Code of Conduct

by Brad Thor

  The President, though, was in the hospital, and a tsunami was about to hit the beach. There was only one course of action Harvath could take.

  CHAPTER 45

  * * *

  CLIFTON FARM

  Pierre Damien stood at the edge of the pool in all of his naked glory.

  “Very handsome,” Helena stated. “Can you turn for the judges, please? Let’s see what fills out the back of those jeans.”

  Smiling, he dove into the illuminated water with a powerful splash.

  His muscular arms rose like shark’s fins as he raced toward the glorious, naked woman at the other end.

  Stroke after stroke, he pulled himself toward her, getting more aroused the closer he came. He couldn’t wait to ravish her.

  She was lounging in the shallow end, and the water barely covered her breasts. Their time together was growing short. He was amazing, and she was going to miss him, but she vowed to think happy thoughts every time she reflected upon her bank balance.

  Coming to a stop just in front of her, he stood.

  For all of the crappy assignments the Mossad had ever given her, at least this last one had been halfway decent.

  Reaching for him, she pulled him close and smiled. Pierre was in rare form. He hadn’t had much to drink, yet. He was still tipsy from lunch, but not much. He wanted to make love, and they would. Probably twice.

  He had been good to her, but he was also a monster. What he had planned for mankind was beyond horrible. She was beyond caring, though. She had lost that ability a long time ago. Life was cruel. If it ever gave you an opportunity, you took it. You made something of it or you didn’t.

  Once she had pieced together the extent of Damien’s plans, she had made a personal decision. She would ride out the storm with him.

  He not only knew what was coming, but how bad it was going to get, and had prepared accordingly. She had been trading her body for so long, what was a little longer? It was about survival, as it always had been. Damien cared for her and she would use that to her advantage.

  Wrapping her in his arms, he crushed her against his chest as they kissed. She felt warm all over, even as he had lifted her halfway out of the pool, exposing her to the crisp, autumn air.

  Momentarily, she broke from his kiss. “Pool house or guest house?” she asked, a naughty smile on her face.

  “Right here,” Damien said, placing her fully onto the edge of the pool. “Alfresco.”

  This was how she was going to remember him—passionate, powerful, tender. He had always treated her with kindness, with respect. He had treated her like a lady. There had been many bad men in her life, but Damien wasn’t one of them. She would never forget that.

  Wrapping her arms around him now, she tried to burn a snapshot in her mind—the pool, the house, the breeze on her damp skin, the sound of Wilhelmenia Fernandez singing La Wally from the terrace speakers.

  She didn’t want to forget any of it. She wanted to always remember both how well he had treated her, and how much she had actually enjoyed her assignment. How it hadn’t even seemed like an assignment. How she had given herself freely to him.

  Her only regret was that he would never know her—not the real her—and what her life had been. Not that it mattered. Without that life, without the Mossad, she and Damien never would have been drawn together.

  All that mattered was that Bentzi and his people, his precious Israel, wanted him. That was what Bentzi cared about. It was all that he ever cared about. And Bentzi would do whatever he had to, including using her, to achieve Israel’s goals.

  It was why she had kept Damien’s passwords for herself. She didn’t care if the Mossad was ever able to access the hard drive they had back in Tel Aviv. That wasn’t her fight. It had never been her fight.

  Bentzi and Israel had used her, repeatedly. And in planning her exit, she had found a way to not only secure reparations for herself, but to stick it to the Mossad and everyone else in the process.

  She had been an innocent, a good, young woman with her whole life in front of her. Israel could have done the right thing, it should have done the right thing. But it didn’t. Instead of freeing her, returning her home, it kept her in bondage. All they did for her was upgrade her shackles.

  They might come after her someday, if there was even an Israel left. It was a possibility. What was a certainty was that they would eventually come after Damien. Though Bentzi hadn’t admitted it, she knew that they were thinking of killing him.

  It was the biggest reason why she couldn’t stay with him indefinitely. Men like Pierre Damien were incapable of disappearing.

  She, on the other hand, could disappear. Like so many other things in life, it all came down to money.

  Once she had captured the code to Damien’s safe in Geneva, the password to his computer soon followed.

  He kept everything on his laptop. A multitude of the files were also password protected, but patience proved to be its own reward. It was like having the keys to a palace in which locked doors and room after room contained some sort of secret or piles of treasure.

  The most important thing she was able to ascertain was how to obtain immunity against the disease that was going to sweep the globe. As long as she survived the tumult and chaos in the immediate aftermath, the rest of her life would be hers to do with as she wished.

  She quietly reached out to her parents and explained what they needed to do. Her father, always so stubborn and simpleminded, refused to believe her, instead calling it a grand conspiracy cooked up by the Jews. There was no circumventing his bigotry. She begged her mother to heed her advice and work on convincing her father. If he perished, it would be his fault, not Israel’s.

