by Brad Thor
Harvath hoped that the security men outside were as professional as the ones upstairs had been. As he stepped through the doors with his hostage, the men exchanged quick remarks and lowered their weapons as they backed away.
Looking for his car, Harvath saw that it was blocked in by two large Bentleys. Idling in the drive was a Saleen S7. While the paint job was a little flashy for his taste, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Pushing his hostage through the driver’s side into the cramped cockpit, he pulled down the gull wing door and took off.
Even though he didn’t need to look in his rearview mirror to see what was going on, he did so anyway. Commands were being shouted as the security team scrambled for their vehicles.
“You’ve made a big mistake,” said the woman sitting next to him. She had a thick accent.
“It probably won’t be my last.”
“Don’t be so sure. You’ve stolen something very valuable.”
Harvath gripped the steering wheel and turned hard onto the street at the end of the drive. “At $400,000, you’d think this car would corner a bit better.”
“I’m not talking about the car,” said the attractive blonde as she buckled her seatbelt. “I’m talking about me.”
“And who are you?”
“My name is Eva, but it’s my husband’s name you should be concerned with.”
Downshifting, Harvath took another tight turn and accelerated. Knowing the Russians, they wouldn’t call the police. Just like the thieves infamously dropped from the helicopter out in the ocean, they’d want to handle him personally. The thing was, Harvath was in no mood to go swimming.
The security men were going to come after him hard. But fast was going to be a little tough for them. They were creatures of habit, trained to follow orders. It wouldn’t occur to them to grab several of the guests’ sports cars. Instead, they’d pile into their heavily armored SUVs and wend through the narrow streets of Antibes as fast as their enormous tanks would allow.
Hitting the Boulevard du Littoral south toward Cannes, Harvath tried to focus on the traffic and not the tanned, toned legs projecting from the woman’s exceptionally short skirt next to him. “I don’t even want to know your husband’s name,” he said as he overtook the car in front of them. “As soon as we’ve put enough distance between us and the men from the hotel, I’ll let you out.”
“That’s going to be difficult,” said Eva as she produced what looked like an iPod Nano.
“Your husband monitors you with a tracking device?”
“He’s very jealous,” she said. “And very insecure.”
“Okay, I’ve changed my mind. Who’s your husband?”
“Nikolai Nekrasov.”
“Never heard of him.”
“The Russian billionaire? Owner of the Hotel du Cap.”
Now he knew why the guards had been so quick to lower their weapons. “Sorry,” he replied. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but in all fairness to your husband, I’ve fallen behind on my Forbes lately.”
Eva smiled. “So this isn’t a kidnapping?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad.” Rolling down the window, she tossed out the device. “That should buy us a little time. If you’re hungry, I have a friend who runs a wonderful restaurant in Cavalaire-sur-Mer.”
Either this woman was extremely unhappy with her husband or this was the world’s quickest case of Stockholm Syndrome on record. “Maybe I can take a rain check,” he said, looking into his rearview mirror. He could see the Russian security team weaving in and out of traffic behind him. They had to be insane to be driving like that in those kinds of trucks. They were going to get people killed.
“That’s too bad,” the woman said. “Nikolai hates Cavalaire-sur-Mer, but I think it’s very romantic. Something tells me you would enjoy it.”
Harvath didn’t doubt it. “Maybe another time,” he said as he pulled into the oncoming lane and accelerated. The closer they got to Cannes, the heavier the Saturday-evening traffic became.
Drivers honked and flashed their brights, but he kept going before a truck forced him back onto his side.
He glanced in the rearview mirror again and couldn’t see the security men. Not yet, at least. The momentary satisfaction he felt evaporated when his passenger said, “It looks like Nikolai is taking you very seriously.”
Harvath looked to his left and saw a red EC135 Eurocopter tracking parallel with them over the water.
“Your husband is very persistent, isn’t he?”
