“And one of these Greek war correspondents made mention of this weapon of unimaginable destruction?”

“Yes, Silenus did, as well as the crest on the breastplates worn by Hannibal ’s elite guard.”

“So where is this Silenus reference? Maybe we can learn something more from it?”

“That’s the problem,” said Vanessa. “No one in modern civilization has ever seen it. The original was said to have been lost when the Library of Alexandria was sacked in 640 A.D. by Muslims under the Caliph Umar I.”

“Any idea how long the breastplate has been in Dr. Davidson’s possession?”

“Her e-mail doesn’t say, but the fact that she referred to it as coming from a new client makes me think it can’t have been that long.”

Harvath was quiet for several moments as he pondered what their next move should be.

“What are you thinking?” asked Jillian.

“I think we need to get a look at that breastplate.”

“And what exactly do you expect to glean from it that a foremost expert in the field hasn’t been able to already?”

Harvath went back to the small Formica table and began gathering up his notes. “May I take these with me?” he asked Vanessa, as he motioned to a reference book and the stack of documents she had printed out for him.

“Of course you may,” she replied.

“Scot,” interrupted Jillian. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Harvath accepted a rubber band from Vanessa to put around his stack of pages and said, “I don’t believe in coincidences. There’s some sort of connection here, and I want to find out who this new client of Sotheby’s is.”

“Dr. Davidson won’t tell you that,” responded Jillian. “When it comes to the anonymity of their clients, Sotheby’s makes the Swiss banking establishment look loose-lipped.”

“Well, we’re going to have to figure out some way around that,” stated Harvath.

“I’m sure if you had an official from Washington contact Sotheby’s on your behalf they would-” began Vanessa, but she was interrupted by Harvath.

“I can’t deal directly with Washington right now.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me, it’s a long story,” answered Jillian.

Assembling his papers, Harvath looked at Vanessa and asked, “I’ll want to contact Mrs. Davidson myself and set up a meeting. Do you have a phone number for her in London?”

Vanessa looked back at the e-mail on her computer screen and replied, “She’s not in London. According to this, she’s in France working out of Sotheby’s Paris office.”

On the street below, that was all Khalid Alomari needed to hear. Harvath should never have allowed the Alcott woman to abandon her briefcase at the London department store. Just as her e-mail correspondence with Emir Tokay had led him to London, so had the hard copies of her correspondence with the Whitcombs led him here to Durham. As he packed up his parabolic listening device and climbed back into his rental car, Alomari decided he could come back for the old couple later. Right now, though, he needed to get to Paris. Somehow, a knot from his past had come untied. Both the archeologist and the two Sherpas from the Alps were dead. He was sure of it. He had killed them himself, but the artifacts they had uncovered were now making their way onto the market. If he had any hope of collecting his money from the Scorpion and maintaining favor in his mentor’s eyes, Alomari needed to tie up his loose ends.

As he drove away from the university campus, he wondered what it was going to be like to watch Scot Harvath die.

TWENTY-SEVEN

PARIS

It was easily the worst flight Scot Harvath had ever taken in his life. A severe storm had buffeted the plane all the way across the Channel to France. Even the most stoic of passengers had death grips on their armrests, and from where Harvath sat, he could see Jillian Alcott was on the edge of absolutely falling apart. For security, they had traveled separately on a budget carrier out of Newcastle International Airport. The British police would have been looking for a man and a woman traveling together.

Once they were on the ground in Paris and had cleared both passport control and customs, Harvath finally breathed a silent sigh of relief. While he was traveling under an assumed name and a false passport, Alcott had only her authentic passport. The fact that she had been able to make it through without being stopped meant that the police must have still only had shots of her face to go on and hadn’t yet put a name to them. They had been lucky, but they couldn’t hope for that luck to hold out forever. They needed to make some headway, fast.

Harvath normally liked Paris -the fashionable bistros of the Marais, the intimate cafés of St. Germain-des-Prés, the smoke-filled bars of the Latin Quarter. There was no city in the world like it, but as their taxi splashed through overflowing puddles on the way to Sotheby’s, the city seemed alien to him. There was something different about it-something just didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the lightning. Harvath had experienced all kinds of Parisian weather before, but never this.

The afternoon sky was as black as he’d ever seen it, punctuated only by the erratic stabs of lightning. By the time their cab pulled up in front of a rather derelict-looking façade in the Les Halles neighborhood, a light rain was already beginning to fall.

“Are we in the right place?” asked Jillian as she looked at the building.

Harvath double-checked the address on the piece of paper Vanessa Whitcomb had given them. “This is it, “He said as he paid the driver and then held the door for Jillian as she got out of the cab.

The edifice they were standing in front of was supposedly a storage and restoration annex. Whatever it was, it was a far cry from the resplendent auction house Sotheby’s had on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré-a stone’s throw from the Paris Ritz. This shabby, rundown building, which leaned precariously to the left (like many in France), was easily three hundred years old. It looked as if it wouldn’t take more than a seismic hiccup to bring it crashing to the ground.

As they ran up to the door, Harvath heard a loud roar and felt the sidewalk shake beneath their feet. It took a moment for him to realize that they were standing above one of the many Métro lines that crisscrossed at the nearby Châtelet Les Halles Métro station.

Émile Zola had called Les Halles the belly of Paris -a fitting sobriquet as it had long been the city’s main food market, where citizens, restaurateurs, and merchants alike traveled on a daily basis to purchase the wide variety of staples that made up the Parisian diet. Les Halles was also practically the geographical hub of Paris as it lay just north of the Louvre-the point from which all of Paris’s arrondissements, or administrative districts, spiraled out in clockwise fashion, much like the continuous ring of a conch shell.

Sotheby’s three-story annex was bordered by some sort of warehouse to its left and a butcher shop to its right. Beneath the eaves of the butcher shop was a mural that Harvath thought he recognized. Before he could give it further thought, he heard a buzz as the lock on the annex door was released and he realized that Jillian was already on her way inside.

The interior of the annex was incredibly modern and bore little resemblance to the building’s dilapidated exterior. The only hints of its age were the timeworn wooden floors, which had been polished until they shone like honey-colored mirrors. Rows of halogen lighting illuminated a variety of paintings and sculptures displayed against the stark white walls. A sleek, brushed aluminum reception desk sat in front of a frosted pane of glass complete with an etched Sotheby’s crest. Behind the desk was an impeccably dressed young woman, flanked by two armed security guards in crisp black uniforms. The guards were not your everyday rent-a-cops either. Their eyes had an unmistakable Don’t fuck with me look. Judging by the Heckler amp; Koch MP5s slung over their shoulders, the body armor strapped to their chests, and the.40-caliber Berettas at their sides, their employers took security of this annex very seriously. Harvath knew the price tag for all of the art stored in this facility had to have been astronomical.