by Brad Thor
Ryan stood up from the table.
“Where are you going?”
Walking out of the study, she replied, “To start a hot bath while I look for some razor blades.”
CHAPTER 48
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MALTA
“I’m not riding in a fucking ambulance,” said Gage as he looked out his window at the approaching vehicles.
“Yes, you are,” said Harvath. “Haney too. That’s an order. We keep a low profile and we don’t cause any trouble. That goes double for the nurses. Understood?”
Gage nodded and Haney flashed him the thumbs-up.
When the jet came to a complete stop, Staelin opened the cabin door, extended the air stairs, and said, “On behalf of your anonymous flight crew, we’d like to thank all of you for flying Central Intelligence Airways this afternoon. We know you have a choice when traveling to faraway lands to interact with extremely bad people, and we appreciate your choosing CIA.
“Please check your seatbacks and overhead compartments for any weapons you may have brought on board and remember, you were never here.”
There was a round of applause from the team, Staelin bowed, and they deplaned.
In addition to the ambulance waiting to take the two wounded team members to the Naval hospital, there was an older passenger van, and a black SUV with tinted windows.
Standing outside the SUV was Deborah Lovett, who had recently arrived from Rome. A tall, attractive woman in her midthirties with long blonde hair, she looked more like an Eastern European tennis star than a CIA case officer.
“Let’s guess which vehicle is here for Harvath,” said Morrison.
“A hundred bucks says he’s kicking himself for using up all his ketamine,” replied Gage.
Harvath shook his head as he helped retrieve bags from the plane’s cargo hold. The air smelled like salt water and jet fuel.
Once Gage and Haney had been loaded into the ambulance, he told Staelin, Barton, and Morrison, who were on their way to base housing, that he would catch up with them in a couple of hours.
Picking up his bag, he walked over to Lovett and introduced himself.
“Do your friends want a ride?” she asked, after they shook hands.
Harvath looked over his shoulder and then back at her. “They’re not my friends.”
She smiled as he opened her door for her. Closing it, he was almost positive he heard Barton shout some sort of an insult his way, but it was drowned out by a pair of F-18 Hornets as they went screaming down the runway.
Hopping into the passenger seat, he asked, “Where are we headed?”
“To the SCIF,” she replied.
SCIF stood for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—a secure room in which classified information could be briefed and discussed.
Lovett was dressed in a black pantsuit, and while it likely had been intended to showcase her professionalism and downplay her attractiveness, it failed. Harvath tried not to look at her and instead focused his eyes on the airfield beyond the windshield.
As they drove, she provided him with an update. “We received confirmation that the Libyans picked up Halim and the satellite phone salesman. They also liberated the refugees at the compound. The Red Crescent has them now.”
Harvath was glad to hear it. “Any blowback from the firefights?”
She shook her head and he made the mistake of looking at her as she did. Once he locked eyes with her, it was difficult to look away.
Fortunately, she had to pay attention to where she was going and broke contact.
“Libyan government forces took credit for the losses that the Libya Liberation Front militia suffered,” she said. “That’s a good PR coup for them. Which, I heard, was your idea.”
“Wasn’t me,” he replied. “I’m not that smart.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smile.
“That’s us up ahead,” she stated as they approached an unremarkable two-story building whose only distinguishing features were the antenna arrays and clusters of satellite dishes on the roof.
Pulling into a parking space reserved for military officers, Lovett grabbed her credentials from the center console, a briefcase from the backseat, and, with a smile that displayed her perfect white teeth, motioned for Harvath to follow her.
He remembered being shown into a similar facility by a similarly attractive CIA officer at Al-Dhafra Air Base outside Abu Dhabi. She had turned out to be extremely good at her job. Harvath wondered if Lovett would prove to be as well.
Showing her ID to two Marines standing guard in the lobby, she led Harvath through a series of security doors and down a long hall.
Its walls were lined with pictures of aircraft and assorted commendations from American units that had been based at Sigonella over the years.
“Hungry?” the CIA officer asked as they arrived at a vending machine filled with plastic-wrapped sandwiches.
“No thanks,” he replied.
Lovett bought a Diet Coke from the machine next to it and they continued walking.
Arriving at a door simply marked A7, she pressed a button and they were buzzed in.
He followed her into a small office where four Navy personnel sat working at gray metal desks. None of them looked up.
“Phone,” she said as they approached the heavy metal door of the SCIF. Mounted on the wall next to it was an old wooden hotel mail sorter.
Harvath wasn’t excited about leaving his cell phone in an office with four strangers, even if they were U.S. military personnel, but he understood the rules and slid his into the cubby next to Lovett’s.
“Coffee?” she asked, nodding at the Keurig machine to their left.
“Actually, yes,” he replied. “You good?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she replied, holding up her drink.
After walking over to the coffee station, Harvath brewed a cup of black coffee and added a shot of espresso.
Rejoining Lovett at the door to the SCIF, he smiled and said, “Good to go.”
