The First Commandment

by Brad Thor

S o, Agent Harvath,” said the Troll as he scooted up onto the couch with a snifter of Germain-Robin XO and made himself comfortable, “what is it I can do for you?”

  Sitting face-to-face with the smug little bastard like this, Harvath’s trigger finger began to itch. He was seriously weighing the merits of killing him. If the Troll didn’t come up with something of value, he was going to put a bullet in him and toss his body into the bay. “Why did you leave Philippe Roussard’s name off the list?” demanded Harvath.

  The Troll didn’t know what to say. He was angry at himself for underestimating Harvath. He was also angry at Roussard. His foolishness had put the Troll in a very difficult position.

  The little man seemed to be a million miles away, so Harvath fired a round into the pillow he was leaning on. “Tick tock.”

  The booming noise startled the Troll. It was not only extremely aggressive, it was also rude.

  Though none of Harvath’s behavior should have come as a shock to the Troll, he had felt as if they had developed a partnership of sorts, or at the very least a détente. He felt a professional respect for Harvath, but it was obvious that it was not reciprocated.

  Puffing his cheeks full of air, the Troll exhaled and said, “I have not seen or spoken with Roussard in many years.”

  “So you do know him.”

  “Yes,” replied the Troll. It was hopeless to lie, and he knew it. Harvath held all the cards in his hand—his fortune, his livelihood, even his life.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Five, maybe ten years ago. I can’t remember exactly.”

  “But you knew he was one of the five released from Guantanamo,” asserted Harvath.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And yet you purposely left his name off the list you gave to me. Why? Were you two hoping to kill me before I could stop you? Is that it?” demanded Harvath as he raised his pistol for emphasis.

  It was the most logical conclusion for Harvath to come to, but it was absurd. “The last time I saw Philippe, he was nothing more than a very troubled young man.”

  “Funny how quickly things change.”

  The Troll thought about laughing it all off, but the pistol pointed at his chest was not particularly amusing. “I have had no contact with him since then.”

  “So why leave his name off the list?”

  “In my line of work, a person collects enemies very quickly. Friends are much harder to come by.”

  “Roussard is a friend of yours?” asked Harvath.

  “You could say that.”

  Tired of his obfuscation, Harvath put another round through the couch, millimeters from the Troll’s left thigh. “My patience is wearing thin.”

  “My godson,” stammered the Troll. “Philippe Roussard is my godson.”

  “Somebody made you a child’s godfather?”

  “It was more of an honorary title bestowed on me by the family.”

  “What family?” demanded Harvath, as he adjusted his aim and prepared to squeeze the trigger.

  A slow smile began to spread across the Troll’s face.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Sometimes,” replied the Troll, “the world is an amazingly small place.”

  Chapter 86

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  I t was late, but the president had told his DCI that he would wait up for his assessment. When James Vaile arrived, he was taken upstairs to the residence.

  The president was in his private study watching the Chicago White Sox play the Kansas City Royals. It had been a great game that had gone into extra innings.

  When the DCI knocked on the study’s open door, Jack Rutledge set down his drink, turned off the TV, and waved him in.

  “Are you hungry?” asked the president as the CIA chief closed the door behind him and took the empty leather club chair next to him.

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “How about a drink?”

  Vaile shook his head and politely declined.

  “Okay then,” said Rutledge, glad to be getting on with it. “You’ve had a chance to look at everything. Let’s have it.”

  The DCI withdrew a folder from his briefcase and opened it. “Mark Sheppard is no Woodward or Bernstein in the writing department, but he more than makes up for it in the depth of his research.”

  Vaile handed a copy of the reporter’s article to the president and continued, “The attention this piece would have brought to the Baltimore Sun would have sent their circulation through the roof. Based on Sheppard’s notes, the paper was looking for ways they could stretch the story into a series of articles. They’d already planned to recreate the car accident, as well as the takedown of the John Doe hijacker in Charleston—fake FBI agents and all.

  “We’re just lucky this guy Sheppard came looking for a statement a week before he was going to press. Had he come the night before, Geoff Mitchell and the press office wouldn’t have been able to put him off while they claimed the White House was looking into it.”

  “And you never would have had time to get to him,” said the president as he finished scanning the article.

  “Not the way I needed to,” replied Vaile.

  “Then we dodged the bullet.”

  The DCI shook his head. “Right now, Sheppard’s editors have to be fuming. This story was the best thing to come along for their paper in years and now it’s been torpedoed.”

  Rutledge had a feeling he knew where this was going. “You think if we put out the alert on the school buses that might trigger the Sun into running Sheppard’s story anyway?”

  “It’s always possible. Though we’ve got all his original source material, they’ve got the notes they took in their editorial meetings. If they suspect Sheppard killed his story under duress, they might smell blood in the water, decide to reinterview his sources, and run it all without his name on it.”

  “Then he’d better have been damn convincing when he withdrew it.”

  Vaile nodded. “He definitely had the proper motivation, that’s for sure.”

