Blowback

by Brad Thor

  There was a jangle of metal on metal as Alomari delivered another searing kick to his ribs. If Harvath could only unbuckle the nylon webbing strung with pitons, carabiners, and other climbing accessories around his waist, he just might be able to use it as a weapon.

  Harvath sucked up the pain and fumbled for his buckle. He suffered two more blows before it came free, but he put those blows on account, along with all the rest, determined to make Alomari pay in full. This time he had the right guy, and even if there had been cameras present, he was still going to beat him to within an eighth of an inch of his life. He wouldn’t stop until Alomari begged to die. Then he’d drag him back and turn him over to the United States to be interrogated and spend the rest of his life rotting in a jail somewhere while Harvath roasted a pig in his honor each weekend under his prison window.

  As Alomari drew his foot back for yet another kick, the belt came free, and Harvath rolled away from his attacker, swinging it in a wide arc. He wanted to fell the man by nailing him right in the back of the legs, but first Harvath had to rid him of his weapon.

  With a sharp crack, Harvath brought the equipment-laden piece of webbing around and hit Alomari’s hand so hard that his Steyr TMP was torn out of it and sent clattering across the floor. With the weapon out of the way, Harvath could go to work, and go to work he did. Springing to his feet, he swung the belt in a large figure eight above his head and then struck Alomari across the back. The metal pitons tore huge pieces of fabric away from the assassin’s parka. Harvath could only fantasize what they would do when he finally connected with flesh.

  Whipping the belt around harder this time, he tore straight through Alomari’s parka. The man screamed as the last piece of metal hanging from the webbing split open a deep gash in his neck. Alomari could do nothing but recoil as Harvath kept coming at him. Blow after blow, Harvath swung the belt harder and harder. Backing the man up against one of the many tunnel entrances, Harvath beat the assassin mercilessly. Alomari’s screams filled the entire cavern as Harvath made good on his promise that the assassin would pay for every innocent life he had ever taken.

  The killer’s parka hung from his body in bloody shreds as Harvath pulled the belt back for another devastating blow. But just as he was about to whip the belt forward, it went completely slack. It made no sense until he started hearing pitons, carabiners, and other pieces of climbing metal hitting the ceiling and raining down on the floor. The belt had broken.

  It made no difference to Harvath. He was more than happy to turn his bare hands on the remorseless assassin, but before he could land the first punch, Alomari turned the tables on him. Harvath took two steps backward when he saw what the man had in his hands. In his absolute rage, Harvath had once again underestimated his opponent, and this time he knew he was going to pay the ultimate price.

  “Now I am going to kill you,” spat Alomari. He had a double-action, hammerless .357 Ruger KSP revolver pointed right at Harvath’s chest.

  Harvath dropped the broken belt to the ground, looked Khalid Alomari right in the eye, and said, “You just don’t get the point, do you?”

  “What point?” he sneered as he steadied his hand and began applying pressure to the trigger.

  “This one,” said a voice from behind as a twenty-four-hundred-year-old Celtic falcata was thrust through the assassin’s back.

  The powerful sword erupted through his chest in an incredible spray of blood. With its curved blade, it kept climbing upward. Still alive, Alomari was able to see it come back at him and feel the tip of the blade thrust up from underneath his chin and impale his entire face.

  As Alomari’s dying body fell twitching to the ground, Jillian released the falcata’s handle and stared at what she had done.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  J illian was unable to stop shaking. “He would have killed us both,” said Harvath as he tried to break the spell that had come over her.

  “I know,” said Jillian quietly. “I know.”

  As if her handling of the shelf collapse wasn’t enough, in killing Alomari, Jillian Alcott had proven that when she really needed to, she could make her fear work for her and not vice versa.

  “Here,” said Harvath, handing her the Ruger. “This is yours. You earned it.”

  “I don’t want a souvenir.”

  “It’s not a souvenir. It might save your life. Do you know how to handle one of these?”

