Hidden Order: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  Returning his flashlight to his pocket, he bent down and examined the exterior of the can. Near the very bottom, he found it. It appeared that the can had been filled with water, but that someone had drilled a hole at the bottom to let the water out. Why?

  Harvath stood and went back over to the plank and reexamined everything. That’s when it hit him. The killer, or killers, had probably left long before Herman Penning was even dead.

  It was all making sense now and what he had originally seen as ingenious was quickly reaching the brilliance level.

  The sixty-year-old man had been fitted with a noose and was then placed onto the plank, which would function like a chute. When the appointed moment arrived, the chute tipped forward and gravity jettisoned the father of two and grandfather of four through the window. The man then fell, but only until he reached the literal end of his rope, at which point his neck was snapped.

  Judging by the size of the garbage can and how much water it could hold, it had functioned like a timer. Secured to the plank, it would have acted as a counterbalance, holding it horizontal for as long as its weight was greater than the victim’s. As soon as that ratio changed, gravity would take over.

  After taking several pictures of everything, Harvath grabbed a chair in order to better examine the pulleys. He’d only been up on it for a few moments when he heard a throat being cleared behind him.

  He turned around to see a man and a woman, shields on their belts and their hands very near their weapons.

  “Agent Wyatt Earp, is it?” the woman said. “I’m Detective Annie Oakley and this is my partner, Buffalo Bill. Why don’t you step down. We’d like to have a word with you, please.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Annie Oakley” turned out to be Boston Police Homicide Detective Lara Cordero. Her partner’s name sounded like Sabatelli or Sabatano, but Harvath didn’t catch it. He wasn’t really paying attention at that point. He was trying to not appear as if he was staring at Cordero while he was, in fact, staring at Cordero.

  She was a very exotic-looking woman and quite attractive—a knockout, actually. If Harvath had to guess, he would have pegged her as maybe Spanish with something else. It was hard to discern. She was in her early thirties, tall, tan, and took very good care of herself. She had green eyes and long brown hair that was streaked blond by the sun.

  Harvath introduced himself and presented each of them with a crisp white business card embossed with his company’s name and a phone number, nothing else.

  “So you’re the kidnap and ransom specialist,” said Cordero. “I wasn’t aware that the kidnappers had made any demands.”

  “They haven’t,” Harvath replied. “Not yet.”

  “Maybe it got lost in the mail,” her partner said.

  While Cordero’s Boston accent was almost nonexistent, this guy’s was over-the-top. It had an edge to it, too, that Harvath didn’t care for.

  “Who’s the client?” Cordero asked.

  The Old Man had warned him to be ready for this question. The FBI was being circumspect with the details it was sharing with the Boston PD. Monroe Lewis had told him to do the same. “The deceased has some very powerful friends in Washington.”

  “Had,” Cordero’s partner corrected him. “Past tense.”

  Harvath studied him for a moment. He was dressed in a halfway decent suit. Other than that, there wasn’t anything particularly impressive about him. He wasn’t short, he wasn’t tall, and his features were unremarkable. He looked to be in decent shape compared to a lot of the other cops in the room, but that wasn’t saying much. It was obvious that the man didn’t like him, and that was fine by Harvath, who was about to thank him for the English lesson when Cordero asked another question.

  “So what’s your background?”

  “Why do you ask?” Harvath replied.

  “You don’t strike me as the law enforcement type.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got more of a military vibe to me. They hire a lot of ex Special Forces types for Kidnap and Ransom companies, right? What, are you an Army Ranger, or maybe a Navy SEAL?”

  It was either an incredibly good guess or she was intentionally flirting with him. He couldn’t tell. Either way, he didn’t really want to get into what his background was and laughed it off. “A SEAL? They only take smart guys,” he replied. “Plus, I can’t swim.”

  Cordero smiled. “I think you may be downplaying the smarts part.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I was watching the way you examined the pulleys and the rest of the crime scene.”

  “I did that good of a job, huh? How about we trade places and I’ll watch you this time. Maybe I can learn something.”

  “How about we go swimming instead?” the partner interjected.

  Good one, but this guy was getting on Harvath’s nerves. He ignored him and said to Cordero, “Who found the victim?”

  “About half of Boston,” she replied. “We’re right downtown. We’ve got lots of people on their way to work. Our 911 center was flooded with calls. A patrol unit responded within about four minutes. Within fifteen minutes of arriving on scene, they had accessed the building and retrieved Penning’s body. They’d hoped that he was still alive and one of the officers even tried to resuscitate him, but we’re confident his neck was broken instantly. There’s nothing they could have done.”

  “Where’s the body now?”

  “On its way to the ME.”

  Harvath leaned and looked out the window to the street below. “Any CCTV footage, traffic cams, that sort of thing you can pull from the area?”

  “Why didn’t we think of that?” the male detective snarked.

  “What I meant to say—” Harvath began, but Cordero interrupted him.

  “I know what you meant and yes, we’ve got a few cameras we’ve already requested footage from. We’re not holding out much hope, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ve already checked the security cameras here in this building. As far as that footage is concerned, no one ever entered.”

