by Brad Thor
Omar had assigned him to Rome and used two other men for Washington. Though Dodd had consulted on the assignment at the Jefferson Memorial, it had not worked out as planned.
The Park Police had apparently altered their patrol patterns. Omar’s men should have had twenty minutes, but another patrol unit had been right on their heels.
If the men had been allowed to take Nura and Salam at one of their homes as Dodd had suggested, they wouldn’t be having this problem right now. Sheik Omar, though, had had other plans. His greatest flaw was that he liked to make statements.
When Omar discovered that Nura and Salam already had a rendezvous planned at the Jefferson Memorial, he decided that would be the perfect place to kill them. He saw it as laden with ironic symbolism.
In reality, it had been laden with incredible complications, not the least of which was the security camera system. Salam had survived and was in police custody, but Omar didn’t seem to be losing any sleep over it. Dodd could only trust that the evidence they had planted would be enough to convict Salam for Nura’s murder.
The car bombing outside the café in Paris had also been overkill, just as Dodd had said it would be. Omar still didn’t care. Once he set his mind on a course of action, he stuck with it regardless.
Killing Anthony Nichols up close in his hotel room would have made more sense. It would have been quiet and efficient—the way these things should be done. But Omar didn’t want quiet and efficient. He wanted to send another message that would be heard loud and clear. It was loud and it was clear, all right. The problem was that car bombs were not Dodd’s area of expertise.
Dodd was an assassin, not a bomber. And despite Omar’s justifications backed up with extensive recitations from the Koran and Hadith that non-Muslims could never be considered innocents, Dodd disagreed. He didn’t like killing civilians. What’s more, the bombing was excessive. It was using a sledgehammer when all that was needed was a flyswatter.
To pull off the bombing, Omar had reached out to people he knew who had contacts in France. It was too many degrees of separation and had all been one big clusterfuck from the get-go.
Omar’s local talent had been able to get only half the amount of explosives they needed. When they finally were ready to pull off the attack, the trigger man had gotten jumpy and had blown the Mercedes prematurely. As a result, Nichols had survived.
The entire operation had been a waste of time and money and now Nichols was spooked instead of dead.
But no matter how incompetent the team had been, it was still Dodd’s assignment and he took responsibility for it. He was nothing if not a man of honor.
The first few drops of an approaching rain began to fall and Dodd turned up the collar of his coat. He was in the process of considering moving to one of the cafés along the edge of the Parc Monceau when the prepaid cell phone he’d purchased that morning vibrated.
“Yes,” he said as he activated the call.
The deep voice of Sheik Omar resonated from the phone as if he were sitting right there on the bench next to him. “How were the lines at Versailles today?” he asked.
“Not as bad as the Louvre,” replied Dodd.
With the authentication between them complete, Omar inquired, “Did the flight take off on time?”
“No,” replied Dodd. “It actually took off early. Before all the passengers were able to board.”
Though the cleric said nothing, Dodd could feel Omar’s anger building from almost four thousand miles away back in America. “Tell me what happened,” the sheik finally said.
Dodd filled him in as ambiguously as he could, ever leery of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping systems. Both were on chat-n-chuck, throwaway phones purchased strictly for this conversation, but if the NSA had his voiceprint and the ECHELON system registered a match, it wouldn’t do them much good.
“We need to make sure any passengers that missed the flight are rebooked as soon as possible,” stated Omar.
“Same airline as before, or can this be a private charter, as I originally suggested?”
It took a moment, but the cleric relented. “Private charter will be fine. Just make sure that our passengers get to their destination.”
“Understood,” stated Dodd. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” replied the sheik, almost as an afterthought. “You mentioned another man who was rushing for the plane as it left the gate.”
“I did. He had a woman with him. Do I need to be concerned about them?”
“I’m not sure,” said Omar. “I’ll leave it to your discretion, but should you happen to see them again, I’d like them treated as VIPs.”
“Understood,” replied Dodd as he stood up from the bench. “I’ll make sure they’re booked on the next flight as well.”
He ended the call and removed the phone’s battery and SIM card, then broke the phone into several pieces, all of which he dumped into a series of storm drains as he exited the Parc Monceau.
Dodd had his orders. He needed to find Anthony Nichols and finish the job. If the man and woman from outside the café got in his way again, he would kill them too. And this time, he would do it his way.
CHAPTER 9
Harvath glanced at his Kobold Chronograph. He and Tracy had spent twenty minutes searching for Anthony Nichols. They had no way of knowing if he’d walked away of his own accord or if he’d stumbled off as a result of his head wound and was bleeding in a doorway somewhere. Harvath, though, had a hard time believing it was the latter.
He stopped walking and turned to Tracy. “This guy obviously doesn’t want to be found. I’m inclined to support his wish.”
“Then what do we do now?”
Harvath could see a Metro stop at the end of the block and he pointed at it as it began to rain. “How about onion soup? I’ll take you to a nice little restaurant called The Foot of the Pig in Les Halles.”
