The Lions of Lucerne

by Brad Thor

  “Good morning, Mr. Martin, this is Tabatha. May I take your order, please?”

  “I don’t know how good the morning is, Tabatha, but you may certainly take my order.” He began reciting what he wanted, half looking at the room service menu and half skimming the Post’ s cover stories. “I would like a pot of coffee. Two eggs and—oh, Jesus, no.”

  André had gotten to the small article regarding a drive-by shooting the previous night that had killed Mitchell Conti, aide to Senator David Snyder, and an as yet unidentified man believed to have been a friend of Mr. Conti’s.

  “Mr. Martin, are you okay?” asked the room service operator.

  “Cancel my order,” was all André Martin could manage before rushing to the bathroom to throw up.

  Through some very low-key questions to close mutual friends, André tried to piece together Mitch’s movements before the shooting. Everyone said that Mitch had been very down lately because of his job difficulties and because of losing André. Apparently, Mitch had been out with his friend Simon, looking for a gift for André, when the drive-by shooting occurred.

  The police assumed that it was just a classic case of “wrong place, wrong time” for Mitch and Simon when they were caught in a hail of bullets. But what the police failed to dig up was who the shooters were and who the assumed target was. Despite the initial public outcry, Mitch and Simon became just another statistic. But not to André Martin. Something was rotten in the capital of democracy.

  The whole thing smelled funny. There were conflicting accounts about the shooters, their vehicle, and nothing solid about the intended victims. The more André looked at it, the more he was convinced the drive-by was not an accident.

  He continuously replayed in his mind the things Mitch had told him about Senator Snyder, how he never lost and no one ever stood in his way. André also remembered the final message Mitch had left for him at the Holiday Inn saying that he thought he knew of a way whereby the senator would have to cut him loose from the affair but still allow him to keep his job. Mitch had bragged he might even get a promotion out of it, and then they both could celebrate getting their lives back to normal.

  Had Mitch been foolish enough to think that he could blackmail the senator? Had he thought the senator would end the affair and yet still allow Mitch to keep his job and maybe even go so far as to give him a promotion? It sounded like something Mitch might try. He’d always thought he was smarter than everyone else. On more than one occasion, André had told him he was too smart for his own good. No matter what Mitch might have thought he had on the senator, any way he came up against him, he would have lost. The more André thought about it, the more the drive-by shooting made sense if you assumed Mitch had been the intended victim. And the more the drive-by shooting made sense, the more André was determined to avenge the death of Mitch Conti.

  Even though it hadn’t been easy getting close to the senator, André had eventually succeeded. While he didn’t have the political network that Mitch’d had, he was an excellent fact finder and quickly assembled his own dossier on the New York senator and the causes closest to his cold heart. Several months later, through a partner’s wife at his firm, André was able to wrangle an invitation to the Gold Circle Ball of the International Diplomats’ Forum.

  At the black-tie affair, André was every bit as striking in his tuxedo as Mitch would have been. He came to the event bolstered by a couple of martinis, convinced he would be able to seduce the senator. The senator had indeed noticed André, but it took “coincidentally” bumping into him at several more important functions before the two had a real conversation.

  Once they had their first “date,” André wisely played hard to get, acting unimpressed with the senator’s lifestyle and power, which only served to set the hook deeper. Snyder was soon thoroughly taken with André and couldn’t get enough of him. Jealous and insecure, he wanted André with him every moment.

  Lately, though, Snyder had seemed tense. None of the signs would have been visible to a casual observer, but André had been studying him long enough to know when something was afoot, and whatever it was, it was very big.

  All of his experience as a lawyer told André that he could be in a lot of trouble snooping around in the life of one of the country’s most powerful senators, but he wasn’t after state secrets. He wanted personal secrets, and André knew the man was dirty. He knew he was responsible for the deaths of Mitch and Simon, and André wanted to hang him with that, if not something equally damning. He also knew that if Snyder ever caught on to him, an accident would happen just as easily to him as it had to Mitch and Simon.

  When Snyder had sneaked out of the house shortly after receiving the first strange phone call around midnight, André had known something important was happening. He’d let himself out a side door and caught the senator getting into a cab a half a block down the street. The rain made it difficult to see, but André managed to get the cab’s number and soon thereafter caught one himself.

  The senator was in a hurry and didn’t take many precautions against being followed. André had no trouble staying with him. A half hour later when the cab turned onto a posh residential street in McLean, Virginia, André knew where his quarry was headed. He told his cab to stop and watched the senator’s driver say something into an intercom at the large iron gates of a brick Georgian Revival. Moments later, the gates swung open and Snyder’s taxi drove through. Satisfied, André instructed his cabbie to take him back to the town house in Georgetown. He lay in bed awake for the rest of the evening, pretending to be asleep when the senator came home. He didn’t stir until Snyder got out of bed to take the second phone call.

  Now, in the overcast light of a rainy morning, André hung up the black Sony phone and rolled over to his side of the bed, contemplating the implications of what he had just heard. It was time to get up, and he thought a hot shower might steady his nerves.

