Takedown

by Brad Thor

  “Fine, but if we still don’t hear anything from New York?”

  “Then we’ll dig a little deeper. But for now, I want you focused on helping the people here who need it the most. I’ve been to Transcon and Geneva Diamond. Believe me, those folks know how to handle themselves.”

  Thirty-Six

  NEW YORK CITY

  Navigating through the traffic as best he could, Fiore kept the Secret Service Command Center apprised of their status, while Marcy fed him updates from the backseat. The bottom line was that their progress was horrible and their patient was getting worse.

  With the FDR completely impassable, Tim was forced onto side streets, most of which were jammed.

  At 7th Street near Tompkins Square, Marcy yelled, “Tim, she’s crashing! We’re losing her!”

  Rapidly scrolling through the iQue’s options, Tim found what he was looking for. “I’m going to cut through this park. Hold on…”

  Jumping the curb at Avenue B, Fiore raced through Tompkins Square and came out again at 10th Street and Avenue A. He barreled through a police barricade at First Avenue and, after hanging a tire-screaming right turn, pinned the accelerator and raced for Beth Israel Hospital. His only hope was that they’d be able to make it there in time.

  Thirty-Seven

  The lone NYPD officer standing guard outside the battered Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange storefront was relieved when Harvath appeared and flashed his DHS credentials. The fact that he had pulled up on a dirt bike along with four other rather hard-looking individuals didn’t faze him a bit, not with everything else that had already happened that afternoon.

  The officer had been waiting for backup since stumbling onto the scene forty-five minutes earlier while en route to another location. With every pair of professionally trained hands in the city needed to help search for survivors in the rubble of the bridge and tunnel bombings, random lootings weren’t on the patrolman’s priority list. But when a group of 47th Street merchants flagged him down and told him what had happened, the officer immediately changed his mind.

  After moving onlookers away from the front of the store, he ventured a few feet inside. What he saw had caused him to remain there until help arrived. He was just about to reluctantly abandon the post, when Harvath showed. Now, he was more than happy to turn things over to someone with more authority and greater jurisdiction. In all his years on the job, nothing had prepared the patrolman for the carnage he’d seen inside.

  Now it was Harvath’s turn. With Bob Herrington and the rest of the team in tow, they picked their way around the dead bodies and brass shell casings at the front of the store and headed toward the vault-style door at the back.

  The door was half open and as they approached it, Tracy Hastings ordered the team to stop.

  “What’s up?” said Harvath.

  Hastings pointed to the pockmarks on the walls and ceiling around the frame and replied, “Shrapnel. We can’t touch that door until we’re sure it’s not rigged.”

  Harvath thought she was being a little too cautious, until Herrington said, “Trust her. She knows what she’s doing.”

  “All right,” he responded, stepping aside to let her get a better look at it. “But make it quick.”

  Once Hastings was convinced it was safe, she waved the rest of the team forward.

  Inside, they found a high-tech security control room that had been blown apart by what Hastings claimed was probably one or more fragmentation grenades. Lying on the floor were the badly mangled bodies of three men in tactical vests with modified M16s lying nearby.

  “These guys are jarheads,” remarked Morgan as he rolled one of the bodies over.

  “Plenty of guys in the security industry cut their hair too short,” said Cates. “That doesn’t make them marines.”

  Morgan ignored the remark and pointed at the men’s feet. “The Marines only use the best gear, and these guys are all wearing Quantico Desert Boots.”

  While Harvath preferred Original S.W.A.T. boots, Paul Morgan did have a point. Many of the marines he’d known were particularly fond of Quantico Boots, but even with the M16s, there still wasn’t enough evidence to qualify the bodies as being marines.

  As if reading his mind, Morgan slid a plate out of one of their tactical vests, wrapped on it with his knuckles and said, “U.S. military–issue Interceptor body armor. Harder than Kevlar and can stop anything up to a 7.62-millimeter round.”

  Cates whistled and said, “These guys certainly were prepared.”

  “But for what?” replied Harvath, more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. “Whoever took these marines out must have been very good. Let’s finish clearing these rooms.”

  Bob and the rest of the team relieved the marines of their SIG Sauer P228 pistols, as well as their machine guns and as many loaded magazines as they could carry, before sweeping the balance of the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange. As they did, Harvath tried to figure out what the hell the operation’s real function was. In the heart of New York City, no jewelry store—no matter how busy or how well connected its owners—was going to be granted the protection of three machine-gun-toting U.S. marines.

  As they went from room to room, it became apparent that the operation was completely paperless. Whatever secret it held had either been taken to the grave when its personnel had been raked with gunfire, had been stolen by the terrorists, or was locked up in its workstations and racks and racks of servers.

  Exercising the only other option left available to him, Harvath collected whatever photo identification he could from each of the fifteen corpses, including the three U.S. servicemen whose IDs listed them in fact as active-duty marines.

  He hoped Gary would be able to make some sense out of it, because at this moment, Harvath had absolutely no idea what or who they were dealing with.

