by Brad Thor
The man fell over backward, his weapon clattering across the kitchen floor. One down.
Moving forward, Harvath swept into the living area. It was clear, as were the kitchen and dining room. Looking through the windows, he didn’t see anyone on the deck outside
With Argento right behind, he moved into the bedroom. There was another AK-47 propped up in the corner. Argento checked the closet and under the bed. Both were clear. That left only one place to look.
Before he even reached the bathroom door, he could hear someone on the other side. The closer he got, the more he could begin to smell him. Someone was in gastric distress.
Kicking open the door, Harvath found the other terrorist pale and sweaty, sitting on the toilet, sick as a dog. The stench was overwhelming.
Clutching a garbage can, which he had been vomiting into, the man had to undergo an extreme balancing act when Harvath told him in English and Arabic to raise his hands over his head.
After making sure the man didn’t have any weapons, Harvath released Argento to go check outside.
A few minutes later, he came back in, issuing orders over his cell phone. Pausing his call, he offered to watch the prisoner while Harvath went out onto the deck to review the evidence.
Backing out of the bathroom, and grateful for the fresh air, Harvath stepped onto the terrace. There, beneath the tarp Argento had pulled halfway back, was the Russian mortar and a crate with two chemical shells.
One team down, five more to go, thought Harvath.
When the tactical team arrived, there was nothing for them to do but secure the scene. Close on their heels was an explosive ordnance unit, as well as a chemical containment team.
An ambulance had been dispatched as well, the big fear being that the terrorist on the toilet had been exposed to a hazardous chemical, perhaps something currently leaking inside the apartment or from the shells out on the deck.
As it turned out, the man had food poisoning and was severely dehydrated. His partner had turned their cell phone on in hopes of reaching their handler and receiving instructions on how best to deal with the situation. The handler had never replied.
The medical team wanted to start an IV on the man. With Argento’s help, Harvath pushed them and everyone else back out of the bathroom and out of the bedroom. He wanted to see what kind of information he could extract from him.
To a large degree, what he was able to get was useless. The man knew nothing about the other cells, their locations, or the location of the handler. Everything had been compartmentalized. He knew the other mortar teams because he had trained with them in Syria, but they had all entered Italy via different means and he had no idea where they were now. Harvath believed him.
The one thing the terrorist was able to do was confirm the identity of his handler. Holding up the picture of the man in the bar in Reggio Calabria that Argento’s men had uncovered, the terrorist nodded. That was him.
The terrorist only knew him by his nom de guerre. Harvath had yet to meet a true jihadist who hadn’t taken on an assumed name for engaging in combat. It was a time-honored Islamic tradition.
Allowing everyone back in the room, Harvath stepped outside to get more fresh air. Argento was standing off to the side, smoking a cigarette. So much for fresh air.
“Did he give you anything?” he asked.
Harvath shook his head. “Not much. Just confirmed the picture from earlier. No name or location, though.”
“What did he say about the phone?”
“They were only supposed to use it in case of emergency. They have a communication window every eight hours. The man is so sick, his partner was afraid he might not make it. That’s why they activated the phone and sent a message. They were hoping the handler might check in early.”
“When is the next window?” Argento asked.
Harvath checked his watch. “Not for six more hours.”
“That’s a long time.”
Nodding, he leaned against the parapet and looked out over the rooftops of Rome. Where the hell are you?
Finishing his cigarette, Argento flicked the butt off the roof as his cell phone rang.
At almost the same moment, Harvath’s rang as well. Looking at the caller ID, he saw that it was Lovett.
“You need to get back here right away,” she said, as he activated the call.
“What’s going on?”
“That picture Argento gave you? The ISIS middleman who bought the weapons from Vottari? We’ve got him on camera. He just walked through St. Peter’s Square forty-five minutes ago.”
CHAPTER 89
* * *
* * *
Returning to the operations center back at Vatican City beneath the Monastery of Mater Ecclesiae, Harvath asked Carl to roll the footage for them.
“Coming up,” Carl said, as he scrolled through. “Okay, that’s him entering Vatican City. Blue blazer, tan khakis.”
Freezing the shot, he zoomed in.
Harvath looked at it, and then at the picture on his phone. It was definitely the same guy. “How’d you find him?”
“We ran the photo through facial recognition. The computer did the rest.”
“Unfreeze it,” said Harvath. “Show me where he goes.”
The Vatican intelligence officer did as asked.
Everyone in the room watched as he strolled St. Peter’s Square and then headed through security and over to the bronze doors of the basilica. There, he began speaking with a pair of Swiss Guards.
“What’s he doing now? Have you spoken with those two Swiss Guards?”
“Personally,” said Carl. He was there to pick up a ticket for tomorrow’s papal audience.”
“Did he show any ID?”
“Yes. He had an Austrian passport and the ticket had been reserved ahead of time.”
The Vatican intelligence officer handed Harvath a copy of the reservation.
