The Sword of Moses Read Online Free Page A

Museum of Iraq during the war.”
    She paused, looking across at Hunter to see if he wanted more detail.
    “Baghdad’s a dangerous place for a civilian working outside the Green Zone.”
    The unexpected comment came from the athletic man to Hunter’s left. His accent was British. Although not in uniform, he looked windswept and tanned from an active outdoor lifestyle. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties.
    She glanced at the identity tag hanging round his neck. It simply read ‘David Ferguson’. There were no other details.
    Ferguson’s interruption had been a statement not a question. He was now looking at her closely with none of Hunter’s affability. She met his gaze, wondering what he meant. But his expression told her nothing.
    She ignored the comment and turned back to Hunter. “My task is to spearhead reassembling the museum’s decimated collections. It’s going to take decades. We’re finding looted artefacts as far away as Peru.”
    Hunter’s expression changed. For a split second she thought she saw a flash of remorse, then it was gone. “We dropped the ball on that one, Dr Curzon. We know that now. The chain of command just didn’t appreciate how important the museum was.”
    “Yes, you did,” she replied, anger flaring briefly. “You just had other priorities.” Her eyes flicked to the screen showing the real-time oil price.
    She knew that for weeks before the hostilities began, the coalition’s assault armies had been begged by diplomatic channels to protect the museum and its unique holdings. She knew because she had been tasked with coordinating a briefing paper for the military high command. In it, she had painstakingly explained that the collection was priceless, unique, and irreplaceable—as important to cataloguing human history as the holdings of the British Museum, the Vatican, or the Louvre.
    But in April 2003, as the street-by-street artillery battle raged furiously in Baghdad’s al-Karkh district around the museum complex and the neighbouring Special Republican Guard base, the pleas for the museum’s security were ignored. Unguarded and vulnerable, tens of thousands of its priceless artefacts disappeared into the dark Iraqi night. Some went into pockets and underneath flapping
dishdashas
, while others were strapped onto borrowed and stolen flatbed trucks.
    International newspapers quickly began to talk of the unprecedented rape of the world’s heritage. They reported that over one hundred and seventy thousand of humanity’s earliest records of writing, literature, maths, science, sculpture, and art were all gone—stolen, destroyed, or lost.
    Ten years on, it still made her furious. It had been a completely preventable catastrophe. But for whatever reason, the coalition military staff had taken the operational decision to sacrifice the museum.
    She had no words to describe how angry it made her.
    Ferguson interrupted her thoughts. “You were telling us about your experience?”
    She nodded, pulling herself back to the present. “My published work deals mainly with the countries of this region’s fertile crescent. My specialism is the Bronze Age.” She smiled. “To most people that means I do the archaeology of the Old Testament period of the Bible.”
    Ferguson looked up from the file, making direct eye contact with her this time. “It says here you had trouble fitting in at school.”
    Ava wondered if she had heard correctly.
    What sort of a question was that?
    She had assumed she was there to help, not to be insulted.
    She looked at the files the three of them were leafing through.
    Were they personnel files?
    On her?
    She stared back at him.
    Was this some kind of test?
    He continued. “And that aged sixteen, you broke out of your boarding school in England. You found an African tourist company on the Earls Court Road in London, and impressed them so much with your knowledge of east African languages that you talked your way into a job as a tour guide on a Blue Nile