"You know your assignment," Ben said. "I'm the desk guy. You find the ship."
"I'm going to do that," Briars said.
"I'd give you a high five, but I hurt too much," Ben said. "Let's just shake hands very carefully."
I was really happy for the two of them, but I couldn't get as excited about it as I probably should have. There were too many loose ends. And there was something bothering me about this discussion, a not quite fully formed thought hovering around the edges of my consciousness.
"So of this cargo, the stuff that's listed here on the plaque, what would you expect to still find, given that over two thousand years have passed, Briars?" Ben asked.
"The silver and copper ingots would probably not be in good shape, unless they got completely buried in a great deal of silt. Anything gold would be fine. Gold is essentially inert. The statue should be okay, although it probably isn't solid gold, so it depends what's under it and how well protected that might be. If the coins were gold, they'd be fine, although if they're small, they might easily have been washed away by currents. Silver and bronze coins would survive only if they were well sealed in the terra cotta. In fact, anything in the terra cotta might do just fine, if well sealed. You never know, we might even be able to drink the dregs of the wine."
The terra-cotta wine jug in Rashid's warehouse! "I hope this doesn't throw a damper on this conversation," I said. "But you remember, Briars, you told me that you thought someone else might have found the ship; that there were artifacts coming on the market that made you suspicious?"
"I do. I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"I saw four large amphorae, and a wine jug that matched the one in the photo you showed me, Briars--the jug Zoubeeir took from the wreck--in Rashid Houari's warehouse the night he died. I'd completely forgotten to tell you about it. I don't know what happened to me."
"Seeing Rashid hanging up there with his puppets might have something to do with it," Ben said.
"Now I'm wondering if Rashid was very carefully placing these things for sale one at a time, so that no one would get really suspicious, or if they did, there wasn't enough of it, to raise a hue and cry."
"What kinds of objects did you see? Just the wine jug and amphorae?"
"No. Gold jewelry, quite a bit of it, an old bronze sword, and a handful of coins."
"This isn't good, Ben," Briars said. "I had a feeling this stuff was leaking onto the market. If a lot of it's gone, then we'll have trouble reconciling the plaque and the wreck." He looked at his watch, and stood up. "We've got to go, Lara. Take care of yourself, Ben. We'll be back in a couple of days to get you and we'll talk about this some more. I'm going to go pick up my bag, and I'll meet you out front, Lara."
"I've got to get going, too, Ben," I said, a few minutes later.
"Is something bothering you?" he asked.
"Sort of," I replied. "You know that feeling when a thought is lurking at the back of your mind, and you keep trying to pull it up and you can't and . . . Coins," I said, rising from my chair. "It's coins. It's Emile. He's been looking for the source of some Carthaginian coins that are destroying his business. Chastity's been following him everywhere. She's in danger."
I raced toward the lobby. Out on the street I could see four Toyota Land Cruisers lined up, engines running, luggage already loaded, the members of our group milling about, and the drivers having a last-minute smoke nearby. I couldn't see either Chastity or Emile. "Hedi," I said, grabbing his arm. "Where's Chastity?"
"She's just on the other side of the driveway, talking to Emile," he said, looking surprised at my tone.
They didn't see me at first. Chastity was crying. "But I love you, Emile," she sobbed. "I won't tell anybody you were there."
Seeing me, Emile grabbed her arm and started pulling her toward the first Land Cruiser. "Don't, Emile," I shouted. "Leave her alone."
He had a gun. He opened the back door and pushed her inside. "Get in," he said to me, gesturing toward the front seat, and climbing in the back beside Chastity. "Drive!"
I drove. I gunned it up the hill to the street, looking in the rearview mirror for any sign of Briars. At the main road, I expected Emile to tell me to turn right and head for the airport or possibly the Algerian border, but he ordered me to go left.
We passed a policeman on the outskirts of town, but I was going the speed limit, and he just waved us through. We looped down an old road, and then hit a causeway that stretched straight as an arrow ahead of us.
"Keep going," Emile said. "Drive as fast as you can, but watch out for police. If you get stopped, she's dead." Chastity whimpered.
We were on the Chott el-Jerid, I was reasonably certain, a landlocked and dry salt lake. To either side of us was an arid landscape with shimmering sands but very little water. Small pyramids of salt were piled on either side of the raised roadway which, if memory served me correctly, stretched almost sixty miles across the Chott. In places the salty crust had broken through to reveal a little water beneath the surface, sometimes green, sometimes pink, a mirage of sorts. The landscape was painfully bright as the sun caught the salt crystals in the soil. I reached across the front seat for my bag.
"What are you doing?" Emile barked from the back seat.
"I need my sunglasses," I said.
"Get them from her bag," Emile said to Chastity, who fumbled nervously with the clasp before finding them for me.
I checked the rearview mirror. Way back, there was a plume of dust. Other than that, there was nothing. From time to time, a tent or two would break the otherwise uniform vistas, and to the north and east the thin brown line of the Jebel El Asker, the El Asker mountains, could be seen through the haze.
We stopped at a Berber tent at the roadside to get water. "Don't even think about calling for help," Emile said. We didn't get out of the car. In a minute or two we were on our way again. The plume of dust stayed with us, a little closer, I thought, or perhaps I was only willing it to be so. Let it be Briars, the police, help, I prayed. I tried letting up on the gas pedal just slightly, hoping Emile wouldn't notice.
"Step on it," he snarled.
At the far end of the causeway, we swept through Kebili, stopping just once to get gas. Emile kept the gun out of sight, but there was no way for me to signal the attendant at the gas station. I just hoped, by some miracle, that someone was following us, would find this gas station, and the man would remember the woman driver with the nattily attired European and the girl in the back. A long shot, I knew, but hope was all there was.
I had no idea where we were going. Logically, if I remembered the map I'd studied the day before, we would head northeast from here, up to Gafsa, and then on to much better roads, which would take us to international airports in Monastir or even Tunis. But it looked to me as if we were angling south to Douz. Why he would do this, I didn't know. It seemed to me that south of Douz there was nothing but sand.
The road out of Douz got progressively worse, broken pavement, really, with dunes to either side. From time to time I had to weave my way through sand that had blown across the road. I could taste sand in my mouth, and my skin had a grittiness to it that seemed to mirror the grating of my nerves. The road, with its curves and rises, made it impossible to see if anyone was behind us. Occasionally I thought I saw an oasis, but I wasn't certain. The light was playing tricks on me.
Soon even scattered houses and reed huts were few and far between. It was like being at the edge of the world. The dying sun touched the dunes, turning them first golden, then pink, then the most extraordinary shade of red, shot through with yellow. It was almost as if the desert were in flames, or had been changed to molten lava that undulated like the sea. It seemed a cruel quirk of fate that such a dangerous, no desperate, situation could play out against a landscape so impossibly beautiful.