by Brad Thor
Halfway there, Scot thought to himself. He shifted his weight onto his left arm and with his right, reached out and threw back the covers. Breathing a little harder than just getting out of bed warranted, he inhaled deeply and in one motion swung his feet out from under the blankets, pivoting his body so that he now sat on the edge of the bed.
With the weight off his arms, he was now able to stretch. His range of motion was severely limited. He had taken some beatings before, but this one was definitely Academy Award material. Nothing, though, that a long, hot shower couldn’t help.
Harvath eased his feet to the floor and slowly stood up from the bed. His legs were weak, but with a concerted effort he propelled himself forward to the bathroom.
Taking the gown off was the hard part. With the straps tied behind him and his arms so stiff, he couldn’t reach around to untie it. He walked toward the toilet, lifted the bottom half of the gown like a skirt, and began to relieve himself. Then, ever so slowly, Scot inched the gown over his head until it came all the way off. He reached inside the shower and turned the control all the way to hot. As he did, he caught a glimpse of his back in the mirror. He wouldn’t win any beauty pageants, that was for sure, but it would heal.
God bless the president for having friends that can afford houses like this, Scot thought as he sat on the marble bench in the ornate shower and let the hot water beat down on him. After what he figured had been a good fifteen minutes, he flipped the lever that activated the steam shower and closed his eyes. As he breathed in the searing moisture, he replayed the events of the past twenty-four hours in his mind. The avalanche didn’t make any sense. There had been a lot of snow falling, but both the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center and Deer Valley’s avalanche-control team had assured him that the risks were minimal. Scot himself had even made the trip up to Squaw Peak to test the conditions that very morning.
Could more snow have fallen than he thought? Even though the UAFC had rated the risks minimal, there still had been risks. The weight of responsibility rested heavily upon Scot’s battered shoulders. He sat in the shower in a trance and replayed everything over and over in his mind. Then, with a jolt, he sat upright. He had completely forgotten about Hollenbeck’s conversation with Hermes right before his exhaustion overtook him, Two agents down…unnatural causes.
Scot threw the lever back to shower and twisted the knob all the way to cold. He had learned this trick in a massage club in Hong Kong. A hot bath followed by a cold plunge was better than four cups of coffee any day.
The shock to his system had the desired effect, and Scot climbed out of the shower feeling alive, his senses keen, even if his body was still in pain. He promised himself no sedatives or pain medication, no matter what Hollenbeck or Dr. Trawick said. He hated how those things could cloud his mind, and his mind was his most important weapon. Gumming up the works was just asking for trouble.
Not seeing his clothes lying around, and figuring they had probably been cut off him, Scot was relieved to find a terry cloth bathrobe in the bedroom’s cedar closet. He put it on and headed for the door.
When he stepped into the hallway, he noticed the door across from his was wide open and the room’s bed was made. He searched his brain for what Dr. Trawick had said about Amanda. Hadn’t he said she was across the hall? If she had been, she had been moved, and Scot added her whereabouts to the list of questions he had.
There were no detail agents in the hall as he made his way toward the stairway, but he did hear voices coming from below.
Walking in a straight line across a level surface was one thing. Walking down stairs was another. Scot leaned heavily on the pine banister as he forced his knees to bend and accommodate. He let out a small thanks that none of the agents in the enormous, picture-windowed living room had seen his struggle. After three shuffling steps at the bottom of the landing, he was spotted by Agent Palmer.
“What are you doing up, Scot?”
“I’m not paid to sleep, and I want to know what’s going on.”
“It’s bad. Real bad.”
“I heard Birdhouse talking with Hermes about finding two agents down last night.”
“From what I heard, you took a real beating. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Scot growled with a little more venom than Agent Palmer deserved. “Would somebody just tell me what’s going on?”
“Have you eaten?”
“Palmer, damn it. I want to know what’s happening.”
“Listen to me, Scot, just relax. A lot has happened, and I mean a lot. I’ll be more than happy to fill you in. Why don’t we get you some breakfast, and I’ll tell you everything. You’re gonna need to sit down for this.”
Palmer walked away for a moment toward the front door and returned carrying a blue duffel bag with a Secret Service emblem on the side.
“They had to cut you out of your clothes last night. Hollenbeck figured you might need some things, so he had one of the agents get this stuff from your hotel.”
“He’s all heart.” My hotel. Scot still couldn’t remember its name.
“There’s a bathroom just down the hall there. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me in the kitchen? I’ll put some coffee on and see what I can rustle up foodwise.”
“Thanks, Palmer.”
“No prob.”
Twenty minutes later, shaved and past the painful ordeal of getting dressed, Scot appeared in the kitchen wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of Timberland boots. Palmer was sitting on a stool at a granite-topped cooking island reviewing paperwork.
She looked up from her reading and saw Scot standing in the doorway. “How are you doing?”
“Enough about me. Let’s have some answers.”
“You know, Harvath, I’m willing to cut you some slack for what you went through, but you’re getting dangerously close to the limit.”
“I know,” Scot said as he took the stool next to her, glad that it had a soft cushion he could rest his body against. “I’m sorry. I just want to know what the big picture is.”
