secured the glass top. 'Nothing there either,' he said.
'Good,' Zebari muttered. He reached down, unclipped the catch and lifted the lid. He gestured to Hammad to support it, then reached into the cabinet.
'Wait,' Hammad whispered urgently, looking at the back of the cabinet, which was now revealed by the lifted lid. 'I think that's an infra-red sensor.'
But it was too late. Immediately, security lights flared on around the outside of the property, most of the house lights came on and a siren began to wail.
'Out the back door,' Zebari ordered, grabbing the card and sliding it into his pocket. 'Run!'
They pelted down the corridor, wrenched open the back door of the house and ran for the ladder propped against the boundary wall. Zebari reached it first, Hammad right behind him.
Once on the top of the wall, Zebari grasped the rough stone with both hands and lowered himself as far as he could on the outside of the wall, then let go. He consciously bent his knees as he hit the ground, absorbing the shock of the impact with his legs. He toppled sideways and rolled once, then climbed to his feet, unhurt.
Then a volley of shots rang out from the other side of the wall.
From his precarious perch near the top of the ladder, Hammad looked back into the grounds of the property. Three men had appeared, two from around the front of the house and one from the back, and all of them were firing pistols.
He never stood a chance. Silhouetted in his dark clothing against the sheer white paint of the boundary wall, Hammad was hit almost immediately. He tumbled sideways, screaming with pain as he crashed to the ground.
Outside the property, Zebari ran for his life, heading for the safety of the car. But even as he did so, he heard more shots echoing from behind him as one of his pursuers reached the top of the ladder and began firing.
26
'That's the wrong answer – again,' the tall man with the paralysed face snarled. He stepped forward and delivered a stinging backhand blow to the wounded man who sat directly in front of him, his arms and legs firmly bound to the upright chair, his battered head slumped down onto his chest.
Amer Hammad was dying, and he knew it. He just wasn't sure whether the tall man would finally lose patience with him and put a bullet through his head, or if he'd die before that from blood loss.
When the three guards had dragged him back to the house, the first thing they did was call their boss. Then they'd lashed his wrists together and roughly bandaged the gaping wound in his left thigh where the bullet had ripped through the muscles and torn a deep furrow. That had reduced – but hadn't stopped – the bleeding, and Hammad could see a slowly spreading pool of blood on the floor beneath him.
The interrogation was taking place in a small square building in one corner of the compound. The dark stains that discoloured the flaking concrete floor were mute evidence that the building had been used before, for similar purposes.
'I'll ask you once more,' the tall man snapped. 'Who were you with, and what were you looking for?'
Hammad shook his head and said nothing.
The tall man stared down at him for a long moment, then picked up a length of wood from the floor. One end of it had been sharpened to a point. His captive watched him through half-closed, bruised, bloody and terrified eyes.
The tall man rested the sharpened end of the wood quite gently on the blood-sodden bandage wrapped around Hammad's thigh and smiled, the paralysed right side of his face barely moving.
'You probably think I've hurt you enough, my friend, but the truth is I've hardly started. Before I've finished with you, you'll be begging for death.'
As he spoke, he steadily increased the pressure on the length of wood, twisting and driving the end of it through the bandages and deep into the open wound.
Blood spurted and Hammad howled, the incredible pain adding a new dimension to his agony.
'Stop, stop,' he yelled, his voice a blubbering wail. 'Please stop. I'll tell you anything you want to know.'
'I know you will,' the tall man said, pushing still harder.
Hammad's head flew back as a flood of pain overwhelmed his senses, and then he slumped forward, unconscious.
'Put another bandage on his leg,' the tall man ordered, 'then we'll wake him up.'
* * *
Ten minutes later, a bucket of cold water and a couple of slaps brought Hammad round. The tall man sat down on a chair in front of him and prodded his captive sharply in the stomach with the sharpened length of wood.
'Right,' he said, 'start at the beginning, and leave nothing out.'
27
'Does this hotel have wi-fi?' Angela asked, pushing her coffee cup towards Bronson and nodding for him to refill it.
They were sitting at a small table in Bronson's hotel room on the outskirts of Rabat, because he was still concerned about being seen by the wrong people, and breakfasting in his room had seemed a safer option than going down to the hotel dining room. Angela was still wearing her nightdress under the large white dressing gown she'd found in her bedroom next door. It was a gesture of intimacy he appreciated – it showed that she was comfortable enough in his company – but he was frustrated because she'd insisted on sleeping in the adjoining room.
Bronson sighed. 'You want to do some research?'
'Yes. If I'm right about the words on the tablet, there must be others like it – it has to be part of a set – and the logical place to start looking for them is museums. There's a kind of museum intranet that I can use to carry out a search. It allows people with the right access – and that includes me, obviously – to check both the exhibits and the relics that are in storage in most museums around the world. It's an ideal tool for researchers, because you can study particular objects without having to travel to the museum itself to do so.'
Bronson cleared a space on the table, opened up his laptop and switched it on, then waited a couple of minutes for the Sony to access the hotel's wi-fi network.
'How does the system work?' he asked, turning the Vaio to face Angela and watching as she input her username and password to log in to the museum intranet.
'It's fairly simple. First, I have to fill in various fields to approximately identify what I'm looking for.'
As she spoke, she was ticking a series of boxes and inserting brief details in text fields on the search form. When she'd completed the page, she turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen as well as her.
'We still don't know too much about this tablet, so I've had to be fairly flexible in the search. For the date I've suggested between the start of the first century BC and the end of the second century AD – that's a period of three hundred years, which should cover it. Baverstock thought the tablet was probably first century AD, based on what he could translate of the inscription, but he couldn't be sure. For the origin I've been just as vague: I've specified the Middle East.'