by Brad Thor
“Oh, this guy’s good,” stated Palmer with a smile. “Real good.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you,” said Carolyn, “But I don’t think either of us is in the market for any new perfume, are we?”
Palmer shook her head. “Maybe next time.”
Roussard’s lips spread into a boyish grin. “At least please try it. It’s quite nice and my supervisor won’t be able to say I’m not doing my job.”
Carolyn looked at Kate Palmer, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Why not?”
Roussard handed them the bottle and politely stepped back. The women sprayed the perfume on their wrists, rubbed their necks, and Palmer even sprayed some onto her hair.
“It doesn’t have much of a scent,” commented Carolyn Leonard.
“That’s because it works with your body’s own chemistry. Give it a little time and you’ll see. It is quite remarkable.”
Leonard gave the bottle back as Roussard handed her and Palmer a sample card with the name of the product and a phrase that looked to be Italian.
As the ladies headed out to the parking lot, neither of them had any idea of the horror they had just invited into their lives.
Chapter 61
CIA SAFE HOUSE
COLTONS POINT, MARYLAND
T he small, unremarkable home sat at the verdant end of Graves Road on St. Patrick’s Creek—a small inlet of the Potomac River, less than fifty kilometers from where the Potomac emptied into the Chesapeake.
The cars parked in the home’s driveway were equally unremarkable—a smattering of SUVs and pickups, the kind of cars one would expect to see at the weekend home of a general contractor from Baltimore.
Had the neighbors seen any of the men getting out of their vehicles and entering the house, none would have given them a second look. They were trim and of varying heights, their faces bronzed from being in the sun, signs that they were all undoubtedly engaged in the same profession as the home’s owner. Had anyone taken any notice of them they would have assumed the men had all come down for the fishing.
The fishing was one of the many reasons that the area around Coltons Point was known as one of the best-kept secrets in southern Maryland. The chamber of commerce slogan made for a wink-wink, nod-nod insider sort of joke among the select few at the CIA who knew about the Coltons Point safe house. If there was anything that the spooks at Langley loved, it was irony.
The six highly skilled men assembled inside the home were known in CIA parlance as an Omega Team. The word Omega was taken from the Greek, which referred to the last and final letter of the Greek alphabet. It also referred to the literal end of something. Omega Teams had not been given their name by accident. Theirs was very, very dirty work. Sometimes their missions were overt, but more often than not they were extremely covert and required surgical delicacy.
The team leader unbuckled his leather briefcase and tossed five dossiers onto the dining room table. He didn’t need one for himself. He’d already memorized the contents. “I know many of you are currently standing up other operations,” he said, “but effective immediately, this assignment is your one and only concern.”
Like most CIA field groups, Omega Teams were composed of highly intelligent and extremely patriotic individuals. One of the team members looked up from the dossier and said, “Are you sure about this?”
“Not that any of you are allowed to repeat this, but this came from DCI Vaile himself.”
“But this guy’s practically a national hero,” said another operative. “It’s like asking us to shoot fucking Lassie.”
The team leader didn’t care for what he was hearing. “What is this, a book club meeting all of a sudden? Nobody asked for your opinions. The subject is a significant threat to national security.
“He was asked repeatedly by the president to stand down and refused. He was then given a timetable within which to turn himself in and he refused again.”
“Wait a second. How’s President Rutledge involved in this? What’s this guy wanted for anyway?” asked another.
“That’s none of your business. All you need to know is that, by not complying with the president’s orders, he’s putting innocent American lives in jeopardy.”
“Bullshit,” claimed yet another member. “We’ve all read his jacket. This guy is one serious tack-driving pipe-hitter. If we’re going to go after somebody this experienced, this dangerous, I think we deserve to know what he’s really up to. Why won’t he comply with the president’s order?”
The team leader was in no mood to explain the motivations of their target, or those of the director of Central Intelligence, or those of the president of the United States to his men. “I’m going to say this once and only once, so shut up and listen. All I am going to tell you, and all you need to know, is that both DCI Vaile and the president of the United States have okayed us to take down this target. Our job is to stop Scot Harvath by any means necessary. End of story.”
Chapter 62
P hysically and emotionally, Harvath was wrung out. His nerves had been grated down to stubs and he probably shouldn’t have even been in the field. Nonetheless, all he could think about was the Troll. The man had lied to him. There weren’t four terrorists who had been released from Gitmo; there had been five. Harvath couldn’t wait to get his hands on him.
He’d used the onboard phone to fill Finney and Parker in on what he’d learned, and they immediately began strategizing. They expected to have several different options to present by the time he returned.
Harvath spent the next several hours going through his own set of scenarios. What little reserves of energy he still had were all but depleted. After the takeoff from refueling in Iceland, his fatigue won out and he fell into a heavy, dark sleep. And with the sleep came his dreams.
