Blowback

by Brad Thor

  “So a year passed and you decided to do what?”

  “I decided to sell Monsieur Burnham the artifacts. We would fix a price and he could have them all.”

  “But that’s not what happened.”

  “No. He told me he didn’t have any money. Not right now, at least. He offered to give me a small deposit and pay me later, but I wouldn’t agree.”

  “Smart lady,” said Harvath.

  “I told him I needed all of the money right away. He became very angry, telling me they belonged to the foundation. When I told him I knew there was no foundation, he tried to make excuses. Finally, I threatened to go to the police and tell them everything I knew if he didn’t cooperate.”

  “I bet he didn’t like that,” replied Harvath as he remembered what a temper Rayburn had.

  “Not at all, but he was in a similar position as me. He had no choice. He could not afford to pay me, and he definitely did not want me taking the artifacts or my story to the police, so we settled on the compromise of selling everything through Sotheby’s.”

  “So what’s at Sotheby’s represents everything Ellyson uncovered?”

  Lavoine looked away for a moment before responding. “No. Not everything.”

  “There’s more?” asked Jillian.

  Lavoine tried to explain. “Even though we were dealing with Sotheby’s, I still didn’t trust Monsieur Burnham. I thought he might find a way to cheat me. I couldn’t risk everything on the first venture. Besides, Ellyson had never even told Monsieur Burnham exactly where the site was, much less what he had recovered from it. Monsieur Burnham had no idea what I had in my possession. By doing it my way, if the first sale went well, I could wait a while and then quietly go back to Sotheby’s with more.”

  “And without having to split the money with anyone.”

  Marie nodded her head.

  Harvath stood from the table and said, “We need to see those remaining artifacts.”

  “Why?”

  “Because even though your husband never made it back from that chasm, the weapon the Romans paid so dearly to prevent getting to Rome actually did.”

  Lavoine was shocked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the man you call Elliot Burnham has been working with Muslim terrorists, and they plan on using Hannibal’s weapon against the Western world.”

  “The weapon actually exists? What is it?”

  “An illness of some sort,” replied Jillian. “Please, Marie, whatever artifacts you have still, we need to take a look at them. We promise you, that is all we want to do. We have no intention of taking them from you. Millions of lives may be at stake here. We know Bernard had no idea as to whom he was helping, but you can help us to fix this. Please, we need your cooperation.”

  Lavoine thought about it for several moments and then said, “Okay,” as she stood. “Get your coats. You’re going to need them. It’s very cold outside.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  W HITE H OUSE SITUATION ROOM

  W ASHINGTON , DC

  O nce the secure videoconference link with CIA headquarters in Langley had been established, the president began speaking. “I assume I wasn’t called out of my meetings upstairs because you have good news.”

  “Unfortunately no, Mr. President,” responded the director of Central Intelligence, James Vaile. “Two days ago we made a very important electronic intercept related to the village of Asalaam.”

  “If you made it two days ago, why am I just hearing about it now?”

  “With all due respect, sir, our Arabic translators are seriously overworked and dangerously backlogged.”

  “I know. I know,” said Rutledge, “and I’m doing everything I can to get you additional funding to hire more of them, but now’s not the time for this discussion. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got.”

  “We intercepted a posting in an Islamic chat room that commented on the hand of Allah successfully striking down all but his most faithful followers in a remote location referred to as the place of peace.”

  “Asalaam?”

  “That’s what we think,” replied Vaile. “The fundamentalists like to describe Iraq as the crusaders’ burial ground. The people talking in that chat room signaled that the place of peace was within the land known as the burial ground of the foreign crusaders.”

  The president was silent as the DCI continued. “One of Osama bin Laden’s most beloved was also said to have been present to witness the power of Allah firsthand.”

  “Khalid Alomari.”

  “We think so. There were enough allusions to his past accomplishments for us to be fairly certain it’s him. We’ve been monitoring the room, but the poster hasn’t returned, or at least not under the same handle as before. We’re not holding out much hope of tracking him down. Just like cell phones, these guys will use a chat room once and then never come back to it again. They know it makes it impossible for us to trace them that way.”

  Though none of this was exactly good news, Rutledge knew his DCI well enough to know that he was saving the very worst for last. “What else did you find out?”

  “One of the people in the chat room claimed that what happened at the place of peace was only a small example of what Allah and his most holy warriors had planned for the enemies of Islam, in particular the United States.”

  The president was again silent for several moments as the confirmation of their worst fears began to sink in. Finally, he asked, “Is that it?”

  “No sir,” replied Vaile. “There was one other thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “According to the transcript, the means by which Allah intends to decimate all but the most faithful followers of Islam has already arrived in America. It says that it’s only a matter of days before the bodies of our citizens begin piling up—overflowing our hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  F RANCE

  C arrying flashlights, Harvath and Alcott followed Marie out into the bitterly cold night and were led behind the hotel to a small barn at the far end of the property.

  “You keep the artifacts in here and don’t even keep it locked?” Harvath asked as Marie pushed the door open.