“Scot,” insisted Tracy. “We have to find this guy.”
“No, we don’t,” replied Harvath. “Maybe he was CIA after all. But whoever he is, he’s a grown man and he can fend for himself. He didn’t come about the president’s private phone number for nothing. He’ll have people who can help him out.”
“And who’s going to help us out?”
“Out of what?”
“Out of what?” repeated Tracy incredulously. “I’m suddenly the only person who knows how the investigation into that bombing is going to unfold? In that block alone, there were two banks—each with ATMs and a hotel. Once the area is secure, the French police, or more likely the internal intelligence service, the Renseignements Généraux, is going to pull all the surveillance tapes from their cameras.
“They’ll see the car get stolen, the Mercedes come in and take its place, and then they’ll see you and me beating a hasty exit from the café, only to have you rush back and knock that Nichols person to the ground a split second before the bomb goes off. Then they’ll see us help him up and evac him from the scene.”
Tracy didn’t say anything else. She just closed her mouth and waited.
“Shit,” said Harvath. This wasn’t his fight and he didn’t want any part of it, but Tracy was right. The French authorities were eventually going to be looking for the two of them whether they liked it or not.
They hadn’t done anything wrong, but their behavior was suspicious and could be construed as an indication of foreknowledge of the attack. Whether “gut feelings” counted as a reasonable defense in France was not something Harvath was terribly eager to find out.
Nichols was the reason the attack had happened. Harvath was sure of it. He was also sure that without Nichols, he and Tracy were going to have a lot of trouble with the French authorities.
For a moment, he thought they might be able to hop onto a train and leave the country, but Harvath knew he was deluding himself. This was a major terrorist attack. French citizens were dead and France would stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it.
Harvath knew how good the French inte
lligence services were. He and Tracy might make it out of the country, but they wouldn’t be safe anywhere. Besides, running would only make them look guiltier.
They needed to track down Nichols. Harvath looked at Tracy. “How long do you think until they have our pictures isolated from the CCTV footage?”
It was a rhetorical question and Tracy knew it, but she pieced it together for him anyway. “They’ll take witness statements from as many people as they can. If someone mentions our behavior as being out of the ordinary, that’ll make them instantly scrutinize the camera feeds for more than just who the bombers were.
“Once they’ve got our faces, they’ll enhance them and then run them through every database they have access to while simultaneously sending our pictures out to every law enforcement officer up and down the chain of command in France. At best, we’ve got two, maybe three hours.”
“And at worst?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” responded Tracy. “It’s giving me a headache.”
Harvath retrieved Nichols’ hotel key card from the man’s wallet and said, “Then I guess we need to get moving.”
CHAPTER 10
The Hotel d’Aubusson was located on the Rue Dauphin in the Paris neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés. Stopping at a nearby department store, Harvath and Tracy purchased a change of clothes and wore them out of the store.
They carried their old clothes in the shopping bags they had received from the department store. Though the hotel probably wouldn’t have stopped them from passing through the lobby, Harvath felt that by carrying the bags, they looked even more like hotel guests.
Just to be sure, Harvath had Anthony Nichols’ key card out and in hand as they crossed the Hotel d’Aubusson’s stone lobby and headed for the elevator. The only interaction they had was a quick smile from a harried front desk clerk.
Harvath and Tracy got off the elevator on the third floor and walked down the hallway to Nichols’ room. They had decided that Tracy would knock and pretend to be a staff member with a fax for him from the front desk. If Nichols answered, Harvath would take him. If he didn’t, Harvath would use the key card to let them in.
After listening at the door for any signs of life, Tracy gave the door three sharp raps. She announced in both French and lightly accented English that she had come with a fax. There was no response. She repeated the procedure once more and then stepped back.
Harvath dipped the key card into the reader. The mechanism beeped twice and the door unlocked. Slowly, he pushed it open and stepped inside.
The bathroom was to his right, its door slightly ajar. Harvath nudged it open with his foot and his eyes were immediately drawn to the marble vanity. Sitting on top of a plastic pharmacy bag were a bottle of antiseptic, some gauze pads, a box of bandages, and an open package of Steri-Strips. Nichols had obviously been back to his room, and recently.
But if that was the case, the key card shouldn’t have worked. Any new card issued by the front desk would have come with a new code, rendering the previous card inactive. Harvath was wondering how the hell Nichols had gotten back inside his room when he heard Tracy scream.
Harvath turned just in time to see the lamp come crashing down. Raising his left arm, he absorbed the brunt of the blow with his forearm as the lamp shattered against it. Instinctively, his right hand drew back in a fist and came sailing forward, connecting with his attacker’s jaw and sending Anthony Nichols to the bathroom floor.
They both looked at him.
“He sure fights like a history professor,” Tracy said finally as she stripped the cord from the lamp and tied Nichols’ hands behind his back.