  “The footage was looped,” said Harvath.

  Cordero nodded. “With that level of sophistication, plus getting around the alarm system and no signs of forced entry into the building, we think the chances are slim that we’ll get him on any of the cameras, but you never know. They got the Son of Sam with parking tickets, right?”

  “Have you uncovered anything else unusual?”

  The woman’s partner rolled his eyes. “Nah, we see murder scenes with ropes and pulleys and little dolls every day.”

  “Dolls?” Harvath repeated.

  “Yeah, it was shoved into the boot Penning was wearing.”

  “He was wearing only one?”

  “We think the other one fell off and maybe some homeless person picked it up or something. We’re looking into it.”

  “No doubt,” replied Harvath. “Let me ask you about the victim’s boot. Was the sole painted green?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “And the doll. Does it look like a little devil?”

  “Yeah,” the man answered, his eyes narrowing. “How’d you know that?”

  Harvath plowed forward. “It’s grinning and holding a scroll, too, right?”

  “What the fuck? How do you know all this?”

  Harvath held up his hands and looked around as if it were obvious. “This is the Liberty Tree Building, right?”

  The male detective mimicked Harvath’s gesture and replied, “It obviously ain’t Fenway Park. So what?”

  “It’s not important. Never mind.”

  Cordero, to her credit, knew that it was important and that Harvath understood much more than he was letting on. “Sal, can you give us a few minutes, please?” she asked.

  Her partner looked at Harvath and then back at her. He didn’t like being asked to leave. It made him feel as if he were some sort of impediment and that hurt his pride. He paused just long enough to sugges
t that he was trying to come up with something clever to say, but nothing materialized.

  Finally, he replied, “No problem. I need to talk with the uniforms anyway and see how the canvass of the neighborhood is going.”

  “Thanks, Sal,” Cordero replied. “I’ll be down shortly.”

  “Mr. Harvath,” he said, drawing out the word mister as if to highlight Harvath’s non-law-enforcement status before turning on his cheap shoes and walking away.

  “Interesting guy,” Harvath said once the man was out of earshot.

  “He means well.”

  “You two been together long?”

  “Partners for six years. Best cop I’ve ever known. Loyal and nobody knows the streets better than him.”

  “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “I can see it’s breaking your heart.”

  “I’m insecure like that.”

  Cordero stifled a laugh. “Yeah, you’ve got insecurity written all over you. That was the first thing I noticed when you came in.”

  “What was the second?”

  Ignoring his question, she said. “Follow me. I want to show you something.”

  As they walked, Cordero asked, “How did you know about the boot and the doll and all that?”

  “I paid attention in class.”

  “And what class would that be?”

  “American history,” said Harvath. “Boston colonists hung an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the man chosen by King George to impose the Stamp Act. They hung it from an elm tree right on this spot that became known as the ‘Liberty Tree.’ Along with it, they also hung a British cavalry jackboot with its sole painted green. It was meant as an ‘up yours’ to two British prime ministers tied to the Stamp Act. One was named Grenville and the other Bute. Grinning from inside the boot was a devil doll holding a scroll with the words Stamp Act written on it.”

  The female detective nodded as she turned the information in her mind. “I guess I really didn’t pay enough attention in class.”

  “You walk by history every day in Boston.”

  “But nobody’s ever a tourist in their own hometown, are they?”

  That was true. “Did you grow up here?” he asked.

  “We moved here when I was a little girl. I was born in another country.”

  “Is Cordero Spanish?”

  “No, Portuguese, but via—”

  “Brazil,” Harvath replied, everything about her falling into place.

  She stopped and smiled. “Very good,” she said. “You know your geography.”

  “My parents felt bad that they couldn’t afford swimming lessons, so they gave me a globe instead. I got rather good with it.”

  “Your insecurity is showing again.”

  “Is it?” Harvath asked, glancing over his shoulder. “I’m going to have to get a better tailor.”

  Cordero started walking again. “Been there recently?”

  “Brazil? Yes, a few years ago, but only a quick in-and-out for business.”

  “Kidnap and ransom business?”

  “You could call it that,” he replied as he remembered traveling there to track down a man he believed to be involved with the torture and killing of several friends and family of his.

  The female detective appraised him once more, this time with a bit more appreciation. “Maybe you actually could be Navy SEAL material.”

  “Except for the swimming and the smarts stuff.”

  “Except for those,” she agreed with a smile as they arrived at a long counter where the evidence technicians had arrayed everything that had been bagged, tagged, and would soon be dragged to headquarters once the rope, plank, and pulley apparatus was disassembled and packed up.

  “Here,” she said, tossing Harvath a pair of latex gloves. “Anything you see and want to touch, please just ask my permission first.”

  There were only a million responses that rushed to the front of Harvath’s brain at that point, but being the consummate professional that he was, he refrained from all of them. “Why don’t we start with the doll?”

  Cordero nodded at her evidence tech, who presented a log and asked Harvath to print and sign his name before allowing him to examine the item.