“Fine. I can understand that. There’s a lot to go over, so why don’t I pour us each a cup of coffee and we’ll get started. I hunted up a microwave breakfast. One of those eggs-and-bacon things. Probably doesn’t taste too good—”
“Sold. I’ll take it.”
With a cup of steaming hot coffee and a bland microwave breakfast to keep his mouth busy, he listened as Palmer explained what the Secret Service knew so far.
“At sixteen-ten yesterday afternoon you relayed Goldilocks’s desire to call it a day. You met Hat Trick’s detail at the last lap, from which he proceeded with his detail toward Death Chute and your detail accompanied Goldilocks toward her usual route back here. At approximately sixteen-twenty-five your report states that Goldilocks wiped out and while you were retrieving her gear, you thought you noticed Ahern and Houchins fall going into the treed area of Death Chute. It was at this point that you noticed communications—”
“Palmer,” said Scot between bites of hash browns, “can you please skip ahead to the stuff I don’t know? Give me the abridged version.”
“You know, I could just let you sift through the reports.”
“Don’t give me a hard time. Give me the facts.”
“All right, all right. Your team didn’t make it.”
“None of them?”
“We’ve recovered five members of your detail already and are looking for the others, who are now presumed dead. The five we’ve got were killed by the avalanche.”
Scot hung his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to fight off the headache and emotion he felt coming on. “And Goldilocks? What’s her condition?” he asked without looking up.
“She suffered some severe head and neck trauma, frostbite, and hypothermia. Had you not gotten her out of the snow and the intercept team not found you when they did, she never would have made it. Her condition is guarded, but stable. She has some damaged vertebrae, but they believe they can be fixed.”
“Will she be able to walk? Is there any permanent damage?”
According to Dr. Paulos, there shouldn’t be any permanent damage. It looks like she’s going to pull through.”
“Thank God for that. What about Hat Trick?”
“That’s where it gets really bad. Every member of Hat Trick’s detail is dead.”
“Dead, how?”
“Nine millimeter, best we can tell.”
Scot couldn’t believe what he was hearing and sat up ramrod straight. “What? They were all taken out?”
“All of them.” Palmer paused for a moment to let it sink in before continuing. “We had several JARs, as you know, in the trees along that part of Death Chute, and they were sanctioned as well.”
“What about Hat Trick?”
“We don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We haven’t been able to recover his body.”
“Holy shit.” Despite the anger and sadness he felt, his years of training had taught him that when the time came, he would be able to grieve privately, but that for now, he needed to filter his emotions. What mattered was not how he felt, but how he thought.
“So,” Scot continued with amazing composure, “the entire detail and the JAR team was sanctioned. There is no sign of Hat Trick. I can’t believe this. Somebody must have grabbed him.”
“We’re not positive, but—”
“You found all of the other bodies, sanctioned, but not his. Sounds like he was grabbed to me. Have there been any demands?”
“Hold on. You are getting way ahead of things here.”
“Palmer, how am I getting ahead? You found all the detail agents, but not Hat Trick. They normally stick pretty close to him.”
“Yes, but this was an avalanche. He could have been swept in any direction.”
“Don’t give me that. You know how this looks. If it was just an avalanche, that would be one thing, but his detail was terminated.”
“Scot, we’re all in shock. Never in the history of the Secret Service have we lost so many agents protecting the president. Nor has anyone ever succeeded in a kidnapping, which is how we’re playing this.”
“So, you do agree.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, I can’t believe this.”
“We do have one lead, though.”
“What kind of lead?”
“Harper managed to get off a shot and kill one of the people we believe were responsible for the attack.”
Good ol’ Harp, Scot thought to himself. “They left the body behind? Who was it? What can you tell me?”
“We’re waiting for confirmation on the identity. We’ve had to wire the prints and picture off to CIA station chiefs in the Mideast.”
“Sand Land? You’re telling me the job was carried out by a bunch of Bedouin Bobs? That’s impossible! The only thing they know about snow is that it’s spelled with two different letters than sand.”
“What I’m telling you is that we’ve got upward of thirty dead Secret Service agents, a missing president, and one deceased male of Mideastern descent found at the scene of the crime with a bullet in the back of his head that I’m betting dollars to doughnuts was fired from Sam Harper’s SIG.”
Scot put his elbows on the cold granite countertop and rested his head in his hands. He had to be dreaming. Soon he would wake up and this nightmare would be over.
As he sat there with the microwave breakfast and coffee going sour in his stomach, the pieces began falling into place. “The failure in our communication systems wasn’t caused by the weather, then, was it?”
“We still don’t know.”
“So, what’s the status of our investigation? Are they gridding Death Chute and going through it millimeter by millimeter?”
“No.”
“No?” Scot asked incredulously. “What do you mean no?”
“Scot, you put the pieces together just as fast as everyone else did. The president has been kidnapped or worse, and that now makes this an FBI matter. We have been instructed to secure the area.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Who gave those orders?”
“It came from D.C. after Hollenbeck spoke with the director of the Secret Service. Agents from the Salt Lake FBI field office are already on-site waiting for the special agent in charge who is going to handle the investigation. He’s due in about an hour.”