  He walked into the bathroom and didn’t even feel the radiant heat from the tiled floor on the soles of his feet. He turned the shower control to hot and climbed in, scrubbing himself with a lemon beeswax soap, one of the many bath products the senator liked to indulge himself with. His mind racing, he was so preoccupied he didn’t notice his lover had entered the bathroom until the shower door swung open.

  “André, I think you and I need to have a little chat.”

  20

  When Harvath and Hollenbeck had hiked to the bottom of Death Chute, there was a Sno-Cat waiting to take them back to the command center. Once they were seated inside and were underway, Hollenbeck pulled a stack of Polaroids out of his parka and handed them to Harvath.

  “Ever seen one of these back in your SEAL days?”

  Harvath looked intently at the first picture. It was a box, painted white, about the size of the average surround-sound subwoofer. By its appearance in the picture, it had been found buried in the snow. Scot flipped through the shots, which were taken from different angles. In some, the box was partially obscured by the branches of a pine tree it was under.

  “I don’t know. It looks like a white box,” Harvath said, handing the photos back to Hollenbeck.

  “When our guys found it, we had no idea what it was either. Our gut said it might be an explosive device, so we got the bomb tech guys up there right away.”

  “Where? Up there?” Scot asked, gesturing over his shoulder back toward Death Chute. “I thought this was an FBI investigation now.”

  “It is, but we were operating outside the secured crime scene under the pretext of discovering if any of our agents might have survived the slide.”

  “But you said they were all accounted for.”

  “Now they are. But we hadn’t released that information to the FBI at that point. Listen, I don’t want to split hairs with you. I busted your ass up there because that’s my job. I’ve heard about that guy, Zuschnitt. He’s got a reputation with the FBI for being a real prick. That’s probably why he got stuck posting the crime scene. Think about it. That’s a pr
etty long rotation to be standing with your thumb up your ass in the freezing cold.”

  Harvath laughed at the image. It was the first time he had laughed all morning. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Damn straight I’m right. Now I want you to look at these,” he said as he pulled another group of Polaroids from his pocket. “Once we determined the device was not an explosive, we were able to discover that it was encased in panels and that the panels could be removed.”

  Scot flipped through this set of pictures with greater interest. Each displayed a different exposed section of the box’s interior, which contained densely packed electronics.

  “It looks like an air-sick bag for a supercomputer that had a really bad lunch. There must be at least a hundred circuit boards crammed in there. There could never be enough air circulation in there to keep whatever this thing is from overheating. Unless—”

  “It was placed in the snow?” responded Hollenbeck, who’d already come to that conclusion. He pulled some more photos from his parka and narrated as he flipped through them. “The alloy construction of the box probably helped circulate the cold. There are also fans and a set of tubes with screened vents, which we think acted as a cooling system. Any guesses yet as to what its purpose is?”

  “Judging from this picture,” said Scot, pointing to the one Hollenbeck had just revealed, “I’d say that little device there is a low-profile antenna. If you have your guys look up into the tree above where you found the box, at the very top you’ll probably find a camouflaged transmitter with a booster.”

  “Yup, that’s exactly what we found.”

  “So, this device is a transmitter of some sort. I’d be willing to bet you may have found the source of our communications problems.”

  “It was. We shut it down, and the radios and everything else came back on line clear as a bell. What do you make of this?” said Hollenbeck as he removed a final Polaroid from the stack and handed it to him.

  Harvath studied it carefully. “The writing looks Korean. By the sophistication of the equipment, I’m going to guess this is something from our friends in the north. Most of the components will probably turn out to be Taiwanese, but the overall design and assembly is probably North Korean.”

  “I had our communications guy look at it, and then I slipped Jim Bates and some of his White House Communications Agency people up to take a peek. They’ve never seen anything like it, but they’re all guessing it’s a very sophisticated jamming system.”

  “But why’d it jam our communications and not the CB radios?”

  “It could be that proximity-wise they weren’t close enough, or—”

  “Tom, proximity had nothing to do with it. Our radios were cutting in and out when we were on Deer Valley’s main runs. If this was an overall jam, the CBs would have been affected as well.”

  “The other possibility Bates and his WHCA guys are kicking around is that the device can be tuned to jam specific frequencies and at different intervals.”

  “On for a minute, off for twenty,” Scot said, more for his own benefit than Hollenbeck’s. “It got us used to the on-again, off-again status of the radios. Made us think it was some sort of natural anomaly.”

  “Yup.”

  “But for that, you’d have to already know at least what frequencies the Secret Service was using, and that’s a closely guarded secret.”

  “Exactly. So, whoever was jamming had to have an inside line on the frequencies of not only our radios, but also Deer Valley’s and the Smocks.”

  “Deer Valley’s wouldn’t be hard to get, but ours? Are you suggesting a leak? No way. Not possible.”

  “I want you to stay quiet about this, Scot. Understand? I don’t want to start a witch hunt.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about starting it. Pandora’s box is going to open all by itself. I’d be more worried about how you’re going to close it.”

