Blowback

by Brad Thor

  “All possible,” replied Jillian, “but Vanessa said she’d been through the entire Arthashastra and couldn’t find a recipe that matches up with all the symptoms seen in Asalaam.”

  “I know,” said Harvath, “but what if the Carthaginians only used the Arthashastra as a base or a jumping-off point of some sort? What if they came up with an Azemiops feae hybrid? What if they duplexed it and came up with an illness nobody had ever seen before?”

  “Also possible,” said Jillian as she paused to think about it, “but where does that leave us? We have no idea where all of those artifacts came from, much less who gave them to Sotheby’s in the first place, and nothing short of a court order or official government request is going to get that auction house to open their doors again for us.”

  “Suppose we didn’t need them to actually open their doors for us?” suggested Harvath as he reapplied the ice pack to the bruise on his side.

  It didn’t take a genius to intuit what Harvath was contemplating. Jillian sensed he wasn’t the type to give up easily. “We were lucky enough to get out of there once without being arrested,” she said. “I don’t think the odds will be very heavily in our favor for a second go around. Especially if you’re contemplating breaking in.”

  Harvath smiled.

  She had pegged him correctly. He was definitely a hammer.

  “I think you’re wrong about today,” continued Harvath. “There was no way they were going to arrest us. Davidson can’t be sure the artifacts didn’t come from an illegitimate source, and she’s wary of bad press.”

  “Even so, how do you propose we get back inside? From the security I saw, it has to be next to impossible.”

  “Magic,” replied Harvath with a smile.

  “What kind of magic?”

  “We’re going to walk through walls.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  W hen Jillian came down to the Hotel Gare du Nord’s lobby, she was dressed in the second-hand clothes Harvath had sent up to her room earlier in the evening. She couldn’t figure out if he’d incorrectly guessed her sizes or if he had purchased the black turtleneck and black jeans slightly snug on purpose. Regardless of what his intentions had been, with the battered, secondhand leather jacket she felt that she looked perfectly Parisian. She was also glad to have the warm clothes, as a second storm front had moved in and the rainy night air was bitterly cold.

  At exactly midnight, Harvath appeared in the lobby and motioned for her to follow him. Outside on the street, he hurried her through the rain to a tiny, windowless van. He had left it running, and though the wheezing heater was cranked all the way up, its effect was barely noticeable.

  “How do the clothes fit?” he asked as they pulled away from the curb.

  “Strangely enough,” replied Jillian, “the boots are a perfect fit, but everything else is a little tight.”

  Harvath glanced over at her before turning right onto the boulevard de Magenta and said, “No they’re not. They’re just right.”

  Jillian should have known better. Anyone who could nail her shoe size after having only spent two days with her certainly knew what he was doing with everything else. “Where’d they come from?”

  The tires of the tiny van wobbled as they splashed through puddles making their way south. “I got them at a flea market.”

  “And the van?”

  “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

  Jillian looked into the cargo area behind their seats. “And I assume everything in back is from—”

  “The same guy,” said Harvath, hanging a right onto the boulevard de Strasbourg and speeding up in order to make the light at the next corner.

  “So what is all that stuff?”

  “Skeleton keys.”

  “Skeleton keys?” repeated Jillian, looking behind her at the duffel bag and two plastic Storm-brand cases. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I couldn’t be more serious. Trust me. You’ll see.”

  Ten minutes later, they had threaded their way through the bustling Les Halles neighborhood and had managed to find a parking space around the corner from the Sotheby’s annex. Walking around to the back of the van, Harvath opened the double doors and leaned inside to get his head out of the rain. He slid the two Storm cases and heavy black duffel toward him, opened them, and checked their contents one last time.

  “I thought you said you had a set of skeleton keys in there,” said Jillian, who had darted behind the van and was now leaning inside next to him.

  “I do,” replied Harvath as he withdrew a small sledgehammer about a foot long from the duffel. “This one unlocks the downstairs door.”

  Jillian looked at him as if he was nuts. “You realize that when I said you were like a hammer and that you approached all your problems like nails, I was speaking metaphorically, right?”

  Harvath ignored her and tucked the sledgehammer beneath his coat.

  “I’m serious,” said Jillian.

  “I know.”

  “So tell me what your real plan is.”

  “I told you. I’m going to use my skeleton key to open the downstairs door.”

  “What about the security guards?”

  Harvath zipped up the duffel and then slung it over his shoulder. He grabbed the larger of the two Storm cases and indicated that Jillian should take the other. As he closed the rear doors of the van, he said, “If we do this right, they won’t have any idea what we’re up to.”

  “And if we don’t do this right?”

  “Then I hope your tight jeans don’t prevent you from running.”

  “That’s a good one,” said Jillian. “You sure know how to kid a girl.”

  “Who’s kidding?” replied Harvath as he set off down the block.

  Jillian peppered him with questions the entire way, but Harvath didn’t feel like talking. Despite his leather jacket, the nylon straps of the overweight duffel were cutting into his shoulder. He couldn’t wait to finally set it down. Thankfully, the heavy Storm case had built-in casters that allowed it to be dragged behind him.

