by Brad Thor
Yatsko looked away.
“Legend has it that it began in Africa, but there are some who say it started in Haiti. The Brazilians also lay claim to it—they call it microondas—a play on the word microwave. Apparently, it gets pretty hot. But not so hot that you die right away. They say it can take up to twenty minutes.”
“Go to hell,” said Yatsko.
“I’ll let you go first and do some reconnaissance for me,” replied Ralston as he lifted the tire.
The Russian squirmed and tried to avoid being ringed, but sitting on his ass with two broken knees in front of him and his arms lashed behind his back, there wasn’t much he could do.
The pungent odor of the gasoline filled his nostrils as his captor forced the tire down over his shoulders.
“You sent a team to kill my friend, Yaroslav. Now we’re alone in the desert. No one’s coming to rescue you. This is going to end very badly. It’s up to you.”
“I told you to go to hell,” he repeated.
Fucking Russians, Ralston thought to himself. “It’s certainly not the way I’d want to go,” he said, producing a book of matches he’d found back at Yatsko’s house. Removing one from the pack, he struck it and leaned forward.
Yatsko turned to face the match and with a puff, blew it out.
Ralston grinned. “You’re a funny guy. Last chance,” he said as he struck another match and used it to light the entire pack on fire.
He held the flaming pack just above the tire. The Russian could huff and puff all he wanted, but he wouldn’t be able to blow them all out. What’s more, they were soon going to be too hot to hold on to and Ralston would drop them right onto the gasoline-soaked tire.
The former FSB agent seemed to realize he had no choice. “His name is Ashford,” he offered suddenly. “Robert Ashford. He’s a British Intelligence officer for MI5.”
“MI5?”
“Yes.”
It didn’t make any sense. Ralston figured the Russian was making it up to save his own skin. He wanted to make sure the man was telling the truth.
He dropped the flaming matchbook into the sand and crushed out the flames with his shoe. “Who were you hired to kill?”
Yatsko looked right at him and without hesitating said, “Larry Salomon, the movie producer, and two other men he was working with.”
“Why were you hired?”
“They don’t tell me and I don’t ask.”
“How many men did you send?”
“Four,” said the Russian. “One of my men was the driver. He was supposed to wait outside. Three others were brought in from Russia to do the job.”
“Brought in by you.”
“Yes. Brought in by me.”
“And you were hired by someone named Robert Ashford who works for MI5?” said Ralston.
“That’s what I told you.”
“Why would MI5 want to kill Larry Salomon and a couple of documentary filmmakers?”
“I told you, they don’t tell me and I don’t ask.”
Ralston found the man awfully flip for someone who still might very well get roasted alive. “You didn’t think the job was a little strange?”
“You could never do what I do,” stated the Russian.
Ralston looked at him.
“You ask too many questions.”
Yatsko was really pissing him off. “I believe that you sent that team to Salomon’s house,” said Ralston. “But I don’t believe this has anything to do with MI5.”
“I can prove it.”
He was negotiating again, but Ralston listened anyway. “How?”
“The portable drive you took from my safe.”
“What about it?”
“It has copies of my communications with him,” said the Russian.
“Really?” Ralston said sarcastically. “An MI5 operative was that careless. What do you have? Copies of the personal check he scribbled out for the hit?”
“Everyone slips up. Everyone makes mistakes at some point.”
“My mistake has been listening to you. I think you’re full of shit.”
Yatsko shook his head. “When you’ve been at this game as long as I have, you learn to protect yourself. Listen, you don’t want me. I’m just the middleman in all of this. You want Ashford. But to get him, you need what’s on that drive. The file is encrypted, though. If you want access to it, you’ll need a password.”
“Give it to me.”
The Russian smiled. “Once I’m safe and away from you, I’ll provide you with it.”
Ralston turned and began walking back to the car.
“Where are you going?” asked the mobster.
“To find some more matches.”
“Cobb 2-2-4-6.”
“Say that again,” Ralston instructed as he turned and came back.
“Cobb 2-2-4-6. Cobb has two b’s, as in Ty Cobb.”
Without a computer, Ralston had no way to know if the man was telling the truth or not. Bending down, he pried off the tire.
Once it came free, he gave it a shove and rolled it the rest of the way down into the wash.
“So what happens now?” asked Yatsko. “You take my car and make me crawl? I’ll eventually need some of that money you took from me.”
This guy really did have balls. Ralston looked at him and shook his head. “There’s still the matter of the two filmmakers at Salomon’s house who your Spetsnaz guys whacked.”
The Russian looked at him. “You.”
“What about me?”
“You’re the one Salomon was at the restaurant with. You drove him home. Who are you?”
“I told you,” replied Ralston. “I’m nobody.”
“You killed them. Didn’t you?”
Ralston didn’t respond.
“You’re not going to let me walk away from here, are you?”
“You couldn’t walk if you wanted to.”
“You know what I mean,” said the Russian.
“Yeah,” said Ralston, pulling out his revolver.