Scot groaned, knowing who it would be. “Let me guess, the SAC is Gary Lawlor, right?”
“Yeah, the FBI’s deputy director himself. Makes sense. The director is gonna have no choice but to stay in D.C. and coordinate. This is going to be one hell of a firestorm.”
17
Harvath needed to clear his head. The information Palmer had relayed was overwhelming. Upward of thirty agents dead and the president missing, presumed kidnapped. It was too much to grasp.
Scot grabbed a blue-and-white Secret Service parka hanging by the back door of the kitchen and walked outside. Three agents taking a cigarette break looked in his direction, but didn’t say anything. What could be said?
Harvath walked into the woods alongside the house, and when he felt he was out of sight of the other agents, leaned against one of the tall trees and closed his eyes. A million questions raced through his mind. What happened? How could I not have seen this coming? Did I overlook something during the advance?
Every whacko in a four-hundred-mile radius had been accounted for, the more dangerous of them locked up for the few days the president would be here. There hadn’t been any pings on U.S. Immigration hot sheets, and there had been no new threats from any extremist groups that had even hinted at this.
He breathed deeply, letting the chilly air fill his lungs, and held it until it burned. Slowly, he let the air escape in a long hiss. He repeated the process again, trying to get a handle on what was going on.
Upward of thirty agents killed and the president missing. Scot began second-guessing himself, convinced that there had been some sort of warning sign that he’d missed. There were still agents out there trapped under the snow, but Palmer had been right. The chances that they were alive were slim to none. Scot fought back a surge of guilt. Many of those men had been his friends, and they all had been his responsibility. Not now, a voice inside him said. Turn and let it burn. But it was so hard. Even though he was trained to be a master of his mind and emotions, he was still human. He had lost comrades before, but it had been on missions to faraway places where he had been striking at threats to domestic or international security. Those men had fallen in battle, but this, this wasn’t the same. These Secret Service agents never had a chance, never saw what was coming. And they had been hit on home turf.
The thought of foreign insurgents executing this attack on American soil and then scooting back to wherever they came from, especially if it was Sand Land, really pissed Scot off. Deep breathing out in the woods wasn’t the road to the answers he wanted. Besides, his ribs were killing him. The answers would be found where the action was, up on Death Chute. Until Gary Lawlor got here, the crime scene still belonged to the Secret Service, and as the leader of the presidential advance team, Scot felt he had not only a right, but a duty to examine every inch of it.
”What, are you nuts?” said a young FBI agent from the Salt Lake field office when Harvath ducked under the tape and started making his way to the scene.
Scot had hitched a ride up with a Sno-Cat that was hauling equipment as close as it could get to the plateau, where a combination of Secret Service and FBI agents were acting as Sherpas, walking the gear the rest of the way to the crime scene.
“Listen, Agent”—Scot looked at the identification tag hanging around the man’s muscled neck—“Zuschnitt. I need to get in there and take a look around.” The man had about three inches and a good seventy-five pounds on Scot, but Scot had messed with bigger guys and come out on top.
The FBI agent was in no mood to d
eal with Harvath. His orders were to let no one in until Lawlor got there, and he intended to make sure those orders were carried out. “This is a crime scene under the jurisdiction of the FBI. No one goes in there except FBI. Capisce?”
Capisce? Where did a Salt Lake Fed with a name like Zuschnitt pick up capisce? Scot wondered. His need to get answers turned the flame up on his anger a couple of notches. “My name’s Scot Harvath, Secret Service. I was head of the advance team—”
“Boy, are you going to have some explaining to do. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” snapped Agent Zuschnitt.
This guy is a real asshole. I thought this shitty treatment was reserved for muscling in on local law enforcement jurisdictions or when the FBI got one-upped by the CIA. Most of the FBI guys Scot had met in his career had been pretty decent. The Secret Service and the FBI normally got along quite well. This guy, though, was asking for it.
“Agent Zuschnitt, I know you’re doing your job, and I’m just trying to do mine.”
“If you’d done yours, the FBI wouldn’t have to be here cleaning up your mess.”
“What’s your fucking problem?”
“I don’t have one. What’s yours?”
Harvath’s pissed-off meter was now well into the red zone, but he fought to stay in control and keep his cool.
“Over two dozen men probably have died on my watch—”
“And you want me to let you in here to contaminate this crime scene? Somehow that’s going to make everything all right? Guess again, buddy.”
“You know,” said Harvath, backing down, “you’re right. You’ve got a job to do, a post to stand. I can appreciate that. If you couldn’t keep one lowly Secret Service agent out, it’d probably make you look like a pretty big ass.”
A smile spread across the lips of the beefy FBI agent as he smelled victory and saw Harvath turn to walk away. The smile disappeared when Harvath quickly spun around and delivered a blow to Zuschnitt’s sternum. It felt like a red-hot ingot of lead that had been fired at him from a cannon. As the air rushed from his lungs and the agent doubled over in pain, Harvath placed his palms on Zuschnitt’s shoulder blades and drove his knee up into the man’s mouth, splitting his lip open and knocking him unconscious.