Foreign Influence

by Brad Thor

  “Me?” he repeated. “How the hell could this possibly affect me?”

  “You’ll see. Trust me.”

  Vaughan rolled his eyes and peeled the lid off his coffee. Examining the logs from the dispatch computer in Nasiri’s cab, he had discovered a pattern. The Pakistani driver picked up fares in a certain part of the city at regular times of the day. As that area was nowhere near his apartment, there had to be another reason Nasiri favored it.

  On a hunch, Vaughan cross-referenced the pickups with Muslim prayer times and his hunch paid off. Nasiri was picking up fares after he had gone to pray. The only problem was that there were no official mosques within the entire eight-block radius they were looking at. The keyword, though, was official.

  With one phone call, Davidson was able to learn that there were unofficial, makeshift mosques and prayer rooms all across the city. Normally they were hiding right in plain sight. People just didn’t know what to look for, such as an abundance of taxicabs in front, papered-over windows, Arabic writing, or the word Masjid written somewhere on the facade.

  Once Vaughan and Davidson found out, it took them several hours, but they finally located what they believed to be Mohammed Nasiri’s mosque.

  Unlike American places of worship, Vaughan knew that it wasn’t unusual for mosques, especially those frequented by fundamentalists, to be used to plot attacks, store weapons, and give sanctuary to terrorists.

  “Anything else happen while I was gone?” he asked.

  Davidson pretended to consult his notebook. “Muammar Gaddafi dropped bin Laden and Zawahiri off for Sunday school, Jimmy Hoffa pulled up with a stack of union ballots in Arabic, and Amelia Earhart has been circling overhead with this really cool banner that says Islam is the bomb.”

  Vaughan shook his head. “Hey, don’t take it out on me. My wife’s not happy either and I’m sure it goes double for my kids. I normally cook pancakes on Sunday.”

  “How old are they?”

  “My wife would tell you her age is none of your business, but the kids are five and seven. How about you? Do you have children?”

  “No. Just two extremely high-strung miniature Dobermans who piss the carpet if I shut the refrigerator too loud.”

  “I hate tiny dogs.”

  “Do you mind?” asked Davidson, his head pulled back. “You’re talking about my kids here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Forget about it. I don’t like tiny dogs either. Can you picture what I look like walking those little apartment rats when the wife is under the weather?”

  Vaughan chuckled.

  “How about you?” continued Davidson. “Do you have any animals?”

  “We’ve got a lab mix.”

  “Mixed with what?”

  “Pit bull.”

  “Now that’s a man’s dog.”

  “That’s what Mrs. Vaughan tells me,” he said as he opened up a bag and offered Davidson a doughnut. “Sorry. They didn’t have any turkey or tofu sausage.”

  “I’ll let my wife know to add you to the wrongful death suit as well,” he said, reaching into the bag. “Which one has the Crestor sprinkles?”

  Vaughan was about to laud the health benefits of doughnuts when his eye caught movement across the street. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Me neither. They’re all glazed. There’s not a single chocolate one in the whole bag. Who goes for doughnuts and doesn’t bring back at least one chocolate?”

  “I’m not talking doughnuts. Check out the guy who just got out of that car across the street.”

  Davidson looked up as a fat man with a long gray beard and dark sunglasses was helped out of a car by two younger men. He looked to be in his late sixties and was dressed in traditional Muslim clothing with a length of fabric wrapped around his prayer cap.

  “Look at his hands,” said Vaughan.

  “Holy hand job, Batman. Where’d he get those back-scratchers?” exclaimed Davidson as he saw the man’s two stainless steel hooks.

  “Probably not from baking cupcakes.”

  “You can say that again. Don’t they cut off hands for stealing over there?”

  “The Saudis do, and sometimes the Taliban. It’s definitely an Islamic thing, but I’ve got a feeling this guy’s a different story,” said Vaughan.

  “Lose a hand and you end up becoming an instructor. Isn’t that what you said?”

  Vaughan nodded.

  “Judging by this guy’s qualifications, he must be teaching a Ph.D. course.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said the Organized Crime officer as he put the lid back on his coffee cup.

  “Maybe we should hand this over to the Joint Terrorism Task Force now.”

  “And tell them what? While looking for our hit-and-run cabbie we saw a man with hooks for hands? Everything from Nasiri’s apartment is poisonous tree.”

  Davidson knew he was right. “But if what we think is going on, actually is going on, we can’t just sit around and do nothing.”

  “I agree. We need to do something, but the last thing we can afford to do is to be spotted. If that happens, everyone will scatter and this thing will go deeper underground. We’ve got one thread we’re hanging on by and if we lose it, there’s no telling how badly this will end.”

  The Public Vehicles officer shook his head. “I wonder if this was why 9/11 didn’t get stopped.”

  “We’re not going to let another 9/11 happen. I don’t care what we have to do. But the one thing we can’t do is continue to sit here in your Bronco. We need a better surveillance vehicle.”

  “The PI company I moonlight for has one,” said Davidson as he pulled out his cell phone.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “Because I don’t like using it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It has a certain feature that’s a real pain in the ass.”

