by Brad Thor
Reaching the third floor, Harvath turned to his apartment door on the left of the landing and looked closely at the upper-right-hand corner of the doorframe. Satisfied his apartment hadn’t been entered during his absence, he balanced the pizza and beer on one knee, removed the hair from the doorframe, unlocked the door, and entered his home.
Harvath had cleared his voice mail in the cab, but now he picked up the phone and listened for the stutter dial tone just in case—nothing. A strange sense of calm descended upon him as he placed his bags in the bedroom and fell down onto the couch with the remote. He opened a bottle of the Japanese beer and grabbed a slice of pizza. Every channel, just like the airport CNN TV sets, was running the Jody Burnis story. Although careful to repeatedly state that no one had confirmed the kidnapping of the president, they pushed the fact that it hadn’t been denied either. When they stated that word of the kidnapping had been from a source within the Secret Service, Scot realized he had lost his appetite and threw his half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box.
Placing the remainder of the six-pack on the floor next to him, Scot stretched out on the couch and turned to the Outdoor Life Network, which thankfully wasn’t reporting anything about the president. Instead, OLN was rerunning a ski competition from Innsbruck, and he drank beer and watched it, letting his mind go blank. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was kicking off his shoes and letting them fall onto the rug in front of the couch.
At precisely seven A.M. Scot awoke to the building manager knocking on his door. She had heard him come in last night and wanted to give him his mail. Harvath figured as long as he was up, he would put on a pot of coffee and take a shower. He skipped shaving and, after getting dressed, ate the last two Eggo waffles he had in the freezer. He was out of syrup, so he covered them with butter and honey.
Being part of the president’s first team definitely had its advantages. Not only did they get a clothing allowance, because the Secret Service had to look good on TV, but they had better access to some highly sought after specialists in the D.C. area. One of those people was Dr. Sarah Helsabeck, who agreed to see Scot right away.
Harvath spent the better part of the morning being poked, prodded, quizzed, tested, and scanned. Dr. Helsabeck remarked on the incredible bruising up and down his back, saying it was amazing that the force that caused the trauma hadn’t broken any bones or done any internal damage. Actually, what she really said was, “I would ask you if you got the license numbers of the trucks that hit you, but if you just tell me what color they were, a fleet this size shouldn’t be too hard to track down.” As she continued her examination and reviewed his test results, Dr. Helsabeck commented, “Doesn’t look like anything snapped, crackled, or popped, and there don’t seem to be any signs of leaking.”
“So, it’s all pretty good then, right?” asked Scot.
“I’m most concerned about the knocks you took to your head. The brain is a very complicated mechanism. Your films don’t show any bleeding, but I’m still concerned.”
“Why?”
“Well, for starters, there’s your psychometrics. When you joined the Secret Service, they ran a battery of tests to establish a baseline for your performance. They charted things like your memory, concentration, and reaction time. All of which, compared to the tests we ran today, I can see are impaired.”
“But, Dr. Trawick said—”
“No offense to Dr. Trawick, but his was an extremely subjective diagnosis. Without the baseline that I have, he was taking shots in the dark.”
“C’mon, Dr. Helsabeck. I’ve hit my head before and I’ve been fine.”
“This time, we don’t know for sure. You’ve suffered a significant loss of short-term memory—”
“Doc, I appreciate your seeing me so quickly and running all these tests, but can you just give me the bottom line?”
“The bottom line is this: When you fell, you probably hit your head on something extremely hard, like a rock, and suffered a concussion. While you haven’t forgotten who you are, there seems to be some low-grade amnesia, which is what we were talking about in terms of short-term memory loss.”
“How short?”
“It’s normally things that are new. You might have trouble recalling things that happened in the last month.”
“Will I get it back?”
“Probably. There may be people you’ve met recently whom you’ve forgotten, or bills and bank deposits you can’t recall…that kind of stuff.”
“Are there any other potential problems?”
“You might experience difficulty with concentration, and like I said, your reaction time is down.”
“What about physical side effects?”
“You may find yourself sleeping a lot more, or your sleep may be interrupted.”
“Great.”
“You might also continue to experience the headaches you complained to me about, as well as some nausea.”
“Any other good news?”
“It’s not uncommon for patients who have suffered trauma such as yours to become irritable.”
“Irritable how?”
“Things beyond your control will frustrate you more than they would in normal conditions. Basically, your fuse might be a lot shorter.”
Scot wondered if that was why he had decked Agent Zuschnitt, or if he would have done it regardless of his fall. After a moment of reflection, he decided he would have done it regardless. Zuschnitt had been asking for it.
“Is that it?” asked Scot.
“Pretty much. Just keep in mind that all of these symptoms I’ve mentioned can become more profound with physical exertion. Basically, your brain has been scrambled and you need to give it, and your body, time to repair.”
Scrambled. You had to love a doctor who put things in laymen’s terms. Not only did she know how to break it down, she was also a comedian. As he was leaving, Dr. Helsabeck gave him the name of a good chiropractor she knew. “You’re going to need him,” she said. Scot thanked her and headed out into the drizzly afternoon.