  “I grew up on a farm. I’ve done my fair share of shooting.”

  “Killing people is a lot different than killing rabbits,” said Harvath, who immediately regretted his words. It was definitely the wrong thing to say, and as if he needed any further convincing, Jillian turned away from him and vomited. He felt so stupid. The woman had just killed a man. Sometimes Harvath simply forgot the code civilians lived by. As they should, people who had never killed before found it reprehensible, even those who did so in defense of themselves or the people they cared about. What Jillian Alcott had just been through would probably haunt her for the rest of her life. Offering to let her keep the pistol was definitely a bad idea, no matter how well intentioned.

  Harvath left Jillian alone while he combed through Alomari’s pockets. What he found he took—a car key, a high-end Benchmade tactical folding knife, and some spare ammunition. Al-Qaeda had trained him well. There was nothing on his person that could lead anyone anywhere. The U.S. intelligence community was going to be awfully upset at having lost a chance to interrogate him, but as far as Harvath was concerned, he and Jillian had been faced with no other choice.

  They spent the next hour combing the tunnels for any clues they could find about Hannibal’s mystery weapon. The quiet searching seemed to allow Jillian time to make a tentative peace with what she had been forced to do.

  Jillian spent some time studying the intricately carved box they had examined earlier, trying to divine the meaning of its engraving. Finally, she spoke, and when she did, she was all business. She agreed with Harvath that the scenes were allegories but their exact message wasn’t clear. There was a depiction of some sort of magical book, which she thought might represent the Arthashastra, but paleopathology, not iconography, was her specialty.

  Jillian did, though, concur with his assessment that what they had originally believed were wolves on the breastplates were actually dogs. The reason was that on the box, more than just snarling heads were depicted. These animals also had curved tails—a definite Canis familiaris trait and not something normally associated with Canis lupus.

  While Harvath was glad to have her agree with his opinion, it still didn’t explain why Hannibal had wanted to use the image of dogs to scare his enemies.

  “Did Hannibal use dogs in battle?” he asked as they continued to explore the box together.

  “A lot of ancient armies did, but I can’t say one way or another if Hannibal used them. If he did, it would not have been unusual.”

  “And not particularly scary.”

  “Nope. Besides, if these troops were using dogs, where are they? I don’t see any evidence of them down here. Not one leash, not one muzzle, nothing.”

  Harvath nodded his head in agreement. “So what’s the connection?”

  “I have no idea,” said Jillian as she turned away from the box and ran her hand through her hair. “There are too many pieces missing. It could take months, if not years, of excavating down here with a full team before we could uncover the answers we’re looking for.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “What are we going to do then?”

  Harvath looked at his watch. Without blankets and a way to make a fire, there was no way they could survive through the night. “We have to go back.”

  “I wish I had brought a camera,” said Jillian.

  “Maybe in one of the expedition cases,” began Harvath, who stopped when he saw her shaking her head.

  “I already checked all of those. There’s nothing. Even if we found one, the batteries would long be dead.”

&nbs
p; She was right. Harvath hadn’t thought of that.

  “There’s one other thing we can do,” said Jillian. “Give me your axe.”

  Harvath handed her the one he’d been using to chop chunks of ice out of the wall to hold against his face. “What are you going to do?”

  “Collect samples.”

  “Samples of what?”

  As she headed off toward one of the tunnels, Alcott looked over her shoulder and replied, “Human tissue.”

  FORTY-NINE

  T hey picked five soldiers at random. The ones buried behind the thickest pieces of ice were Harvath’s responsibility, as was the most gruesome task of all—lopping off the top of each skull so that Jillian could collect samples of brain matter. As the mystery illness involved such a serious encephalitis component, she had insisted that in addition to the other tissue samples they were collecting, samples of brain tissue were absolutely imperative. Though Harvath and Alcott were each armed with only an ice ax, they went at their task as if chipping away at a priceless diamond while wielding the most precision cutting instruments in the world.