  “Yet, you’re still opposed to sending out any sort of Homeland Security alert.”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  The president set the article down on the table. “If an attack does happen, what then? You don’t think at that point the Sun will repackage the article in a way that’s equally damaging?”

  “How could they? We’re the only ones who know the full story. What they have is only a small piece of the puzzle, and it’s a piece we can spin. It’ll show we were engaged in a concerted effort, before the fact, to bring the terrorists to justice. Harvath’s already killed two of them, two more are about to be apprehended in their home countries, and we’ve got multitudes of agents in the field trying to track down the fifth and final one. I think we should let this play out.”

  Rutledge admired Vaile’s confidence, but unfortunately he wasn’t convinced. “If we learned anything from 9/11, it’s that hindsight is always 20:20. People will demand to know why, if we knew about a threat to school buses, we didn’t put out an alert.”

  “Because,” replied the DCI emphatically, “putting out an alert is an admission of guilt. It would tell our enemies that we believed we had broken our word and that we deserved to be hit, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  The president tried to say something in response, but Vaile held up his hand in order to be allowed to finish. “Rightly or wrongly, our agreement with the terrorists was based on the assumption that the five men released from Gitmo would not use their freedom to strike against us here at home.”

  “Of course,” said Rutledge. “We agreed not to hunt them.”

  “That’s what’s been bothering me. The more I look at this, the more I believe the terrorists have had other plans all along.”

  Chapter 87

  W hat kind of other plans?” asked Rutledge.

  Vaile looked at him and replied, “Those five men must have been very important for their organization to risk so
much to get them released.”

  “Agreed,” said the president, nodding.

  “We’re also worried that they’ve remained important enough that their organization will make good on its promise to retaliate for any of their killings.”

  “I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

  “Palmera and Najib are both dead, yet nothing has happened so far. Nothing.”

  “Well, one was killed in Mexico and the other in Jordan. Maybe their organization doesn’t know yet.”

  The DCI shook his head. “Everyone in the neighborhood knew Palmera, and his death was very public. Najib was a member of Syrian intelligence and while I have no idea what the Jordanians might have done with his body, Harvath allowed Al-Tal’s wife and son to live and they are definitely not going to keep their mouths shut. Word like this travels fast. Their organization knows. And yet I keep coming back to the fact that nothing has happened.”

  The president thought about it a moment. “For all we know, they’re putting their people in place as we speak.”

  “Oh, I think they’ve done more than that,” replied Vaile. “I think they’ve got one person and he’s already been in place.”

  “Roussard?” asked Rutledge.

  The DCI nodded. “If we maintain the reasoning that these five were so important that their organization risked all to spring them from Gitmo and then could be so angered by the deaths of two of them that it would make good on its threat to retaliate, then how could this same organization not know that Roussard was here and not know what he was doing?”

  “He could be acting alone. He’s obviously got a vendetta against Harvath.”

  “He might be acting alone in carrying out his attacks, but he’s getting a lot of support from somewhere. This kind of operation takes money, intelligence, weapons, forged identification. There’s no way, just over six months after being released from Guantanamo, he could pull this off completely alone. His people know what he’s doing, and I think this has been their plan from the beginning.”

  The president was quiet while he thought about this from as many angles as possible. Finally, he said. “It’s an interesting theory, but can you prove it? Because you’re asking me to risk the lives of tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of American children on a theory.”

  “No, sir,” answered Vaile. “I can’t prove it.”

  Rutledge rubbed the hairline scar where his right index finger had been reattached, an ever-present reminder of his own gruesome kidnapping several years ago, and said, “Well, there’s one thing I can prove. I can prove that these people already hijacked one school bus and killed its driver. Those victims and their families were terrorized and traumatized beyond belief. It made national headlines, and as president, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that never happens again.

  “So I am going to allow DHS to issue the alert and I’ll deal with the Baltimore Sun or whomever else I have to deal with if and when they become a problem. In the meantime, I am ordering you to find Scot Harvath and stop him. No more excuses. You tell your people to do whatever they need to do to get their job done. And damn it, you remind them that when I said dead or alive, I meant it.”

  Chapter 88

  ANGRA DOS REIS, BRAZIL

  T he Troll had dropped a bombshell on Harvath and the impact was intense. Philippe Roussard wasn’t the assassin’s real name after all. It was the name that had been given to him as a boy to protect him from his family’s enemies. His real name was Sabri Khalil al-Banna.

  He began to explain who Roussard had been named after, but Harvath held up his hand to stop him. “He was named after his grandfather.”

  The Troll nodded his head.

  There was an acidic gnawing in the pit of Harvath’s stomach. Before Osama bin Laden, Sabri Khalil al-Banna had been the world’s deadliest and most feared terrorist. His exploits were bloody, ruthless, and the stuff of legends in both the terrorism and counterterrorism worlds.

  As was common with Islamic radicals, he was known by many names, the most famous being Abu Nidal. Philippe Roussard was almost a dead ringer for his late grandfather. Now Harvath knew why he had looked so familiar in the material Vaile had sent.