Successfully hailing a cab in D.C. in the rain is almost impossible. As a matter of fact, attempting it ought to be classified as an extreme sport. Scot was tempted to hold up his credentials and draw his gun on the next taxi he saw, but one finally stopped and he gave the driver the cross streets of a family grocery and deli near his apartment.
He walked home through the rain with grocery bags in each arm, wondering why he hadn’t been called in yet by his boss. Surely, Lawlor had made a big enough fuss that people would be standing in line to chew him out. His pager and cell phone had been with him all day, but no one had tried to contact him.
It was all for the best anyway. He was in no mood to deal with anything at this point. All he wanted to do was get back to his apartment, unpack the groceries, and dig into his Reuben sandwich.
After the Reuben and a half pint of chicken soup, Harvath thought about calling Agent Palmer at the command center in Park City to see if anything new had popped up, but decided against it. He lay down on the couch to rest his eyes for a moment and quickly fell into another deep sleep.
In the darkness of sleep, he could make out what sounded like the faint drumming of jackhammers on wet cement. The thudding was soon joined by a high-pitched screeching that somewhere in his mind he knew he recognized. He lay in a trancelike state in the warm void halfway between sleeping and waking until his mind began to assemble different explanations for what he was hearing, and he felt himself being forcibly dragged upward toward the surface world of the wakeful.
His pager, cell phone, and home phone were all going off at the same time. Startled, Scot reached for the cordless phone first.
“Harvath,” he said.
“Harvath, this is Shaw,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
Scot sat straight up, trying to shake the cobwebs from his head.
Reaching to silence his vibrating phone and the pager on the coffee table, he responded to the director of
Secret Service Operations for the White House. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“The director wants to see you. How soon can you be ready?”
Scot looked at his watch. “I just need to grab a quick shower. I can be ready to go in twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” said Shaw. “There’ll be a car coming to pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later on the dot, Agent Harvath was showered, shaved, and wearing a perfectly pressed dark Brooks Brothers suit under his lined trench coat as he stood outside his apartment building. By the looks of it, the rain had been falling all day. Large puddles were everywhere.
Watching his warm breath rise into the cold, damp air he saw a pair of headlights turn the corner and slow as they approached him. The car Scot had been expecting to take him to his meeting would have been a typical domestic four-door, like a Crown Victoria—something that screamed government vehicle. Instead, a long black limousine slowed, and the rear window rolled down as it drew even with him.
“Get in,” said Stan Jameson, director of the Secret Service.
The door opened, and Scot did as he was told. He had met the director on only two occasions. The man had aged incredibly since then. The job must be taking its toll, he thought. As soon as Scot was in and had closed the door, the heavy, armor-plated limo growled away from the curb and headed toward D.C.
“It’s been a helluva couple of days,” began the director.
“Yes, sir, it has,” said Harvath.
A uniformed man was sitting to the director’s right, and motioning toward him, the director said, “Agent Scot Harvath, I’d like you to meet General Paul Venrick, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said Scot as he shook the man’s hand. With his broad shoulders, square jaw, and flattop haircut, the general was the picture of military rectitude.
“Likewise, Agent Harvath,” said the general with a strong Louisiana drawl, returning Scot’s grip.
“We don’t have a lot of time, Agent, so I want to make this quick,” said the director. “Both General Venrick and I have read your debriefing report, but something is missing, isn’t it?”
Scot was confused. If he was going to get his ass chewed out and then fired, why didn’t the director have him come to his office? Why do it in his limo with the JSOC commander along for the ride?
“If you’re referring, sir, to what happened with the story on CNN, I was recalled before I could type up a report and—”
“Son, I wouldn’t bother betting a bicycle basket full of cow chips against what any reporter has to say. Never have trusted them, never will. At this point, I’m not judging whether you said anything to her or not. Although I’d be willing to guess, after reviewing your service file, that wherever she got her story, it didn’t come from you,” said the general.
Before Scot could voice his thanks, the director jumped back into the conversation. “Yes, let’s hold off on the discussion of where the information came from. It does seem that there is a leak somewhere inside the organization, and that in itself is very bad, but first things first. I want to hear your version of events and what you think happened.”
As the armor-plated car rolled down the rain-slicked streets, Harvath recounted his story. Not knowing if the director had been informed of his exploits at Squaw Peak or the Maddux farm, he glossed over them, implicating himself as little as possible. When he had finished, the general removed a file folder from the briefcase by his feet.
“Agent Harvath, are you familiar with a terrorist organization known as the FRC?”
“You mean the Fatah RC?” asked Scot.
“Yes.”
