Tears welled out of her husband’s eyes, too, as he tried to make her understand. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone, least of all the police. These animals were ready to act on their threat at any moment. Nazim trusts nobody. I couldn’t move an inch.’ He turned to Ben. ‘You saw what he did to poor Romy.’

‘Go on,’ Ben said.

‘Then in August this year, Nazim contacted me again to tell me about his latest scheme. This was to be the start of a whole new venture, one that took a great deal of organising but promised to be the most lucrative for them yet.’

‘The big plan,’ Ben said. ‘The cargo from Tripoli.’

Segal nodded.

‘What’s on the ship?’

Segal replied, ‘Since it seems you’ve watched video footage of my meeting with Nazim inside the warehouse where the cargo was being stored prior to shipping, then you must already have seen it. We were standing right next to it as we talked.’

‘Statues?’

Segal nodded. ‘The biggest artifacts they’ve ever forced me to smuggle into Europe for them. Each inside its own shipping container, requiring two trucks to transport them by road. They’re a pair of giant human-headed winged bulls, of the kind that existed long ago in ancient Mesopotamia.’

‘Lamassu.’

‘The guardians of the gateway. In the Akkadian language their name meant “protective spirits”. You seem to have more knowledge of this subject than I realised.’

‘I saw them in the Louvre, years ago,’ Ben said. ‘Watching Romy’s video brought the memory to mind. I went back there to check.’

‘So you have some idea of what’s involved. Similar examples are also on display at the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Others haven’t survived, such as the ones that were housed in the Mosul Museum before the filthy vandals of ISIL invaded the city and pounded them to pieces with sledgehammers. I’m quite certain that further magnificent examples are still waiting to be discovered beneath the sands of Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Egypt, utterly priceless in value. However, I can assure you that you’ve never seen anything quite like the Lamassu on board the cargo ship, heading towards us even as we speak. These are quite different.’

Ben asked, ‘In what way different?’

Segal said, ‘Well, for a start, they’re not real.’

Chapter 47

‘Full of surprises, aintcha, Mister Segal?’ Roth chuckled.

‘In terms of size and scale, they’re more or less identical to the exhibits you saw in Paris,’ Segal explained. ‘Otherwise, they’re nothing more than crude, poorly detailed replicas that only a blind man or a complete fool could possibly mistake for the real thing from less than a few feet away. They’re made of cheap plaster and were knocked together from moulded pieces in a backstreet workshop in Benghazi three months ago.’