Rian and her team had searched through the rooms of the home that Special Operations raided and to supervise the careful packing of the artifacts so that they could be prepared for shipping to a secure location, and from there, transported to the museums and institutions they’d been stolen from.

While they searched the rooms and packed the artifacts, while recording the objects and writing down notes to establish their provenance, Rian found artifacts that she knew were likely stolen from the National Museum of Iraq. Earlier in their covert surveillance, she and Jonah had heard rumors of another location where those artifacts were being stored. They’d set that lead aside because they couldn’t triangulate that information, and they were focusing on what the team had established was the bigger hoard.

But now that she’d found a few of the artifacts stolen from that museum, carefully set aside in a strongbox in a corner in one of the rooms that also housed various ledger books and computers, she knew that what she and Jonah had heard about was likely true.

Fearful that that smaller hoard would be relocated quickly, once word of the successful special operations raid spread, she, Jonah and a small special operations team drove immediately, wrapped in robes and under cover, to the neighborhood of this other place. Together with the interpreter she’d used from the start of their work, she’d found out there were residents in a couple of nearby houses who had been trying to get this information out to authorities.

When she’d called Mike to ask for instructions, he’d effectively asked her to ask them to continue to keep watch.   “Use the connection, the bond they’ve formed with you, Rian, to convince them to stay if it looks like they want to leave before we can get something organized.”

She’d been conflicted about leaving them in this situation, particularly since there were several children in those homes, and they’d said that they wanted to leave the neighborhood, like many in the neighborhood were preparing to do, because they feared the continuing conflicts around them.

Meanwhile, since this new place was deemed a higher risk area than the home that had been raided, and where a major hoard of stolen, authentic artifacts had been found, new instructions from headquarters were sent to Rian and her team that they didn’t need to join the new operation being planned – after all the hard work they’d performed that had resulted in a crippling blow to the financing chain of the radicalized group, they had the thanks of their country, and that they could return to the US, at last.