  He also knew why he, or more appropriately the people he cared about, were being targeted.

  It was payback for a mission he had led several years ago, code-named Operation Phantom. His assignment had been to decapitate a resurgent Abu Nidal terrorist organization. The reins of power had been handed to Nidal’s daughter and son, twins who had been born and raised without the knowledge of Western intelligence agencies. Based upon what Harvath was hearing, it seemed something of a family tradition.

  “As far as we know, Abu Nidal had only two offspring.”

  “Correct,” said the Troll, “the son, Hashim, and the daughter, Adara.”

  Just their names had the power to send a chill down Harvath’s spine. They were two of the most vicious terrorists he had ever come across, Adara even more so than her brother, Hashim.

  Harvath remembered her all too well. Her hatred for Israel and the West consumed her to such a degree that it poisoned what would have otherwise been ravishing features. She was tall, with high cheekbones and long dark hair. Her eyes, though, were her most striking feature. They were gray to the point of almost being silver, like the color of mercury. But when she was enraged or under stress, they underwent an amazing transformation and turned jet black.

  It was in the midst of a hijacking by Adara Nidal and her brother that Harvath had met Meg Cassidy. Together, they had tracked the twins to a vineyard outside Rome, only to be beaten to the punch by a veteran Israeli intelligence operative named Ari Schoen—a former top-ranking member of the Mossad who had his own axe to grind with the Nidal family.

  It had ended very badly. The memories had haunted Harvath for a long time, and he did not care to be reliving them now.

  Hashim had appeared like a wraith out of the vineyard and had run right at them with hand grenades in each hand. Harvath prepared himself for the attack, but Hashim ran right past them. He took Schoen and his team completely by surprise. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Hashim jumped into the van just as the door began to close.

  Harvath had thrown himself on top of Meg. The grenades detonated and the van exploded into a billowing fireball, taking Schoen, Hashim, and his sister, Adara, along with it.

  The horrible smell of gasoline and burnt flesh was one Harvath would never forget.

  So now someone from the Nidal family tree was out for blood. The only question was which branch Philippe Roussard represented.

  “So whose son is Philippe? Hashim’s or Adara’s?”

  “Adara’s,” replied the Troll.

  “Who’s his father?” asked Harvath.

  “An Israeli intelligence operative who died before the boy was born.”

  “Daniel Schoen?” responded Harvath, stunned that the twisted operation had come back to haunt him so. “He was Ari Schoen’s son.”

  Harvath was good. “How did you know that?” asked the Troll.

  “I didn’t.”

  “But then—”

  “The night Adara was killed,” said Harvath, “Schoen confessed to having broken up her relationship with Daniel. He called her a whore and she said something about Daniel wanting to have children with her. But I sensed there was something more—something that she wasn’t saying.”

  “Obviously, there was. She had the child out of wedlock shortly after leaving Oxford where she and Daniel had met. Since the elder Schoen had done such an admirable job of making it look like Daniel wanted nothing further to do with her, Adara raised the boy in secret. She placed him with a French family she had connections with, and they raised him as their own. He wanted for nothing and went to the finest Western schools. But he always knew who he was and where he came from.”

  “Just like his mother,” said Harvath.

  Once again, the Troll nodded.

  “You still haven’t
explained your connection. Was it with the Nidals, or the foster family, the Roussards?”

  “It was with the Nidals,” replied the Troll. “Abu Nidal was one of my earliest clients.”

  Harvath looked at the dwarf with contempt. “You keep rather distasteful company. Birds of a feather, I suppose.”

  The Troll took a long sip of his brandy. “Like I said, in my line of work, a person collects enemies very quickly. Friends are much harder to come by. Abu Nidal was one of the best and most loyal friends I ever had. His daughter, Adara, was the second best. Normally, a man like me has to pay for a woman’s attention. With Adara things were different.”

  Harvath had heard some boasts in his time, but this guy was full of shit. “You and Adara Nidal?” he asked.

  “A gentleman wouldn’t ask such questions,” said the Troll as he took another sip of brandy.

  From what Harvath knew of her, Adara Nidal was a raving psychopath with unparalleled bloodlust. She was a woman of strange appetites, and the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Adara Nidal and the Troll would be perfect for each other.

  At the moment, though, none of that made any difference. Harvath had a killer to catch. “So Adara’s son is targeting the people around me because he holds me responsible for his mother’s death?”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense,” replied the Troll.

  “What about tying his attacks to the ten plagues of Egypt? The lamb’s blood above my door, the attack on Tracy, my mother, the ski team, the dog, and all the rest of them are tied in to the ten plagues, but in reverse order—ten through one instead of one through ten.”

  “Hold on a second,” said the Troll. “The dog I left for you?”

  Harvath nodded.

  “What about it?”

  Harvath realized that he might have just touched a nerve. “Roussard took great joy in torturing it. He severely beat the puppy and then put it in a body bag infested with fleas. He hung the puppy upside down from a rafter and left it there to die.”

  The Troll’s face flushed with anger.