Yatsko’s face changed. There was nothing but hate in his eyes. “Fuck you,” he yelled. “Fuck you!”
He was about to yell it again, but the sound of Ralston’s weapon discharging drowned it out.
Ralston pulled the trigger once for each of the murdered filmmakers, Chip and Jeremy. He then fired a third time for the homeless man in the trunk of the car and kept pulling the trigger until the weapon was empty.
The Russian deserved much worse. He deserved to have been necklaced. Ralston, though, wasn’t the kind of man who could torture another man to death, not even one as evil as Yaroslav Yatsko. Ralston was, after all, still a man of principle.
CHAPTER 49
The house Nicholas had found for Harvath had been foreclosed on and would be going to auction at the end of the month. “It should be coming up on your right,” he said over Harvath’s earbud.
“I see it,” Harvath replied as he rolled past. The house was located in Monterey Park, just east of downtown Los Angeles.
“How’s the line of sight?” Nicholas asked from back in Reston.
“I’ll let you know in a minute.”
Harvath maintained his speed as he passed Tariq Sarhan’s house. It was three houses up on the left. Harvath had seen it before arriving by using Google Street View. It was a single-story ranch with a high wooden privacy fence that ran the length of the front. There was no light from inside.
“It’s going to be tough,” he said to Nicholas once he had driven past. “We’re not going to see anything over that fence. Not unless I can plant one of the remote cameras somewhere.”
“You’ve got two with you. You could put one on the front and another on the back.”
Harvath looked at his watch. It was already after 4:00 a.m. The sun would be coming up in less than three hours. He didn’t want to get near the target house until he had had a chance to study it better. “I think I’d better get set up at my new digs first.”
Making a right turn at the en
d of the street, Harvath drove several blocks over and then doubled back.
Parking around the corner from the house he was going to occupy, he popped his trunk and removed a heavy backpack. Closing the lid, he locked the car and got ready for the hardest part of his entry. He was going to approach the foreclosed property from behind, but to do so he was going to have to cut through four backyards. He prayed none of the homes had dogs.
Slinging the pack over his shoulders, he stepped onto the sidewalk and cut across the lawn of the first house.
There were motion lights near the garage, so he chose to go around the other side. At the gate to the backyard, he stopped and readied his Taser. The last thing he wanted to do was to Tase some poor dog that was just doing its job and protecting its territory, but there was no other way for him to get where he needed to go undetected.
After looking over the fence for any telltale signs of animals, he quietly rattled the gate and waited. Nothing happened. Lifting the latch, he pushed the gate partway open and slipped into the yard. He stayed away from the house, hugging the property line, and moved quickly.
In the far corner, he crouched low, scratched at the fence, and waited. When no dog came to investigate, he boosted himself up and over. He repeated the process two more times until he reached the final fence separating him from the foreclosed property. Fortunately, he hadn’t encountered any dogs.
Leaping the final fence, he landed in a backyard untended and overgrown with weeds. He moved rapidly to the rear of the house and peered through a kitchen window. All of the appliances were gone and there was garbage strewn across the floor. At the back door, he removed a lock-pick gun and a thin, spring steel tensioning wrench.
Sliding the tensioning wrench into the lock, he applied pressure and then inserted the pick gun. As he clicked the gun, the pick struck the pins inside the lock and knocked them upward. With each click, he applied a little more pressure to the wrench, causing the plug to catch the top pins. Seconds later, the door was unlocked and Harvath slipped inside.
He did a quick sweep of the first floor. Unoccupied homes that had gone into foreclosure had become frequent targets of squatters.
Looking around, he saw that the house had been absolutely trashed. There were large holes punched through the walls, most of the fixtures had been stripped out, and it looked as if even the copper pipes had been taken.
Once he was confident that the first floor was clean, he retraced his steps and set up a battery-powered MSensor wireless perimeter security system. If anyone else entered the house, he’d be alerted instantly.
Moving back to the stairs, he headed up to the second floor. There was a small room above the garage that promised to provide the best view of Sarhan’s.
The upstairs was in an even worse state of disrepair than the first floor. As Harvath quickly checked out each room to make sure it was unoccupied, he marveled at the damage. He couldn’t begin to understand the mind of someone who would strip a house bare and vandalize it so totally on his way out. It was just something he could never picture himself doing.
At the end of the hall, he found the room he was looking for and stepped inside. It wasn’t any better than the other rooms on that floor, but it wasn’t any worse, and compared to a lot of the hides he had holed up in around the world to do surveillance, this one was pretty nice. It wasn’t the Ritz, but there were no bugs and no snakes. Plus, he had a roof over his head. All things considered, he had it pretty good.
Removing the clean cell phone he had brought with him, he texted a quick message back to Nicholas and the Old Man: I’m in.
He then took a small headlamp from his pack, affixed a red filter, and slipped it on. The lamp provided just enough light to see by, but not enough to be noticed by anyone from outside.
