Hidden Order: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  “Just about,” the man responded as he affixed the gauze over Harvath’s left eyebrow and taped it in place. “Now we’re done.”

  He thanked the man, and after he and Cordero signed off on paperwork refusing to be transported to the hospital for further evaluation, the EMT stood up and moved on to treat other people.

  “Now what?” Cordero asked.

  “Pretty serious crime scene. Multiple homicides. I’d imagine you want to investigate.”

  “No,” she said, looking at how filthy she was. “You know what I want? I want to change my clothes, hug my son, and have a drink.”

  He understood how she felt. They were both in shock.

  “You want company?” he asked.

  Cordero looked at him.

  “For the have a drink part.”

  He didn’t need to clarify his remark. She knew what he meant.

  “I’d like that,” she replied.

  Harvath helped her to her feet, and they leaned against each other for a moment. It felt good. It also felt wrong. They shouldn’t be going for a drink. They should be working this crime scene, trying to find clues, something that would lead them to who had done this so that they could prevent any further deaths.

  He also knew that this entire investigation had gone to a completely new level. This was beyond a homicide investigation now. This was going to be classified as terrorism. Boston PD, the FBI, ATF, DHS, all the alphabets in the soup were going to be involved. They would comb every square millimeter of space looking for clues, and they would bring to bear the most sophisticated technology available.

  This wasn’t the place for them now. If something broke, they’d be notified. Besides, after what they had just been through, cheating death like that, they needed some downtime. Nevertheless, Harvath felt guilty about leaving.

  Cordero seemed to be able to read his thoughts.

  “This wasn’t our fault,” she said.

  She was right, but it didn’t change the way he felt. This was the first time that they had been ahead of the killers, but it hadn’t made any difference. It hadn’t stopped anything. There were even more people dead now.

  They walked in silence, showing their credentials when they had to duck under crime scene tape to get out of the blast area.

  Just past where Betsy Mitchell had been detonated, they stopped at one of the corpses. It had been covered with a plastic tarp. Cordero leaned over and pulled it back. It was a mass of cloth and bloody flesh. There was no human form to it all. The man had been so close when the explosion happened. The only possible means of identifying him was the half-melted nameplate that still read KACZYNSKI.

  Cordero lowered the tarp. “He was a good cop,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion. “A really good cop.”

  “We’re going to get the people who did this. I promise you.”

  She turned and faced him. “How can you promise something like that?”

  “You wanted to know what I do? What I really do? That’s what I do. I get people. And I promise you, I will get the people who did this.”

  CHAPTER 63

  Harvath’s clothes were filthy. There were bits and pieces of things on them that neither he nor Cordero wanted to identify.

  They spent twenty minutes looking for Sal, hoping they could grab some of the extra clothing he had in his vehicle. His cell phone was off and he wasn’t responding to any calls over the radio. They figured he was either with the head of the homicide unit, or more than likely debriefing with the FBI. It wasn’t a big deal. At least Cordero knew he was okay. His had been the first face she had seen after the explosion. In the chaos, he had helped her to her feet and then helped get her to a safe area. He had even found the EMT for her before she had sent him back to find Harvath.

  When they got to her car, Harvath asked her if she was okay to drive. She nodded.

  “I guess if you want to drop me at my hotel,” he said, “I’ll change into my old clothes there.”

  “I have clothes I think will fit you,” she replied. “That is, if you don’t think it’s too weird.”

  “No, I don’t think it would be too weird at all.”

  At any other time, Harvath would have turned her invitation into a joke about an offer to wear her clothing, but he knew that wasn’t what she was inviting him to do. It was an incredibly vulnerable moment for her, and he treated it and her with all the respect that it deserved.

  They drove through the Boston streets in silence. There wasn’t much to say. Not after what had just happened.

  It was a goofy analogy, but as they got closer and closer to her house, Cordero was like a knight letting one piece of armor fall away at a time. You could almost hear them clanking onto the asphalt and receding behind them as they drove.

  As each piece fell, she softened, and Harvath saw a different side of her, something he hadn’t even noticed over wine at dinner. The take-no-prisoners cop was sexy, but the woman beneath was even more so. It was like watching her turn into a completely different person. Which was exactly what was happening. She was shifting into becoming a mother, a daughter, and simply a person. The transformation was captivating. It was a depth he had never really appreciated in the women he had known before.

  They arrived at her home and she parked her car in the garage. It was an attractive three-flat made from heavy blocks of stone.

  “Is the whole place yours?” he asked.

  Cordero nodded. “The whole building’s mine. I rent out the ground floor unit, Marco and I are on the second floor, and then my parents have the top.”

  “Whose watching Marco now?”

  “I’m guessing it’s my mom. Dad has probably already gone to bed.”

  She checked the mail on her way in and then led Harvath up to the second floor. Just inside the front door, there was a closet with a small gun safe. Unloading her primary and backup weapons, she tucked them inside along with her cuffs, her badge, and her credentials.