  Thirty-Eight

  Less than halfway through their list of locations, Abdul Ali considered himself lucky that they’d only lost one of the Chechen soldiers. It was a treacherous but necessary path they’d been forced to follow. The Troll had explained that each location would be more difficult to assault than the last, and that was why Ali and his team were taking them in ascending order of difficulty. There was no sense starting with the most difficult location and working their way backward only to find that Mohammed bin Mohammed was being held at one of the less fortified sites. It seemed reasonable and there was a consolation, however small, that with each location they scratched off their list, Abdul Ali was one step closer to recovering Mohammed.

  Whether the man was waiting inside this location or the next made no difference to the Chechens. Unbeknownst to Ali, the Troll was paying them on a per-assault basis, and so it was in their financial interest that the attacks continue until the very bloody end.

  What Ali did know was that the Troll had been one hundred percent correct about the American government’s penchant for secrecy—especially when it came to the deep-cover operations on their list. Both the left and the right hands purposefully strove to keep each other in the dark and thereby created a considerably uncommunicative culture. It would take days to sort out what had happened to the various New York undercover operations, and by then, Allah willing, Abdul Ali and Mohammed bin Mohammed would be long gone.

  As the team approached its next objective, Ali was supremely confident that its occupants had no idea they were coming. He girded himself with the hope that this might be the last assault they would have to conduct.

  The vents for the Lincoln Tunnel vent shaft were located at the West Midtown Ferry Terminal, also known as Pier 79, on Manhattan’s West Side. As Abdul Ali and his Chechen mercenaries arrived, the vent shaft towers were still belching plumes of acrid black smoke high into the air from the hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles burning in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.

  Emergency personnel were everywhere as they tried to use the ventilation shafts to evacuate survivors. With over forty million vehicles passing through the tunnel each year, it was
one of the busiest in the world and a perfect target. Ali quietly marveled at the chaos. Allah had indeed blessed their undertaking.

  Attached to the north ventilation tower was a New York Waterway bus garage, and Ali instructed Sacha to park just past it alongside two large dumpsters. The men readied their weapons and then donned their gas masks and black tactical helmets. In practiced unison, they exited the vehicles and raced into the nearly empty garage accompanied by a very special Trojan horse.

  Most of the bus staff had raced next door to try to help extricate survivors from the tunnel and only a handful remained behind. They were quickly dispatched by three of the Chechens who then dragged their bodies to the rear of the garage, where they could be hidden away out of sight.

  The secondary stairwell secreted within the north ventilation tower had been constructed to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find without proper help. Once it was located, the team readied its secret weapon and sent “Ivan” hobbling down the stairs.

  Via a fiber-optic camera mounted inside the animal’s collar, Ali and his Chechen handler watched as the small yet sturdy border collie with its brightly colored search-and-rescue vest, limped forward toward a large steel door. Three feet away, the handler depressed a button on his remote, which caused the dog’s collar to beep twice in quick succession. Immediately, the dog began whimpering and laid itself down.

  For a moment, it appeared that their tactic was not going to work. Then the groan of metal on metal resounded through the corridor and up the stairwell as the steel door began to slowly open. Two men outfitted similarly to the marines at the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange appeared, and seeing no one else in the corridor, shouldered their weapons and cautiously approached the injured dog, wondering how it had made its way down there. They assumed it must have been part of the search-and-rescue efforts in the tunnel and had somehow lost its way.

  What the marines should have been asking themselves was where the animal’s handler was.

  Once the marines were close enough, Ivan received another cue, got up and limped inside the facility.

  Having seen enough from Ivan’s collar-mounted camera, Ali nodded to the handler, who then signaled the rest of the team to get ready. The dog was then sent its final cue.

  Ivan bit down on a tab at his right shoulder and pulled it forward, causing the heavy vest packed with plastique and ball bearings to activate and fall to the ground. The speedy dog was halfway to the stairs before anyone inside knew what had happened.

  With the deafening roar of the explosion still ringing in the ears of those not instantly killed by the detonation, Abdul Ali and his men rushed inside with their weapons blazing. They plowed a bloody trail through the odd submarine-like structure as they searched for the man al-Qaeda was willing to risk anything to recover.

  But once again, it was all in vain. Not only was Mohammed bin Mohammed nowhere to be found, there was no sign he had ever been there to begin with.

  When they were safely inside the Tahoes and back out into the maddening traffic, Abdul Ali quietly went over the plan for taking down their next target. From everything he had read, this one was going to be their most difficult yet, and for the first time since they had started, he questioned his team’s chances for success.

  Thirty-Nine

  SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

  The Troll had gone through only a fraction of the information from the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange when the Lincoln Tunnel data began to stream in. It was time for another payment to Sacha’s account. The Chechen was easily worth his enormous weight in gold—especially when it was someone else’s. The fact that Abdul Ali had no idea what his al-Qaeda money was really buying made the transaction even more delicious for the Troll.

