Curious, Ben rested Madame Segal in a corner, made sure she was comfortable, then joined Roth in examining the contents of the opened boxes.

‘Food baggies,’ Roth muttered. ‘For what? Packing sandwiches?’

Ben popped open one of the sealed boxes. Inside were tightly-rolled cylinders of brick-sized, food-grade plastic bags like the ones Roth had found. The box easily weighed ten kilograms, which amounted to several thousand empty bags packed up inside. He checked two others and found the exact same contents there as well. A fourth box contained dozens of bobbins of sealing wire, pliers, tape and surgical rubber gloves and facemasks. A fifth was packed full of brand new digital weighing scales, still in their factory wrapping. Roth dug inside another and held up a plastic scoop and a funnel for Ben to see.

‘Whatever they’re doing with all this stuff,’ Ben said, ‘it’s no cottage industry. All these empty benches were put here for a reason. There’s enough material here to bag up at least fifty thousand packages, or more. Question is, of what?’

‘It’s a goddamn drug processing lab, is what it is,’ Roth said. ‘Got themselves a nice little production line set up, smack bang under the middle of Paris.’

‘But without any drugs.’

‘Let’s find out.’

They checked every single box, and found no trace of illicit substances inside them or anywhere else. Roth studied the business name and logo on the packaging. ‘ETZ International. No address, no web URL. Is that some kind of shell corporation, or what?’

‘Remember Jafari mentioned some kind of grand plan he didn’t seem to know much about?’ Ben said. ‘This has got to be it.’

‘So what’s the deal? Heroin? Cocaine?’

‘You know as well as I do that’s one of the ways terrorists have been funding themselves for decades.’

‘Three billion dollars a year from the opium harvests of Afghanistan alone,’ Roth agreed. ‘Until our government clamped down on the fuckers so hard we choked off most of their supply. Now if they so much as bend over to blow out a fart or pick a poppy, the CIA knows about it.’

‘Then they’re getting it from somewhere else,’ Ben said. ‘And they mean business, obviously.’

Roth spread his arms wide. ‘So where’s the merchandise? This place is as clean as an anal retentive’s butthole.’

‘They’re waiting for it,’ Ben said. ‘The shipment coming in from Tripoli. That could be what this was about, all along. It could be what Romy overheard Segal and Nazim al-Kassar talking about. It could be the reason they killed her.’

Roth lowered his voice so that Margot Segal wouldn’t hear. ‘If the shipment is drugs, what’s our guy Segal’s part in it? Why involve a freakin’ antiquities expert in a major narcotics smuggling operation?’