Harvath helped carry him to a chair, where they threaded his arms over the back and secured his feet to the legs with drapery ties. Tracy found a bathrobe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and used its belt as a gag.
Once they had him secure, Harvath checked the hall to make sure no one had heard the commotion. Confident that they were safe, he hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, turned on the television set, and prepared to interrogate the man named Anthony Nichols.
CHAPTER 11
Harvath pulled up a chair and placed it in front of Nichols. He was not happy at the thought of having to interrogate him, but he’d been left with little choice. This was all supposed to be part of his old life; the life he had given up in order to begin anew with Tracy. But here he was.
Though Harvath tried to ignore it, he had a deep-seated fear that he would never really be free of his old life. It would follow him like an overzealous bill collector and haunt him until the day he died.
He’d been lucky for a while; happy. But then the specter of his past had found him sitting in a Paris café with the woman he loved, minding his own business, and decided to pull up in a bomb-laden Mercedes and say hello.
Even so, Harvath wasn’t ready to give up yet. Once he got the information he and Tracy needed from Nichols to clear themselves in the bombing, he could go back to trying to live a different life; a life that would make him happy, which meant putting as much distance between himself and his old ways as possible.
As Nichols began to come around, Harvath lightly slapped his face to get him to focus. Tracy knew the game and sat behind Nichols where she couldn’t be seen.
When Harvath felt the man had regained enough of his senses he said, “I’m going to start by telling you three things that are true. I want you to listen very carefully as your life depends on remembering them.”
Nichols’ eyes were slow to focus, but then suddenly went wide with fear as he realized what was happening. He tried to move, but was bound to the chair too tightly. His face paled and his breathing became rapid.
“One,” said Harvath, continuing. “I know a lot more about you than you think I do. Two, I will only ask my questions once. If at any point you lie or refuse to answer me, I will break a bone of my choosing. And three, if you attempt to cry out for help at any point, I will cause you a pain so intense that you will beg me to go back to breaking your bones.
“Now if you understand me, I want you to nod once for yes.”
Nichols nodded repeatedly.
Harvath placed his hand atop the man’s head to stop him. “I said once for yes. Pay attention, or things are going to get ugly very fast.”
When Harvath removed his hand, Nichols nodded once and stopped.
“Good,” said Harvath. “I’m going to take your gag off now. Remember, the only sounds I want to hear coming out of your mouth are the answers to my questions. Do you understand?”
Nichols nodded once for yes.
Harvath nodded and Tracy undid the man’s gag. Nichols opened and closed his mouth and then worked his jaw from side to side.
Though Harvath had hit him pretty hard, the man’s jaw didn’t seem to be broken. “What’s your name?” asked Harvath.
The professor spoke slowly. “Anthony Nichols.”
“Where are you from?”
“The United States. Charlottesville, Virginia.”
So far so good. “How’d you get into this room?”
Nichols looked at him. “With my key card.”
“Your key card was in your wallet,” stated Harvath, “and you left your wallet behind.”
“The hotel gave me two. I had the other in my trouser pocket.”
Silently, Harvath chastised himself for the mistake. He should have anticipated that. “Who do you work for?” he asked.
There was a slight pause before Nichols said, “The University of Virginia.”
During his time with the Secret Service, Harvath had been trained to detect microexpressions, subtle facial cues and body movements that suggested a subject was under stress caused by lying or an intent to do harm.
Both the pause and a shift of Nichols’ eyes told Harvath the man wasn’t being completely honest with him. “Who else do you work for?”
“Who else? What do you mean?”
Nichols was stalling, trying to buy time while his br
ain raced to come up with an appropriate answer, and Harvath knew it. This guy was not an operative. Even the greenest of field agents would have been much better trained. This guy was a civilian.
Looking at Tracy, Harvath instructed, “The gentleman obviously needs to be convinced that we’re serious. Put the gag back on him. I don’t want anyone to hear him scream when I go to work on him.”
Nichols started thrashing against his restraints as he tried to turn his head to see what Tracy was doing behind him. “No, no, no. Please don’t hurt me,” Nichols shouted. “I work for the White House.”
The man’s eyes dropped with shame at his admission and Harvath waved Tracy off with the gag. “You mean you work privately for the president.”
Nichols looked up at him but said nothing.
“You had a card in your wallet with his voice-mail number.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because,” replied Harvath, “only a handful of people have ever been given that number, and I’m one of them.”
“You work for the president?” asked Nichols.
“I used to. Now, I’m retired.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me,” said Harvath.
“I can’t do that,” replied Nichols.
“Then you can tell the French police.”
“I can’t tell them either.”
Harvath puffed up his cheeks like a blowfish before slowly letting the air escape. “Then you’re in a very tough situation.”
Nichols’ mind was racing to find a way out of his predicament. “Call the president,” he said. “He’ll vouch for me. He’ll also tell you to let me go.”