Blowback

FORTY-SIX

Pinpointing Jillian’s exact location was no easy task. The labyrinth of tunnels bounced the sound of her voice in so many directions that it was impossible to tell if she was in front of or behind him.

Eventually, Harvath exited the system of tunnels into another large room and found her along with the reason she had been calling for him. Lying at the mouth of the tunnel were three very contemporary yet very dead bodies that had been frozen into bizarre contortions. With their arms outstretched and fingers curled, they appeared to be both begging for help and trying to reach out and grab anyone unlucky enough to come close. Apparently, Jillian had almost tripped right over them.

Taking a closer look, Harvath could see that two of them had been shot in the back of their heads. With his bushy black beard, Bernard was the easiest of the three to identify. Harvath guessed the other man lying next to him was Maurice, which left only one other person. A little apart from the two men, dressed in expensive North Face climbing clothes, was the body of Dr. Donald Ellyson. His throat had been cut from ear to ear, and his parka, as well as his trousers and the ice all around him, were stained a deep crimson bordering on black. Harvath had seen some grisly crime scenes in his day, but this one was pretty horrific.

Jillian asked, “Who could have done this?”

There were a million possible answers, but only one that made sense. “Rayburn.”

“Why him?”

“Why not him? He was in charge of the expedition. He knew they were here. It makes perfect sense.”

“Look at all the artifacts lying around here. Why would he leave them behind?”

“Maybe he was in a hurry.”

“But Marie told us that Ellyson never shared with Rayburn exactly where the dig was. She didn’t trust him, remember?”

Jillian was right. “Maybe Rayburn followed them, or maybe he hired somebody else to do it. Whoever it was didn’t want these men talking about what they had found.”

“You mean Hannibal’s weapon,” said Jillian as she watched Harvath bend down toward Bernard’s corpse. “What are you doing?”

Gently, he removed a gold chain with a small medallion from around the man’s neck. “Ironic,” he said as he held the medallion up for her to see. “Saint Bernard, patron saint of mountain climbers, Alpinists, and skiers.”

Jillian sadly shook her head.

“I think Marie would want to have this,” said Harvath.

“I think you’re right,” she replied as she walked away from the bodies. She didn’t want to look at them anymore, and there was something half buried in ice on the other side of the small room that had caught her eye.

Harvath placed the chain in his pocket and then went through Bernard’s pockets, where he found a pair of ancient wrist cuffs made from gold and set with amethysts and small pieces of creamy white marble. It bore the same wolf’s head with intertwined vipers as the breastplates. They were definitely something special, and he could see why Bernard had singled them out to bring back. There was something, though, about the way the snarling wolf looked that bothered him.

“Scot, come over here,” said Jillian, interrupting his thoughts. “You need to see this.”

Harvath tucked the wrist cuffs into his jacket pocket and joined Jillian on the other side of the room, where she was staring at a large wooden chest, its lower half frozen in a solid block of ice.

“Look at these,” she said as she pointed to a series of carved figures along the lid.

“The wolf and intertwined vipers,” replied Harvath. “The same as on the breastplates.”

“Exactly. And these panels along the side seem to tell some sort of story.”

Harvath studied the carvings.

“Somebody melted away this ice on purpose,” continued Jillian, “to get into the box.”

The carvings reminded Harvath of images he had seen in books of the Ark of the Covenant being carried into battle. “Do you think this was used to transport Hannibal’s weapon?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said as she carefully raised the lid.

Together, they both looked inside. The long box was intricately partitioned, but other than that was completely empty.

“Damn it,” said Jillian. She spent a few more minutes studying the box and then moved on to investigate something else near the mouth of one of the tunnels.

Harvath stayed with the crate, trying to decipher its story. It was an allegory, but its meaning was difficult to understand. “You know what?” he yelled over his shoulder as he continued to stare at the intricately carved relief. “I’m not so sure that these are actually supposed to be wolves.”

“No?” replied Jillian, engrossed in something inside the tunnel. “What are they then?”

“I think they’re supposed to be dogs.”

“You may have missed your calling in life,” came a man’s voice from behind.

It was a voice he recognized — a voice he knew almost as well as his own. It belonged to the man he had been chasing for months, the man who had set him up in Baghdad and had tried to kill him in Cairo, London, and Paris — Khalid Sheik Alomari.

Harvath wanted it to be a figment of his imagination, but he knew it wasn’t. As he turned and saw the al-Qaeda assassin standing there with a fully automatic machine pistol in his hand, Harvath began to reach for his gun. The problem, though, was that he had left it in his pack to help weigh it down. Defenseless, Harvath did the only other thing he could think of. He yelled for Jillian to run.