  “You don’t keep something next to the bed?” he asked.

  “I absolutely do,” the detective replied. “Just not this one. Racking a twelve-gauge shotgun sounds a lot more intimidating than racking a Glock.”

  Harvath smiled. He liked her, more than just a little bit. The female detective smiled back and led him into the living room, where her mother was watching TV.

  She made the introductions in English and then spoke to her mother for a few moments in Portuguese. He had no idea what they were talking about but assumed, by the look on the older woman’s face, that she was giving her a quick rundown on everything that had happened. She seemed like the type who would try to spare her mother any unnecessary worry and had probably watered down a lot of what had transpired. At the end, both women had looked at Harvath and the mother had appeared impressed. He couldn’t tell why. He figured Cordero had told her how he had knocked her to the ground and thrown himself on top of her to protect her from the blast.

  The female detective showed him down the hallway to the guest room.

  “The guest bathroom is through that door,” she said. “There’s fresh towels in there. You can help yourself to anything you need. I’ll grab some clothes and leave them here on the bed for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Harvath.

  She lingered in the doorway. “You’re welcome.”

  He smiled again. “I saw that look on your mother’s face.”

  “What look?”

  “At the end, when you were telling her what happened with the explosion and everything, how I knocked you to the ground. You didn’t have to tell her that.”

  Cordero laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “She asked me where you grew up. I told her Southern California. She said you look like a surfer. I told her that was impossible.”

  “Why is that impossible?”

  “Because you never learned how to swim.”

  She was playing with him, and he liked it.

  “There’s a
neighborhood place around the corner that stays open late,” she added. “We can get a drink and something to eat there.”

  “What about Marco?” he asked.

  “My mother will stay. Now hurry up and take a shower. I’m getting hungry.”

  • • •

  Cordero really put the “guest” in guest bathroom. There were razors, mouthwash, combs, everything he could possibly need. After taking a quick shower and grabbing a shave, he stepped out of the bathroom to find she had left clothes on the bed for him as promised. For the most part, it all fit pretty well.

  After getting dressed, he threaded his holster through his belt, double-checked his weapon, and then put on the jacket she had picked for him. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He thought his pistol would print through the material, but it didn’t. All in all, she had done very well.

  He transferred the contents of his pockets into the clothes he was now wearing, exited the guestroom, and walked up to the front of the apartment.

  He made small talk with the detective’s mother until Lara emerged from her room wearing jeans, boots, and a very flattering top. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had gone light on the makeup, focusing mostly on a shade of lipstick that drew attention to her attractive, full lips.

  “It all fits,” she said. “You look good.”

  “Thank you. So do you.”

  “Are we ready to go?”

  “What about that hug for your son?”

  Cordero smiled. “I gave him one while you were in the shower, but I do want to kiss him goodbye. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “Sure. I’d love to.”

  Harvath followed her down the hall, past the guest room to a small room off the master bedroom. With enormous stuffed bears, airplanes suspended from the ceiling, and bright blue walls, it was the perfect little boy’s room. And asleep in his race car bed, complete with rails that made sure he didn’t fall out, was the perfect little boy.

  Marco had sandy blond hair and was tan like his mother. He had cheeks that probably got pinched, a lot. He looked so peaceful, so unaware of what had happened in the world tonight. It was the way it should be. Harvath was immediately taken by the little guy. He was even cuter than the photo Cordero had shown him.

  As she walked in to kiss her son, Harvath’s eyes scanned the shelves above the little boy’s bed. There were lots of great children’s books, a bunch of stuffed animals, several Fisher Price vehicles, and something that stopped Harvath’s heart cold.

  Cordero spotted the look on his face instantly. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Harvath leaned over the bed and grabbed the object off the shelf. “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s just an airplane. Why?”

  “Lara, where did this come from?” he demanded, as his other hand began to reach for his gun.

  “It was a gift from Sal. What’s this all about?”

  Placing the detailed display model of the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet back on the shelf, Harvath said. “I’ll explain in the car, but we need to move. Now.”

  CHAPTER 64

  They had argued the entire above-the-speed-limit drive to Sal Sabatini’s home. No matter how strenuously she defended him, though, Harvath knew she was entertaining the possibility. Over their years together, she had seen something, perhaps even several things that either she had chosen to ignore or that hadn’t made sense until this evening. The bottom line was that she was cooperating and that was the most important thing at this point. Coming to grips with it was something he could help her with later.

  As he stood in the backyard and peered through the kitchen window, he could hear the phone ringing inside. After dialing the number a second time and letting it ring, Harvath signaled for Cordero to put her phone away. Sal was home and waiting for this to happen, in which case Harvath regretted showing up without the SWAT team, or he’d already offed himself, or maybe was someplace else entirely, preparing to kill the remaining hostage. Having looked in the garage and finding it empty, he figured Sal was dead or someplace else.