  With her health and that of her family addressed, she began to dig into the information on Damien’s computer.

  Knowing the financial markets were going to collapse, he had taken a series of positions in order to profit from the calamity. Some were so esoteric that she dismissed them out of hand. Others were quite simple, and those were the ones she focused on.

  But like his passwords, many of Damien’s financial bets kept changing. It made it very difficult to keep up.

  She established a relationship with a Zurich-based trading firm with offices in Geneva. Upon setting up her account, they provided access to their proprietary app that would allow her to get real-time market info, establish trades, and conduct business with their banking division. It was like having a miniature Swiss banker in her purse or pocket at all times.

  But the most interesting thing of all on Damien’s laptop were his journals.

  He had begun them shortly after his wife had passed away as a form of therapy, and had kept them going ever since. The insights deep into his mind and his soul were both fascinating and disturbing.

  The transformation of a grief-stricken widower to a man determined to bring about the greatest holocaust in human history was riveting. And the closer the deadly event came, the more Damien’s confidence grew.

  In his most recent entries, it was as if he knew his diaries would be read and dissected by posterity. He was standing at a pivotal moment in time, calmly laying out his case, explaining what steps needed to be taken, and why. They were quite literally brilliant and mad at the same time.

  If history had any sense of decency, it would see Damien through the lens of his macabre devotion to eugenics—his belief that if not for the “overkindness” of the Western world, entire strains of “inferior” lines would have been allowed to die off, releasing pressure upon the planet and its limited resources.

  The journals stood in sharp contrast to the man whose bed she so often shared. She had never heard him say a disparaging word about any group or class of people. In fact, he had always seemed devoted to helping those in the greatest need. It was an unsettling dichotomy that made it feel as if a completely different person had written the jou
rnals. But there was one thing in particular about them that betrayed his hand—his love of birds.

  From the golden faucet knobs shaped like swans on his jet, to the original Audubons hanging in the apartment in Geneva, she had not been surprised to see him reference birds in his journals, but it was the manner in which he had that was so unsettling.

  Each phase in the plan he had created was named after a specific type of bird. The Congo phase was named after the Crow, while the American phase was named after the Hummingbird. It was the Hummingbird reference that she found the most disturbing of all.

  While he professed a love for the bird, he also admitted—while intellectually patting himself on the back—a nod to a dark event that had taken place in 1934.

  Known as the Night of the Long Knives, or the Röhm-Putsch, it was a political purge, a three-day killing spree where Adolf Hitler’s SS and Gestapo were said to have killed hundreds and arrested thousands of his enemies in order to consolidate power. The code name they had adopted was Operation Hummingbird, the same name Damien would adopt almost a century later.

  Helena knew that was why he had poured the 1934 sauternes for his dinner guests the other night. She had found the empty bottle in the kitchen trash. Dates mattered to Damien. It was why he had brought the bottles from 1978 to lunch. Wine was his portal to history, both good history and bad.

  •••

  After making love, they grabbed their thick white robes from where they had left them on the chairs. She took her phone from the pocket, wanting to capture a picture of him, but Damien was famished and hurried them inside.

  A tray of charcuterie, his favorite snack, was already waiting for them in the TV room along with a decanted red wine.

  Damien held up the bottle and showed it to her. “Romanée-Conti,” he said. “Nineteen forty-five.”

  “The last year of World War II,” she replied.

  “And the founding of the United Nations. From fifty-one original member states to a hundred ninety-three today.”

  He poured glasses for both of them. After admiring the color, the aromas, and the bouquet, he lifted his glass and recited a UN motto, “To peace and security.”

  She met his glass with her own. “To peace and security.”

  It was another outstanding wine. After taking a sip, she set it down on the table and prepared two plates.

  Jeffery had laid out a stunning array of pâtés, terrines, prosciutto, dry sausage, salami, and cheeses. There were three different kinds of breads, pickled vegetables, mustard, olive tapenade, nuts, and fruits.

  While she worked on the plates, Damien turned on the TV. On almost every channel, there were scenes of reporters in front of various hospitals.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Damien responded. He was as good a liar as she was.

  Handing him his plate, she sat down on the couch next to him and tucked her feet underneath her to keep them warm. Damien turned up the volume.

  “. . . a virus public health officials are likening to Ebola,” the newscaster said. “Tonight we have team coverage across the country. We begin in the nation’s capital.”

  The pair sat there watching as reporters at hospitals coast to coast tried to put together the breaking story from the pieces of information that were beginning to stream in.

  After a while, Damien muted the TV and reached for more wine.

  “So,” Helena said. “Looks like it’s not a meteor after all.”

  Damien smiled. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

  She was about to respond when Jeffery appeared in the doorway and asked to speak with Pierre. Damien waved him in, but Jeffery requested he step out into the hallway.

  Damien excused himself as he stood up and walked across the room. As soon as he stepped into the hall, Jeffery began speaking and reached to pull the door closed, cutting her out of the conversation.

