Foreign Influence

by Brad Thor

  “You are much more intelligent than I ever gave you credit for,” said the Troll as he came closer. “Here I thought Tsui was some little hacker operating out of his parents’ basement somewhere. I was obviously very wrong. I shouldn’t have let my prejudice get the better of me.”

  Sterk turned her eyes away.

  “Why so shy, my dear? Don’t you want to see what you have accomplished? Granted, as friends remind me, I wasn’t very pretty to begin with, but I’m downright hideous now, wouldn’t you agree?”

  The woman who had built a burgeoning intelligence dynasty as Tony Tsui remained silent.

  “Own it!” the Troll screamed. “Look at me and own what you have done!”

  Sterk looked up at him and as she did a tear rolled down her left cheek.

  “Oh that’s good,” said Nicholas. “That’s very, very good.”

  With a calm and perfectly placid expression, he drew back his small arm and struck her across the side of the head with the wrench he had removed from the van’s emergency toolkit. Harvath, who was standing behind Sterk, looked at Nicholas and drew a hash mark on the dusty support column she was tethered to.

  “My, what a horrible gash,” said Nicholas as he studied the wound he had inflicted upon her.

  Sterk had never had any of the bones in her face broken, but she was fairly certain that her cheekbone had just been shattered. “You like to hit women. You’re pathetic.”

  The Troll wound up and hit her again, this time on the other side. Sterk cried out from the intensity of the pain.

  Harvath ticked off another hash mark on the column.

  “You’ve been a very, very bad girl, Adda,” said Nicholas as he hit her again.

  Harvath put yet another hash mark on the board and was fairly certain the little man was going to start popping stitches.

  Blood was rolling freely down both sides of her face. “I hope the woman I sent was a good lay, because she was obviously a terrible assassin.”

  Nicholas was about to hit Sterk again, but he stopped. Michael Lee had been right about her; about both her asthma and her pride.

  He dropped the wrench, and without a hint of irony, smiled and said, “Now we can speak freely.”

  “If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “get it over with.”

  Nicholas got a considerably good laugh out of that. “Kill you? You’re worth much more to me alive than dead.”

  Sterk looked at him.

  “I have big plans for you. First I’m going to cut out your tongue and seal your rather bland face inside an iron mask. Then I’m going to sell you to an unusually perverse Saudi prince who will chain you outside his tent in the middle of the desert, naked. Between the Arabs and the camels, you’re going to be the belle of the Bedouin ball.”

  “And the award for S&M fiction goes to the man with the world’s smallest penis,” said Sterk.

  Nicholas lunged for his wrench and struck the woman again. This time he tore open a wound along her forehead.

  Harvath tallied his fourth hash mark. Nicholas would be allowed only one more swipe at her before he stepped in.

  The Troll set the wrench down, quietly this time. “Do you know that man across from you?”

  The woman didn’t reply.

  “Of course you do. That’s Michael Lee,” Nicholas continued. “He’s the man you set up to take the fall as Tony Tsui if the heat ever got too close to you.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Do I need to pick the wrench back up, Adda? Or perhaps you would like to meet my dogs?” Nicholas snapped his fingers and the dogs began growling. “In fact, I’m going to even go so far as to suggest that the untimely demise of Lars Jagland wasn’t an accident, but that he somehow stumbled on to what you were up to and you killed him.”

  To frighten the woman, Lee had been bound to the other column facing her. And in order to make him look like a real hostage, which in part he was, and also to make sure he didn’t say anything he shouldn’t, Harvath had placed a piece of duct tape across his mouth. The man now struggled against it. His eyes bulged as he cursed her and yelled from behind the tape.

  “I agree with you. I think Lars was probably murdered, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said the Troll. “I think he discovered what you were up to and you killed him. Didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I have to hand it to you. The Tsui persona was exceptional. You not only had me fooled, but you covered your tracks quite well. And the icing on the cake was positioning Michael Lee to take the fall if things ever got bad. Brava.”

  “I didn’t kill Lars,” Sterk insisted.

  “But you’re not denying you set up Michael, are you?”

  Sterk said nothing.

  “I have no reason to believe anything you say. You tried to have me killed. What’s one more?”

  Sterk remained silent.

  “You always have a fallback, don’t you?” said Nicholas. “When the assassin you sent after me failed, you implicated me in the bombings in Rome. What about Paris? Are my fingerprints going to surface there too?”

  At that moment, something in the woman’s face shifted.

  Nicholas motioned his dogs over. “You really have been a very, very bad girl.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Sterk demanded.

  “That depends on how you answer my questions.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Is there another assassin looking for me?” asked Nicholas.

  Sterk didn’t respond, and Nicholas bent down and picked up the wrench again.

  “No,” she responded.

  “None at all?”

  “I’m sure you have plenty of enemies, but when Leveque’s woman in Spain failed to return, I assumed you had killed her and had gone deeper to ground.”

  “So you moved to plan B: implicating me.”

  The woman shook her head. “Alive or dead, you were always going to be implicated.”

  “Why? Why implicate me?”

  “My employers wanted a diversion.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Someone I fear much more than you.”

