looking at the statues and other artifacts that Salim and his colleague hadn’t yet been able to remove to safety, and the vacant plinths of those that they had. His voice echoed in the stone chamber as he spoke:
‘I am Nazim al-Kassar. You must be Salim Youssef, the curator. Tell me, old man. This place is looking quite empty. Where have you hidden the rest of these idolatrous pieces of trash you call art?’
‘So you have come here to destroy them,’ Salim said defiantly.
‘This house of blasphemy, along with everything inside it and all that you have vainly tried to rescue,’ said Nazim al-Kassar. ‘It shall be razed to the ground, inshallah.’
‘You will not! You must not!’
The commander smiled. ‘These are the idols of previous centuries, which were worshipped instead of Allah. They have no place in the new Caliphate that will now rule this country for the rest of time. Allah commands that they be shattered and broken into dust.’
‘Savages! Vandals! What gives you the right to erase history? You think you’re doing Allah’s bidding? Where does the Qur’an make such a command? Nowhere! I am also a Muslim, and I say that you bring shame and disgrace upon our religion!’ The old man was seething with fury. Cringing behind him, Julien Segal was too terrified to utter a word.
The commander’s voice remained calm as he pointed a black-gloved finger at Salim and replied, ‘Old man, I will ask only once. You will lead me to where you have hidden the idols of this false divinity, so that the soldiers of the Caliphate may consign them to the past, where they belong.’
‘Then I belong there with them,’ Salim said. ‘I will die before I allow you to wreak your unholy destruction in this place.’
‘So be it,’ the commander said. ‘What you ask for, you will receive.’ He nodded to his men. Four of them stepped forwards, seized Salim and Julien Segal each by the arms, and forced them down to their knees on the flagstone floor. The Frenchman knelt with his head bowed and shoulders sagging. Next to him, the older man refused to break eye contact with his tormentors and remained straight-backed, chin high.
The commander reached down to the hilt of the long, curved knife that hung from his belt, and drew out the blade with a sigh of steel against leather. Salim wouldn’t take his eyes off him for an instant, even though he knew what was coming.
Julien Segal let out a whimper. ‘For God’s sake, Salim. We have to tell them. Please.’
‘I’m sorry, Julien. I will not go to my grave knowing that I betrayed my life’s work to these maniacs.’
The commander stepped around behind Salim.
Salim closed his eyes.
What happened next had Julien Segal burying his face in the dirt and crying in unbearable anguish. But the old man never made a sound. He faced his death with the same steely resolve that he’d shown throughout his life.
Moments later, Julien Segal felt the thump of something hitting the floor beside him. Followed by a second, heavier thud as Salim’s decapitated body slumped forward to fall on the floor next to where the commander had tossed his severed head. Segal couldn’t bring himself to look directly at it, and instead watched in horror as the blood pool spread over the floor, trickling into the cracks between the flagstones and reflecting the light from the arched window.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ said the man called Nazim al-Kassar.
The present day
It was a cold, bright and sunny October morning in Paris, and Ben Hope was making a brief stop-off in the city on his return from a long journey. The trip to India hadn’t been a scheduled event, but then few things in his life were, or ever had been, despite his best efforts to lead the kind of peaceful and stable existence he might have wished for. It seemed that fate always had other plans for him.
All he really wanted to do now was put the experience behind him, move on from it and get home. Home being a sleepy corner of rural Normandy some three hundred kilometres west of Paris, a place called Le Val, and he couldn’t wait to get there. First he had some business to attend to in the city, which he intended to get sorted as quickly as possible, partly since it was a rather dull chore that he’d put off for too long.
The first thing he’d done when his plane had landed at Orly Airport the previous evening was to call Jeff Dekker, his business partner at Le Val, to say he was back in the country and would be home by early next afternoon. Jeff was pretty well used to Ben’s frequent impromptu disappearances; all he said was ‘See you later.’
Ben’s second action was to call a Parisian estate agent he knew to talk about finally selling the backstreet apartment he’d owned for years and never used any more. Back when he’d worked freelance and lived a nomadic existence, the place had come in handy as an occasional base camp in the city. It had never been more than a bolthole for him, and he’d made little effort to furnish or decorate it beyond the absolute basics of necessity. The pragmatic nature of military life was an ingrained habit that refused to die in him, though he’d been out of that world for quite some years.
Whatever the case, the apartment had long since become surplus to his requirements. Though every time he’d been on the verge of putting the place up for sale, as had happened on several occasions, another of those bolts from the blue would arrive to yank him off on some new crazy mission or other. Which, as he was all too aware, was just a reflection of the broader reality that whatever kinds of plans he had in mind, some new crisis would invariably loom up to divert him right off track.
Such was life. Maybe, after another forty years, he’d get used to it.
But that wasn’t going to happen this time, he told himself. This time he was going to bite the bullet, put the place on the market, go home to Le Val and get back down to running his business. The eternally patient Jeff, his longtime friend and co-director of the tactical training centre they’d founded and built together, might appreciate Ben’s actually being around sometimes. Instructing the world’s top law enforcement, security and close protection services in the finer points of their craft was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.
It was just after eight a.m. At ten-thirty he was due to meet with the property agent, a nervous-mannered chap called Gerbier who, Ben already knew, would spend an hour hemming and hawing about the difficulties of selling the place. First, because despite its theoretically desirable central location it was all but totally secreted away among a cluster of crumbly old buildings and its only access was via an underground car park. Second, because even at its best it had never looked like much on the inside, either, and needed decoration work to appeal to any but the most Spartan of buyers. And third, because right now wasn’t a good time for the Parisian property market in general.
Ben had to admit the guy might have a point about that. For months the city had been locked in increasingly turbulent civil unrest, boiling with constant anti-government protests that had sparked off over a long list of political and social grievances and seemed to grow more serious and violent each passing day. There had been mass arrests, the cops had started deploying armoured personnel carriers and water cannon in the streets, and there were no signs of things cooling down any time soon. Now the troubles had spread across the city into Ben’s normally quiet neighbourhood. He had lain awake for some time last night, listening to the screeching sirens and