“Why would he want a ticket?” Argento asked. “He’s not going anywhere near St. Peter’s Square tomorrow.”
Harvath thought about it for a moment. “It could be a scalp. Just a sick souvenir. On the bin Laden raid, the SEALs allegedly found some 9/11 memorabilia in his house in Abbottabad.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Argento, and they watched the rest of the footage. It lasted right up until the man left Vatican City. Stepping out onto the Via della Conciliazione, he eventually disappeared into the throng of morning tourists.
“Rome has a billion CCTV cameras. You can’t follow him through those?” Harvath asked.
“My authority ends at the walls of Vatican City.”
Harvath looked at Argento, who was already dialing a number on his cell phone. “I’m on it,” he said.
As great as the ROS operators had been, Harvath had no idea who would be put in charge of sifting through the CCTV footage to try to locate their subject. For all he knew, it was some twenty-year-old kid, working for the City of Rome, who had been out all night partying and had showed up to work with a hangover and no sleep. Every second counted.
“Carl, could I get a copy of your footage?” Harvath asked.
“I don’t see why not. How do you want to receive it?”
Harvath scrolled through his phone and pulled up a DropBox account he used with Nicholas. The Vatican intelligence officer took the information down and went to have one of his IT people copy and upload the footage.
Picking up a mug, Harvath filled it with coffee, added a shot of espresso, and after asking Argento for the keycard back headed upstairs to make a few phone calls.
Stepping outside, he wandered into the garden, where he found a small, shaded bench. Setting his pack down next to him, he fished out his satellite phone, extended the antenna, and fired it up.
When Nicholas answered, he filled him in on everything that had transpired. After describing what their target was wearing, Nicholas agreed that there’d be lots of people dressed like that in Rome today. He also agreed that the Italians were going to have a tough time
finding that needle in such a large haystack.
“That’s why I need you to hack into their CCTV system. There’s already footage from Vatican City being uploaded to my DropBox account. Use it as a baseline and then apply the gait algorithm to all the cameras in Rome.”
The gait algorithm was a program that could run concurrently with facial recognition software. But instead of studying faces, it studied how people walked. Your gait was unique, almost like a fingerprint. Once the program knew what it was looking for, it could race through footage until it located and identified its target.
“That could take a while,” the little man replied.
“I need it as soon as possible,” said Harvath, and before Nicholas could respond, he had already disconnected the call and was on to his next.
He called Staelin, who, along with Barton and Morrison, had stayed behind to help Vella continue his interrogation of Vottari. After bringing him up to speed, he asked for an update on their end. Staelin put Vella on the phone.
The doctor explained that he was coming to the end of what he could do in the field. He might be able to extract more back at the Solarium, but he doubted it. He was pretty confident they had wrung everything of value out of the Mafioso.
Harvath thanked him for the SITREP and told him he’d be back in touch as soon as he could.
Now came the hard part. Picking up his mug, he prepared to wait. Stretching out his legs, he was about to take a sip of coffee when something about the CCTV footage hit him.
Grabbing his pack, he ran back inside.
CHAPTER 90
* * *
* * *
It wasn’t that they hadn’t been asking the right question about the CCTV cameras. It was that they had only been asking one—where was the man going? No one had thought to ask where had he been?
Focusing on the moment the man had arrived at Vatican City, Argento’s contact with the City’s cameras had been able to work backward. Even though the man had disappeared into a crowd as he left St. Peter’s, his arrival had been via quiet, uncrowded streets.
As soon as the City’s computer system had locked in on him and had begun piecing his route together, Argento and Harvath had hopped back in the Fiat sedan and had given the driver directions on where to go.
Over his cell phone, Argento’s contact continued to update him until the trail led to video of the man leaving a hotel near Rome’s Termini station. Once the ROS operator had that information, he called the tactical team back at Campo de’ Fiori and told them to get there as quickly as they could.
Stopping a block up, the Carabinieri officer pulled over and dropped Argento and Harvath off. With their backpacks slung over their shoulders, they walked down to the hotel and entered the lobby.
As Argento approached over to the front desk, Harvath kept an eye on the front door, along with everything else.
In under two minutes, the ROS operator had the man’s room number and a pass key. The young lady working the desk this morning had been working the desk when he checked in two nights ago. She prided herself on remembering guests.
At Argento’s request, she had called up to the room. There was no answer. They had beaten him back to the hotel.
Hustling up the stairs, they stepped out into the hallway and walked down to the room. The man, who had used an Austrian passport at the Vatican, had checked into the hotel under a Ukrainian passport.
Drawing their weapons, they took position on either side of the door as Argento knocked. There was no answer.
Identifying himself as hotel security, he knocked again, but there was still no answer. He dipped the card into the reader, the light flashed green, and he pushed open the door.