“Sure I am. FRC stands for ‘Fatah—Revolutionary Council,’ also known as the Abu Nidal Organization. It was classified not too long ago by the State Department as the most dangerous terrorist group in the world. They were founded in the mid seventies by Sabri Khalil al-Banna, aka Abu Nidal, and blazed a bloody path across the Mideast, Asia, South America, and Europe throughout the 1980s. Though the organization has struck at targets of many different nationalities, if you’re a high-profile PLO member and aren’t aggressive enough toward Israel, you move to the top of their hit list pretty quickly.
“There was some activity up until the early nineties, but after that the organization pretty much dropped out of sight. Nidal is rumored to be very ill, if not dead already, and hiding somewhere in Libya under that country’s protection—even though they deny it. For the most part, they’ve been quiet, and it’s been said by some that they’re out of business.”
“That’s what we thought too, until we saw this,” said the general as he withdrew a newspaper clipping from The International Herald Tribune and handed it to Harvath. “On January fourteenth, the Austrian Police announced the arrest of a high-ranking Fatah—Revolutionary Council member, Halima Nimer. They grabbed her as she was attempting to withdraw about seven point five million dollars from a bank in Vienna.”
“Where did the FRC ever get that kind of money?” asked Scot.
“They have always been extremely well financed. For a long time Iraq and Libya were two of its biggest contributors, and they have always been very judicious with their assets. That seven point five is probably only the tip of their iceberg.”
“So what does this have to do with anything?”
Now it was the director’s turn to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “We’ve received a ransom demand for the president.”
Harvath was shocked. “From the FRC? What are the demands? Are you sure they’re legitimate?”
“Yes,” continued the director, “we’re very sure. There’s no question. Even if there were, the demands were already en route before the leak to CNN about the kidnapping. So, we know it’s not a hoax.”
“En route? What do you mean?” Scot looked from the director to the general, who was letting Jameson run this part of the show.
“This morning, a prepaid Airborne Express pouch arrived at my office. It had the appropriate routing codes to bypass the usual screenings and get right to me. As the Salt Lake City Field Office’s address was listed as the return address and its special agent in charge as the sender, I figured the SAC had come across something that didn’t make the courier flight or wasn’t important enough for it. These are copies of what was inside.”
He pulled three sheets from the folder that had been sitting on his lap and handed them to Scot.
As Harvath looked at the three photocopies, the director narrated for him, “Page one is, as you can see, a Polaroid photo of the president. You can’t tell in the photocopy, but his eyes are very glassy and appear unfocused. In his hands is a copy of Sunday’s USA Today. You notice the president is not wearing any gloves?”
Scot nodded his head.
“Well, that brings us to page two.”
Scot flipped to the next page as the director continued, “This is a photocopy of the front page of that same newspaper, which the FBI lab has verified has the president’s fingerprints on it. So far, they haven’t come up with any other prints.”
Harvath doubted if they ever would. These guys had been exceptional, right from the start.
“And finally,” said the director, “a little love note from the kidnappers themselves. It also is completely clean.”
When he saw the letterhead of the stationery, Scot’s jaw almost hit the floor of the limo. Knowing what he was going to say, the director raised his hand to stop him. “Yeah, the Best Western, Park City. The same hotel that housed half of the Secret Service. We’re checking into it. The FBI is tracking down the prepaid Airborne envelope, but I’m not holding out any high hopes for that one. I’ll give you a second so you can read the note.”
Harvath did.
Director Jameson. How small a man you must be feeling today with the shame of the country resting so heavily upon you and your men. After years of America’s meddling in the affairs of other countries, its deceit and treachery has now returned home, a
grown beast, to avenge the many injustices you have wreaked far and wide. Today is a great day for Islam and one which history shall remember as marking the beginning of the end for the Great Satan.
When Scot was finished, he handed the packet back to the director. “You must have had the profilers and handwriting people already rip through this thing six million ways from Sunday. Any luck?”
“It’s all inconclusive. The Middle East analysts at the CIA have taken a look at it and say that the phrasing is not consistent with what they would expect from a Middle Easterner, even if he or she had been schooled in Britain or over here.”
“He or she?” asked Harvath.
“We can’t tell. The handwriting people seem to think there are some flourishes in the script that may suggest a woman wrote it, but then they butt up against the shrinks who think the syntax is tilted strongly in favor of a male author.
“We’re cross-referencing the handwriting and the word choices through the threat databases and comparing it to any and all recorded threats against the president and the U.S. over the last fifteen years. Because we believe Abu Nidal and his FRC might be involved, we’ve sent a copy to the Mossad for their help. Our reasoning is that the FRC was born in that part of the world and essentially remains a Palestinian organization at heart, so the Israelis might be able to shed some light on the authorship or the subtext of the message, if there is any. The problem is, though, that every move this group has made has been extremely well choreographed.”
“But maybe not choreographed well enough,” broke in the general.
Scot asked, “I don’t understand why you tie the FRC to all of this. It could be any Middle Eastern extremist group. Why not the PLO? I understand the body in Park City was ID’d as a long gun who worked occasionally for them.”
“You’re right, and based on the knowledge you have so far, I’d be inclined to agree with you,” said the director, “but I told you that we had received demands.”