  “No one locks their doors here. If you do, you send a message that you have something worth stealing. Besides, how long do you think it would take if someone really wanted to get in here?”

  The woman had a point.

  Marie closed the door behind them and then used her flashlight to point to a stall in the middle of the structure. “In there.”

  After moving several bales of hay and kicking away the loose pieces of straw, Harvath found the trapdoor. Drawing it back, he played his flashlight down a series of stone steps, which led into a large cellar.

  Jillian joined him, and with Marie bringing up the rear, they descended the steps. The cellar was enormous. Marie found a box of matches and lit several of the lanterns hanging from the low ceiling. As the lanterns illuminated the room, Harvath heard Alcott draw a sharp intake of breath.

  Perfectly arranged on clean sheets across the cellar floor were hundreds of artifacts contained in clear plastic bags. Jillian couldn’t help herself and she rushed over to get a closer look. “How were they able to transport all of this?”

  “Strong backs, big packs, and many, many trips,” replied Marie.

  Joining Jillian, Harvath carefully picked up one of the sealed bags and examined its contents. Inside was a weapon he recognized from his study of military history—a Celtic falcata. With its inward curving blade, legend had it that the powerful short sword could slice through a shield and helmet with just one blow. There was something else about it that interested Harvath, though. Stuck to the bag was a piece of masking tape with a string of numbers. Holding it up so Marie could see them, he asked, “Do you know what these are?”

  “I have no idea,” said Marie, shaking her head sadly. “I took several of those pieces of tape to a friend of Bernard’s who is also a mountain guide. I hop
ed he would be able to decipher it. I thought it might be GPS or something like that. I thought maybe it would help us find Bernard and Maurice, but they seem to be just a bunch of numbers that do not make any sense.”

  “Actually,” replied Jillian as she read the numbers along her bag, “they do make sense. They’re grid coordinates.”

  “Like on a map?”

  “Very similar. Ellyson must have established a grid system over the site where the artifacts were found. The first numbers are a reference point, maybe an outer corner or dead center in the middle of the site. The next set of numbers explains what part of the grid the item was found in.”

  “What about this last set of numbers, the one with a degree marker after it?” asked Harvath. “That’s not a longitudinal or latitudinal designation?”

  “No. It’s degree of elevation followed by a depth designation. I’d say Ellyson was dealing with a very steep surface and was cataloging not only at what point along the slope he was finding things but also how deeply embedded.”

  “Embedded?”

  “Yes, probably in ice. Call him what you will, but the man was thorough,” said Jillian.

  “Thorough, but not to the point that these strings of numbers will tell us where the actual discovery was made.”

  “No. They’re all in relation to that first set of numbers. Those are the anchor which all the others work off of. We’re missing one key piece of the puzzle—the Rosetta stone, if you will, which explains the overall message.”

  Harvath turned to Marie and asked, “When Bernard failed to return home, did you call the police?”

  “Of course,” replied Marie.

  “What happened?”

  “They came and asked the same questions they always ask when climbers have not returned.”

  “What did you tell them?” asked Jillian. “Did you mention anything about the Hannibal connection?”

  “I told the police basically everything I knew, that my husband was climbing the crevices somewhere near the Col de la Traversette and he had not come home.”

  Harvath looked at Lavoine and asked, “The local police looked through all of your husband’s maps, charts, whatever they could find that might tell them exactly where he was climbing on the day he disappeared?”

  “The police and his climbing friends. They looked through everything, but they found nothing. Doctor Ellyson was trying to keep his work a secret, so it is no surprise Bernard left no record.”

  It was obviously painful for Marie to relive the experience. Nothing was said for several moments as Harvath set down the falcata and wandered among the rest of the artifacts.

  “These are all very interesting from a historical perspective,” said Jillian, “but they don’t really shed any more light on Hannibal’s mystery weapon itself.”

  “The Arthashastra talked about applying poisons to edged weapons, right?” said Harvath.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we should have these analyzed then.”

  Jillian noticed Marie tense and discreetly motioned for her not to worry. “If Hannibal was going to eliminate every Roman man, woman, child, and even their animals, he wasn’t going to do it one sword stroke at a time. He had a bigger delivery vehicle in mind. We need to find Ellyson’s dig.”

  Harvath shook his head. “No. This is a dead end. We need to find Emir Tokay.”

  “And how are we going to do that? We don’t have any leads.”

  “We’ve got the e-mail address that Marie used to contact Rayburn, and we know Rayburn was involved with Emir’s kidnapping. I’d say that’s a pretty good lead.”

  “Only if it leads somewhere. Look,” she continued, “if we can find the dig, maybe we can find enough physical evidence to help us piece together what this mystery illness is all about and figure out a cure.”

  “And Emir?”

  Jillian was silent as she considered her response. “We don’t even know if he is still alive. It’s possible that he’s been killed. The answers we’re looking for might be closer than we think. We’re here now and finding Ellyson’s dig is at least a possibility we can’t afford to turn our backs on.”

