The Artifact (6 page)

She sniffed, produced a tissue from a box on the end table and blew her nose. “First thing tomorrow.”

Sammy rose from the couch, walked to her desk and brought back the cordless phone. “Now,” he said.

After she made an appointment with her primary neurologist, Andrea picked up several pages of the Airborne Association printout from the table where Sammy had dropped them.

“Name and rank,” Andrea read, “unit, e-mail, occasional phone and address.” She looked at Sammy. “Gee, this is pretty good.”

“It’s not consistent, though. Because it’s all voluntary, not an official personnel list or anywhere near complete. Most guys just surfed into the site looking for a buddy they served with.”

Andrea sounded discouraged. “May be a whitewash in any event. Written by the very army whose soldiers stole millions in ancient Arab treasure.”

“Military Intelligence are like Internal Affairs in police departments, Andy. For the most part smart and dedicated. They’d need a lot of people to conduct an investigation like that. How could the army cover it up? And why?”

“Those are precisely the questions we’re going to answer.”

Andrea reached to the table for the spiral-bound pad in which she had entered notes during her interview with the general, flipping through the pages to refresh her memory.

“If the Army is covering up a high casualty rate in Mitchell’s second platoon during Black Dawn, I might have a pretty strong wedge to pop some congressional eyeballs.”

Sammy nodded his agreement as he made another note on the printout.

Andrea lifted the pages of the JCS summary onto her lap and began reading from it aloud. The report began with an introduction repeating the unsubstantiated charges leveled by Iraqi interim PM Allawi, the questions asked of the 211 soldiers in Bravo Company interrogated, the inconclusive findings, the subsequent fruitless search for the nomadic tribe by a platoon of impartial British Marines, and the conclusion that the Bedouin story had been fabricated for some reason known only to the workings of the incomprehensible Arab psyche. The names of the soldiers interviewed were not listed, nor were any verbatim comments made to MI and CIA investigative officers. Major Charles X. Geoff signed the Report Summary.

They were both silent for several minutes until Sammy said, “These crooks we’re looking for, probably half a dozen tough buggers, twenty-something, went through rugged training together, ate and slept side by side for months, grown to trust each another.”

“Could the average soldier pull this off?” she wondered. “This is brainy stuff, unloading the family jewels of some ancient Mesopotamian king; not like stealing dollars from Saddam’s stash.”

“These were just patrols, search and apprehend.” She lifted her eyes to gaze at the opposite wall. “Female medics are allowed on patrol under some circumstances. Would they be more squeamish about the theft than guys? Shooting the Bedouins? Would their male buddies exert pressure? How much?”

“What about the female guards at Abu Ghraib?”

“Good point. We’re not going to find a bunch of pussycats behind this. According to the Bedouins, they killed to get the treasure, they’ll kill to keep it.”

Sammy stared at her until she met his gaze. “You’ll bear that in mind won’t you, Princess?”

Andrea smirked. “I’ve been under fire before, remember?”

“This would be different. After your broadcast a lot of criminal minds will be figuring how to snatch the loot from a bunch of amateurs.”

“Hey!” Andrea said. “I do what it takes to get the job done. You don’t tiptoe through the tulips trying to break past a phalanx of macho suits.”

“Tell me about it,” Sammy said.

She saw the flash of pain cross her friend’s face and pressed her lips together. Two years ago, after Sammy’s partner had died of AIDS, and a still unknown homophobic employee had started the malicious rumor that Sammy was HIV positive. This information was quickly relayed to Rand Duncan, who immediately laid Sammy off before the lie could be challenged with the fact of his negative test results.

When Andrea caught up with that charade she organized a petition signed by most NNC employees, confronting Duncan with it during a well-attended staff meeting at which she threatened to take his blatant act of discrimination to a competitive network and sue the knickers off Duncan and any other NNC troglodytes who believed AIDS could be transmitted by shaking hands.

“How would the perps react to any upright trooper,” Andrea continued, “man or woman, who decided that stealing a priceless treasure was wrong?”

“Lots of things can happen out there away from the strictures of Main Street, middle America. Loaded weapons you’re trained to use, your focus is killing. A few guys with rough backgrounds, in the service as an option to jail. Hard to relate to civilized society back home.”

“They’re back in it now,” Andrea said, “and we need to find them.”

Shortly before noon, Andrea poured vodka into an empty can of Coke and replaced the pint back in her desk drawer just as T.P. Viola gave a courtesy rap of his knuckles on her closed door, then poked his head inside her office.

“Got a minute?”

“I’m right in the middle of something, Toilet, can we....”