  For her part, as much as Jillian wanted to trust Harvath, she couldn’t help feeling he was acting out of desperation. Smashing through the glass front doors of the Sotheby’s annex with a sledgehammer was the most insane plan she could ever imagine. They wouldn’t make it more than five feet before the armed guards would be on them. She was just about to say as much when Harvath pulled up three doors short of the annex. Ducking into a small alcove, he set his heavy duffel down, leaned his Storm case against the wall, and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Here, “He said as he offered them to her.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I, but that’s not the point.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Everybody in Paris smokes.”

  “So?”

  Harvath turned the pack over, tapped out a cigarette, and handed it to her. “So, standing around with nothing to do looks suspicious.”

  Jillian didn’t see the sense in his logic. “But it’s okay to stand around with nothing to do as long as you have a cigarette in your mouth?”

  “In Paris it is,” replied Harvath as he raised the lighter for her.

  “You know, I quit smoking these things about three years ago,” said Jillian as she bent over the flame. When she had it lit, she leaned back and took a deep, long drag. She felt that old familiar feeling as the smoke filled her lungs and the nicotine began to race through her bloodstream. Though she knew it was terrible, the cigarette tasted fabulous. It was like coming home. “What I do for queen and country,” she sighed.

  Harvath hated cigarettes. “I didn’t say you actually had to smoke it, you know.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Fake it. Don’t inhale.”

  “Too late now,” she replied as she took another hit. The damage was already done. “While I’m standing here throwing away three years of willpower and hard work, what are you supposed to be doing?” she asked. />
  Harvath tucked his hands in his coat pockets, rocked back and forth on his heels, and nonchalantly said, “Me? I’m just waiting for the Métro.”

  “Waiting for the bloody Métro? You’re aware that it runs below ground in these parts?”

  “Quite aware,” replied Harvath as he continued rocking.

  Jillian had no idea what to make of him. “If you see the bus for Piccadilly coming, you’ll be a dear and let me know, won’t you?”

  “No problem.”

  Jillian stepped to the edge of the alcove and watched as the heavy rain pounded the roofs of cars parked up and down the street. There were flashes of lightning accompanied by peals of thunder somewhere off in the distance. Jillian counted the seconds between them. The storm was getting closer, and as it did, her unease grew. As she stared out into the rainy street, her mind was taken back to the night she had lost both her parents and her grandmother.

  “The French call it the danse macabre,” said Harvath, figuring she was staring at the disturbing mural under the eaves of the building across the street. “It means—”

  “Dance of death,” she replied as Harvath stepped out of the shadows of the alcove to join her for a moment.

  “Do you know it?” he asked.

  “Of course. It’s probably one of the single most popular allegorical art themes in the paleopathology field. People in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries believed that skeletons rose from their graves to seduce the living to join them in a mysterious dance that ended in death. From the pope on down, no one was immune. The murals served as a memento mori.”

  “What’s a memento mori?”

  “Simply put, it’s a reminder that no matter what we do in life, we’re all going to die. It supposedly comes from Imperial Rome when victorious generals had their triumphal processions. A slave was said to have accompanied each general as he passed through the streets repeating the chant, ‘Remember thou art mortal.’ Kind of a reality check, I guess.”

  “Interesting. Do you know where the first mural was painted?”

  Jillian looked at him and said, “Germany. They refer to it as the Totentanz. It depicted a festival of the living and the dead.”

  “Actually,” replied Harvath, “the first depiction of the danse macabre was painted three blocks from here in 1424, in the Church of the Holy Innocents.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been to Paris a couple of times. I like to learn about the history of the places I visit.”

  “You’re sure that the first danse macabre was painted here?”

  “I double-checked it this afternoon,” replied Harvath, a flash of lightning illuminating his face.

  Jillian counted the seconds in her head until the thunder. “I suppose then that it must have something to do with what we’re doing here?”

  “In a way.”

  “How so?”

  The ground beneath them began to rumble with the sound of an approaching Métro. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” replied Harvath as he removed the sledgehammer from beneath his jacket. “Right now, we’ve got a train to catch.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  W hile Jillian kept an eye on the street, Harvath used the noise of the Métro to cover the three full swings of the hammer it took for the heavy wooden door, with its thick metal lock, to splinter and give way. The door to the apartment upstairs proved much easier to get through.

  As Harvath set up his gear, he explained to Jillian that on their first trip to Sotheby’s today, he noticed that this building had the same danse macabre under the eaves as the one across the street. It reminded him of a story he had once read about what the French did with the bodies from the Holy Innocents cemetery when it got too full and they needed to make room for new arrivals.