The CIA officer nodded, punched a code into the keypad, and then opened the door.
CHAPTER 49
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SCIFs were designed to be immune to electronic eavesdropping and surveillance. The moment you entered, the first thing that struck most people was the silence. It was like walking into a tomb.
It was lit from overhead with strips of white LED lighting and smelled like compressed air. In the center was a chipped blue Formica conference table surrounded by gray faux leather chairs.
At the front of the room were three flat-panel monitors, as well as two workstations. Harvath and Lovett were the only people there.
Removing a laptop from her briefcase, she plugged it into a port beneath the conference table and motioned for Harvath to sit.
“What do you know about ISIS and its ties to the Italian Mafia?” she asked.
“Not much,” Harvath replied. “Though I’d imagine there are some areas where their interests overlap.”
“More than just some.”
Once she had her computer powered up, she opened PowerPoint and an image of Roman ruins appeared on all the monitors.
Harvath recognized them immediately. “Palmyra,” he said. “Syria.”
She was impressed. “You know it.”
“All too well.”
On a recent assignment, Harvath had barely escaped from that part of Syria with his life. He had passed right through Palmyra.
What ISIS had done to that ancient city was as bad as what the Taliban and their RPGs had done to the Bamiyan statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.
“Across Syria, Iraq, and Libya, ISIS has overrun UNESCO world heritage sites, slaughtering archeologists and plundering everything they can get their hands on.”
As she spoke, she backed her points up with slide after slide.
“They load the looted artifacts onto cargo ships headed for southern Italian ports. There, the Mafi
a usually purchases them with cash. Increasingly, though, we’re seeing payment made in weapons.
“The Mafia then help smuggle the weapons farther north into Europe, where ISIS and other terror groups can carry out attacks.”
Immediately, Harvath’s mind was drawn to what had happened at the cathedral in Spain. “What about explosives?” he asked.
Lovett nodded. “The Italian organized crime groups are all interconnected. The Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the N’drangheta—what one doesn’t have, the other can get. They’re supplied by an array of arms dealers from Ukraine, Russia, and other places across the Balkans and Eastern Europe.”
“What about the name I gave you? The guy our Libyan smuggler, Halim, gave up?”
She took a sip of her Diet Coke and pulled up a new series of images, surveillance photos taken by Italian police. “Sicily is home to a highly organized, ruthless Nigerian criminal network known as the Black Axe. They operate with the permission of the Sicilian Mafia.
“The name you gave me, Festus Aghaku, he was a tassista for the Black Axe. It’s Italian for taxi driver. His job was to meet the smuggling boats from Libya out at sea and sneak in high-paying customers before Italian authorities could get to them.”
Harvath held up his hand and interrupted. “You said his job was to meet the smuggling boats from Libya. What’s he doing now?”
Lovett advanced to her next slide. “He’s dead.”
The image showed a corpse inside an unzipped body bag. “What happened to him?”
“He drowned. The same night, the same storm, as your chemistry student, Mustapha Marzouk.
“The Italians have a handful of informants in the Black Axe. From what I’ve been able to gather,” Lovett continued, “Festus Aghaku didn’t want to go out that night, but he was forced to.”
“Forced by whom?”
“The Sicilian Mafia. Allegedly, there was a VIP who needed to be picked up off the coast of Lampedusa. The Cosa Nostra didn’t care about the storm. Festus Aghaku was a dead man if he didn’t go.”
“So what happened?”
“He went. The storm was much worse than predicted. The boat sank. He and two Nigerian crew members drowned.”
“Do we know who the VIP was?” Harvath asked. “Did they mention Mustapha Marzouk by name?”
“No.”
“What about where he was going once he reached Italy?”
Lovett shook her head. “They didn’t mention that either. But they wouldn’t have known his final destination. That’s not how it’s set up. The Black Axe runs the water taxi portion. That’s it. Once the customer gets to dry land, the Cosa Nostra takes over. They then run the smuggling routes up through Italy and into the rest of Europe.”
Harvath hated the Mafia. They thrived on human suffering. He didn’t care if they were Italian, Nigerian, or Libyan. Profiting off other people’s misery, they were nothing more than animals in his book.
The Sicilians were some of the most violent. They paid lip service to honor and respect while they trafficked in drugs, money laundering, blackmail, weapons, and terrorism. There was nothing honorable or respectable about how they made their livings.
“So who would have been in charge of getting Mustapha Marzouk to his final destination?” he asked.
The CIA officer advanced to her next slide. On it was a sixty-something-year-old man with dark, olive-colored skin, a prominent Roman nose, and a pair of green eyes saddled with heavy bags. His receding hairline had gone gray and boasted two prominent widow’s peaks.
“Meet Carlo Ragusa. Anything and everything the Black Axe does in Sicily, it does because Ragusa allows them to. He’s the one who sent Festus Aghaku and his crew into the storm that night. He’s also the one who can tell you where Mustapha Marzouk was headed.”
It was some of the best news Harvath had gotten yet. “Where do I find him?”