Viola pushed the door open wide, shut it, then walked to the chair beside her desk and sat down with a manila file folder in hand. The news director of NNC-TV was a short wiry man with thinning black hair, a placid manner that concealed an infallible sense for the best lead story of the day and a sense of integrity forged from steel cables.

“Oh, come on in, Toilet,” she said, “have a seat.”

When he had hired Andrea five years ago, no one at the station knew Viola’s first name or what ‘T.P.’ stood for. Within a month, her inquisitive nature discovered that her boss’s given name was Theodosius Pangloss, and the initials stemmed from an incident in his youth when he had served as a navy ensign aboard a destroyer as supply officer. During training maneuvers with the fleet, his ship ran out of toilet paper, and the captain became the joke of the flotilla when he was forced to beg 300 rolls from his peers steaming beside him. Andrea never revealed this information to anyone and only addressed him as ‘Toilet’ when they were alone.

Viola reached for the remote on her desk, turned his chair around to face her monitor and clicked it on. The TV screen showed a man and woman sitting side by side at a chrome anchor desk with their station logo.

“...will go to any lengths to get an audience,” the man said, “which borders on irresponsible reporting.”

“Yeah,” Andrea quipped, “just like Bernstein and Woodward.”

“It certainly does,” the woman agreed. “How long will the American people have to wait for the other shoe to drop? So far there are just rumors and innuendo. Suppose their so-called artifact story comes to an abrupt halt right where it is?”

“Precisely,” the male commentator said, turning from his co-anchor toward the camera. “But if there is a story, if an antique treasure has in fact been stolen from the Arabian desert by renegade American soldiers, that news will be verified first by legitimate sources before we report it right here on....”

T.P. switched to another channel on which the head and shoulders of a silver-haired anchorman faced his audience. “During the past year, this ‘Preacher Lady’ has raised the hackles of the hard-core faithful and the ire of religious leaders across the country.” A distance shot of an attractive AmerAsian woman with long black hair filled the screen behind the reporter as he continued speaking. “Decried by many as a heretic and anti-Christ, she has caught the imagination of a small percentage of people disenchanted by recent abuses by clergy, Muslim terrorists, unpopular issues such as same sex unions, birth control, female bishops and marriage for Catholic priests.”

“What’s her point?” Andrea asked. “If she’s against organized religion, how does she expect to establish a congregation to pull in the bucks?”

T.P. transferred the file folder from his lap to her desk. “Here’s the background we’ve accumulated on the Hannah Ogie woman. It’s pretty thin. No real history. She’s surrounded by a half dozen bodyguards, permits no behind the scene photos, refuses all questions.”

Viola sat erect in his chair, preparatory to standing up. “The artifact fades to black till something significant breaks. That’s non-negotiable.”

Andy fixed him with a hard stare, but couldn’t hold it. She reached toward the credenza beside her desk, picked up the Military Intelligence summary Captain Brooks had given her the previous night, handing it to him.

Viola began speed reading through the report, flipping the pages quickly. “As benign as it is, I want to use this before the pool gets out of their press conference at Bragg. Good way to let things hang for awhile after your pitch last night.”

She sighed, took another sip from the Coke can, pausing a moment before pretending acquiescence. “All right.”

T.P. stood and turned to leave, pointing at the Preacher Lady investigative summary on her desk. “Let me see thirty seconds of copy before two. I’ll squeeze it into Frank’s three o’clock slot while the pool’s still in the conference at Bragg.”

Andrea grinned. “They’ll be bullshit.”

“So will I,” T.P. said, pointing to the Coke can on her desk, “if you don’t lay off that stuff in the office.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Teignmouth, England

September 2004

Bradford Jamison had e-mailed a trio of identical messages shortly after reading the morning edition of the
London Times
account of Andrea Madigan’s special television newscast from Fort Bragg. Seven hours later, three of the most successful international art thieves patched into a secure conference line from their respective domiciles to listen to the plumy voice emanating from the country estate of their respected senior, their personal computers ready to receive encoded messages.

These independent cracksmen of precious artwork, whose financial achievements during the past decade were largely due to Jameson’s meticulous coaching, now listened attentively as their mentor proposed their association in an undertaking to find and steal the cache of ancient artifacts unearthed in the Syrian Desert by American soldiers.

“
We may very well not be obliged to meet until we locate the items,” Jamison said in English, the
lingua franca
of the quartet, “so I suggest we maintain our usual pseudonyms for all communications.” A tall, sparse man with military posture, the Englishman wore a black Cashmere double-breasted smoking jacket and regimental tie reflecting his Imperial Guards service during the 1960s.