  Harvath didn’t need to remove the grinning demon from its clear plastic bag. He only wanted to see what was on its little scroll. “Does anyone have a magnifying glass or something that I can use on this?”

  The evidence tech borrowed one from a crime scene technician and handed it to him. Harvath held up the bag so he could get as much light on it as possible. Upon the scroll had been drawn the same skull and crossbones with a hovering crown that he had seen in the Claire Marcourt crime scene photos. Beneath it were written the words Death to Tyranny. And beneath that were the initials S.O.L.

  Harvath thanked the evidence tech and handed back the doll and the magnifying glass.

  “Any idea what any of the writing stands for?” Cordero asked.

  She wasn’t asking for state secrets. A few minutes on a Web browser and she’d be able to figure it out for herself. “Death to Tyranny and the skull-and-bones motif with the crown summarized popular anti-British sentiments in the colonies leading up to the Revolutionary War,” he said. “We think S.O.L may be shorthand for Sons of Liberty. They were an organized resistance group back then and were believed to have been responsible for hanging the Oliver effigy in the Liberty Tree.”

  Cordero jotted a couple of notes in a notebook, then asked, “What’s the connection to our victim, Mr. Penning?”

  Now she was drifting into state secrets. “What do you mean?”

  “Why so heavy on the symbolism?”

  “Maybe somebody thought he was a tyrant.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I barely know anything about the man, certainly not enough to have an opinion.”

  Glancing back at the ropes and pulleys, then returning her gaze to Harvath, the detective said, “This all looks pretty personal.”

  “The killer definitely wanted to send a message.”

  “Death to tyranny? Pretty nonspecific, if you ask me,” she replied. Making a final mark in her notebook, she looked up and asked, “What else would you like to take a look at?”

  Harvath scanned the table. There wasn’t really anything else of interest, nothing that screamed lead. “I think we’re good.”

  “Okay,” she replied, adding her own signature to the evidence log and letting the tech know he could take everything down to the lab. “Now let’s talk about why you’re really here.”

  “I told you, Detective, the victim has—excuse me, had—some very powerful friends in D.C.”

  “First the FBI pretends all it knows is that Penning was kidnapped. Then we find out there were four others grabbed the same night, but the FBI won’t tell us what they have in common. You don’t have to be a detective to pick up on the fact that they’re probably holding something back. Now, a wisecracking James Blond type in the K-and-R business shows up at my murder scene knowing a bit too much about American history and won’t tell me who the client is. You’ll forgive me if my BS meter is drifting into the red zone.”

  James Blond. He’d have to remember that one. “I imagine your job requires you to be a little suspicious about everything.”

  “And everyone,” she added.

  Harvath smiled and tried to change the subject. “What can you tell me about the circumstances surrounding Penning’s kidnapping?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right,” she replied, her right forearm resting on the butt of her holstered pistol. “I think you know a lot more than you’re telling me. Can we help each other? Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m not giving you anything else until you come clean with me.”

  “I could call back to Washington and have some of Mr. Penning’s friends call your chief.”

  Cordero nodded. “You could do that. But the chief would only kick it down to my commander, who would end up assigning Sal to be your l
iaison. Mama mia, can that guy be slow in handling requests, especially if he doesn’t like you. Which he doesn’t. So why not just cooperate and make it easy on yourself?”

  “I bet you use that line on all the guys you meet at murder scenes.”

  “Only if it’s the right guys and I haven’t already put a bullet in them.”

  Harvath thought about her offer. When it came to investigating a murder, you wanted to be as close to the streets as possible and that meant lashing up with the cops. No matter what happened, it was much more likely that the Boston PD would hear about it before the FBI. In the end, he needed her cooperation.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Take me someplace for breakfast, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything within reason.”

  Cordero didn’t like the qualifier, but it left the door open. “I know a place not far from here,” she replied. “We’ll take my car.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Since Cordero and her partner had both arrived at the Liberty Tree Building in separate vehicles, she told him she would catch up with him at headquarters later and drove Harvath to the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood.

  The Paramount was a local institution known for its breakfast by generations of Bostonians. That was her primary reason for taking Harvath there. There was also a secondary reason. She wanted to prove she wasn’t completely illiterate when it came to Boston history. She waited until he had ordered and they’d both been served coffee to fill him in.

  “Really?” Harvath said. “It happened here?”

  Cordero nodded. “Right upstairs. Her name was Mary Sullivan. She was nineteen years old and the Boston Strangler’s final victim.”

  “I saw a documentary about him. He was a sick guy.”

  “I’ve seen the crime scene photos. You have no idea.”

  Harvath took a sip of his coffee and set the cup back down on the table. “They caught the guy, though, didn’t they?”

  “They caught a guy, a rapist named Albert DeSalvo. He allegedly confessed while being held in jail for a rape he committed nine months after the rape and murder of Mary Sullivan. There still remain a lot of doubts as to whether or not DeSalvo was the actual Strangler, or if there may have been more than one killer.”