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“Want me to pull over at the next exit?”
“No. There won’t be anything in the inbox, and we wasted a lot of time with the last stop.”
Even believing that, she held her breath as she logged into her very old email account she’d only ever used to receive marketing emails to receive coupons and online deals. The usual junk filled her inbox. Penis enlargers, home and car warranty scams, notification of payouts from class action lawsuits she wasn’t part of, or exuberant messages about being the grand prize winner of a sweepstakes she’d never entered. All she had to do was give them her bank account number to receive her winnings.
She quickly dropped the obvious spam into the trash, then began clicking through the messages that remained. Nothing in the inbox panned out, so she switched to the junk mail filter, which strangely always let scam emails and penis enlargers through, but usually snared the actual emails she wanted to read.
Her heart fluttered when she saw five emails from the same numerical email address. Each message showed a paper clip attachment icon with a subject line that was all question marks. This, she knew, often happened when she received emails written in Arabic. The text usually came through fine in the message itself, but the right-to-left formatting often caused a problem with the subject line, especially for mail accounts not configured to send and receive messages in Arabic.
It could be the subject line of question marks or the attachments that tripped the spam filter. Probably both.
She let out a soft gasp when she saw the time stamp on the series of emails.
“You found something?” Chris asked.
“I think so. It looks like the camera was plugged in and the emails sent on Thursday night. While we were together.”
“You didn’t check after that?”
“I was…in a state, when I finally got home on Thursday and didn’t check. I didn’t remember to look Friday before my appointments. By the time I got home on Friday, my place had been broken into and they took the tablet.”
“Was it with your computers?”
“Yes.”
“Will they get anything off the tablet?”
“No. The only thing I ever did with it was log into this email account, and I didn’t save the log-in or password to the device.”
“The history will show you used the browser and visited exactly one site.”
“Yes.”
She returned her focus to the small full-color screen and the list of emails. Did these photos really help her at this point? Unless Freya got a location from the sender’s IP address, all they were was evidence the Jordanian government could use against her when she went on trial.
Most of the artifacts didn’t look all that exciting to Chris, but Diana gave him the rundown on their age and the inscriptions on some of the tablets. According to her, the lettering was Nabataean, but the words were Aramaic. She explained that while the Nabataeans had their own language and alphabet, they often wrote in the more common Aramaic of the region.
They sat in a fast-food restaurant parking lot, eating french fries and drinking sodas, a short break to give Chris a chance to view the photos. “How much would these be worth?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Archaeologists don’t like to put a price on artifacts, but that’s exactly what I had to do, both that first night and the last day. Both times, the valuation was for Rafiq.”
“Both times?”
“The first day—before you came—they tested me. Made me authenticate artifacts. Give them a price to charge. When Rafiq showed up that night, he took the artifacts I’d authenticated. That’s when I learned they planned for me to loot the site where we camped. At first, I thought they’d just grabbed me to authenticate the artifacts, like I’d been doing to get an in with Bibi at the market.”
She touched the image of what looked like a jug on the screen. The photo was low resolution, and she’d explained that the camera only sent the smallest version of the files. “So when it came to these, I made up prices based on nothing but my desire to present them to Rafiq and get his location so your team could swoop in and get him. I inflated everything to make them sound more valuable. To be fair, many of them would be quite valuable. The one I broke—a glass ingot—was among the more valuable because it was incredibly rare and the largest of the ingots we discovered…”
She touched the photo of a cobalt-blue glass puck—which, she’d explained, was really the size of a salad plate—then touched her neck. This must be the type of artifact that she got the glass shard from. That shard had probably saved his life. From what she’d told him, he’d been about to walk into Jamal’s line of fire. The boy would have had a clear headshot, before Chris would’ve had a chance to raise his rifle from where it pointed at Bassam.
Diana cleared her throat, picking up the thread where her voice had trailed off. “As an added benefit, I thought the high value of everything might mean they wouldn’t just hack away at the site once I wasn’t there to oversee the looting.”
He noticed she didn’t call it excavation, even though that was what she’d tried to do. “Did you take notes on the dig?”
“I tried, but my supplies were limited. Bassam and Jamal literally gave me only one sheet of paper per day in the field. They didn’t want me to leave artifacts in situ while I was taking notes. If I couldn’t write stuff down, there was no point in finds remaining in the ground.”
She’d spent weeks as a prisoner in the desert, painstakingly removing artifacts for the goal of getting Rafiq’s location. He understood now even better than he had before how she’d violated everything she believed in. All to get to Rafiq.
Now, those artifacts had probably been sold. The images on the screen were the only tangible evidence they’d ever existed.