The room and its contents were unremarkable. There were clothes in the closet, a few things in the dresser, and toiletries in a shaving kit in the bathroom. The only thing that caught Harvath’s eye were the two different types of phone chargers on the desk. Other than that, there was nothing in the room that would give the man away as a terrorist.
They went through his clothes and his suitcase, looking for any hidden compartments or things that might have been sewn into the lining. They found nothing.
They then turned the room upside down, looking under drawers, in air vents, and behind draperies. Still nothing.
After putting the room back together, they had a decision to make. Stay and wait him out, or try to pick up his trail out in the city?
Without a solid lead, Harvath wasn’t keen on driving around Rome, hoping to get lucky. All the man’s belongings were in this room. They had every reason to believe he was coming back. Whether that was in five minutes or five hours there was no way to tell.
In the meantime, though, they could begin moving guests and isolating this end of the hotel. Already the room next door and the one across the hall were empty. If there was a shootout, or worse, they’d be glad they had minimized collateral damage as much as possible.
While Harvath remained in the room, Argento went back downstairs to speak with the desk clerk and wait on the tactical team.
Pulling out his phone, Harvath scrolled through to see if he had received any messages. There was one from Haney, letting him know that he and Gage had made it back to the United States and . . .
Harvath’s thoughts were interrupted by a sound at the door. Argento would have knocked. This was not a knock. It sounded as if someone had started to dip his room key into the card reader, had second thoughts, and had suddenly stopped.
Picking up his pistol, he began to move off the bed when a hail of bullets tore through the door. Rolling hard onto the floor, he returned fire.
He ran his H&K dry, ejected the spent magazine, and inserted a fresh one. Depressing the slide release, he focused on the door and waited for another round of incoming fire, but it didn’t come.
Pulling the alarm clock off the nightstand, he yanked the cord out of the wall, tossed it at the door, and waited. Nothing happened.
Hugging the floor, he crawled over to the door. Reaching up, he released the handle and opened it just far enough to get his fingers in between the door and the jamb. Taking a deep breath, he pulled it the rest of the way open.
From the other end of the hall, there was another barrage of gunfire, but it all went high, where the man had expected him to be.
Harvath returned fire, hitting him in both legs. He heard him cry out and fall back into the stairwell.
Down in the lobby, Argento had to have heard the gunfire. Without radios, their cell phones were their only means of communication.
Harvath pulled his out to call him and tell him what was going on, but he saw that Argento had already texted him.
I’m coming up south stairwell.
He couldn’t let him do that. That was where the injured shooter was. Argento would run right into him.
Pushing into the hall, he hit the Dial button on his phone as he rushed toward the south stairs with his gun up and ready.
Before he could get there, the whole building shook with two horrible explosions.
They had come from the stairwell. Without even opening the door and seeing the destruction, he knew what had happened—a pair of grenades had been detonated.
Bracing for gunfire, or even more grenades, Harvath flung open the stairwell door. One flight down, bleeding badly from both legs, was the man they had been chasing.
It took everything Harvath had not to finish the job and put a bullet in him right there. “Hands!” he yelled. “Show me your hands! Do it now!”
Slowly, the man complied.
With his gun trained on him, Harvath descended the stairs and kicked his pistol away. When he was sure he wasn’t hiding a live grenade, ready to blow them both up, he rolled the man onto his stomach, flex-cuffed his hands behind his back, and searched him for other weapons.
Confident that he was clean, Harvath peered over the railing. There, halfway between floors, was Argento. The grenades had torn him apart. Harvath had no words.
Fr
om the ground floor, he could hear the tactical team, finally on scene, entering the stairwell.
CHAPTER 91
* * *
* * *
RURAL VIRGINIA
THREE WEEKS LATER
Harvath stood at the windows of the Old Man’s study and looked out. The weather was already changing. There wouldn’t be an Indian Summer this year. Winter would be here soon, and by all accounts, it was going to be long, hard, and cold.
He had stayed in Italy long enough to clean everything up and attend Argento’s funeral. Lovett put on a tough show, but it was obvious that his death disturbed her deeply.
If there was anything good that had come out of it, it was that the attack on St. Peter’s had been averted. Once they had the cell phone used to communicate with the other mortar teams, the ROS waited for the next communications window to open up and then tricked the terrorists into leaving their phones on. While they thought they were awaiting further instructions about the attack, the ROS was zeroing in on their locations.
The terrorists did not go peacefully. Many of them fought and were killed. Three ROS operatives were injured. The number of lives that were saved, though, was incalculable.
Once Tursunov was stable, the Italians agreed to let Harvath have a short window to interrogate him. He flew Vella in and let him do the work. With the information they gleaned, they were able to roll up high-level ISIS members across Europe and even in the United States. He turned out to be full of useful information. They were even able to locate the chemist who had helped assemble the shells for the St. Peter’s attack.
Harvath would have been happy to take any or all of them out, but they were considered of significant intelligence value. What’s more, the countries in which many of them had committed their grisly crimes wanted them to stand trial.
