‘In this business you soon learn to roll with the setbacks,’ Madison said. ‘Dad knew there was no point in driving himself crazy over it, and he had plenty of other projects to keep him busy. Still, the war dragged on for much longer than anyone had expected. For nearly ten years Dad bided his time while the Russians slugged it out with the Mujahideen. Then in February 1989, the magic moment came. Almost the same day as the troops pulled out, he was in like Flynn and getting together his expedition team. His head guide was a local man called Abdul. Soon afterwards, they reached Zakara. Nothing had changed, not a stone moved since the last time he’d been there. Which meant the place had stayed safe from looters all those years and whatever might be under the ground would still be untouched. This time he got the men to dig in a slightly different spot. What instinct told him to look there, I’ll never know. He always had amazing intuition for finding buried objects.’

‘And did it turn out he’d been right?’ asked Wolf, totally drawn in. Ben was just listening intently.

‘You damn well bet it did,’ Madison replied. ‘After hours of hard digging they unearthed a rectangular stone slab that Dad realised was the floor base of a large building. Not just any old building, like a house. That would have been amazing enough, but what they found was stunning. It was the remains of a palace treasury. Underneath the slab was a buried chamber, partly collapsed, but still accessible through a crack in the stonework that one of the team, a fourteen-year-old kid called Safi, was skinny enough to be lowered down into.’

‘You’re killing me with the suspense,’ Wolf said. ‘What did they find?’

‘Caskets,’ she said. ‘Caskets so heavy with treasure, it took three men to haul them up by rope. Inside was the biggest haul of golden artefacts from the time of Alexander that anyone had ever discovered. Along with all the ingots and statues and rings and bracelets, an estimated half a million gold coins. And to top it all, each casket was marked with the royal seal of Alexander himself. It was the proof of everything Dad had believed in. There really had been an Alexandrine city here.’

‘Unbelievable,’ Wolf said. But Ben had picked up on something in her wording, and asked, ‘Why estimated? Didn’t anyone count them?’

‘Because,’ she replied with a sigh, ‘no sooner had Dad made his discovery, but things went south yet again. This is Afghanistan. Things so often do.’

‘What happened?