  That said, he had fooled a lot of people for a long time and had been exceptionally well trained. For all Harvath knew, he could have parked his car around the corner to give anyone considering entry a false sense of security. Harvath’s mind was doing flips trying to sort out all the possibilities. There was only one way to approach this—prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

  With his weapon out and ready, he said to Cordero, “Good to go?”

  She nodded, and removed her picks from the lock. He hadn’t seen any signs that the house had an alarm system. That was the funny thing about cops. Some were extremely security conscious, while there were others who were incredibly lax. Sal Sabatini, though, was also nuts, so who knew what his deal was.

  Harvath counted in a whisper, backward. “Three, two, one.”

  On one, she turned the handle and quietly pushed the door open so Harvath could slip inside. The kitchen was thirty years out of date, but clean and smelled faintly of spices. There was a door to the basement and Harvath made a quick command decision. They’d save that for last.

  Grabbing one of the vinyl-backed, lime-green kitchen chairs, he tucked it under the knob and made sure the door was securely closed. If Sal or anyone else was hiding down there and tried to come back up, they were going to make quite a ruckus trying to get out.

  With Cordero covering his six o’clock, Harvath swept in and cleared the dining room, living room, and the front hall closet. Next were the bedrooms, which he hated almost as much as basements. The tiny bungalow-style dwelling only had two bedrooms, which were clear. There was no one in the closets or under the beds. The bathrooms were also clear, as was a tiny attic space above that they accessed from a set of pull-down stairs. That just left the basement. Lord how he hated basements.

  Weighing the odds that there might be a teachable, I-told-you-so-moment in the kitchen, he opened the freezer, but it was devoid of severed heads or any other body parts. Time to face the real music.

  Cordero put her hand on his arm this time. “I’ll do it,” she said.

  Harvath shook his head.

  “He might not shoot me, but if this is all true, he’ll definitely shoot you. I’m doing this, so get out of my way.”

  Removing the chair from underneath the doorknob, she flicked on the lights and waited. Nothing. She then did something Harvath hadn’t thought of. Noticing there were no risers, she lay down on her stomach and peered between the first and second stair. After that, she used her flashlight to illuminate the far corners.

  Satisfied, she stood up and went down to clear the basement. Two minutes later she was back in the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Everything must have taken place via that warehouse.”

  “I’ll bet he’s the one that tipped them to clear out before we hit it.”

  Cordero didn’t comment. She was still having trouble wrapping her mind around everything. She felt guilty and disloyal, doubly so by agreeing to accompany Harvath and break into her partner’s home.

  “Why don’t we see what else is here,” he said, heading back toward the living room, a small corner of which had been set up with a desk and appeared to function as the man’s home office.

  Sal was meticulous. There were records and receipts for everything, just nothing attaching him to anything illegal. While Harvath had hoped against hope that there would be something here, he wasn’t surprised. A detective would hopefully be much too smart to leave anything directly tying himself to a crime.

  Harvath powered on the computer and waited for it to boot up. Once it did, he was greeted with a password screen.

  “Try REDSOXFAN7,” Cordero said from behind him. “All caps. All one word. That’s what he uses at the office.”

  Harvath entered the password and was granted access.

  “It worked,” he said.

  “I’m sure after all these years he knows
mine, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “None of your business,” she replied.

  “All caps? All one word?” he said as he tried to pull up Sal Sabatini’s recent Web browsing history. There was nothing there. It had all been scrubbed. There was nothing in his email history, either, though he doubted that was how Sal conducted clandestine communications. He would have received better training than that.

  Harvath looked at his Word documents as well as his iTunes folders. It was all very pedestrian and boring, right down to the wallpaper on his desktop. It looked like Sal had chosen the factory default, which was a little odd, as Harvath didn’t know anyone who didn’t monkey around with their desktop at least a little bit to try to make it more personal.

  Going into the settings area, he opened the folder that held sample photos for the desktop. They were typical stock landscape shots. He then clicked over to the screen saver folder, and that’s when he saw it.

  Cordero was looking through some of Sal’s books on the other side of the living room.

  “You’re going to want to see this,” Harvath said. “Recognize this young lady?”

  There were a series of shots of a Goth-type woman posing around headstones at the Granary Burying Ground. “That’s Brittany Doyle. The one you paid four hundred dollars to for her bracelet cuff.”

  “From which we got a full and a partial print.”

  “But if those were Sal’s prints, why didn’t we get a hit on them?”

  “Because whatever prints the Boston PD has on file for Detective Sal Sabatini, they don’t belong to Sal Sabatini.”

  She was about to ask who was capable of making prints disappear from the Boston PD database when her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. Looking at the caller ID, she froze.

  “Who is it?” Harvath asked.

  Cordero held the phone up so Harvath could see. “It’s him. Sal.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Cordero activated the call and waited. She didn’t know what to say. How do you greet the man you’ve just learned is a cold-blooded killer? As it turned out, she didn’t have to say anything. He started the conversation himself.