Blowback

by Brad Thor

  “He’s very good at what he does and extremely adept at not getting caught. For over two months he’s been my number one priority, but all that’s changed now.”

  “Why?” said Jillian. “What’s happened?”

  “Emir Tokay is what happened. He and his colleagues have engineered an illness, which poses a serious threat to the West.”

  Jillian’s mouth was agape. They had done it. “How come word of this hasn’t made it into the press?” she asked as she stared at the man sitting across the table from her. There was something about him, something she couldn’t put her finger on. She was torn between wanting to trust him and wanting to get up and run like hell. He could very well be one of the bravest, most confident men she had ever met, or the most insane and dangerous. There was a chance that he was just the wrong mix of all of the above. Until she uncovered why he refused to go to the police, though, there was no way she could even begin to consider answering his questions. Taking another sip of her drink, she said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Harvath, but I find it extremely disconcerting that you still haven’t explained why we, or more particularly you, can’t go to the police.”

  Harvath looked past her to the small television in the bar area that had just been switched to the evening news. Already the press was reporting breaking news of a shootout at the upscale Knightsbridge department store. In some small way it was a relief to see something other than his al-Jazeera footage leading the news. His relief was short-lived, as the footage from the al-Karim bazaar was the next story the anchor cut to. There was no getting away from it. Harvath had a decision to make.

  He had taken a chance with Nick Kampos, and now he was going to have to take a chance with Jillian Alcott. If he didn’t trust her, there was no way he could expect her to trust him. “Turn around, “He said.

  Jillian half expected to see either the police or the assassin from Harvey Nichols standing in the front of the pub, and it took her a moment to figure out what Harvath was looking at—the television. The footage was all too familiar to her by now, but she watched again as the American soldier mercilessly beat the unarmed Iraqi. Each time she saw it, it was more distressing than the last. When it was over, she turned back and looked at Harvath. “Not a good day for America’s public image.”

  “Nor mine,” replied Harvath.

  “Why?” said Jillian. “Wait a second. Are you telling me that was you? You’re the man beating that innocent Iraqi?”

  “He was far from innocent, believe me. That man was paid a lot of money to act as somebody’s decoy.”

  “Whose decoy?”

  “Khalid Alomari. The man who tried to kill you less than a half hour ago.”

  “That’s why you can’t go to the police?”

  Harvath nodded his head. “That’s part of it. It’s important I keep as low a profile as possible right now.”

  Jillian looked at him and replied, “You might want to start by not shooting up department stores.”

  “Thanks. I’ll make sure I remember that the next time I see someone getting ready to use the back of an innocent high-school teacher’s head for target practice.”

  Jillian ignored his remark. “What about going to the American embassy?”

  “I definitely can’t go to the embassy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because a subpoena has been issued for me back in the States. The president’s political opponents want to run him out of office on a rail. They think the way to do it is to have me testify in open court about what happened in that market in Baghdad.”

  “So why not do it? If you didn’t do anything wrong, why not go and clear your name?”

  “Because the whole Baghdad thing is just the tip of the iceberg. That’s only where it starts. Regardless of how it’s handled, it could be extremely embarrassing for the president.”

  “Is there anything he’s done that should make him embarrassed?” she asked.

  Harvath didn’t like talking about sensitive political matters with an otherwise perfect stranger, so he once again chose his words very carefully. “Absolutely not.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is how his opponents could make it all look. Often the mere suggestion of impropriety is enough to ruin someone.”

  Jillian respected Harvath’s apparent loyalty to his president.

  “The other thing I’m not too crazy about,” continued Harvath, “is that they want to televise the hearings. Even if I’m cleared, my career will be over, but that’s not the worst of it. There have been more fatwas issued against me than you can shake a falafel at, and once my face is made public, I’ll have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I don’t want to do that.”

  “It sounds like you are in a very difficult situation, and I would like to say that I sympathize,” said Jillian, “but none of this makes me any more inclined to believe you. I don’t even know if that’s really you in that al-Jazeera footage. All I can see is the back of that soldier’s head.”

  She didn’t trust him, and Harvath couldn’t blame her, but by the same token, he could still sense that part of her wanted to believe that he was here to help her. “Listen, when this thing is all said and done, I don’t really care about my career, or the president’s for that matter. I care about the threat to my country. Foreign policy isn’t my department, but I can tell you one thing: I have seen how this illness kills, and no one deserves to die like that. No one.”

  Jillian tried not to appear too interested, but her scientific curiosity was on fire. Emir’s accounts had been somewhat vague, and she was very keen to know what Harvath had seen. “You’ve actually seen the illness at work in human beings?”

  Harvath nodded his head.

  “How does it manifest itself? What’s the progression like?”

  Though he hated to even relive it in his mind, Harvath explained in detail what the disease was like from the moment it first made itself known to the last horrifying minutes of a victim’s life.