“He doesn’t like sharing his things,” she said, placing her hand on the inside of his thigh.
She quickly pulled it back and gripped the edges of her seat as Harvath slid between two cars with just inches to spare.
Now that there was a helicopter involved, there was only one way he could disappear and to do it, he’d need cover.
Turning to Eva, he said, “I need a favor.”
“That depends,” she replied.
When Nikolai Nekrasov’s armored Denalis thundered into Cannes, they came to a screeching halt at a café on the Avenue du Petit Juas. As the hotel helicopter hovered above, Mrs. Nekrasov recovered from her ordeal over a glass of Montrachet. The American who had tortured the hotel’s concierge and shot three of its security staff was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER 22
CHICAGO
Javed Miraj, the Pakistani mechanic from the Crescent Garage, turned out to be an excellent source of information.
He explained in detail how Ali Masud, the shop’s bookkeeper, had been instructed to create a new logbook and to leave out the vehicle the police were searching for.
When asked why, the mechanic’s response was very simple. Not only were Fahad Bashir, the Crescent’s owner, and Ali Masud from the same village in Pakistan, but so was the driver who had run down Alison Taylor.
In Pakistan, loyalty followed a very strict hierarchy: family first, then village, and then tribe. The rules were even stricter abroad. It was a firmly held us against them mind-set.
Davidson asked the mechanic if he knew where the original logbook was. Miraj had no idea, but strongly suspected it had been disposed of. Fahad Bashir and his son, Jamal, were smart. Once they were committed to doctoring the logbook, he was certain they wouldn’t leave behind any information that could incriminate them.
Vaughan was more concerned with nailing the driver than the men of the Crescent Garage, but this was where Javed Miraj’s usefulness as an informant started to break down.
Yes, he had worked on the cab in question. He even ID’d the piece of black plastic that had been recovered at the scene which turned out to be part of the plastic header from above the radiator. He described how he had replaced the hood and a side mirror and had pulled a new windshield, complete with a Chicago City sticker, from one of the damaged cabs in the lot behind the garage.
The driver had been nervous and upset. He had offered to pay double to get the work done right away. The mechanic had been pulled off another taxi to work on the Yellow Cab. It was a small shop and he couldn’t help but hear how the man had sustained the damage. At that point, though, the information flow from the mechanic practically dried up.
Understandably, he couldn’t remember the cab number. He saw lots of cabs every day. Cataloging the numbers was Ali Masud’s job. All he could remember was that it was a four-digit number with a three in it.
He was able to provide a description of the driver and even coughed up a first name, but a dark-skinned Pakistani named Mohammed in a city like Chicago probably wouldn’t do much to winnow down the haystack.
As the mechanic had no Chicago family that would be looking for him, Vaughan and Davidson decided to let his coworkers think he’d been arrested. After cleaning up his road rash they drove him down to the Department of Revenue and searched every four-digit cab license with a three in it until their eyes were bleeding and they had come up with their man, Mohammed Nasiri.
With Nasiri’s full name and cab number,
they approached the owner of his cab, Yellow Cab Company.
Because of his position with Public Vehicles, Paul Davidson was fairly well known by the cab operators. He was also, because of his no-BS, take-no-prisoners style, fairly disliked.
He wasted no time in going straight to the top at Yellow, calling the director of operations at his home and waking him up. After Davidson threatened to enact a crackdown of epic proportions on Yellow Cabs across the city, the director agreed to meet him the next morning at their corporate offices.
When Davidson and Vaughan showed up, the director was there, along with the company’s corporate counsel, who quickly and repeatedly pointed out that their cooperation was in no way an indication of liability on their part. Rather, in the interest of being a good corporate citizen, Yellow want to help in the investigation in any way it could.
Davidson gave them a list of things he wanted, and within the hour he and Vaughan left Yellow Cab not only with Nasiri’s personnel file, but also with the dispatch logs and GPS coordinates that placed his cab right in the vicinity of the accident that evening.
