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.”

TWENTY-TWO

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?”

“But how could a bioweapon over two thousand years old still be viable after all this time?”

“You’d be surprised how long ancient poisons remain lethal. The Victoria and Albert Museum just discovered that the heads of several arrows from India in their collection were coated with deadly substances that are still lethal today, over a thousand years later. If the substance in question here was even somewhat volatile, as long as it was preserved in an anaerobic substance like honey, which was well known to the ancients, or sealed within a container crafted from a nonporous material like faience, gold, or glass, it could remain quite deadly and still be quite dangerous today.”

“If what Emir was dealing with was some ancient bioweapon, it was becoming painfully clear why he had reached out to Jillian Alcott for help.

“How these poisons survived is really not what’s important,” she continued. “The point is that for some reason historians all too often choose to overlook the ancients’ skillful manipulation of nature. They’d rather believe that soldiers of old adhered to the highest moral codes in battle, but this just isn’t the case. The ancient world was filled with terrifying precursors to today’s sophisticated chem-bio weapons: from flamethrowers and incendiary devices, all the way to poison gases and dirty bombs. And they did it all without the help of modern science.”

“I’m willing to concede,” replied Harvath, “they had a handle on chemical and biological warfare, but what does this have to do with what Emir was working on?”

“How familiar are you with Islamic science?” asked Jillian.

“If you mean the state of science in the Islamic world, I know a little.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. In the context of what Emir Tokay was doing, the term Islamic science refers to a rather bizarre hybrid of modern science and Islamic mysticism practiced by Muslim fundamentalists.”

At the mention of Muslim fundamentalists, Harvath leaned forward even further and began listening even more intently. She was speaking his language now, and a connection was finally starting to form.

“Many of the people involved with Emir at the institute are Islamic scientists,” continued Alcott. “They believe that things like Ebola, smallpox, and atomic energy all contain powerful, unseen spirits called djinns-from which we take the English word genie. The scientists think that these djinns can be commanded via secret knowledge contained within the Koran. They’re fascinated with things such as Pandora’s box and the plague demons King Solomon supposedly harnessed to build the great temple at Jerusalem and then sealed up within its foundations.”

“This all sounds pretty strange,” said Harvath.

“It is,” replied Alcott, “especially to the Western mind, but it bears scrutiny. There are many fundamentalists, particularly in the Arab world, who are absolutely obsessed with harnessing the power of ancient biological weapons. The older the weapon is, the more powerful they believe the djinn inside it to be. The scary fact is that they are fixated on possessing these ancient weapons and have been on a mad, Indiana Jones-style quest to do so for decades.”

“The David effect,” said Harvath.

“Exactly,” replied Alcott. “A scenario by which a significantly smaller player, with access to the right technology, is able to severely damage a much larger foe, which in this case appears to be the enemies of radical Islam.”

“If this isn’t something that Emir and his group bioengineered themselves, how is it possible that it only targets non-Muslims? Muslims weren’t even around over two thousand years ago.”

“I don’t know,” said Jillian. “Unfortunately, I never got far enough with Emir to figure it out.”