He caught the statue with his left hand. He knew from experience that if she was intent on returning to the city, further discussion would be futile. He stowed the artifact in his bag, taking something out at the same time.
"Hey Lyse." He held up his Glock. "You might need this."
Her face broke into a smile of sincere gratitude. She slid a hand down the inside of her left thigh, separating the fabric with a rasping noise that could only be the halves of a Velcro closure. A compact automatic pistol-a Glock 26, nearly identical to his only much smaller-appeared in her right hand.
"You had that the whole time?"
"Nick, you know I hate violence. This is for emergencies; a last resort."
Kismet let out a frustrated sigh. "Just be careful, will you?"
"Always." She smiled and turned the camel to ride away.
"Wait a minute. There's something I need to tell you."
She gazed back. "What's that?"
"The statue. There's no way it's an ancient artifact. Whoever made it did an expert job, but the inscription is a style of Hebrew that wasn't used until about three hundred years after the end of calf worship in Samaria. In short, the statue that you refused to leave behind is a fake."
Her reaction left him dumbstruck. Lyse did not protest or question his appraisal, nor did she fly into a rage at having been tricked by a forger. Instead, she simply laughed.
"Nick, I knew that."
She laughed again then urged the camel to a gallop. When the cloud of dust left by her exit had been swept away by the desert winds, Kismet, with a fixed look of disbelief, climbed onto his camel and rode toward the last gleams of sunset.
TWO
It was not the blowing sands of the Sahara that tapped lightly against the windowpanes of Nick Kismet's office, but rather a dusting of grainy, New York City snow. Though it was only five o'clock in the evening, the stormy December sky over Manhattan was already dark. The snowflakes were visible only in the glare of street lamps. Kismet gazed absently out the tiny window a moment longer, and then turned away.
The official presence of the UN's Global Heritage Commission was located not in the legendary United Nations building on 44th Street overlooking the East River, but instead several city blocks away in an inconspicuous corner of the American Museum of Natural History. Its extensive collection of anthropological artifacts had made the AMNH one of two locations considered for the dubious privilege of hosting the GHC, the other being the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Natural History had drawn the short straw and grudgingly made room in the lower level of the massive edifice, giving Kismet a converted supply closet just down the corridor from the school lunchroom. It wasn't much of an office, but for Kismet's purposes it was more than adequate.
The Global Heritage Commission had been created in the early 1980's as part of the UN's effort to remodel UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Established in 1946, UNESCO had set forth noble goals for itself — the elimination of illiteracy, the free exchange of scientific ideas, the protection of historical locations and art treasures — but decades of Cold War politics had undermined those lofty intentions. In 1984, the United States of America had withdrawn from membership, removing a cornerstone of financial and political support. Nevertheless, it had taken the United Nations more than fifteen years to address the issues that created the schism in the first place. The Global Heritage Commission had begun as an interim compromise, addressing a narrower band of issues without being subject to the whims of an international governing body. The efforts to repair UNESCO had ultimately paid off, culminating with the official renewal of the United States' membership in 2003.
Despite the reestablishment of its parent organization, the GHC continued to perform a valuable function on the international playing field. Kismet's duties typically involved random inspections of American sponsored archaeological sites, advance negotiations on behalf of pioneering scientists, and acting as a liaison with law enforcement agencies investigating the illicit antiquities trade. In the big picture, it probably wasn't a very important job, and it certainly didn't pay very well, but Kismet found his vocation desirable for one simple reason: answers.
Nick Kismet didn't know a great deal about his own origins. A foundling, he had been raised by Christian Garral, a globetrotting adventurer and a self-made man of means, who had adopted the boy as his own son. His name was itself a relic of his post-natal abandonment — Garral, on one of his adventures, claimed to have encountered a young woman in the throes of child birth and assisted her in extremis. Almost immediately following the birth, the mother had slipped away, leaving only a single word, written in the blood of her womb and in a strange alien script. Garral had eventually deciphered it-the Arabic word: qismat. To Westerners, it transliterated as "kismet." An ancient and powerful word, its earliest meaning was the portion of land given to the firstborn, but later came to be associated with fate and destiny. Taking this as omen, Garral had elected to adopt the boy and ascribed him that distinctive surname. "Nick" was chosen for more prosaic reasons; Garral's own father was named Nicklaus.
Because he had no memory of his strange nativity, Kismet had over the course of the years, regarded the matter with some suspicion; his father was not above spinning a whopper of a tall tale. His uniquely stimulating childhood had kept him from agonizing overmuch about the matter as Garral's adventures took him to exotic environments in every corner of the globe. When at last it became time for him to formalize his education, his affinity for the many places he had visited in his youth led him to pursue the study of international law. In order to help pay for his studies — a matter of personal pride on his own part, for Garral was certainly wealthy enough to foot the bill — he had joined the Army ROTC, and his grasp of several different languages had led him to choose Military Intelligence as his occupational specialty. It had all been academic up until the events of late 1990, when armies from Iraq had invaded Kuwait and seemed poised to attack Saudi Arabia as well. Although he had always recognized the possibility of a deployment, the activation orders had come with the finality of a guillotine. He had said his good-byes and after a brief train-up, shipped out to Riyadh.
After the initial shock of dislocation had faded, he had come to accept his part in the greater mission to liberate Kuwait, but on one fateful night his world had been turned upside down. Seemingly from out of nowhere, he had been given orders for an over the border operation — the rescue of a defector with important military secrets. Compounding the irregularity of the orders was the fact that he would be accompanied only by a squad of Gurkhas. Britain's answer to the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas were a regiment of soldiers named for the fierce warrior tribe of Nepal whose signature weapon was a boomerang-shaped chopping knife called a kukri, and like their namesake, the Gurkhas fought heroically wherever they were sent. Half a century after the fact, they were still boasting about the fact the Gurkhas had suffered the highest casualty rates of Allied soldiers during the Second World War. Kismet's escorts had certainly honored the memories of their predecessors that night with a sacrifice of their own blood, but not before Kismet made contact with the defector, a man who identified himself as Samir Al-Azir, an engineer for the Iraqi regime who had, in the course of rebuilding the ancient city of Babylon, discovered a strange and extraordinarily valuable relic dating back to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar. Fearing that the United States might capture the relic and return it to Israel, Saddam Hussein had ordered Samir to destroy it, but the engineer had demurred choosing instead to use the artifact as a bargaining token to secure safe passage for himself and his family.