  Jillian’s care came out of respect for ancient history. In Harvath’s case it was out of his respect for fellow soldiers. Though outside daylight was fading, neither hacked away at their subjects. They carved carefully into the ice until they were able to access the frozen flesh. While Alcott wasn’t sure if Alan Whitcomb would be able to learn anything from the samples, she certainly wanted to give him a chance. Lying within these frozen bodies could be the key they were looking for. Hannibal never would have sent his men into battle without protecting them against their own weapons. Maybe these soldiers, the members of his elite guard, had been inoculated, and maybe their DNA could tell the modern world something about the great weapon they were carrying.

  Once the samples had been collected, they hurried back to their climbing equipment; Harvath unfastened his rope and watched as the weight of his pack up above pulled it through his secondary set of anchors. The rope zipped across the empty space above them and landed with a soft thwack on the correct side of the cavern, right next to Jillian’s.

  Attaching their ascenders, Harvath demonstrated how the devices were used to climb back up the rope. He worked with Jillian until she got the hang of it, and then, after he connected the leash between them once more, they began their ascent. Twenty feet from the top, Harvath detached his pack from the line and managed to get it over both his shoulders. After changing ropes at the remnant of the ice shelf, they made it back up onto the narrow Col de la Traversette, packed up their gear, and began the difficult hike back to the Carré de l’Ours with only their headlamps to light their way through the dark.

  A thick curtain of heavily falling snow was well under way by the time they arrived at the rear of the hotel’s property. During their trek, not much in the way of conversation passed between them. Jillian was wrestling with the psychological and emotional trauma of having killed Khalid Alomari while Harvath was trying to figure out how the assassin was tied to Timothy Rayburn in the first place. Rayburn had organized the expedition to recover Hannibal’s mystery weapon, and Alomari seemed to be killing anyone who had any knowledge of it whatsoever. Yet there was one person Alomari hadn’t been able to kill, and that was Emir Tokay, but only because Rayburn had gotten to him first and kidnapped him. It didn’t make any sense. Rayburn and Alomari seemed to be working the same project but from two different angles. Rayburn helped put it together while Alomari worked on taking it apart.

  Killing the scientists once their work was complete, as well as silencing anyone with any knowledge of it made sense, but what didn’t make sense was kidnapping Tokay. Why wasn’t he killed as well? Why kidnap him?

  As they approached the hotel, Harvath tried to quiet his thoughts. At this point, he no longer wanted to struggle for answers. All he wanted was a long hot shower, followed by several Advils and a good night’s sleep. The minute they stepped through the hotel’s back door and into the kitchen, though, he realized that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Putain, bougez pas! Bougez pas!” yelled one of two provincial police officers startled by Harvath and Alcott’s entrance. Based on their uniforms, they looked to be motorcycle cops, but that still didn’t explain what they were doing in Marie Lavoine’s kitchen.

  Before Harvath could react, the men had drawn their sidearms and had both him and Jillian covered. The last thing he wanted to do was provoke a shootout with police officers, so he just raised his hands above his head and left all of the guns he was carrying where they were for the time being.

  Seeing Harvath with his hands above his head, Jillian did the same and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Ta gueule!” barked one of the motorcycle cops, while his partner turned and yelled into the other room for their captain. Moments later, a heavyset man in his mid-fifties with thinning hair and bags under his eyes entered the kitchen. At first he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but he quickly recovered and began giving orders to his men.

  As they bounced Harvath up against the wall and searched him, they found not only Alomari’s tactical machine pistol and .357 revolver, but also the folding knife, Harvath’s Sam Guerin identification, and the stacks of U.S. dollars, British pounds, and EU euros that Harvath had been given by his boss, Gary Lawlor, to help finance his assignment. After patting down Jillian, they searched both the packs and found Jillian’s tissue samples and yet another weapon, Harvath’s .40-caliber H&K USP Compact.

  “At least they are all of different calibers,” said the captain, in English, as he examined the guns. “That should help speed up the ballistics process.”

