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Another company in the fold, Gardner Tours, wanted license to sell luxury package tours to Petra and Wadi Rum to American consumers. Included in these packages would be “archaeologist for a day” digs, in which tourists would conduct archaeological fieldwork in areas outside the protected boundaries of Petra and Wadi Rum under the supervision of local archaeologists. To achieve this, the CEO of Gardner Holdings, Dennis Gardner, courted favor with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s government by funding real digs through the university.
While the grant money had gone directly to the university, Gardner had insisted an American archaeologist be included on the dig team. In return, Diana was expected to give him realistic feedback on how best the tourist digs could be run to maximize entertainment and information obtained from digging while limiting the harm that could result from amateurs wielding trowels.
The end result was Diana had spent the last fifteen weeks working with Jordanian archaeologist Dr. Fahd Yousef, overseeing his graduate students excavating and recording a site an hour outside Amman. Yousef hadn’t been pleased to be saddled with an American at first, but he appreciated the research dollars she brought to the project, and she’d won him over when he realized she was, in fact, knowledgeable about the Nabataeans and other nomadic cultures that inhabited this region in the thousands of years Before Common Era—BCE—and after in what was now called Common Era, or CE.
If the men who’d abducted her had been watching her or the dig, they would know about her language skills and expertise. Dare she even hope they didn’t know about her work for FMV?
She stepped inside the tent, thankful for the temporary escape from sun. The thick curtain closed behind her. She stumbled, temporarily blinded by the dark interior after the brightness of the early afternoon sun reflecting off pale pink sand had shrunk her pupils to pinpricks. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the furnishings were neither traditional nor handmade.
In the center of the tent was a long folding table, the same hard gray plastic and metal leg design that could be found the world over. But what lay on top of the table had her complete attention: artifacts.
Prehistoric. Historic. Stone. Metal. Glass. Even bone.
One could describe the entirety of the human history of Jordan with what lay on the table.
“Where did these come from?” she asked in English.
The man ignored her question. “You will go through and tell us the age and culture of each item and how much each one is worth.”
Again, the instructions came in Arabic.
She replied in his language. “Archaeologists don’t put a value on artifacts. I couldn’t say—”
Swift as lightning, an open-handed blow to her cheek had her stumbling backward. Her head rang with the shock of the fierce slap.
For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to have her bell rung.
She swallowed and faced the table, her vision blurred from both the pain and the tears she’d been holding back from the moment she realized she’d stepped into a trap.
This was real, and it was very much happening to her.
“You will tell us how much to sell each item for.”
Her arm itched. She reminded herself she couldn’t touch the tracker. Not until she was certain there was a working phone nearby.
She picked up a jar from the table, running her hands over stone that had been smoothed with sand by human hands sometime in or after the eighth millennium BCE. Because she didn’t have location or carbon dates to go on, she estimated the age based on the typology of the artifact, guessing they’d want the oldest—and therefore most valuable—age estimation. “Calcite alabaster tripod vase. Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period.”
She remembered the slides she’d studied of the artifacts that had been recovered by other Valkyries before she joined the team last year, and the amounts they had reportedly been sold for. “I would guess you could get twenty thousand for this one.”
She moved down the line. Twenty-two artifacts. None were fake. She wondered if a few were replicas, but they were handmade, carved from stone, so it was impossible to tell. One oil lamp had been carved, likely recently, adding a symbol to the top that would raise the value from a few hundred dollars to several thousand if it had been original to the piece. “It’s poorly done and has depleted the value to worthless because it was altered.”
As she examined the artifacts, she wondered if this was some kind of test. Didn’t they know where these items came from? What, exactly, did they want from her?
She studied a tablet with Nabataean writing. It was authentic. She searched her memory for a similar one but came up blank.
All the items were standard objects that had survived millennia, but none were familiar, making her think none had been stolen from a museum. They’d been washed, but some still had dirt embedded in grooves. Were she to guess, she’d think these came straight from the ground.
The truth sank in. These were recently looted artifacts, and they needed professional cleaning in addition to some kind of description and assigned value to garner the highest possible price.
These men hadn’t abducted her because she was a spy for the US Army. No. They wanted her to prep the haul so they could be sold on the black market.
She’d been brought to the very place she’d been looking for when she asked Bibi about her wares. She was at the center of the hub artifacts passed through before they were lost forever in illicit deals.
Chapter Three
“The car drove deep into this wadi, stopped briefly, then returned to the main road,” Captain Dodd said while pointing to a small, narrow valley on the aerial photo. “As near as we can tell, it’s a semipermanent camp, but given the limited resources, it might not be her final destination. We need to exfiltrate her tonight before they have a chance to move her again.”
In situations like this, when the hostage could be moved again at any time, waiting for zero dark thirty could be too late, but Chris knew they weren’t in the air yet because they hoped to gather more intel. Making a move without more information could lead to the wrong casualties, and that valley was narrow at one end.