  Originally, they placed them in charnel houses adjacent to the church, but they didn’t have enough space to keep up with demand. So they started quietly buying up buildings in the neighborhood to use as undisclosed charnel houses. Sometimes they’d wall the bodies up and rent out the apartments to help recoup some of their costs. Sometimes they’d place the bodies on the top two floors and rent the floors beneath. Everything was going just fine until the walls and floors began rotting away and dead bodies started falling into people’s living rooms.

  Even building to building, corpses were falling through the walls. At this point, Paris caught a break. They had pretty much stopped mining stone under the Right Bank because they were afraid that all of the tunnels had weakened it close to the point of collapse. It was the perfect place to transfer the contents of the charnel houses. They hauled the dead out in the dark of night by the wagonload, stacked their skulls and bones throughout the tunnels, and voilà, the Paris catacombs were born.

  Seeing the murals earlier that day had gotten him thinking. He tracked down the club where the DJ who lived in the apartment worked and learned that the man would be working a rave in Calais for the next two days. After that, he did a little research at the Bibliothèque Nationale and learned that all of the buildings on this block were at least several centuries old. The wall that separated the apartment from what they wanted in Molly Davidson’s office next door was constructed in exactly the same way as buildings over five hundred years ago—stone and mortar.

  “I hope you’ve got a bigger sledgehammer if you’re planning what I think you’re planning,” said Jillian as Harvath unlocked the lid of the larger Storm case and flipped it open.

  Along with another weapon, Ozan Kalachka had come through for him yet again. Inside the case was a device called a Rapid Cutter of Concrete, or RAPTOR for short. It looked like a large fire extinguisher with a long muzzle attached to it. It was a helium-driven gas gun that could fire steel nails at 5000 feet per second, five times the speed of sound, cracking concrete over six inches thick.

  “What the hell is that?” she asked.

  “Our ticket in,” replied Harvath as he removed a long black silencer tube from the Storm case and screwed it onto the end of the RAPTOR. “There’s one other thing we need.”

  Harvath walked over to a stack of milk crates stuffed with record albums. As he began sorting through them he said, “First, we have to remove the coating of plaster on this side of the wall with the sledgehammers and then we’ll use the RAPTOR to help us get through the wall itself. But even with the silencer, we’re still going to make a good amount of noise. I don’t want to have to depend on intermittent Métro trains coming and going all night to help cover us. Besides, I like to whistle to something while I work. Don’t you?”

  “That depends what we’re whistling to,” she replied.

  Harvath held up George Clinton’s Greatest Funkin’ Hits and said, “How about the Master?”

  THIRTY-THREE

  H arvath turned the stereo speakers around so they faced the wall and then let the music rip.

  Not only was George Clinton great to swing a hammer to, but a song like “Atomic Dog” had enough bass in it to disguise any sounds that might be heard on the third floor of Sotheby’s. As crude as his plan was, Harvath felt fairly confident they were going to be able to get in and out without anyone knowing, until tomorrow morning, that they had been there. By then, it wouldn’t matter. They’d have what they needed and be on the trail of whoever sent the artifacts to Sotheby’s.

  Once the plaster was successfully chipped away, Harvath got to work with the RAPTOR. After loosening several large blocks of stone, he removed a set of telescoping titanium poles from the duffel bag along with a block and tackle set. Jillian and Harvath both used small pry bars to edge the stones out to a point where a web harness could be slipped around each one of them and then they could be lowered to the floor on their side. It was two and a half hours before they had finally cleared a space big enough to crawl through. After packing the equipment, Harvath punched through the plaster on the Sotheby’s side as quietly as he could and crawled inside.

  Using the filtered blue beam of his SureFire to light his way, Scot steppe
d into Molly Davidson’s office with Jillian right behind him. Rain lashed the windows and very little light from the street below found its way inside. The room was a disjointed jumble of shadows, and it smelled different for some reason. There was a mix of odors he couldn’t exactly place. It was a combination of melted plastic and something else—something not as strong, but definitely distinct. Though he didn’t know why, Harvath had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. That little voice in the back of his head that never steered him wrong was trying to tell him something. As they moved further into the room, the hair on the back of his neck began to stand up.

  Harvath swept the beam of his flashlight over the long table and noticed all of the artifacts seemed to be there. That was strange. Why wouldn’t Davidson have locked them up?

  As they crept closer to her desk area, Harvath saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks. Not only did the blue filter on his Sure-Fire reduce the intensity of the light, making the beam harder to see, it also caused certain substances to stand out under dark conditions.

  Harvath noticed the splatters on the wall first. It looked like someone had flicked a heavily soaked paintbrush at it. As he angled the beam toward the floor, he moved it forward and saw a large, dark pool spreading out from the direction of Davidson’s desk. Suddenly, there was a flash of lightning and the room was illuminated for just a fraction of a second. It was enough for Harvath to see a bludgeoned body and, lying next to it, the ancient war hammer.

  Harvath risked flipping the hinged filter up from his SureFire to get a better look at the body as he ran over to it. The war hammer was covered with blood and little pink morsels of tissue, which could only be pieces from Molly Davidson’s scalp. The scene was horrific. Jillian choked back a scream.