Jillian was unable to stop shaking. “He would have killed us both,” said Harvath as he tried to break the spell that had come over her.

“I know,” said Jillian quietly. “I know.”

As if her handling of the shelf collapse wasn’t enough, in killing Alomari, Jillian Alcott had proven that when she really needed to, she could make her fear work for her and not vice versa.

“Here,” said Harvath, handing her the Ruger. “This is yours. You earned it.”

“I don’t want a souvenir.”

“It’s not a souvenir. It might save your life. Do you know how to handle one of these?”

“I grew up on a farm. I’ve done my fair share of shooting.”

“Killing people is a lot different than killing rabbits,” said Harvath, who immediately regretted his words. It was definitely the wrong thing to say, and as if he needed any further convincing, Jillian turned away from him and vomited. He felt so stupid. The woman had just killed a man. Sometimes Harvath simply forgot the code civilians lived by. As they should, people who had never killed before found it reprehensible, even those who did so in defense of themselves or the people they cared about. What Jillian Alcott had just been through would probably haunt her for the rest of her life. Offering to let her keep the pistol was definitely a bad idea, no matter how well intentioned.

Harvath left Jillian alone while he combed through Alomari’s pockets. What he found he took-a car key, a high-end Benchmade tactical folding knife, and some spare ammunition. Al-Qaeda had trained him well. There was nothing on his person that could lead anyone anywhere. The U.S. intelligence community was going to be awfully upset at having lost a chance to interrogate him, but as far as Harvath was concerned, he and Jillian had been faced with no other choice.

They spent the next hour combing the tunnels for any clues they could find about Hannibal ’s mystery weapon. The quiet searching seemed to allow Jillian time to make a tentative peace with what she had been forced to do.

Jillian spent some time studying the intricately carved box they had examined earlier, trying to divine the meaning of its engraving. Finally, she spoke, and when she did, she was all business. She agreed with Harvath that the scenes were allegories but their exact message wasn’t clear. There was a depiction of some sort of magical book, which she thought might represent the Arthashastra, but paleopathology, not iconography, was her specialty.

Jillian did, though, concur with his assessment that what they had originally believed were wolves on the breastplates were actually dogs. The reason was that on the box, more than just snarling heads were depicted. These animals also had curved tails-a definite Canis familiaris trait and not something normally associated with Canis lupus.

While Harvath was glad to have her agree with his opinion, it still didn’t explain why Hannibal had wanted to use the image of dogs to scare his enemies.

“Did Hannibal use dogs in battle?” he asked as they continued to explore the box together.

“A lot of ancient armies did, but I can’t say one way or another if Hannibal used them. If he did, it would not have been unusual.”

“And not particularly scary.”

“Nope. Besides, if these troops were using dogs, where are they? I don’t see any evidence of them down here. Not one leash, not one muzzle, nothing.”

Harvath nodded his head in agreement. “So what’s the connection?”

“I have no idea,” said Jillian as she turned away from the box and ran her hand through her hair. “There are too many pieces missing. It could take months, if not years, of excavating down here with a full team before we could uncover the answers we’re looking for.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“What are we going to do then?”

Harvath looked at his watch. Without blankets and a way to make a fire, there was no way they could survive through the night. “We have to go back.”

“I wish I had brought a camera,” said Jillian.

“Maybe in one of the expedition cases,” began Harvath, who stopped when he saw her shaking her head.

“I already checked all of those. There’s nothing. Even if we found one, the batteries would long be dead.”

She was right. Harvath hadn’t thought of that.

“There’s one other thing we can do,” said Jillian. “Give me your axe.”

Harvath handed her the one he’d been using to chop chunks of ice out of the wall to hold against his face. “What are you going to do?”

“Collect samples.”

“Samples of what?”

As she headed off toward one of the tunnels, Alcott looked over her shoulder and replied, “Human tissue.”

They picked five soldiers at random. The ones buried behind the thickest pieces of ice were Harvath’s responsibility, as was the most gruesome task of all-lopping off the top of each skull so that Jillian could collect samples of brain matter. As the mystery illness involved such a serious encephalitis component, she had insisted that in addition to the other tissue samples they were collecting, samples of brain tissue were absolutely imperative. Though Harvath and Alcott were each armed with only an ice ax, they went at their task as if chipping away at a priceless diamond while wielding the most precision cutting instruments in the world.

Jillian’s care came out of respect for ancient history. In Harvath’s case it was out of his respect for fellow soldiers. Though outside daylight was fading, neither hacked away at their subjects. They carved carefully into the ice until they were able to access the frozen flesh. While Alcott wasn’t sure if Alan Whitcomb would be able to learn anything from the samples, she certainly wanted to give him a chance. Lying within these frozen bodies could be the key they were looking for. Hannibal never would have sent his men into battle without protecting them against their own weapons. Maybe these soldiers, the members of his elite guard, had been inoculated, and maybe their DNA could tell the modern world something about the great weapon they were carrying.

Once the samples had been collected, they hurried back to their climbing equipment; Harvath unfastened his rope and watched as the weight of his pack up above pulled it through his secondary set of anchors. The rope zipped across the empty space above them and landed with a soft thwack on the correct side of the cavern, right next to Jillian’s.

Attaching their ascenders, Harvath demonstrated how the devices were used to climb back up the rope. He worked with Jillian until she got the hang of it, and then, after he connected the leash between them once more, they began their ascent. Twenty feet from the top, Harvath detached his pack from the line and managed to get it over both his shoulders. After changing ropes at the remnant of the ice shelf, they made it back up onto the narrow Col de la Traversette, packed up their gear, and began the difficult hike back to the Carré de l’Ours with only their headlamps to light their way through the dark.

A thick curtain of heavily falling snow was well under way by the time they arrived at the rear of the hotel’s property. During their trek, not much in the way of conversation passed between them. Jillian was wrestling with the psychological and emotional trauma of having killed Khalid Alomari while Harvath was trying to figure out how the assassin was tied to Timothy Rayburn in the first place. Rayburn had organized the expedition to recover Hannibal ’s mystery weapon, and Alomari seemed to be killing anyone who had any knowledge of it whatsoever. Yet there was one person Alomari hadn’t been able to kill, and that was Emir Tokay, but only because Rayburn had gotten to him first and kidnapped him. It didn’t make any sense. Rayburn and Alomari seemed to be working the same project but from two different angles. Rayburn helped put it together while Alomari worked on taking it apart.