37
I don’t know if Carrie Saunders panicked. I don’t know if the tube slipped from her mouth and, trapped as she was, she was unable to reach it again. Sometimes, I find myself imagining her final moments, and always I see Herod tossing aside his spade and staring down at the compacted dirt, then gently tugging the breathing tube from the mouth of the woman buried below. He did it because she had breached some unwritten contract with him, but also because it pleased him to do so. For all his talk of honor, and negotiations, and promises, I believed that Herod was a cruel man. He kept his word about releasing Karen Emory, and he told her where Carrie Saunders was buried before he left her, but the autopsy concluded that Carrie Saunders had been dead for hours when she was found.
I do know this: Carrie Saunders killed Jimmy Jewel, and she killed Foster Jandreau. A gun, a Glock .22, was found in her house. The bullets matched those used to kill Jimmy and Jandreau, and her fingerprints were the only ones found on the weapon. As for Roddam, there was no way of knowing for certain if she was responsible for his death, but Herod had told the truth about her involvement in the other killings, so there was no reason to believe that he had been lying about Roddam.
After Saunders’s body was found, there was some speculation that the man responsible for her death might have framed her for the other killings, but it was dismissed when Bobby Jandreau came forward and told of how he had spoken with his cousin Foster about his belief that the death of Damien Patchett, and those of Bernie Kramer and the Harlans, were linked to a smuggling operation being run by Joel Tobias, although he had no formal evidence to offer in support. Foster Jandreau was ambitious, but he hadn’t advanced fast enough for his liking, and had stalled. If he could find evidence of illegal dealings on the part of Joel Tobias, he might have been able to resuscitate a moribund career. But Bobby Jandreau had made the mistake of discussing the matter with Carrie Saunders during one of their therapy sessions, and then she had killed Foster to stop him delving further into the operation and sullied his reputation with drug vials. Whether or not she did so with Joel Tobias’s knowledge and consent I could not say, and those who might have been able to tell me were all dead. I remembered what others had said about Tobias: he was smart, but not that smart. He was not capable of running an operation potentially involving millions of dollars worth of stolen antiquities, but Carrie Saunders was. In Paris, Rochman revealed that his contact for the purchase of the ivories and the seals had been a woman who used the pseudonym ‘Medea’ and that the money had been wired to a bank in Bangor, Maine. Rumors emerged that Saunders and Roddam might have been lovers during their time together at Abu Ghraib, but they were an unlikely couple. War created such odd unions, but it was probable that Roddam and Saunders were using each other, and Saunders had come out on top, because Roddam had died. Saunders and Tobias had gone to the same high school in Bangor, Saunders graduating the year after Tobias. They had known each other for a long time, but if she had been the guiding intelligence behind the operation, she wouldn’t have required the permission of Joel Tobias or anyone else to do whatever she had to in order to ensure its success.
I was there when they broke open the lock on the box, and I saw Carrie Saunders’s face. Whatever she might have done, she did not deserve to die in that way.
Shortly after the discovery of the body, I gave my statement to the police, with two agents from ICE, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in attendance. Behind them hovered a small man with a beard and dark skin, who introduced himself as Dr. Al-Daini, late of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The agents were part of the JIACG, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, a grab bag of military, FBI, CIA, Treasury, ICE, and anyone else who happened to be passing and had an interest in Iraq, and how terrorists might be financing their operations. They had been drawn to the looting of the Iraq Museum by concerns that the stolen items were being sold on the black market to raise funds for the insurgency. The man who had interrogated me at the Blue Moon was lying, both to me and to himself: people were being hurt by what they were doing, but they were dying on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah and anywhere else in Iraq that American soldiers were being targeted. I told the agents and Dr. Al-Daini everything, with only one detail concealed. I did not tell them of the Collector. Dr. Al-Daini seemed to sway slightly at the news of the loss of the box, but he said nothing.
When we were done, I got in my car and drove south.