  Nicholas tapped the head of the wrench in his tiny palm. “I’ll give you one more chance.”

  Sterk shook her head.

  Nicholas brought back his tiny arm and swung.

  The wrench met its target and blood began to pour from a tear behind the woman’s ear.

  Harvath tallied his fifth and final hash mark on the column and stepped out from behind her. It was time for him to take over. Producing a roll of duct tape, he tore off a piece and placed it across her mouth. He then put the bag back over her head as Nicholas said to Sterk, “Oh my. Things are about to get very bad for you indeed.”

  Harvath cut the rope binding her wrists to the support column, stripped the sheet from her naked body, and carried her back to the van. He had no idea what had triggered the asthma attack the first time. He suspected it was stress, though it could have been something else. Either way, he was determined to re-create the circumstances as closely as possible to bring about another one.

  He tied her back down in the vehicle exactly as he had before and closed the door. From the front seat, he grabbed two water bottles and then searched the warehouse until he found a suitable length of hose.

  The good thing about gasoline was that it was so pungent Harvath wouldn’t need much for what he had planned.

  He made a big deal of banging around the rear of the van. He opened one of the water bottles and poured out some of the water. He then carefully siphoned a small amount of gasoline out of the van and into the bottle.

  With Nicholas in tow, he stepped back around to the other side and opened the sliding door. He studied Sterk. Her breathing was rapid, as it should be for anyone in her situation. She was frightened. She wasn’t yet, though, suffering from another attack.

  “You can’t do this,” said the Troll
as Harvath stepped into the van. “What if you don’t just burn her, but you end up killing her?”

  There was a long list of harsh interrogation techniques he could have tried on Sterk—sleep deprivation, stress postures, sensory bombardment, or even extreme cold—but he didn’t have the time. Frankly, after the beating the woman had taken from Nicholas, he was surprised she hadn’t already broken. She was a much tougher character than he had expected. He had no idea if she had undergone training to resist hostile interrogation or if she was just one tough woman. It didn’t matter. Everyone broke eventually, the key lay in discovering exactly how to break them and if time was of the essence, as it was here, how to do it as quickly as possible. Whether Adda Sterk was left physically or psychologically wounded by the ordeal was of no concern to Harvath. She held all the cards and could end the experience at any point she wanted.

  The more one knew about one’s subject, the better equipped one was to carry out a successful interrogation. Considering the fact that up until several hours ago they had believed Adda Sterk was a young male hacker of Asian descent by the name of Tony Tsui, it was plain they didn’t have much to go on. But they did have one thing.

  On the scale of harsh interrogation methods, one of the stronger tactics that can be employed is the exploitation of a prisoner’s phobias. The fact that Sterk was asthmatic left no question in Harvath’s mind that she harbored a fear that most asthmatics shared, asphyxia.

  Opening the bottle filled with the gas-water mixture, he poured the contents over the woman’s hood. Panic quickly overtook her as she began writhing and struggling against her restraints.

  He followed by pouring the second bottle of water over the rest of her body. Her nostrils were so filled with the scent of gasoline, she would assume that she was now covered with it from head to toe. The gas seeping into her hood had probably found its way into the open wounds around her face and head.

  Harvath didn’t have to wait long. Whether there was some trigger like dog hair on the floor of the van, or if it was the stress of believing she was about to be set ablaze, Sterk was soon consumed by another intense asthma attack.

  Lifting her from the van, he carried her several feet away and set her on the warehouse floor. He pulled the hood from her head and tore the tape from her mouth. He pulled out her inhaler and showed it to her. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

  Gasping for air, Sterk nodded feverishly.

  Harvath shook the inhaler, placed it in her mouth, and administered the medication.

  He waited until her breathing became less labored and then dragged her back to the support column. Now it was time to see if she would cooperate or not. He studied her face as he asked his first question. “When I met you in Jagland’s office, why did you give up Michael Lee?”

  The woman coughed repeatedly before answering. “Because I didn’t need him anymore.”

  “But he was your cover.”

  “It didn’t matter. That cover became useless when Lars was killed.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” said Harvath.

  “I knew that someday, someone might come looking for me. That was why I had created the whole Tsui persona. It was a layer of protection. I set it up so that everything traced back to Lars and from him to Michael. But when Lars was killed, my backstop was gone.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I don’t know. The police say he died in a car accident.”

  “You don’t believe that. I can tell by looking at your face.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “Could what happened to Lars have been an accident? Possibly. But I’m not certain. That’s why I was waiting to see what happened to Michael.”

  “You mean you were waiting to see if he would be killed as well?” asked Nicholas.

  Lee shouted at the woman again from behind the duct tape covering his mouth. He pulled against his restraints and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Sterk’s, that if he managed to break free, he would kill her.

  “That’s why you gave him up to me,” replied Harvath. “You wanted to see if I had been sent to finish off Tony Tsui.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then, when I thought it was safe, I would have started over under a new persona.”

  The woman was absolutely mercenary, but as far as Harvath could tell, she was telling the truth. “So who killed Jagland?” he asked.

  Sterk looked down at the floor and refused to answer.