  It could conceivably take a lifetime to sift through all of the information now gorging his servers. Each piece on its own had a certain amount of value, but the skill—the art, if you will—was in knowing how to join together just the right tidbits to create a true masterpiece. That was where the Troll excelled in his profession. It was quite amazing, especially for someone whose prospects in life had been seen as so negligible that even his parents had given up on him early in life.

  When it became obvious the Troll was not going to grow any further, his godless Georgian parents made no attempt to find a suitable loving home for their son, nor did they try to find even a half-decent orphanage. Instead, they abandoned the boy, selling him as if he were chattel to a thriving brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There, the boy was starved, beaten, and made to perform unutterable sex acts that would have shamed even the Marquis de Sade himself.

  It was there that the Troll learned the true value of information. The loose-lipped pillow talk of the powerful clients proved a goldmine once he had learned what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.

  The whores, most of them life’s castoffs as well, felt a kinship with the dwarf and treated him well. In fact, they became the only family he ever knew, and he repaid that kindness by one day buying their freedom. Those who had been unkind to him were evicted to fend for themselves, a fate made even more unbearable when the Troll had the madam and her husband tortured and then killed for the inhuman cruelty he had spent years suffering at their hands.

  He had indeed come a long way, and once his servers were full from this transaction, the world could go to hell, as far as he was concerned. The data he was now hoarding was the ultimate annuity. With the money he stood to make, he could do and buy anything he wanted.

  As the Troll scanned the data coming in, he enjoyed a bouchée of escargots and morel mushrooms followed by a magret of Duck Martiniquaise with caramelized leg confit, all complemented by an exquisite bottle of Château Quercy St. Emilion Bordeaux from his cellar. Though many, many dots would need to be connected, if the data flow stopped right at this moment, the Troll couldn’t have been happier. The information being stored on his servers represented thousands upon thousands of man-hours, which he would never have to expend, but more importantly would never have to pay for.

  Riding the heady wave of windfall, the Troll decided a little semi-retirement party was in order. There would be Kobe beef for Argus and Drako, and for himself, three of the most exquisite girls a certain mariscala he knew in Madrid would be more than happy to provide.

  After e-mailing a request for the woman’s most recent catalog, the Troll placed an order for hampers full of the most outrageous delicacies London’s Fortnum & Mason had to offer—caviar, aged cheeses, foie gras, charcuterie, pies, chocolate, and chutneys. It was going to be the party to end all parties. The Georgian castoff had hit the ultimate jackpot.

  Forty

  Except for the IDs Harvath had recovered from Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange, the scene had been a complete bust. In fact it had raised more questions than it had answered, which left them with only one remaining lead—the Upper West Side location.

  Since they were not that far from where Harvath had parked, they swung by to grab his bug-out bag. As only soldiers could, Cates, Hastings, and Morgan marveled at Harvath’s custom-designed, high-end Tactical Electronics pack, as well as the wide variety of goodies it held.

  Dumping it out in the rear cargo area, Harvath began repacking it with just the essentials he thought he might need, only to have Bob say several times, “You won’t need that. Nope, that either.”

  Finally, with Bob’s seal of approval the bag was packed and Harvath changed out of his jeans and polo shirt into a pair of 5.11 Tactical TDU trousers, an Under Armour shirt, a Blackhawk tactical vest, and his Original S.W.A.T. desert boots. He was now ready for anything, or so he hoped.

  The team jumped back on their motorbikes, raced out of the garage, and headed north toward 84th Street.

  Inside the Transcon building, the carnage was almost identical to Geneva Diamond. The assailants had apparently entered via two breaching points—a front and side door. The men and women who worked inside were dressed in business attire
and possessed a fair amount of weaponry. The weapons, though, had done them little good. Their dead bodies were sprawled across the floors or slumped over desks that were slick with blood, while the walls were strike-pointed with multiple-caliber bullet holes.

  “Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Cates as he surveyed the damage. “Who the hell is doing this?”

  “More importantly, why are they doing this?” asked Hastings.

  Paul Morgan looked at Harvath and asked, “What’s the connection between these two places?”

  Harvath was asking himself the same question, but so far he wasn’t coming up with any answers. “Let’s split up and take a look around. If you find anything out of the ordinary, let me know.”

  “Out of the ordinary?” replied Cates as he looked around. “What’s ordinary at this point? Space aliens?”

  “You know what he’s talking about,” said Herrington. “We’re all equally in the dark here.”

  Cates didn’t buy it. He had a feeling Harvath knew more than he was letting on, but he snapped Herrington a half-assed salute and walked down the hallway.

  “What do you think?” asked Bob, once the rest of the team had dispersed.

  Harvath took a slow glance around the room, the smell of blood and cordite tap-dancing a little too heavily on his already uneasy stomach. “I don’t know what to think,” he responded. “Obviously, these places were fronts for something, but what? And why are the terrorists so interested in them? After a successful series of attacks on major New York targets, why hang around to do this?” Harvath swept his arm in a wide arc, taking in the devastation around them. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s small-time, compared to what they’ve already accomplished.”