  As he did, she noticed pieces of something in his other hand, and her heart leapt into her throat.

  Jeffery not only had her cell phone charger, but he had completely disassembled it.

  CHAPTER 46

  * * *

  BISHOP’S GATE

  There was a small substructure beneath the church that Harvath had retrofitted to securely hold his weapons and equipment. He and Palmer had already unloaded half of the new supplies into the house. The rest had taken several trips and were being hidden down there.

  They were in the process of deciding what should go where, when they heard people descending the stairs.

  Harvath looked out the door to see Ashby, followed by Mordechai.

  “I think you’re going to want to hear this,” she said.

  Stepping around her, Mordechai extended his cell phone.

  Harvath took it, and, seeing that a video was cued up, pressed play.

  There were sounds of a struggle. Then there was the sound of breaking glass, followed by a woman’s voice screaming, “Pierre! Stop! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Harvath looked at Mordechai. “Helena?”

  The Israeli nodded. “Her cell phone has a distress app. When it’s activated, it records a few seconds of video, and then attaches it to an S.O.S. email along with a GPS location.”

  “There really wasn’t any video. Only audio.”

  “The phone must have been in her purse or a pocket. The point is, she knows that distress app is only to be used in a life-or-death situation. She’s been compromised. We have to get her out, now.”

  Harvath had already made up his mind about Damien, but there were other pieces he wanted to put in place before he moved. Helena’s distress call, though, had just trumped all of that. As soon as Damien figured out who she was, and how badly he had been penetrated, he was going to take off. They needed to move, fast.

  “I’m going to fill Carlton in,” he said to Palmer. “Prep a platform for Mr. Mordechai and then stage everything in the driveway along with my kit.” Looking at Ashby, he added, “Gather up whatever else you two need and add it to the pile. Night vision, suppressors, all of it. I want to be out of here in five minutes.”

  “Roger that,” she replied, as Palmer flashed him the thumbs-up.

  “We’re driving?” Mordechai exclaimed as they moved quickly up the stairs. “It’ll take us at least an hour to get there.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re not driving,” Harvath said.

  He knew how important time was. They needed to make every second count, and not just in order to grab Damien.

  Only twice in his career had Harvath hit the panic button as it was sometimes called. Both times, he was reluctant to do it and waited too long. It meant your op was over, unrecoverable, and you needed immediate extraction. It was one of the hardest things in the world to admit.

  The first time he had done it, help had arrived quickly, and he survived. The second time, though, he nearly lost his life. He knew what it was like not knowing if anyone would come—not knowing if you were going to live or die.

  That said, there were a lot of questions about how loyal Mordechai’s asset was, especially in light of the numerous deletions she had made on the memory card. For all he knew, they might be walking into some sort of a trap. It was an option they all needed to consider.

  Hitting the top of the stairs, Harvath pulled out his cell phone and pressed the speed dial key for Lydia Ryan.

  “We received the email from Nicholas and we’re already working on it,” she said as she picked up.

  “That’s not why I’m calling. I need a helicopter. Mordechai’s asset has been blown. If Damien runs, we’re going to lose him.”

  “Are you looking to extract Helena, or grab Damien?”

  “Both.”

  “Does the President know?”

  “Exigent circumstances. I’m making a command decision.”


  Ryan knew it was pointless to argue with him. “We don’t have any helicopters available.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Everyone Director McGee has been able to contact from that Main Core VIP list has been offered protection. They and their families are being picked up and flown to The Farm. No one is getting on that base without the Director’s say-so.”

  Moving them to The Farm—the CIA’s clandestine training facility at Camp Peary—was a smart move. The fact that the Agency’s helicopters were all tied up, though, presented a real problem.

  “I need you to find me something,” said Harvath. “I don’t care what kind. Just call me when you have it.”

  “Who else can you call?” Mordechai asked as Harvath hung up.

  “She’ll find one for us. Don’t worry.”

  “We have to get to Helena. We have to leave now.”

  “I understand,” Harvath replied. “Go find Nicholas. Tell him what we’re doing, and tell him we need the eagle.”

  “The eagle?”

  “That’s what we named our drone. We thought Liberty would be too ironic,” he said. “Hurry up. Helo or no helo, we’re out of here in five.”

  While Mordechai headed for the front door and the driveway, Harvath made a beeline for his study. It was empty, and so he headed for the kitchen.

  He found Carlton, a fresh mug of coffee in his hand, staring at the TV.

  “It’s on every channel,” the Old Man said. “They’re beginning to link up all of the cases.”

  “We’ve got bigger problems. Mordechai’s asset has been blown. She just hit the panic button.”

  “That means Damien is going to go to ground.”

  “Not if we can get to him first,” Harvath replied. “I called Ryan for a helo, but they’re tied up evacuating the Main Core VIPs and their families to The Farm. She’s going to try to find us something else.”