Unpacking his equipment, he laid it all out methodically on the floor. He had brought everything he thought he might need that would fit in his pack. In addition to the perimeter security system and the two wireless cameras Nicholas had mentioned, there was an infrared-capable digital video camera, infrared-capable still digital camera, a laser microphone, lightweight tripods, a night vision monocular, and several other small pieces of equipment.
He was also carrying a laptop with a filtered screen so it wouldn’t give off too much light in the darkened house. It was set up to stream the feeds back to Nicholas’s SCIF via cellular network or satellite. Harvath powered it up and was pleased to see the signal was quite good.
The home’s previous residents had destroyed everything except the window treatments. Though the ones in this room were old and soiled, Harvath was happy to have them. After turning on his monocular, he balanced it on the base of the window frame and pulled back the curtain partway.
He could see Sarhan’s home, but in addition to the privacy fence there was a tree, which blocked a significant portion of the sight line. The laser mic worked by being beamed through a window at something inside, such as a picture on a wall, that would vibrate as people spoke. Harvath could already tell they weren’t going to get any audio. And until he figured out whether it was worth the risk to get close enough to the house to plant his two remote cameras, he wasn’t going to be getting any decent video either. The only things he had a halfway decent view of were the street and Sarhan’s driveway.
Pulling back from the window, he turned off his monocular and assembled the equipment. After everything had been camouflaged and positioned in the window just the way he wanted it, he checked the image quality on his laptop and then began streaming the feeds back to Reston.
He had worked out a shift schedule with Nicholas so that there would always be a set of eyes on the house. In the morning, the little man would covertly reestablish the home’s power. They had decided to wait until daylight in case any of the lights had been left on. The last thing they wanted to do was advertise that the home was suddenly occupied.
Sliding a Cliff Bar from his pack, Harvath leaned back against the wall and tried to make himself comfortable. There was no telling how long he would be here.
CHAPTER 50
While it was Nicholas’s shift, Harvath closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off. It was morning and he had been asleep for several hours when his cell phone began vibrating and woke him up.
He popped the earbud in, and his eyes were drawn to the laptop as he activated the call.
“Do you see what I see?” asked Nicholas from the SCIF back in Reston.
“I do now,” replied Harvath as he grabbed a pair of binoculars and crawled over to the window. A white passenger van had pulled up in front of Sarhan’s house. He read off the license plate number.
“I’m running it now.”
Harvath readjusted the laser mic and also activated a small parabolic he had pointed toward the driveway.
Nicholas had an update for him momentarily. “The van is registered to a cardboard box manufacturer in Torrance, California.”
“Throw it into the TIP program and see if it connects any dots.”
“Roger that.”
Harvath had moved to the still camera and was taking pictures of the van. It was hard to make out the driver from this angle. He appeared to be waiting for someone.
Two minutes later, the microphones picked up the sound of Sarhan’s door opening. Muted good-byes were exchanged in Arabic before two young Middle Eastern men appeared towing wheely bags.
Harvath snapped several wide shots and then got close-ups of their faces. “Let’s run these right away.”
“I’m already on it,” replied Nicholas.
They were dressed in casual business attire. It reminded him of the airport security footage of the 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about what he was seeing. “Where are you two girls going?”
The two men placed their heavy bags in the van’s cargo area and climbed inside. The driver then pulled away from the curb.
“Can you follow them in the traffic cam system?” asked Harvath.
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p; “Yes.”
“You should ping the Old Man and let him know what’s going on.”
“Already did.”
“Good,” said Harvath as he watched the van disappear at the end of the street. What is going on inside that house? he wondered. Had they just wrapped up some sort of meeting and these two guys were heading home, or was something else going down?
Ten minutes later, the mystery deepened as two more men with luggage exited the house and climbed into a taxi that had just arrived.
Once again, Harvath snapped pictures, and everything was beamed back to Nicholas in Reston.
“We need to follow that taxicab as well. Make sure you get all the information about the cab company and the driver and put it all into TIP.”
There was a delay in Nicholas’s response as he clicked away at his keyboard. Finally he said, “Scot, I can’t sweep data and follow two vehicles.”
“Get the Old Man to help you.”
“I already am,” said Carlton, who had joined Nicholas in the SCIF and had plugged into the call. “We’re going to have to open this up a bit.”
“No, we’ve got to keep it contained.”
“Scot, I’m making the call. Nicholas will remain in charge on this end, but I’m going to open this up to the personnel in the TOC. We need the manpower.”
Harvath knew better than to argue. “Just tell them these are people of interest. They don’t need the big picture.”
“Agreed,” replied the Old Man as he clicked off to activate the office’s Tactical Operations Center.
“So far,” said Nicholas, “the two vehicles appear to be headed in opposite directions. Maybe they’re going to different airports. Or maybe one pair is going to catch a plane and the other a train.”
“Or maybe they’re doing SDRs,” stated Harvath, referring to the surveillance detection routes one used in order to ascertain whether one was being followed. “Just stay on them. They look like they’re headed out of town. As soon as we know where, we need to have teams waiting to put them under surveillance.”
“The Old Man already has teams standing by.”