Daniel Silva - Prince of fire

“And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.

“He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”

“That’s all?” asked Yaakov.

Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”

“My God,” murmured Rimona.

“There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”

“It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”

“It was March fourth,” Dina said.

“The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.

“That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who masterminded Rome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eight days.”

“I think we may have found another one, Professor.”

Paul Martineau, crouched on all fours in the deep shadows of the excavation pit, twisted his head slowly round and searched for the origin of the voice that had disturbed his work. It fell upon the familiar form of Yvette Debre, a young graduate student who had volunteered for the dig. Lit from behind by the sharp mid-morning Provencal sun, she was a mere silhouette. Martineau had always considered her something of a well-concealed artifact. Her short dark hair and square features left the impression of an adolescent boy. Only when his eye traveled down her body-across the ample breasts, the slender waist, the rounded hips-was her remarkable beauty fully revealed. He had probed her body with his skilled hands, sifted the soil of its secret corners, and found hidden delights and the pain of ancient wounds. No one else on the dig suspected their relationship was anything more than professor and pupil. Paul Martineau was very good at keeping secrets.

“Where is it?”

“Behind the meeting house.”

“Real or stone?”

“Stone.”

“The attitude?”

“Face up.”

Martineau stood. Then he placed his palms on either side of the narrow pit and, with a powerful thrust of his shoulders, pushed himself back up to the surface. He patted the reddish Provencal earth from his palms and smiled at Yvette. He was dressed, as usual, in faded denim jeans and suede boots that were cut a bit more stylishly than those favored by lesser archaeologists. His woolen pullover was charcoal gray, and a crimson handkerchief was knotted rakishly at his throat. His hair was dark and curly, his eyes were large and deep brown. A colleague had once remarked that in Paul Martineau’s face one could see traces of all the peoples who had once held sway in Provence-the Celts and the Gauls, the Greeks and the Romans, the Visigoths and Teutons, the Franks and the Arabs. He was undeniably handsome. Yvette Debre had not been the first admiring graduate student to be seduced by him.

Officially, Martineau was an adjunct professor of archaeology at the prestigious University of Aix-Marseille III, though he spent most of his time in the field and served as an adviser to more than a dozen local archaeological museums scattered across the south of France. He was an expert on the pre-Roman history of Provence, and although only thirty-five, was regarded as one of the finest French archaeologists of his generation. His last paper, a treatment on the demise of Ligurian hegemony in Provence, had been declared the standard academic work on the subject. Currently he was in negotiation with a French publisher for a mass-market work on the ancient history of the region.

His success, his women, and rumors of wealth had made him the source of considerable professional resentment and gossip. Martineau, though hardly talkative about his personal life, had never made a secret of his provenance. His late father, Henri Martineau, had dabbled in business and diplomacy and failed spectacularly at both. Martineau, upon the death of his mother, had sold the family’s large home in Avignon, along with a second property in the rural Vaucluse. He had been living comfortably on the proceeds ever since. He had a large flat near the university in Aix, a comfortable villa in the Luberon village of Lacoste, and a small pied-a-terre in Montmartre in Paris. When asked why he had chosen archaeology, he would reply that he was fascinated by the question of why civilizations came and went and what brought about their demise. Others sensed in him a certain restiveness, a quiet fury that seemed to be calmed, at least temporarily, by physically plunging his hands into the past.

Martineau followed the girl through the maze of excavation trenches. Located atop a mount overlooking the broad plain of the Chaine de l’Etoile, the site was an oppidum, or walled hill fort, built by the powerful Celto-Ligurian tribe known as the Salyes. Initial excavations had concluded that the fort contained two distinct sections, one for a Celtic aristocracy and another for what was thought to be a Ligurian underclass. But Martineau had put forward a new theory. The hasty addition of the poorer section of the fort had coincided with a round of fighting between the Ligurians and the Greeks near Marseilles. On this dig, Martineau had proven conclusively that the annex had been the equivalent of an Iron Age refugee camp.

Now he sought to answer three questions: Why had the hill fort been abandoned after only a hundred years? What was the significance of the large number of severed heads, some real and some rendered in stone, that he had discovered in the vicinity of the central meeting house? Were they merely the battle trophies of a barbarian Iron Age people, or were they religious in nature, linked somehow to the mysterious Celtic “severed head” cult? Martineau suspected the cult may have had a hand in the hill fort’s rapid demise, which is why he had ordered the other members of the team to alert him the moment a “head” was discovered-and why he handled the excavations personally. He had learned through hard experience that no clue, no matter how insignificant, could be ignored. What was the disposition of the head? What other artifacts or fragments were found in the vicinity? Was there trace evidence contained in the surrounding soil? Such matters could not be left in the hands of a graduate student, even one as talented as Yvette Debre.

They arrived at an excavation trench, about six feet in length and shoulder-width across. Martineau lowered himself in, careful not to disturb the surrounding earth. Protruding from the hard subsoil was the easily recognizable shape of a human nose. Martineau, from his back pocket, removed a small hand pick and a brush and went to work.

For the next six hours he did not rise from his pit. Yvette sat cross-legged at the edge. Occasionally she offered him mineral water or coffee, which he also refused. Every few minutes one of the other team members would wander by and inquire about his progress. Their questions were met by silence. Only the sound of Martineau’s work emanated from the trench. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow. Pick, pick, brush, brush, blow…

Slowly the face rose toward him from the depths of the ancient soil, mouth drawn in final anguish, eyes closed in death. As the morning wore on he probed deeper into the soil and found, as he had expected, that the head was held by a hand. Those gathered on the edge of the excavation trench did not realize that for Paul Martineau, the face represented more than an intriguing artifact from the distant past. Martineau, in the dark soil, saw the face of his enemy-and one day soon, he thought, he too would be holding a severed head in the palm of his hand.