Lovett winced and clicked to her next slide.
CHAPTER 50
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PARIS
Tursunov checked out of his hotel late that morning and took the train out to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
There, he caught a taxi back into the city and, under a different passport, checked into Le Meurice, the grand luxury hotel on the rue de Rivoli.
It resembled a modern-day Versailles. Gilded mirrors. Silk draperies. Crystal chandeliers and velvet couches. He was offended by the opulence.
Opening the doors to his balcony, the cacophony from the street below pierced the cashmere-wrapped silence of the suite. Horns blared, brakes squealed, and engines growled. Trucks rumbled past and scooters buzzed like angry wasps.
Removing his Gauloises, he slid one from the pack, placed it between his lips, and struck a match.
Inhaling a cloud of leathery smoke into his lungs, he leaned forward against the wrought-iron railing and smiled. The view was perfect.
He was directly across the street from the Jardin des Tuileries.
From where he stood, he could look out over the entirety of the Terrasse des Feuillants—the area along the edge of the park where the Fête des Tuileries was in full swing, and where the attack would take place. He had the perfect front-row seat.
Like the Spanish coordinator in Santiago, Abdel would be close, just in case his men chickened out. He had the numbers of the cell phones attached to their vests programmed into his phone. If something happened, if they didn’t go off at the appointed time, he would detonate them remotely.
That meant that the Moroccan would be someplace where he could watch the event unfold without attracting attention. Tursunov had no idea where. That was by design.
The less they knew about each other’s movements, the better. The more compartmentalized they were, the less chance there was of the full plot being discovered.
It was a similar blueprint to what had been carried out in Spain. The only person who interacted with him was the head of operations for the country. The martyrs themselves never saw his face. They didn’t need to. All that mattered was that they do their job.
After cutting the throat of the drug dealer, Tursunov had contacted Abdel and arranged to meet.
The Moroccan didn’t want to believe that his nephew was involved in a drug ring, but based on what Tursunov explained to him, he had no choice.
Sharing his concern that the chemist’s apartment, phone, and email communications were being monitored, the Tajik laid out a very specific course of action he wanted Abdel to follow. Then he handed him a stack of banknotes and a clean cell phone.
It hadn’t taken long for the dead lieutenant’s body in the men’s room to be discovered. As soon as the police were called, the undercover officers following the chemist and his two drug-cooking cohorts descended on the café. After initial questioning at the scene, all three were taken in for further interrogation.
It was an attempt to get the trio to admit to what the police already suspected them of—drug manufacturing. They knew the young men were not involved in the murder. The victim was part of the gang they cooked for. There was also a trail of partial bloody footprints that led out the back of the café.
Having been a cop for many years, Tursunov knew what kind of exculpatory evidence to leave behind. As long as the chemist and his colleagues didn’t have blood on their shoes, which they didn’t, and there was nothing else incriminating on them, there was only so long that the French police would be able to hold them.
When they were released, that was when the chemist was going to have to make his move. That was what Tursunov had prepped the uncle for.
Because he was family, Abdel could approach the young man without drawing interest from the police. The immigrant grapevine being what it was, the authorities wouldn’t think twice about an uncle showing up in the wake of a nephew’s having been at a murder scene and having undergone police interrogation.
Neither would the police find it unusual that an angry uncle would arrange for his nephew to get out of Paris and away from a bad circl
e of friends for a while.
With a murder and a potential gang war on its hands, the French authorities would need all the manpower they could muster. They’d be glad not to have to waste resources on surveilling the chemist any longer.
So Tursunov had taken the second step in helping his chemist disappear. The third step would come tonight.
CHAPTER 51
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PALERMO, SICILY
Mafioso Carlo Ragusa lived with his wife and five children in a well-fortified home on the outskirts of Palermo. The grounds were patrolled by dogs and plenty of men with guns.
Could Harvath, with Gage and Haney out of the fight, have breached the Sicilian compound and gotten to Ragusa? With enough surveillance and planning, he was confident that he could pull anything off. But in their race against the clock, Libya had stolen much more time than it should have.
Anxiety was running high back home. In the wake of two deadly terrorist attacks, Americans wanted answers and Washington wanted results. Both of those wants fell on Harvath’s shoulders. There had to be another way to get to Ragusa, and he pressed Lovett, the one with all the Italian connections, to find it.
To her credit, she did. A counterterrorism contact of hers in the Carabinieri’s elite Special Operations Unit known as the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, or ROS for short, owed her a favor—a big one. She had allowed him to see intelligence the CIA was building on a suspect who had made multiple trips back and forth between Italy and Tunisia. While he couldn’t cite it directly to his bosses, it had been the final piece in the puzzle he needed, and had helped roll up a burgeoning terrorist network outside Turin. The information he shared in return would prove just as useful.
Street racing of horses was a brutal and highly illegal sport in Sicily. It brought in over half a billion dollars annually, and Carlo Ragusa was right in the middle of it.