  21

  A million things swirled through Scot’s mind as he and Hollenbeck made the rest of the ride to the command center in silence. He felt like that painting The Scream. The phrase, You’re only as strong as your weakest link kept piercing the chaotic jumble of his mind. The idea that someone on his team had leaked information to anyone, much less a source with hostile intentions, was unfathomable. Maybe the information wasn’t leaked, Scot tried to tell himself. The problem was, once it has been suggested that you have a leak, you become focused on it. It becomes hard to concentrate on any other possibilities.

  When the Sno-Cat came to a halt, Harvath and Hollenbeck didn’t wait for the driver to get out of his cab and come around back to open their compartment. They were on the ground and on their way to the command center before the man got halfway around the machine.

  “Tom, can I get my SIG back?” said Harvath, who figured someone on the team must have secured his sidearm for him when he was brought in unconscious last night.

  “As long as you promise not to use it on any FBI agents. It’s in the lockdown cabinet in the command center. I left Longo in charge, so you can sign it out with him.”

  Scot made his way to the extra large Winnebago that had been brought in from the Federal garage in Las Vegas to act as the primary communications and command center for the president’s visit. While the house the president was staying in, just fifty feet away, was also loaded with agents and electronics equipment, this was the nerve center of the operation.

  Scot found Longo in back bent over a laptop, clicking away at the keys.

  “Hollenbeck told me I could grab my SIG back from you.”

  “Your what?” said Longo, distracted by the report he was working on. Written reports were the one thing Scot hadn’t ever been able to get used to. The Secret Service loved their paperwork.

  “My SIG-Sauer. It’s about this long,” Harvath said, showing him with his hands, “blackish gray, and fires these things we call bullets when you pull on the trigger. If you want to find an apple you think might fit on your head, I’ll give you a little demonstration of how it works.”

  “Very funny. Glad to see your accident didn’t damage your sense of humor. I’m sorry, the WHCAs have been crawling all over me about how the radios went down, and I’ve got to document every single thing. The report’s got me hung up.”

  “Since when does the White House Communications Agency give the Secret Service orders?”

  “Those guys are Department of Defense, just in civilian clothes. Hollenbeck said to cooperate with everyone. He’s really worried about how the Service is going to…hell, who am I kidding? He’s worried about how the Secret Service already looks on this one. We lost the president. I still can’t believe it. Now the FBI’s got their top pit bull coming in, and he’s bringing the Hostage Rescue Team with him. The special agents in charge of both the FBI and Secret Service Salt Lake field offices have been on the warpath around here, and I’m just trying to keep my head low so it doesn’t roll.”

  “Listen, Chris, you’re not going to lose your head.”

  “You don’t think so? Harvath, I hate to break it to you, but over two dozen agents are dead and/or missing, the president is gone, and we’ve got next to nothing lead-wise. Heads are definitely going to roll. You know I like you, but as head of the advance team on this one, it looks like you might be married to King Henry.” Being “married to King Henry” was an inside joke that referred to the British king who beheaded several of his wives after he had grown tired of them.

  Chris hadn’t needed to say it. That thought was one of many flying around Harvath’s head, as well as a sense of crushing responsibility for the deaths of his fellow agents. Scot’s only hope of getting out of this one with his career intact was to be part of some significant breakthrough.

  “Here’s your weapon,” said Longo as he turned from the cabinet, setting the pistol on the table and handing Harvath a clipboard. “Sign right there.”

  Scot strapped on his holster, handed the signed clipboard back to Longo, and walked toward the door.

 
“You know where the term severance pay comes from, Scot?” said Longo as he hung the clipboard on a peg inside the cabinet and locked it again.

  “No, but you’re going to tell me, right?”

  Ignoring Harvath’s sarcasm, Longo continued. “It’s also from England. When prisoners were going to be beheaded, they offered the axman a little extra money to make sure he chopped their heads off with one, clean blow.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be sure to remember that,” said Scot as he held the door to the Winnebago open a little longer than he should have, eliciting moans and shouts from the cold agents inside.

  Crossing the compound toward the main house, Scot replayed the conversation with Longo in his mind. He knew that the other agents didn’t blame him. Scot Harvath had been single-handedly responsible for ushering in some of the most significant improvements in Secret Service training and tactical procedure in years. But he also knew that as head of the advance team, he had to bear a tremendous amount of the responsibility for what had happened.

  Looking up at the sky and the still falling snow, Harvath felt that the agents not yet recovered by the search-and-rescue teams were a lost cause. The president, though, was a different story. He was probably still alive, and it was only a matter of time before demands for his ransom would be made.

  Scot thought about Amanda lying in a hospital bed in Salt Lake, glad she would make a full recovery. He didn’t dare think about what conditions the president might be languishing in at this moment.

  There was no question that Scot’s career was probably finished, at least with the Secret Service. He would be transferred to a less “sensitive” posting and would most likely be relegated to protecting third world delegates on visits to the United States…if even. He definitely would never be allowed to head up an advance team again or, for that matter, work another presidential protective detail.