They were golden. Now all they needed to do was collar Nasiri. Vaughan didn’t need to subpoena the phone records of the three stooges at the Crescent Garage, as he had taken to referring to Fahad, Jamal, and Ali Masud, to know that Nasiri had already been tipped off. If they were willing to fabricate a new logbook to protect him, there was no question that they would call and warn him that the police were closing in.
The question at this point was whether Nasiri was still in Chicago. For all they knew, he had hotfooted it back to Pakistan. And if that was the case, their investigation was as good as dead.
With his address in hand, they drove to Nasiri’s heavily Pakistani Devon Avenue neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. As it was Saturday, the sidewalks and streets were crowded with people doing their shopping. Cars were double-parked and those that were moving were committing so many traffic violations, Vaughan and Davidson could have handed out tickets all day long.
As a car blew a stop sign and almost hit them, Davidson commented, “Some day, I’m going to read the Qur’an. But if I’ve learned anything in the Public Vehicles Division it’s that it doesn’t contain anything about the proper operation of a motor vehicle.”
Vaughan chuckled and kept his eyes peeled for Nasiri’s cab. The neighborhood looked like any other immigrant neighborhood in the city. People dressed differently and he couldn’t read any of the signs. He didn’t feel here the way he did in other immigrant neighborhoods. He was an obvious outsider. He could read that in the people’s faces and it was more than just about being a cop. This world was alien to him, much the way Iraq had been. The culture couldn’t have been any more different from his own. It wasn’t like driving through Chicago’s Polish or Mexican neighborhoods. This one put him on edge and he didn’t like it. It was how he had felt when they operated outside the wire in Iraq. He wasn’t supposed to feel like that here in America. The little voice inside his head, the same one that had told him something wasn’t right on that assignment in Tikrit, was trying to tell him something again. But it wasn’t clear enough for him to understand. He wondered if maybe he was just being stupid. This wasn’t Iraq, after all. This was Chicago.
Shaking it off, he refocused on the search for Nasiri’s vehicle. Two blocks later, they found it.
“This means he’s gotta be close, right?” said Davidson as he pulled over to the curb. “Should we hit the apartment now?”
“First things first,” replied Vaughan as he reached into the bag he’d brought along and removed two black triangles about five inches long and three inches high.
“What are those?”
“SWAT chocks,” he said, pulling back the tented part to show the Public Vehicles officer the spikes underneath. “If we miss him or he tries to run, he won’t get very far with a flat tire.”
Davidson laughed. “Did they teach you that little trick in the organized Crime Division?”
“I was on SWAT before I landed at OC.”
“I heard you did intel work in Iraq. Why aren’t you in the Intelligence Division here?”
Vaughan shrugged. “You know how things work. A, there’s got to be a slot and B, you have to have impressed someone enough that they’ll go to bat for you.”
“So in other words, ass-kissing isn’t your forte?”
“Not exactly. No.”
“You just don’t try hard enough. All you have to do is put your lips together and—”
Davidson closed his eyes to demonstrate and Vaughan held up his hand to stop him. “I get it,” he said as he zipped up his bag and reached for the door handle.
“I’ll keep the car running. Just in case he comes out before you’re done and you have to chase him.”
Vaughan was tempted to flip the man the finger, but he didn’t think he knew him well enough yet. “Let’s get a patrol car to back us up on the arrest.”
Davidson nodded and picked up his radio.
“I also want to impound the cab, so let’s get a flatbed too. Once we have it impounded, we can have forensics go to work on it.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
Vaughan walked back to the cab and did a slow loop around it. The bodywork was pristine, right down to the shiny new rivet holding the medallion in place on the hood. The interior was clean and contained no items of any personal nature other than a beaded seat cover. He placed his chocks. One went in front of the rear passenger tire and another behind the front passenger tire. This way, whether Nasiri pulled straight out or backed out of his space, they’d be covered.