  Jillian was right, but how the hell were they going to locate the dig? Teams much more experienced and much more familiar with the area had searched for the missing men for weeks and had come up empty. How were he and Jillian supposed to accomplish what they couldn’t? They didn’t even have any new information. The only thing Harvath could think of doing was to re-cover the ground the police had already been over and hope to find something that they had missed. Without much hope, he turned back to Marie Lavoine and said, “I need to use your telephone, and then I’d like to see Bernard’s personal effects for myself.”

  FORTY

  A fter Harvath called Nick Kampos on Cyprus and gave him the e-mail address Rayburn was using under his Elliot

  Burnham alias, he and Jillian spent the rest of the evening poring over Bernard’s personal things. They studied all of his maps, charts, and atlases without finding anything of use. Their eyes blurry with fatigue, neither of them wanted to believe that they had come all this way only to drive straight down a dead end. It was well past two in the morning when Jillian suggested they finally call it a night.

  Harvath was absolutely exhausted, but as he lay in bed, sleep refused to come. His mind was plagued with thoughts he had been able to keep at bay for most of the day but which now returned with a vengeance. He was troubled by what his life might be like if he lost his job and was “outed,” for lack of a better word, on international television.

  As he lay there, his mind and body numb with fatigue, there was one simple question he could not answer: Without my career, who am I?

  He had never considered himself a weak man, but doubt was beginning to peck away at the edges of his psyche. The more he tried to push his problems from his mind, the harder and faster they came rushing back at him. Finally, he gave up hope of getting any sleep at all and walked downstairs.

  The chalet was quiet. After starting a fire in the fireplace in the reception area, Harvath walked into the kitchen and found a bottle of Calvados and a clean snifter. Filling the snifter, he took the first glassful in one long swallow. Then he removed Hannibal Crosses the Alps from the mantelpiece and poured himself another drink. Snifter in hand, Harvath slumped down into an overstuffed leather chair, opened the book, and tried to escape his own world by losing himself in someone else’s for a while.

  It was half past seven in the morning when Jillian found him, along with Marie Lavoine, poring over boxes of paperwork on the floor of the hotel’s office. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Last night I kept thinking about what you said, that the answers to this mystery illness could very well be waiting for us at Ellyson’s site. When I couldn’t fall asleep I decided to come downstairs and read awhile. I wanted to see why Ellyson was so interested in that particular book about Hannibal crossing the Alps.”

  “And?”

  Harvath pulled the book off the chair next to him and tossed it to her. “Page one seventy-one.”

  Alcott flipped to the page and read aloud the passage Harvath had underlined in pencil. “Until the Alps give up the remains of an elephant, or a Carthaginian officer, or an African or Spanish cavalryman, we will never know for certain exactly where Hannibal crossed. The possibility of discovering the archeological evidence, however, is not as remote as one might think. During no other period in history have scholars had the access to the Alps and the technological assistance that they have today. Satellites, helicopters, and airplanes have allowed aerial surveys to be conducted which yield views of the valleys, ridges, and peaks never before available on such an accurate and detailed scale. “Jillian balanced the book on her thigh and looked up at Harvath, waiting for some sort of explanation.

  “Summers in Europe have been getting progressively warmer, and with that heat, Alpine glaciers have begun to recede. As the book says, today’s scholars have tools available to them
unlike any time in the past. No archeologist worth his salt would ever think of conducting a search like this without as much technological help as he could muster. The Silenus manuscript may have helped Ellyson narrow down the area where the team carrying Hannibal’s secret weapon was killed and swept off the side of the mountain, but there was no way it could provide a pinpoint, X-marks-the-spot location. Ellyson may have known the general vicinity of where his needle was, but he needed to shrink the hell out of the haystack.”

  Jillian was finally with him. “You think he did it with satellite imagery.”

  “And Bernard Lavoine paid for it.”

  “With Rayburn’s money, of course.”

  “Of course, but what I’m hoping is that Bernard did it with his own credit card and then just invoiced the expedition or took the corresponding amount from whatever pile of money Rayburn had left here for exactly such an expense.”

  It was forty-five minutes later when Marie Lavoine uncovered the first credit card statement that made reference to an international satellite company from Toulouse called Spot Image. Soon thereafter, they uncovered several more statements, all referencing the same company. While Bernard had done a lot of business with Spot Image, it was the last set of imagery he had ordered that Harvath was most interested in.

  The most logical step was to have Marie call them up, explain who she was and what she wanted. But when the company informed her that their privacy policy prohibited them from providing anyone but the original customer with copies, Harvath knew he was going to have to come up with a better plan.

  He had no desire to drive all the way to Toulouse to try to conduct another black-bag job to steal the information. Besides, being a satellite company, Spot Image would be a business that ran around the clock. It wouldn’t be empty in the middle of the night with just a couple of security guards sitting behind a desk the way Sotheby’s Paris annex was. There had to be someone Harvath knew outside his established intelligence contacts who could lean on Spot Image hard enough to get him what he needed. Suddenly, he knew just who that person was.