  Jillian was quiet for a moment as she thought about everything she’d been told. If it weren’t for the fact that Emir Tokay had completely fallen off the face of the earth and had stopped returning her e-mails, she would have already left the pub. Draining the last draught of warm liquid from her glass, she asked, “What’s happened to Emir?”

  Finally, progress, thought Harvath as he replied, “He was kidnapped a couple of days ago not far from his office in Dhaka. Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kidnap him?”

  “God, that’s awful. No. I have no idea at all.”

  Harvath studied her face. She appeared to be telling the truth. “What did Emir want your help with?”

  “How much do you know about what he was working on?”

  “I know that his team had engineered something called the sword of Allah,” said Harvath, “and that it’s a weapon of some sort intended to cleanse the world of all but the most faithful Muslims.”

  “You obviously don’t know much then,” replied Alcott, “because you’re wrong on both counts.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  H ow am I wrong?” asked Harvath

  “First of all, Emir had no idea what he was working on.

  That’s why he contacted me,” said Jillian. “And second, his team didn’t engineer anything. What they were dealing with was a discovery.”

  Harvath leaned forward over the table. “What kind of discovery?”

  “It’s a paleopathologist’s dream come true, but it’s also something that probably should have stayed buried and never been found.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The project Emir was working on bore striking similarities to accounts of a very old and virulent bioweapon.”

  “How old?”

  “Over two thousand years.”

  Harvath thought she was pulling his leg. “They had bioweapons over two thousand years ago?”

  “And chemical as well.”

  “That’s impossible. You need
established, modern science to effectively wage chemical and biological warfare.”

  “Tell that to the enemies of the Hittites over three thousand years ago who found themselves beset with human plague bombs. Or how about the soldiers on the receiving end of barbed, poisoned arrows shot by Scythian archers more than five hundred years before Christ?”

  “Pretty nasty stuff,” replied Harvath, “but not very scientific.”

  Jillian expected as much. Most people had a tremendously naïve view of ancient warfare. It was one of the things that made her field so interesting and yet so very frustrating. She often felt as if she had to be equal parts salesman and scientist. “Were you aware that these same Scythians had perfected a composite reflex bow which allowed them to outshoot any archer of their day by double the distance?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “I’d say being able to project a payload twice as far as your enemies constitutes a pretty technologically advanced delivery system, regardless of its day, wouldn’t you?” Before Harvath could respond, Jillian pressed on. “How about the fact that the Scythians had learned how to agitate human blood to separate out the plasma, which they then used to make their poison arrows even more lethal?”

  “But how could a bioweapon over two thousand years old still be viable after all this time?”

  “You’d be surprised how long ancient poisons remain lethal. The Victoria and Albert Museum just discovered that the heads of several arrows from India in their collection were coated with deadly substances that are still lethal today, over a thousand years later. If the substance in question here was even somewhat volatile, as long as it was preserved in an anaerobic substance like honey, which was well known to the ancients, or sealed within a container crafted from a nonporous material like faience, gold, or glass, it could remain quite deadly and still be quite dangerous today.”

  “If what Emir was dealing with was some ancient bioweapon, it was becoming painfully clear why he had reached out to Jillian Alcott for help.

  “How these poisons survived is really not what’s important,” she continued. “The point is that for some reason historians all too often choose to overlook the ancients’ skillful manipulation of nature. They’d rather believe that soldiers of old adhered to the highest moral codes in battle, but this just isn’t the case. The ancient world was filled with terrifying precursors to today’s sophisticated chem-bio weapons: from flamethrowers and incendiary devices, all the way to poison gases and dirty bombs. And they did it all without the help of modern science.”

  “I’m willing to concede,” replied Harvath, “they had a handle on chemical and biological warfare, but what does this have to do with what Emir was working on?”

  “How familiar are you with Islamic science?” asked Jillian.

  “If you mean the state of science in the Islamic world, I know a little.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. In the context of what Emir Tokay was doing, the term Islamic science refers to a rather bizarre hybrid of modern science and Islamic mysticism practiced by Muslim fundamentalists.”

  At the mention of Muslim fundamentalists, Harvath leaned forward even further and began listening even more intently. She was speaking his language now, and a connection was finally starting to form.

  “Many of the people involved with Emir at the institute are Islamic scientists,” continued Alcott. “They believe that things like Ebola, smallpox, and atomic energy all contain powerful, unseen spirits called djinns—from which we take the English word genie. The scientists think that these djinns can be commanded via secret knowledge contained within the Koran. They’re fascinated with things such as Pandora’s box and the plague demons King Solomon supposedly harnessed to build the great temple at Jerusalem and then sealed up within its foundations.”

  “This all sounds pretty strange,” said Harvath.

  “It is,” replied Alcott, “especially to the Western mind, but it bears scrutiny. There are many fundamentalists, particularly in the Arab world, who are absolutely obsessed with harnessing the power of ancient biological weapons. The older the weapon is, the more powerful they believe the djinn inside it to be. The scary fact is that they are fixated on possessing these ancient weapons and have been on a mad, Indiana Jones–style quest to do so for decades.”

