by Brad Thor
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 brain 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.”
“I’m sure he will,” chuckled Harvath. “The thing is, my girlfriend and I like to make sure all of our bases are always covered. We’re going to need you to explain to the French that she and I knew nothing about that bombing until it happened.”
“If you let me go,” implored Nichols, “the president will help you both. You can trust me.”
“I’m sure I can trust you,” said Harvath, reading the man’s face and seeing the truth, “but I don’t know that I can trust the president.”
“So you’d hand me over to the French police just to save yourselves?”
“Let me think about that,” replied Harvath as he paused less than a millisecond in thought. “Yes. Yes, we would.” Turning to Tracy, he said, “We’re done talking with this guy. Bring me the phone. I’d rather take my chances with the French police. Besides, we don’t have anything to hide.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” pleaded Nichols.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” said Harvath as he began dialing. “You had your chance.”
Nichols tried a different tack. He remembered back to when the president had given him that number and all the things he had said to him about being of such important service to his nation. Finally, he hit on something. Looking at Harvath he said, “If you were close enough to the president to have been given that number, then you must have been someone he trusted; someone who cared very much for your country.”
“I still do,” said Harvath, and then he switched to French and began speaking to someone on the other end of the phone.
Nichols was in a panic. If he got handed over to the French authorities, it would all be over. He had to make a choice—either spill it all to the man in front of him or save it for the very interested French police. He prayed to God he was making the right decision. “Stop. I’ll tell you everything. Just hang up the phone.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” said Harvath as he hung up on the automated, Paris version of Moviefone and looked up at Nichols. “I suggest you make this worth my while.”
Nichols waited, hoping his captors would loosen his bonds a bit more, but when they didn’t, he began talking. “The president has brought me on board to help him take down fundamentalist Islam.”
Harvath looked at Tracy with a smile and then back to Nichols. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Nichols shook his head.
“How could a professor of history be capable of anything even remotely resembling counterterrorism work?”
Nichols was about to answer when his hotel room window erupted in a hail of broken glass.
CHAPTER 12
Dodd’s men had jumped the gun, again. Their only job was to keep Nichols in their sights until the assassin could get there. Instead, the men had shot up Nichols’ hotel room from across the street.
The men had seen three figures through the draperies and fearing it was the French a
uthorities, had decided to act. If Nichols broke and told them what he knew, there’d be no containing this thing. It was a rash decision, worse than the car bombing, but he realized the men had been left with little choice. That didn’t mean, though, he had to like the situation. Now he had to play clean-up and make absolutely certain that Nichols was dead.
As far as Dodd’s men could tell, no one had been left alive inside the hotel room. Dodd ordered one man to keep an eye on the hotel while the others sanitized the apartment they’d been using for surveillance. It wouldn’t take the French police long to figure out where the shots had come from and he wanted to be long gone before they got there.
Dodd crossed the street and walked into the lobby of the Hotel D’Aubusson. Everything appeared normal; the staff oblivious to what had transpired only moments ago upstairs. Dodd kept moving and strode right to the elevator.
As the car ascended, he removed a .45 caliber Heckler & Koch pistol from a holster at the small of his back. From a pocket in his Barbour jacket came a Gemtech suppressor, which he affixed to the weapon’s threaded barrel.
When the elevator doors opened, Dodd tucked the hand holding the pistol inside his jacket and stepped out into the hallway. Had the pistol been out and ready, he might have been able to get off a clean shot.
All he caught was a shadow of a figure as it disappeared into the far stairwell. Dodd raced for the stairs at his end of the hall and burst through the metal fire door. He pounded down with tremendous force, taking the stairs three and four at a time.
At the ground-floor level, he tucked his pistol back beneath his jacket and stepped out into the lobby. He searched for Nichols, but didn’t see him.
Crossing the lobby, Dodd reached the far stairwell and opened the door, but no one was there. How was that possible?
Then he realized how presumptive he’d been. Maybe whoever he’d seen hadn’t gone down, but rather up. But what was up? There was only the hotel’s pitched roof.
He took the stairs just as fast going up as he had coming down and considered stopping on the third floor to check Nichols’ room. Maybe Nichols was still there? Maybe, but he doubted it. Dodd didn’t believe in coincidence. If he found the person he’d seen entering the stairway, he’d find Nichols, he was certain of it.
Dodd kept moving, picking up speed as he rushed up the stairs—his body in exceptional physical condition. At the top floor he raised his pistol, eased open the door, and swung out into the hallway. Nothing.
He found the roof access, but it was locked. The only way Nichols could have made it through was if he’d had a key, which Dodd considered highly unlikely.
Taking the stairs back down, he checked each hallway for signs of his prey. Finally, he reached the third floor, and Nichols’ room.
There was broken window glass everywhere. Pieces of a shattered lamp littered the bathroom floor and there was blood in the sink, but that was it.
Whoever had been in this room had gone and they had taken Nichols with them.
Dodd began tossing the room only to be interrupted by a blaring alarm.
CHAPTER 13
Harvath had acted quickly. His first instinct had been to grab both Tracy and Nichols and get out of the hotel as quickly as possible, but he knew better. The shots had been fired from a suppressed weapon, most likely from a building or rooftop across the street.
With the hotel room’s sheer draperies drawn, the shooter couldn’t have had a very good picture of what was going on in the room. Even so, he had taken the shot anyway. In fact, he had taken several. Whoever these people were, they seemed quite intent on making sure that Nichols and anyone else with him be taken out.