The chocks set, he walked back up to Davidson’s Bronco and got back in. “What’s the ETA on the patrol unit?”
“They’re about two blocks away,” replied the Public Vehicles officer. “Where do you want them?”
“Somewhere in front of the building, but not directly in front. Let’s not tip our hand until we have to.”
Davidson radioed the instructions to the patrol unit.
“He’s in the third-floor rear apartment,” said Vaughan as he checked the file once more. “We’ll go through the alley.”
Davidson moved his truck to a better spot and then the two men climbed out. They were both wearing plain clothes and tried to act natural, but they stood out like a couple of sore thumbs in Chicago’s de facto Little Pakistan.
“Man, I must look really good today,” quipped Davidson as he noticed people staring at him. “What do you think? Do I have my mojo working or what? This has got to be what it’s like for Brad Pitt when he goes out, huh?”
Vaughan wasn’t paying attention to his colleague. As a cop, he was always careful, always aware of his surroundings, but there was something about Nasiri and this neighborhood that put him on edge. He knew these were Pakistanis and not Iraqis, but nevertheless, he had clicked into his Iraq mode. It was a heightened sense of awareness and almost hypervigilance. It bordered on paralyzing.
He moved slower than he normally would. Davidson noticed and shortened up his stride to keep next to him. “You all right?” he asked.
Vaughan nodded. He scanned apartment windows for spotters and checked the rooftops for kids who might give away their approach via cell phones. He looked for the LOPs—the little old people who were always used as watchdogs. Thank goodness there were no shops along this street. Shopkeepers in Iraq were notorious spies.
It was all stupid and he knew it, yet he couldn’t stop himself. Every day in Iraq he had honed the skills that had kept him alive while other men had been killed and had come home in boxes. Once developed, those instincts don’t disappear. But why were they flooding back now? My God, he thought. I’ve got PTSD.
“You still want to do this?” asked Davidson as they reached the alley and Vaughan stood still on the sidewalk.
He coughed and shook it off. “I’m good to go. Let’s do it.”
The men entered the alley and came up behind Nasiri’s residence. It was a four-story brick buildi
ng with a wooden set of stairs. There was a chain-link fence separating the property from the alley. Its gate was unlocked.
“So far so good,” said Davidson as he pushed it open and walked down the narrow gangway toward the stairs.
As they climbed, Vaughan had an inexplicable urge to pull out his gun. He didn’t. Nasiri was the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident. They weren’t about to pop Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, his hands were sweaty and his heart was pumping harder than it should have been. PTSD, anxiety attack, or whatever this feeling was, he didn’t like it.
The open-air, third-floor landing outside Nasiri’s apartment contained a couple of rusting lawn chairs and some empty cardboard boxes. Vaughan looked out across the alley with its asphalt-shingled garages at the apartment buildings on the other side. In one of them, he could see someone watching them. Somewhere close by Pakistani music was playing.
A large window with its drapes drawn stood next to Nasiri’s back door. “I guess we knock,” offered Davidson.
“Of course we knock. The only time you don’t knock is when you have a no-knock warrant. Besides, I think we may have an audience.”
“Lawyers,” said Davidson, rolling his eyes. “No wonder you haven’t impressed anyone in the Intelligence Division.”
“There’s someone watching us from the building across the alley.”
Davidson turned, but didn’t see anything. “Don’t worry. You’re just paranoid.”
This time, Vaughan didn’t hesitate to give the man the finger.
The Public Vehicles officer knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. “Police. Open up.” There was still no response.
Davidson tried the door handle, but it was locked. “You’re right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder and gesturing across the alley with his chin. “We are being watched. I think it’s a Scumbagasaurus.”
“A what?”
“You know what those are,” he said as he bent closer to the door handle and slipped something from his pocket. “They suck blood and feed on bribes. Normally you don’t see them this far from a government building. Politicus assholus is the correct Latin term, I believe.”