38
Herod sat in his study, surrounded by his books and his tools. There were no mirrors, no reflective surfaces. He had even placed his computer in another room so that there was no chance of a face being glimpsed. The Captain was a distraction, his desire to see the box opened so compelling that Herod had been forced to banish him from its presence by covering every reflective surface. He needed peace in which to work; to have done so in the presence of the Captain would have driven him insane. Figuring out the mechanisms of the locks would take time: days, perhaps. They had to be opened in a certain combination, for there were cells within cells. It was a puzzle box, an extraordinary construct: whatever relics had been concealed in the final chamber were bound with wire, and the wire was connected in turn to every lock. Simply to have broken the locks by force would have torn the presumably fragile relics apart, and if someone had gone to such efforts to secure them then it meant that it was important that the relics remain intact.
The box stood on a white cloth. It no longer vibrated, and all of the voices within had ceased their whispering, as though wary of imposing on the concentration of the one who might free them. Herod was not afraid of them. The Captain had told him of what lay in the box, and the nature of the bonds that restricted them. They were beasts, but chained beasts. Once the box was opened, they would be revealed, yet still constrained. They would have to be made to understand that they were the Captain’s creatures.
He was about to prise off the first spider, and reveal the mechanism of the lock, when the house alarm went off, shocking him with its suddenness. Herod did not even pause to assess the situation. He hit the locks on the safe room, sealing himself inside. He then picked up the phone, pressed the red button on the handset, and was immediately connected with the security company responsible for monitoring the alarm. He confirmed a possible intrusion and notified them that he had locked himself in the safe room. He walked to a closet and opened it to reveal a bank of monitor screens, each revealing one aspect of the house, both internal and external, and its grounds. He thought that he now caught the Captain’s reflection on the screens, and felt his intense curiosity as he tried to glimpse the box, but Herod ignored him. There were more pressing issues for now. He could see no evidence of intrusion, and the gates to the property remained closed. It might well have been a false alarm, but Herod was disinclined to take chances with his personal safety or with his collection, especially when such a valuable and rare addition had just been made to it.
After four minutes, an unmarked black van appeared at the gates. A numerical security code, changed weekly as an added safeguard, was entered on the pad by the gatepost, which Herod duly confirmed. The gates opened, and the van entered the property, the gates immediately closing again behind it. Once the van reached the front of the house, its doors opened and four armed men appeared, two of them immediately moving to check the sides and rear of the building, one man training his weapon on the grounds, while the last approached the door and activated the main intercom.
‘Dürer,’ said a voice. Like the numerical code, the word confirming the security team’s identity was also changed weekly.
‘Dürer,’ repeated Herod. He remotely activated the front door lock, opening it and allowing the security guards access to the main house. One of them, the one who had given the code word, immediately entered. The man who had been watching the grounds moved to the door, but remained outside until the main search team had joined him, after confirming that the rest of the house was secure, at which point he too entered the house, leaving them outside. Herod tried to follow their progress from screen to screen as they deactivated the main alarm and checked the log, then proceeded to move through the house. Ten minutes after the search had commenced, the intercom buzzed in Herod’s office.
‘You’re clear, sir. Looks like it was something in zone two: dining room window. There’s no sign of attempted entry, though. Might be a fault. We can send out a technician in the morning.’
‘Thank you,’ said Herod. ‘You can leave now.’
He watched the four-man team leave. When they were gone, and the gates had closed behind them, he deactivated the locks on the study door and hid the screens, and the Captain, from sight. Although the room was well ventilated, and he often worked with the door closed, Herod disliked keeping it locked. The thought of imprisonment, or long-term confinement of any kind, terrified him. He thought that was why he had enjoyed inflicting it on the Saunders woman. It was a kind of transference, but also a punishment. He had offered both her and Tobias a deal: their lives for the location of the trove, but they had been greedy, and had commenced a negotiation for which he had neither the time nor the inclination. The second deal was offered to Tobias alone: he could die slowly, or quickly, but he was going to die. Tobias had trouble believing that at first, but Herod had managed to convince him in the end.
As he opened the door of his study, he was still mildly troubled by what might have caused the alarm activation, and was not concentrating fully on the room beyond, so that the Captain’s voice sounded like a siren in his ears as soon as he began to emerge, an incoherent burst of anger and warning and fear. Before he could respond, there was movement in front of him. There were two men, both armed. One of them smelled so strongly of nicotine that his presence in the room seemed immediately to pollute the air. He pushed Herod to the ground and placed a blade against his neck.
Herod stared up at the face of the Collector. Behind him was the detective, Parker. Neither man spoke, but Herod’s head was filled with noise.
It was the sound of the Captain, screaming.