It was the same nightmare he’d been having about Tracy, but this time it was worse. He dreamed he was standing on a long rope bridge between two groups of people he cared for, each in imminent danger. He could only save one. But instead of making a choice, he stood paralyzed with fear.
His indecision cost him dearly. He helplessly watched as the members of each group were killed one by one, their deaths gleefully carried out by a sadistic demon bent on extracting every ounce of pain-wracked suffering he could. All the while, Harvath merely stood and watched, unsure of himself and his ability to do anything to stop the holocaust being carried out so savagely in front of him.
It was a rapid ringing of the cabin chimes that tore Harvath from his nightmare. Opening his eyes, he looked out the window and saw that they were over land, though where exactly he had no idea. He raised the handset and punched the button for the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” he asked when the copilot answered.
“We’ve got a major mechanical problem.”
“What kind?”
The copilot ignored him and said, “We’re about fifty miles out from the airport. Stay seated and make sure your seatbelt is tightly fastened.” And with that the line went dead.
From the front of the cabin, Harvath heard the bolt of the cockpit door being thrown into place. Maybe it was a legitimate safety precaution, but there was something about it that didn’t sit right with him.
Harvath looked at his watch and tried to compute where they were. He had been asleep for a long time.
Protocol dictated that private aircraft stop at the first major city they overflew upon entry into U. S. airspace to clear customs and passport control, but Tom Morgan had been able to pull some strings with people he knew to have those requirements waived for both the Mexico and Jordan trips.
They should have been somewhere over Canada or the Great Lakes, but the terrain beneath them looked more like the East Coast of the United States. Something definitely wasn’t right.
The Citation X banked sharply and there was a hurried change in altitude as the private jet raced downward. Whatever was going on, Harvath didn’t like it.
He felt the landing gear lower and he cinched his seatbelt tighter.
He looked back out the window and a sense of dread welled up from the pit of his stomach as he recognized where they were.
The jet wasn’t landing anywhere near Colorado. It was on final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D. C.
Now he knew why the pilots had locked the cockpit door. There was no mechanical problem. Someone had gotten to Tim Finney. Someone knew that Harvath was on this plane and that person was making it land in D. C.
He needed to plan his next move.
A lot would be based upon what kind of law enforcement presence had been sent to meet the plane on the ground.
Harvath sat glued to his window as the Citation X glided in over the runway and then touched down with a gentle bump of its tires. A string of neon fire trucks and two ambulances had been mobilized and were following the jet on a taxiway just beyond the runway.
It wasn’t the reception Harvath had expected. There wasn’t a police car or an unmarked government sedan in sight. Even so, he remained on guard.
The plane taxied off the runway into a holding area. When the aircraft came to a stop, the emergency vehicles surrounded it and their teams got to work.
Harvath unbuckled his seatbelt and moved to the other side of the jet to see what was going on.
As he did, the main cabin door opened and the high-pitched whine of the Citation’s Rolls-Royce engines filled the aircraft.
A moment later, several firefighters clambered up the airstairs and entered the cabin. Their walkie-talkies belched with orders being barked back and forth between emergency personnel. It was all just background noise to Harvath. He was focused on the men themselves.
Beneath their Nomex turnout gear, they looked like every other firefighter Harvath had ever met. They were lean and athletic, with serious, hard-set faces that communicated they had a job to do.
The only problem was that they bore the same look as many of the elite military and law enforcement personnel Harvath had met and worked with over his years in both the SEALs and the Secret Service.
Harvath stood up and started moving toward the front of the cabin. That was when he saw it. The second “firefighter” had something pressed up against the back of the man in front of him.
In the reflection from the highly polished cabinetry of the galley, Harvath could make out the unmistakable color and size of a Taser X26 pulsed energy weapon. It was the same device he’d used on Ronaldo Palmera just days before.
Harvath was trapped.
Chapter 63
A s part of his training years ago, Harvath had taken a hit from the Taser to see what it was like. In a word, it was intense—more intense than anything he had ever experienced. He had no desire to ride the bull again, so now he simply sank to his knees and interlaced his fingers behind his head. His twenty-four hours had evaporated a lot faster than he’d anticipated.
With a knee against his neck and his face pressed against the jet’s carpeted cabin floor, Harvath felt the burn of the Flexicuffs as they zipped his wrists up behind his back.
They were being exceptionally rough with him, and their message was clear—Screw with us and things are going to get much worse.
A black Yukon Denali was waiting at the bottom of the airstairs. Harvath’s feet never even touched the ground.
He was thrown into the backseat and bracketed by two men who slammed their doors in unison. One of them buckled him in as the other told the driver to get moving.
He didn’t see the hood until it was placed over his head and everything went black.
It was a long ride. Every minute of sensory deprivation in that impenetrable darkness felt like an hour. When the SUV finally came to a halt, one of Harvath’s minders opened his door and then jerked him from the Denali.
Harvath heard birds and what sounded like a motor of some sort off in the distance. It might have been a lawn mower, but based on the Doppler effect it had produced he guessed it was a boat of some sort. They were probably near the water.