  “What ballistics process?” replied Harvath. “What is this all about?”

  “Monsieur Guerin, Madame Alcott, my name is Captain Marcel Broussard of the provincial gendarmerie, and it is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest, pending an investigation of your involvement in the murders of London police officer Donald Mills and two civilians at the Harvey Nichols department store, as well as Dr. Molly Davidson, who had been working for Sotheby’s Paris office, and tonight’s murder of Marie Lavoine.”

  Harvath was about to protest their innocence and ask what evidence the authorities had against them, when he realized the French police and Interpol would already have more than enough. Security camera footage from Harvey Nichols, though it wouldn’t have revealed much of Harvath’s identity, would have perfectly captured Jillian Alcott’s. Then he and Alcott had been asked to show IDs and have their pictures taken for security badges at Sotheby’s. Having been thrown out for an altercation with Davidson the same day she was killed, he and Jillian were the perfect suspects. Now, they had been caught returning to the scene of yet another murder. While not conclusive, there was more than enough circumstantial evidence to hold them indefinitely. He couldn’t blame the French police; they were one hundred percent correct in what they were doing, but he also couldn’t let them hold him.

  As one of the two motorcycle cops stepped up from behind to handcuff him, Harvath swung his head back as hard as he could, shattering the officer’s nose. He followed it up with a right-handed chop to the side of Broussard’s neck, which dropped him like a trash bag full of mud right onto the linoleum floor. As the other motorcycle cop wrapped his arms around Harvath’s waist and tried to tackle him, Harvath laced his fingers together and brought both of his hands down in a lightning-fast snap at the base of the man’s skull. Subduing all three gendarmes had taken only a matter of seconds.

  Harvath looked at Jillian, who was completely amazed by the speed at which he had moved. Sliding the Ruger into the pocket of his climbing pants, he started giving orders. “Guns, cash, passports, all of it. Gather it up and put it in the small backpack.”

  Jillian nodded her head as Harvath grabbed the car keys, then bent down and cleaned out the pockets of the unconscious French police officers. Relieving them of their handcuffs, he shackled them in a convoluted wrist-to-ankle, ankle-to-wrist Twister pose
that would make it impossible for them to move once they came to. After that, he dumped the chambered rounds and magazines from all of their weapons into the garbage, placed their pistols in the oven, and set it to bake.

  When Jillian held up Harvath’s KIVA pack, indicating that everything was ready to go, he held his finger to his lips and signaled for her to follow.

  If there had been other policemen in the small hotel, they would have come running at the first sounds of a struggle in the kitchen. As none had, Harvath felt it was a safe bet they were all alone. That didn’t mean, though, that more weren’t on the way. Small towns like Ristolas didn’t usually get much action, so a murder was likely to attract a lot of attention. The minute Marie Lavoine’s body had been discovered, word would have gone out far and wide.

  The first thing Harvath noticed as they approached the reception area was the blood. It covered half the hardwood floor. Before he even saw the body, he noticed that most of the pictures had been knocked from the wall and their frames lay shattered in pieces. Harvath wanted to believe that the end had come quickly for Marie, but obviously it hadn’t. There had been a struggle, and knowing Alomari, Harvath figured he had taken pleasure in making the poor woman suffer.

  When they finally came upon her body behind the small reception desk, Jillian gasped in horror. Marie’s throat had been cut, much in the same way as Ellyson’s, and her face was bruised and horribly swollen. Alomari had beaten her before he killed her, most likely in the process of trying to extract information. Everyone caves under torture eventually, and if Marie had told Alomari where he and Jillian had gone, Harvath couldn’t blame her.

  Harvath and Alcott needed to get as far away from the gendarmes and Ristolas as possible. Leaning down, he removed the gold chain with the medallion of Saint Bernard from his pocket and placed it in Marie Lavoine’s hand. At least now she and Bernard were together, he thought as he straightened himself up and stepped from behind the reception desk.