First the car bomb and now the shooting. Someone was trying very hard to kill Anthony Nichols, and Harvath wanted to know why. But before he did that, he had to get all of them to someplace safe.
While the shooter had probably packed up and taken off already, Harvath had to operate under the assumption that the threat still remained and that it might very well be closing in on them. Complicating matters was the fact that he was unarmed and the only backup he had was Tracy, who was also unarmed. Thankfully, none of them had been wounded in the shooting. Things could have been worse, much worse.
They avoided the elevator and ran into the stairwell closest to Nichols’ room. Harvath fought the urge to race all the way to the lobby. Whoever was gunning for them could have posted men down there. Instead, Harvath had them descend one level and enter the second-floor hallway.
There they saw signs pointing toward the hotel’s conference room and Harvath headed for it.
Inside, a large U-shaped table had been set for an afternoon session with pads of Hotel D’Aubusson paper, ballpoint pens, and pitchers of water. At the back of the room was a sign marked Sortie de Secours, Exit.
The door opened onto a service area with a narrow set of stairs that led into the bowels of the hotel.
When they got to the bottom, they moved quickly through the basement. The whole time, none of them spoke.
A small service elevator brought them up to the receiving area at the south corner of the building. It was as far from the front of the hotel as they could get without going outside.
Near the door, Harvath discovered a clutch of chairs that sat among a handful of discarded cigarette butts. Atop a nearby time clock were stacks of matchbooks from the hotel bar. Must be the employee smoking lounge, he said to himself.
Scanning the loading area, Harvath got an idea that he thought might help cover their escape.
He dragged a large metal trash bin filled with newspapers and other paper products into the center of the room. Into it he dropped several oily rags he’d found in the corner.
Wrapping the last of the rags around a broom handle, he then tossed Tracy the matches and held his makeshift torch out for her to light.
Once it was going, he tilted it into the trash bin and set the contents on fire. It took a few moments, but soon the room was filled with thick gray smoke. Seconds later, the hotel fire alarm went off.
They stayed in the receiving area for as long as they could. When it became too difficult to breathe, Harvath opened the door and they exited onto Rue Christine.
People were already spilling out of the nearby shops and businesses at the sound of the alarm to see what was going on.
Tracy took Nichols by the arm, turned left, and headed away from the hotel toward Rue Des Grands Augustins. Harvath crossed to the other side of the street and hung back to make sure they weren’t being followed.
They met up at the corner and moved quickly to Place St. Michel. There, they hid themselves among the throngs of tourists who clogged the narrow streets around Rue St. Séverin.
Harvath kept Tracy and Nichols moving as he doubled back three more times over the next twenty minutes. When he was convinced no one was on their tail, he purchased an international calling card and found a telephone.
They needed to get off the streets as soon as possible. Harvath had no desire to go back to his hotel, and checking into a new one was too risky. They needed someplace safe; someplace where nobody would know who they were or why they were there.
For that kind of anonymity, there was only one person Harvath trusted enough to call.
CHAPTER 14
“Port de la Tournelle,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “lower quai, facing the Ile Saint Louis.”
Ron Parker was director of operations for a private intelligence organization known as the Sargasso Intelligence Program. Its chairman and founder was a successful hotelier and former no-holds-barred fighting champion named Timothy Finney. Harvath had a long history with both of them and he trusted them with his life. They were also the unofficial dog-sitters for Harvath’s Caucasian Ovcharka, Bullet, whom he had left with them when he and Tracy had decided to leave the country six months ago.
Sargasso was one of several heavily guarded, highly secretive programs Finney ran behind the scenes of his private, five-star Elk Mountain
Resort outside Telluride, Colorado. Much like private military corporations augmenting American forces in different hot spots around the globe, Finney had decided to do the same thing, but in the intelligence arena. He had been after Harvath for years to come to work for him.
It was a tempting offer. Sargasso’s elite client list read like a who’s who of the American intelligence community. Not only did Sargasso collect and analyze information, they also developed assets, fielded operatives, and ran operations around the world. They were a first-class outfit, run by two patriots who put their love of country above their bottom line and in doing so had become more successful than they ever could have imagined.
The key to their success was giving their people every tactical and operational advantage needed to get the job done. To that end, Sargasso had been developing a string of safe houses around the world, including one in Paris.
“I know you wanted to get away from the St. Germain area,” Parker added, “but it’s the best we can do for you.”
Harvath memorized the rest of the information, thanked his friend, and hung up.
Fifteen minutes later, he, Tracy, and Nichols arrived along the Seine and laid eyes on the Sargasso safe house. She was known in French as a péniche—a sleek, decommissioned barge—which had been painted jet black. He found it just a bit ironic that the Arab World Institute—an organization created to disseminate information about Arab cultural and spiritual values—was headquartered just above the boat at street level.
Harvath punched a code into the recessed keypad near the wheelhouse and the lock released with a hiss. The door was very heavy, and Harvath guessed that it had been armor-plated. He rapped on one of the windows as he stepped inside and noticed that they were not made out of actual panes of glass, but heavy sheets of bulletproof Lexan. Finney and Parker had done an excellent job up-armoring their barge.
Down a short flight of steps were a kitchen, three staterooms with baths, and the main living and dining space. Harvath excused himself and headed toward the main cabin in the stern.