Working alone in order to maintain absolute secrecy, she had been about to complete her excavation and have the remains flown out of Africa when she had been betrayed by the very benefactors who had privately funded the dig. Imprisoned and isolated, it had only been the efforts of her mother and a roguish American former soldier and investigative journalist who had been willing to travel into Israel to rescue her that had kept her alive. Lucy Morgan knew that she had faced death and had absolutely no intention of having anything more to do with either Israel or anything that had been found within its borders.
‘I was on holiday in Israel some years ago,’ Lucy replied, giving the exact response that the Defense Intelligence Agency had instructed her to so many years ago. ‘I did quite a lot of digging in the Negev area but I can assure you I came back with nothing more than fossils of shells and some ancient pottery. I can show them to you, if you wish. They are absolutely fascinating examples of Neolithic and even Paleolithic origin.’
Vladimir leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped before him as the smile slipped away from his features.
‘My superiors are willing to pay handsomely for any information that might help us locate the remains that were found in Israel.’
Lucy began to warm to her theme. ‘They want to pay for my shells? That’s great! Please, let me arrange them for you and you can choose the ones you feel will please your superiors best. My personal favourites are the ammonites, some really good examples and almost pristine in the preservation of their features in the rock strata.’
Lucy stood up from her seat and reached across for a drawer that contained a collection of shells and assorted fossils. Opposite her, Vladimir stood up and one large hand pushed the drawer shut and pinned her hand in place.
‘My superiors will only make the offer once,’ he said. ‘I do not wish this to become any more difficult than it needs to be.’
Lucy, her hand pinned beneath the Russian’s, smiled sweetly as she erected a thin veil of confidence over her sudden fear.
‘If that’s your idea of a threat, then you just lost yourself a sale. I’ll keep my shells. Now get out of my office and don’t come back.’
Vladimir kept her hand pinned in place for a moment longer and then he turned and whirled from the office.
As soon as he closed the door behind him, Lucy exhaled heavily and slumped into her chair. It had been a long time since anybody had mentioned the things that had occurred in Israel and reminded her of the extraordinary, almost unbelievable discovery that she had made and been forced to abandon. To deny any knowledge of its existence pained her far more than the Russian would ever have known, especially as the Defense Intelligence Agency had forced her to sign nondisclosure agreements assuring that she would never share with anybody what she knew.
Lucy thought for a moment. She had not been alone in knowing of what had happened in Israel, and non-disclosure surely did not apply to individuals who already knew what she did. The Russian had threatened her, and what annoyed her most of all was that her work on the scant remnants of the remains she had been able to smuggle out of Israel without the agency’s knowledge now concerned something far more important that archaeological curiosity.
Lucy turned to look at a mock human skeleton standing in one corner of her office, used for instructional purposes during lectures across the country. She looked down to one of the skeleton’s hands, the index finger of which was somewhat longer than it should have been, the genuine bone perfectly disguised among fabricated replicas.
Lucy reached out and picked up the phone to dial a number she thought she would never actually ring.
IV
‘It’s ten dollars a slice and you either pay up now or you clear out.’
Reginald Hood Dyson rubbed his hands together against the cold of the night as he watched the addict’s eyes flicker at the threat of his next fix being snatched away from him. Dyson’s voice was soft with distance, but the crisp night air carried the sound well enough that she could hear it from thirty yards away, delivered as it was with enough force to scare his next customer into parting with money before he had even tested the goods.
Nicola Lopez leaned against the corner of South Princeton and West 63rd, close by the elevated rail line as she watched the deal go down amid crumbling tenement blocks and boarded up houses long since abandoned. Englewood was a neighbourhood on the decline, blighted by crime and poverty. She had been following Dyson for two weeks, the former convict a dealer with connections to some of the major import cartels operating out of South America. Dyson had spent more nights in Cook County Jail than Lopez had spent eating hot meals, a career criminal with enough muscle and reputation behind him to control an entire block on the city’s south side.
Like most all dealers, Dyson operated an area that looked every bit the drug dealer’s paradise. From where Lopez stood she could see multiple fires burning beneath the overpass where homeless people sought refuge from the bitter cold. It would be easy for an onlooker to think that all of them were simply low-life’s living one day to the next in search of their fix, but times had changed. Many of the people huddled over the meagre flames had once lived in decent houses, commuted to decent jobs, raised decent children. Now in the turbulent wake of the economic crisis, all that they had left to their name were the clothes in which they stood and the memories to which they clung.
Lopez focused on Dyson and ignored the mumbling masses shuffling from one fire to the next. The dealer already had a package in his hand and was waving it demonstratively to his potential customers, a small group of whom had gathered around and appeared to be squabbling among themselves as to who would pay. It remained a marvel to Lopez that people in such dire straits had anything to pay for drugs with, but then again she knew that many of them fuelled their addiction with muggings, thefts and other criminal acts, the drug trade the source of some seventy per cent of all crime in American cities.
Dyson handed the package over to a wiry, greasy-haired man with painfully thin features and a wild glint in his eye. Dyson was passed back in return greenbacks dirtied with age and use, much like the people handling them. Dyson pocketed the cash and offered his customers a mock salute, his smile bright in the flickering glow of the firelight and glinting with a gold tooth that Lopez knew he had had fitted two years before upon his release from jail, a celebration for the dropping of convictions due to lack of evidence and the interventions of a lawyer whose motivations were at best obscure.
Dyson swaggered off through the miserable masses as he made his way towards the 4x4 in which he had travelled from the west-side, and the vehicle that Lopez had followed him in. She pushed off the wall and circled back around some of the towering concrete pillars that supported the overpass above, the hiss and rattle of traffic rolling in and out of the city on the nearby I-94 an uncaring symphony to the misery.
As she walked past her car she glimpsed her reflection in one of the windows, long dark hair and equally dark eyes against olive skin. Lopez was only a little over five feet tall, dressed in a tight-fitting leather jacket, jeans and boots and with her hair tied back in a ponytail. She walked out from behind the car toward the 4x4 and intercepted Dyson.
Dyson looked up as Lopez stepped into view and he slowed, one corner of his lips curling up in a gruesome smile as he came to a stop and shook his head. His dark eyes looked her up and down for a long moment before he finally spoke.