A rough set of hands grabbed hold of him on the other side and he was ushered forward. The smooth pavement under his feet gave way to grass and then to wooden steps.
He was directed up them and made to stop as a door of some sort was opened. The air inside smelled musty, with a faint trace of Pine Sol.
Harvath was steered down a long hallway and stopped in front of another door. His hood was removed and he was shoved inside as the door was closed and locked behind him.
At first, all he could see was the color white. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out some blues, as well as the dark color of the distressed-wood floor. A clutch of hand-painted lobsterman buoys were the first objects he could actually focus on. From there, the entire room began to open up.
The décor was straight out of Coastal Living magazine—bead-board walls, model ships, pillows created from old nautical flags. While Harvath had envisioned many kinds of cells the president might have him thrown into, none of them had resembled this.
Skirting a small daybed, Harvath walked over to the window. He wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t open it. What did surprise him was that it appeared to be made out of bullet-resistant glass, about an inch and a half thick. This was definitely no ordinary room.
Harvath figured he was in some sort of safe house. The first agency that popped into his mind as being its likely owner was the CIA, though it could have belonged to any number of others.
Harvath had seen a lot of safe houses in his day, and all things being equal, the quality of the décor in this one suggested the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement over any other group.
The closet was empty, as was the bureau against the far wall. In the nightstand was a Bible with a stamp claiming the Gideons had placed it there, which was obviously someone’s idea of a clever joke.
Harvath noted that the model ships throughout the room were named for Ivy League universities. He was definitely in an Agency safe house, but why? Why bring him here?
There were two doors on either side of the room. One led to a bathroom, conspicuously missing the normal hardware such as a shower rod or mirror that could be fashioned into a weapon. Harvath turned on the tap and took several servings of water from a small paper cup before returning to the bedroom.
The other door presumably led to the interior of the house, but it was locked. No big surprise there. Harvath figured that there was at least one, maybe two guards posted on the other side. Knowing the penchant of the CIA for electronic surveillance, he also assumed his room was wired for both sound and video.
With nothing else to do, he removed the Bible from the nightstand and sat down on the bed. A product of the Sacred Heart school system as a boy, Harvath was embarrassed that it had been so long since he had held, much less read, a Bible.
He respectfully leafed through the pages until he arrived at the second book of the Old Testament, Exodus.
The book was broken into six sections, all of which Harvath was familiar with. He read about the Israelites’ enslavement and escape from Egypt, the ten plagues bearing especially painful significance for him now.
If the attack on the ski team and its facility in Park City was meant to represent hail and fire, there were six more plagues that were yet to come. He read through them in their reverse order—boils, pestilence, beasts or flies, fleas or lice, frogs, and lastly a river of blood.
While some of them sounded tame by modern standards, Harvath knew the man responsible for all of these attacks, the man he believed to be the fifth terrorist released from Guantanamo, would find an exceptionally deviant and terrifying way to incorporate them into his attacks.
The thought of any more attacks made Harvath’s present situation an even more bitter pill to swallow. He had to find some way to get out of here and stop the person who was responsible for all of it.
Placing the Bible atop the nightstand, Harvath rose from the bed. He would take another look around the room. There had to be something here that could aid in his
escape. He didn’t care if they had him under surveillance or not. Just sitting there doing nothing was not an option.
After checking the closet over thoroughly, he was on his way back into the bathroom when he heard voices outside his door. Looking down he saw the knob slowly begin to turn and he knew that he’d run out of time.
Chapter 64
W hen the door to his room opened, Harvath was surprised to see who was on the other side of it.
Before he could open his mouth, the man raised his Taser and pointed it at Harvath’s chest. He threw a pair of handcuffs at him and said, “Your right wrist to the bed frame, now.”
When Harvath hesitated, the man yelled, “Now!”
Harvath did as he was told.
With his prisoner secure, the man holstered his weapon, turned to the guard at the door, and nodded.
Once the guard had closed the door and the man with the Taser heard the click of the lock, he threw Harvath the keys to the handcuffs. “We’ve only got fifteen minutes of talk time while the surveillance servers are rebooted.”
“What the hell is going on here?” asked Harvath as he removed the handcuff from around his wrist and threw the keys back to Rick Morrell.
Morrell was a CIA paramilitary operative whom Harvath had worked with on several occasions in the past. After a considerably rocky start to their relationship, they had developed a professional respect for each other and even a friendship. Harvath didn’t know if his being here was a good thing or a bad thing. In the intelligence world, friendships were all too often subverted for matters of national security. Harvath hadn’t forgotten that President Rutledge wanted him for treason. He’d have to tread very carefully.
“You are in a shitload of trouble. You know that?” replied Morrell.
Harvath did know it and he didn’t need Rick Morrell or anyone else reminding him of it. “You’d have done the same thing in my situation.”
Morrell nodded. “That still doesn’t make my job any easier.”