  “The David effect,” said Harvath.

  “Exactly,” replied Alcott. “A scenario by which a significantly smaller player, with access to the right technology, is able to severely damage a much larger foe, which in this case appears to be the enemies of radical Islam.”

  “If this isn’t something that Emir and his group bioengineered themselves, how is it possible that it only targets non-Muslims? Muslims weren’t even around over two thousand years ago.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jillian. “Unfortunately, I never got far enough with Emir to figure it out.”

  “You said that over two thousand years ago there were accounts of a bioweapon similar to the one we’re seeing today. Where were those accounts from?”

  “In a book called the Arthashastra. It was written in India in the fourth century B.C. It urged kings to set aside their conscience and liberally employ diabolical methods to ensure victory against their enemies. It also contained hundreds of recipes for toxic weapons, as well as countless instructions for waging ruthless, unconventional warfare.”

  “And this is how you were helping Emir?”

  “Yes, I was using my background in paleopathology, the study of disease in antiquity, to help him ascertain what it was he was working with.”

  “That’s what Emir thought he was working on? A disease from antiquity?”

  “He had his suspicions. He’d heard enough rumors that certain people affiliated with the institute had been searching for ancient diseases and ancient bioweapons to know it was a possibility.”

  “What about you?” asked Harvath. “What did you think?”

  “Did I think it was possible? I thought it was very possible. In fact, I think that in this case, where the brain of the victim liquefied to a black sludge and ran out the nasal passages, we have a spot-on match for accounts within the Arthashastra.”

  Harvath was fascinated, yet underneath it all he sensed a but. “But?”

  “But the rest of the symptoms seen in Asalaam—the aversion to light, water, and strong odors, as well as the patient’s aversion to his own reflection and so on, don’t fit.”

  “Could Emir’s group have orchestrated that—added it in somehow?”

  Jillian shook her head. “From what I gathered, this mystery weapon had been discovered, and Emir’s team was responsible for putting it back into circulation, not improving or modifying it.”

  This time it was Harvath who shook his head.

  “What?” asked Jillian.

  “It’s hard for me to believe that Emir didn’t know what he was working on.”

  “According to him, they were duped. They’d been given samples of the weapon, told it was something that had been engineered by the West and that there was a good chance it was going to be used against Muslims somewhere in the world. They had no idea that the reverse was true. Emir Tokay is a good man.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, that has yet to be proven,” replied Harvath. “In the meantime, what were they hoping to gain by working with the weapon?”

  “Apparently, there was some sort of way to inoculate or build up resistance against it. Emir’s group was supposed to find out how Muslims could be protected from it.”

  Immediately, a bell went off in Harvath’s head. “Then this weapon wasn’t bioengineered to decimate non-Muslims, it was engineered to kill anyone who wasn’t vaccinated against it.”

  “Vaccination in the strict sense of the word might not be exactly how it works,” said Jillian, “but you’re in the right vicinity.”

  “What else can you tell me?” he asked. “I need to know more, especially about the Arthashastra. Maybe there’s an answer in there—a formula or an
antidote we can use.”

  “It’s a very complicated book.”

  Harvath was about to assert that it couldn’t be that complicated if a group of nutcase fundamentalist scientists had figured out how to crack it, when the TV at the front of the pub caught his attention again. Several of the patrons had gathered around to watch some sort of update on the Harvey Nichols shooting. “Stay here, “He said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He quietly walked up behind the group of customers at the front of the pub and watched as a reporter explained that three people had been shot to death at the upscale Knightsbridge department store—one of them an off-duty London police officer. The reporter then cut to video from the store’s security cameras showing the shooter in action. It was like the al-Karim bazaar all over again. All of the attention was focused on Harvath, and Khalid Alomari was nowhere to be seen. The only thing Harvath had going for him was that none of the footage showed a full shot of his face. Not that it mattered. According to the reporter, eyewitnesses were already working with police sketch artists, and they were confident they would have a composite soon. What they did have now, though, were several shots of a woman police were saying might have been kidnapped by one of the gunmen. Harvath watched as they ran several pieces of video that clearly showed Jillian’s face.

  Hurrying back to the table and positioning his body so that Alcott would be less visible from the front of the pub, Harvath asked, “How’d you pay for your meal in the café? Cash? Check? Credit card? What was it?”

  “I paid cash,” responded Jillian. “What’s this all about?”

  “Good. That means they won’t have your name, at least not right away.”

  “Who won’t have my name?”

  “The police. They’ve just released images from the store’s security cameras. Apparently, they can’t decide whether I kidnapped you or if you were my willing accomplice.”

  “Accomplice to what?”

  “To the shooting. Three people back at the store are dead. One of them was an off-duty policeman.”

  Jillian didn’t know what to say. “Did you shoot him?”