  “I want to make something perfectly clear,” said Harvath. “Right now, the only person in this entire world you should fear is me. If I even suspect you’re holding out on me, I’m going to light you on fire. I will let you burn and then I will put the fire out before it kills you. The pain will be worse than anything you have ever experienced. The heat will sear your lungs and you’re going to suffer from smoke inhalation. It’s going to be severe.

  “I’ll repeat this process until you’re dead or you give me what I want. Which will it be?”

  “My life’s worth nothing if I survive. They’ll find me and they’ll kill me just like they did Lars, and I’m certain it’ll be in a manner much worse than anything you can possibly devise.”

  “Who are they?”

  Sterk didn’t respond.

  Harvath turned to Nicholas, “See if there are any matches in the van. If there aren’t, heat the cigarette lighter.”

  The Troll nodded and headed for the van.

  Sterk looked at him. Both sides of her face were beginning to swell. “Just kill me and get it over with.”

  “You don’t have to die.”

  “I’m dead anyway.”

  “We can protect you.”

  “You don’t even know what you’d be protecting me against. These people have resources beyond your imagination.”

  “So do I,” he replied.

  The woman laughed and shook her head.

  “What if we gave them Tony Tsui?”

  From the other support column, Lee’s eyes bulged.

  “How would you do that?”

  “Never mind,” said Harvath. “What if we can give them Tsui, or at least make it look like Tsui isn’t someone for them to worry about anymore?”

  “These are not stupid people. They can’t be easily fooled.”

  “I wouldn’t expect them to be.”

  Nicholas returned with the van’s cigarette lighter and held it out to Harvath. “Let’s burn the witch.”

  Harvath took it and looked at Sterk. “It’s your call, Adda.”

  The woman studied the faces of her two captors and thought about her options. After several moments she said, “I’ll cooperate, but on one condition.”

  “You’re trying to negotiate? You’ve got to be kidding me,” stammered the Troll.

  “What do you want?” Harvath demanded.

  Sterk focused her gaze on him and replied, “A little added insurance.”

  CHAPTER 35

  CHICAGO

  John Vaughan sat in a plush leather captain’s chair inside the most comfortable surveillance vehicle he had ever seen and wondered what Paul Davidson’s problem was.

  Josh Levy, the owner of Surety Private Investigations, Ltd., and Davidson’s boss when he was moonlighting as a PI, couldn’t have been more personable, polite, or professional if he had tried. He was a handsome, well-dressed man in his late fifties and very experienced in private investigative work. There was no question in Vaughan’s mind that Levy had easily spent over a hundred thousand dollars on his surveillance van. It really was decked out like a limo inside and the electronic equipment rivaled anything the CPD or the FBI owned. Unless this guy had a DVD carousel loaded with animal porn, Vaughan couldn’t find anything even remotely questionable about him. It was beyond him why Davidson so disliked doing surveillance with his boss.

  “Is the temperature okay for you?” asked Levy. “There’s plenty of juice left in the batteries to run the air exchangers.�
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  As the man bent down to flip a switch, Davidson looked at Vaughan and rolled his eyes.

  “The air’s real good, Josh. Thank you,” said Vaughan, ignoring Davidson.

  Levy righted himself, leaned over, flipped open a mini-fridge and pulled out a cup of yogurt. Davidson tapped Vaughan on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

  “Anybody want one?” asked Levy.

  “No thanks, Josh,” responded Davidson. “We’re all good.”

  Vaughan watched as Levy peeled back the lid and licked the yogurt from the top. When he was done, he placed the lid on the narrow counter beneath the surveillance equipment and went to work folding it into eighths, before dropping it into a Ziplocked garbage bag hanging from the wall.

  While he was fishing a spoon from a drawer near the fridge, Davidson tapped Vaughan again and rolled his eyes. The Organized Crime cop looked back at him and shrugged. He had no idea what Davidson’s problem was.

  Levy took a bite of his yogurt and then picked up the copy of Mohammed Nasiri’s picture. “So this is our guy, but we don’t know if he’s inside the mosque. Correct?”

  “That’s right,” said Vaughan. “Based on the calls we’ve made, he hasn’t gotten on any airplanes out of town.”

  “But he could have hopped on a bus, a train, or borrowed a car and left.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Levy took another bite of yogurt. This time, he licked both sides of the spoon afterward. “Why do you think he’s inside?”

  Vaughan could feel Davidson’s glance, begging him to notice how Levy was licking the spoon, and he tried to ignore it. “We saw a lot of this stuff in Iraq. They know we won’t come into a mosque unless we’ve got a mountain of overwhelming evidence. Especially in the U.S., it’s political suicide. The mosque is a sanctuary for these guys. We’d never in a million years think of doing in a church or a synagogue what they do in their mosques.”

  “Nor would any priest or rabbi put up with it,” added Davidson. “I can’t imagine what my priest would say if I told him, ‘Father, we’re going to go shoot up a girls’ school, plant a few roadside bombs, and be back for lunch. Don’t let anyone into the room downstairs where we keep all of the rifles and grenade launchers, okay?’”