Brad Thor - Blowback

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.”

How 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?”