  “It gets hot and stuffy and begins to stink like every other surveillance vehicle?” asked Vaughan.

  “No, not at all. This thing is wall-to-wall luxury. It’s like riding in a limo.”

  “So then what’s the problem?”

  Davidson turned on the ignition and put the Bronco in gear. “You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 30

  GENEVA

  Harvath didn’t like flying blind. They should have had much more information before moving on Tsui. They didn’t even have a description. All Nicholas could tell him was that Tsui was Asian, possibly Taiwanese. That was it. He didn’t even have any idea how old he was, though based on their interactions, he believed he was young; mid to late twenties, tops.

  He had tracked Tsui’s signature to the servers at the University of Geneva. Once through the university’s security protections, he narrowed the location down to a lab in the Computer Sciences department.

  Tsui had been very careful in covering his tracks. If it wasn’t for the Trojan horse Nicholas had planted in his system, they never would have even gotten this close. There remained, though, one problem. “I can’t find a student or a faculty member anywhere in Geneva with the name Tsui,” said the Troll.

  “First things first,” replied Harvath as Peio drove the van across the river toward the university. “Are you sure everything terminates in this lab? It doesn’t get routed out again to Taipei, or Shanghai, or something like that, does it?”

  “No. That’s as far as it goes. Unless.”

  The Troll’s voice trailed off. “Unless what?” asked Harvath.

  “Unless it’s a digital dead drop.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning his traffic gets dumped onto a drive of some sort that gets physically collected and then rebroadcast from another location.”

  Harvath thought about that. “Either way there has to be a human being involved and that human being has to have access to this lab.”

  “Yes, as far as I can tell.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll start.”

  Many of the university’s buildings were southwest of
Geneva’s old town. Once they had located the building that housed the lab, Peio found a place to park. Harvath watched the foot traffic come and go and then exited the van and walked off campus. A couple of blocks away, he found what he was looking for.

  The bar was noisy and crowded with students who were not paying attention to their belongings. He was in and out in less than five minutes.

  He walked back with his backpack slung over his shoulder, and using the access card he had just liberated, entered the building Tsui’s data was being fed in and out of. He found a directory and located the lab he was looking for. Students came and went. No one paid him much attention.

  When he arrived at the lab, its door was locked. He tried his access card, but it didn’t work. After checking the hallway to make sure no one was coming, he removed a set of lockpick tools from his pack. Harvath preferred lockpick guns, but was able to get the door open in a respectable amount of time.

  Slipping inside, he closed the door quietly behind him. The room was nothing special and exactly what he had expected. Rows of tables with computers faced a long wall at the other end of the room complete with blackboards, a retractable projection screen, a lectern, and a desk. Off to the right-hand side was a pod of offices.

  Harvath made his way forward. There were at least fifty computers in the room, any of which could have been the one designated to send and receive Tsui’s message traffic.

  At the front of the room, Harvath saw that a message had been taped to each of the blackboards. It was written in French and English. It was dated one week ago and listed funeral arrangements for Professor Lars Jagland, as well as an announcement to his students that classes would resume with his teaching assistant on Monday. There was no explanation as to how the man had died, but Harvath had a pretty good feeling it wasn’t an accident.

  The door to the offices was unlocked and Harvath walked through. He studied the nameplates and decided to start with Jagland’s.

  His office was clean and sparsely decorated. Bookshelves and a small desk took up much of the room. There were no photos and no personal effects anywhere. On the wall near the window were two blank spots where artwork must have once hung.

  Harvath took out his cell phone and stepped behind the desk. Dialing Nicholas, he fired up Jagland’s computer.

  “What have you got?” asked the Troll.

  “There are about fifty desktop computers in the lab. There was also a notice about funeral services for a Professor Lars Jagland. Does that name ring a bell with you?”

  “No, but I’m running it now. While I do that, I want you to ping the e-mail address I gave you.”

  “It’s asking me for a password before it will allow me on the system,” replied Harvath.

  “Hold on. Let me see what I can do.”

  “There’s three other offices here. If you want me to check those computers, I’ll probably also need passwords for them. But something tells me, Jagland is our guy.”

  “Lars Jagland, Ph.D.,” replied the Troll, who had just pulled his obituary. “Norwegian citizen age fifty-eight. Expert in the field of computational complexity theory and professor of same at the University of Geneva, at least until he was killed in a car accident just over a week ago.”

  “Any family?”

  “The obit I’ve got here doesn’t recognize any.”

  Harvath was about to ask Nicholas to see if he could uncover an address for Jagland’s home when suddenly he heard a woman’s voice.

  “What are you doing in this office? Who are you?”

  “Let me call you back,” said Harvath as he disconnected the call and stood up. Smiling he offered his hand. “I’m sorry. The door was open.”

  “I asked you who you are,” the woman repeated. She spoke English, but with a Germanic accent of some sort. She was in her early thirties, about five-foot-four with brown hair and trendy glasses. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

  “My name’s Jeff Hemmings. Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Jagland’s teaching assistant. What are you doing in his office?”

  “We had a meeting scheduled,” said Harvath.

  The woman looked at him and her posture softened a bit. “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Dr. Jagland was killed in a car accident.”

