Blowback (16 page)

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.

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.

Harvath took one look at the intense damage to her skull and knew there was no way she could be alive, but he reached down and checked for a pulse anyway. The body was still warm-too warm, especially considering the massive loss of blood. Whoever had killed her had done so very recently, maybe even as Harvath was in the final stages of breaking in. He didn’t like the thought that they might have been able to do something to save her, but there was no way they could have known what was going on while they were busy punching through the wall.

The other thing Harvath didn’t like was that they might have interrupted the killer midway through his work. He swept the flashlight in a slow arc around the room. There were very few places a person could hide, but he wanted to make sure they were absolutely alone.

Understandably, Jillian was extremely frightened and stayed as close to Harvath as possible. “What is it?” she asked as he lit up the different corners of the room.

“Nothing. I just wanted to make sure we were alone.”

“Who do you think did this to her?”

“I have no idea,” replied Harvath, “but-” Harvath stopped mid-sentence as he focused the beam of his flashlight on Davidson’s desktop computer and then responded, “Goddamn it!”

“What is it?” she asked, carefully stepping around the body to see what Harvath was so angry about.

“Whoever killed her was concerned enough about what was on her computer to crack the tower and burn everything inside before leaving. “Now he knew where the burned plastic smell had come from. Davidson’s blood had turned out to be the other odor.

Jillian looked at the computer’s blackened and melted circuitry. “How do you create a fire that burns something that bad without setting off the smoke alarms?”

“You need a type of fire that burns with very little smoke-a real hot one. Whoever did this must have had some sort of a handheld blow torch or soldering iron with him.”

“So much for this being a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion,” said Jillian.

Harvath couldn’t argue with her. Whoever did this had come prepared. And, as he had just pointed out, there must have been something on Molly Davidson’s computer that they were desperate to erase.

“What do we do now?” asked Jillian.

“I don’t know, “He responded as he looked at his watch and realized it was nearing four o’clock in the morning. There had to be something. They were already in the building. Sotheby’s had to have another copy of the information somewhere, but where? Think, he told himself. The hard part is over-we’re already inside. Where would Davidson have kept backups of her files? Was there a central server in the building? Did they have hard copies in a file room somewhere? Harvath laughed at that idea. If Sotheby’s did have a file storage area, there was no telling how big it would be. With all of the transactions they did in Paris each year, the room would be enormous. It could take up an entire floor. It could even comprise a completely different building. Not only were they searching for a needle, they had no idea where the haystack was.

Then, something hit him. “Didn’t Davidson say she worked from home sometimes when she needed peace and quiet?”

“Yes. She most likely had copies there of everything she was working on. I often do the same thing.”

“So do I,” replied Harvath as he opened one of Davidson’s desk drawers. “She must have carried a purse, or a wallet or something that might have her address in it.”

After several moments of looking, it was Jillian who found the purse inside a tiny cabinet beneath the small sink in the corner. “Got it,” she said, pulling it out so Harvath could see it.

“Good job.”

Jillian cleared a spot on the nearest workbench, and while Harvath held the flashlight for her, she turned the purse upside down and emptied its contents. Among an assortment of useless items were a wallet, cell phone, and set of keys. Immediately, her attention was drawn to a Swiss Army knife, just three inches long, hanging from the key ring.

“What is that?” asked Harvath as Jillian extended a rectangular piece of metal-tipped plastic from beneath one of the blades.

“It’s a compact flash memory stick,” she replied. “It’s like a portable hard drive or storage device. I use the same thing to transport files between my computer at work and the one I have at home. Dr. Davidson must have been doing the same thing.”

“That might be exactly what we’re looking for,” said Harvath as another flash of lightning exploded.

Jillian, who was standing near the windows, suddenly saw a figure dressed completely in black, perched on the sloped roof and staring through the glass at them. But before she could scream, Khalid Alomari raised his pistol and fired.

When the window exploded in a hail of razor-sharp glass, Harvath was already in motion. Leaping across the large table covered with artifacts, he knocked Jillian to the ground and drew the.40-caliber H amp;K USP Compact he was carrying at the small of his back. Raising himself up onto one knee, Harvath prepared to fire, but was forced to hit the deck when Khalid Alomari raked the room with another fusillade. A screeching, high-pitched siren soon joined the sound of gunfire. The shattered window had triggered the alarm system. Harvath could almost hear the heavy boots of Sotheby’s well-armed guards pounding their way up the stairs at that very moment. That was all he needed. He had no desire to dance with those guys again. They had to get out of there-now.

Rolling to his right, Harvath pounded the area around the window frame with six rounds from his H amp;K. Turning back to where Jillian lay, he said, “When I count to three, I want you to take off running for the hole in the wall. Stay low and don’t stop for anything.”

“I don’t think I can move,” she wheezed as her breath came in short gasps. Her hands were trembling and her eyes were wide with fear. Seeing Molly Davidson’s body and now this, it was all too much and had resulted in classic adrenaline dump. Her fight-or-flight mechanisms were overloaded and she was completely paralyzed. Harvath needed to get her focused on moving.

Handing her the keys to the van, he said, “I’m going to hold him off while you run. I want you to take the van and go back to the hotel and wait for me. Got it?”

Alcott nodded her head.

“Good. I’m going to count to three. Are you ready?”

“Wait,” she said, scared and trying to stall. “What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll meet you there. Here we go. One. Two. Three!”

Harvath let loose with another volley of six shots while Jillian ran for the far end of the office. When Harvath had fired his final shot, he ejected the spent magazine and inserted a fresh one. He put seven additional rounds through the eaves above, hoping to get lucky and nail Alomari outside on the sloped roof, but there was no way to be sure. All he knew was that he was no longer returning fire. Either Harvath had gotten lucky or Alomari was on the run. Like it or not, Harvath knew he had to go after him.

Grabbing a stool from one of the workbenches, he knocked the remaining pieces of glass from the windowpane as the sound of Sotheby’s security guards racing down the hallway could be heard. Reaching for the best handhold he could, Harvath pulled himself up and out of the window.

The fierce rain was being driven horizontally by the wind, and it tore at him like sheets of nails. It was all Harvath could do to hang on. The sloped roof was slick with rain and an accumulation of Paris grime. Realizing he was going to need both hands, Harvath reluctantly tucked the H amp;K back into the holster at the small of his back, sucked up the pain from his ribs, and scrambled upward.

As he reached the top of the roof, the parapet exploded in a hail of gunfire and Harvath lost his grip. He came sliding downward on the slimy tiles, grabbing frantically for any sort of handhold he could find. Clawing at the sloped surface, he was finally able to stop his precipitous slide.

Harvath struggled his way back up the roof. When he arrived beneath the parapet, he steadied himself and drew his pistol. He grabbed hold of the ledge and swung himself up and over the top. Rolling along the flat surface, he took cover behind a large stone chimney. He listened for any sign of Alomari, but all he could hear was the raging of the storm. Taking a deep breath, he tightened his grip around the pistol and sprang from his hiding place.

All of the roofs of the block’s buildings were connected, and through the driving rain, Harvath could make out the silhouette of Alomari no more than fifty yards away. With no civilians this time blocking his line of fire, Harvath didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger five times in quick succession and on the last round saw Alomari spin, as if he’d been hit in the back, and go down.

Harvath began to advance, ready to finish the job, when he heard voices behind him. The Sotheby’s security guards were scaling the roof, and there were the sounds of police sirens closing in on the street below. He had no choice. Though he didn’t like it, he had to get out of there. Spotting what looked like an access door two rooftops over, he took off at a sprint.