Brad Thor - Blowback

“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.”

While 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?”

Harvath 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 stepped 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.