  “When?”

  “The week before last.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “The funeral was yesterday,” she said. “I’m taking over until the university finds a replacement. Classes resume tomorrow.”

  Harvath stepped out from behind the desk. “And you came in to prepare and here I am.”

  “Yes. Here you are. What is it you were supposed to meet with Dr. Jagland about?”

  “I work for American Express. Dr. Jagland approached us about a project he thought our fraud-monitoring department would be interested in. We were supposed to meet here and go for dinner. He told me to dress casual.”

  The teaching assistant smiled. “You’re a liar.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re after Michael, aren’t you?”

  “Who’s Michael?” asked Harvath.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. But I have to tell you that anyone who knows him won’t be surprised.”

  “Why is that?” he said, curious as to where this was leading.

  “He’s nothing more than an overeducated hacker.”

  Bingo.

  “He’s incredibly rude as well,” the woman continued, “and to tell you the truth, I don’t know what Dr. Jagland saw in him. Love is blind, I guess.”

  “So they were—”

  The teaching assistant nodded. “Disgusting, isn’t it? Dr. Jagland was easily at least thirty years older than him. Why he couldn’t find a boyfriend his own age is beyond me. So what did Michael do?”

  “It’s delicate,” replied Harvath. “I’d rather not get into it.”

  “He finally went too far. I’m not surprised. Are you going to arrest him?”

  “Possibly. We have to find him first. Any idea where he might be?”

  “He didn’t even come to the funeral.”

  “That sounds strange.”

  “It’s typical, selfish Michael. Afterward, we all went out for a couple of drinks and went by the house to give him a piece of our mind.”

  “The house?” asked Harvath.

  “Dr. Jagland’s house. He and Michael lived together. But Michael wasn’t there. It looked like he hadn’t been there for a little bit.”

  “Any idea where he might be now?”

  The teaching assistant thought for a moment and then said, “The chalet, I guess.”

  “Do you have an address you can give me?”

  The woman pulled out her iPhone and began going through her folders. “We celebrated Dr. Jagland’s birthday there over the winter. Here’s a picture of the place,” she said, holding up her phone so Harvath could see it. “Cute, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he agreed.

  “Here’s a picture of Michael too.”

  Harvath looked at him and he was exactly as Nicholas had so poorly described. “If I give you my e-mail, can you send those pictures to me?”

  “As long as you promise you won’t tell Michael I gave them to you.”

  “You don’t need to worry. Michael and I have a lot of other things we need to discuss.”

  “Good,” said the assistant with a laugh. “I really hope he gets what’s coming to him.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Lars Jagland’s chalet was located in a small village in the mountains two hours outside of Geneva.

  Harvath and Peio had picked up Nicholas, who insisted on bringing Argos and Draco along. It was turning into a circus, but Harvath grudgingly agreed.

  The fact that Tsui had set Nicholas up to take the fall for the attack in Rome had bothered him from the beginning. It didn’t make sense. Why not let the terrorists take credit for the operation? It was obviously meant to be a distractio
n, but from what? Another attack? Was it meant to somehow help the terrorists pull off their Paris operation by siphoning away investigative resources? Or, was there another reason entirely?

  Harvath suspected it might be a bit of both. The one thing he knew was that their best and only lead was Tony Tsui. He not only knew about the attack in Rome, he most likely knew about the attack in Paris and whatever else the terrorists had planned. As far as Harvath was concerned, he was the key to everything; most importantly, stopping any further attacks.

  Based on satellite imagery Nicholas had downloaded, Harvath identified a secluded vantage point from which they could observe the chalet as they planned their next move.

  While the teaching assistant blamed selfishness for the fact that Tsui, Michael, or whatever his name was, missed Jagland’s funeral, Harvath had another theory. The man had gone to ground. The question, though, was why? Harvath thought he might have a good idea.

  Somehow, somewhere, Tsui had screwed up and Jagland had found out about it. Maybe he had even threatened to expose Tsui. Whatever the case, Tsui was dangerous. He had already tried to have Nicholas killed, and now Jagland was dead. This was not someone that should be underestimated no matter how mild mannered he looked in the pictures the teaching assistant had forwarded. Tsui was a killer.

  “There’s no way you’ll get close enough without him seeing you coming,” said Peio as he handed the binoculars back to Harvath. “We’ll have to wait until dark.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” said Nicholas. “I want to go in now.”

  “You don’t get a vote,” replied Harvath.

  “The hell I don’t. Who’s financing this operation? Who found Tsui?”

  “Nicholas,” scolded Peio.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned and am going to sin a lot more before the night is through, so get used to it.”

  “I want you to promise me something,” began the priest.

  Nicholas held up his hand. “No. No promises.”

  Peio looked at Harvath, but Harvath simply raised the binoculars to his eyes and went back to surveilling the chalet. The priest didn’t belong here. He knew better than most what was going to happen once they got hold of Tsui. If he cooperated, things would be relatively easy for him. But if he refused to cooperate, it would get ugly fast. Peio wasn’t toeing the edge of some imaginary line, he had crossed it. He had feet firmly planted in two different worlds and needed to decide which side he wanted to be on.