by Brad Thor
The Bucket’s latest acquisition was something that was bittersweet for Dockery and Dall’au to put on display. It had arrived via DHL from Colorado and it took reading Scot Harvath’s letter to understand what they were looking at.
Two of the men tortured and killed in Afghanistan by Ronaldo Palmera had been Bucket customers. Though the proprietors of the Bucket would have much preferred to have Palmera’s pickled head on display, a photo of him lying dead in a Mexican street along with the Taser used to help put him there and his hideous boots were the next best things.
As a former member of SEAL Team Two, Harvath had been a longtime supporter of the Bucket. The items he contributed to the bar’s museum were legendary. Dockery and Dall’au had often joked that if he kept it up at the current pace, they’d need to build a wing and name it after him.
Outside, in the Bucket’s parking lot, Philippe Roussard closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He felt the familiar sensation radiating from the farthest points of his body. It was the indescribable excitement that he’d once heard referred to as “the quickening.”
His reverie, though, was short-lived. The scent from the Vicks VapoRub swabbed beneath his nose was almost as bad as the odor rising from the bags of fertilizer stacked behind him. He thanked Allah that he’d stopped noticing the fumes from the fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel fuel and reminded himself that it would all be over soon.
Climbing out of the RV, he closed the door and locked it. He walked around to the rear and smiled at the Save water, shower with a SEAL sticker he’d affixed to the bumper. There was one remembering MIAs and one that read My RV Loves Iraqi Gas. Anyone who doubted that Philippe Roussard’s RV belonged in the parking lot of the Bucket of Blood probably would have changed his mind upon seeing his bumper stickers.
Not that it mattered much. Roussard didn’t plan on being there for too long. In fact, he had just pulled a newly acquired motorbike off the platform attached to the rear of the RV when he was approached by two off-duty Virginia Beach PD officers. Though they weren’t in uniform, they had a distinct law enforcement bearing about them that convinced Roussard they were cops.
“Hey, you can’t park that thing here,” said the taller of the two.
Reflexively, Roussard’s hand began to reach for the 9mm Glock hidden beneath his jacket, but he stopped himself.
“Especially not when it smells like that,” replied his female partner. “When was the last time you emptied the holding tank on that thing?”
“It’s been a while,” said Roussard as he forced a smile.
“I’m just kidding you,” said the male cop as he pointed at the motorbike. “That’s a nice Kawasaki you got there.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re living the dream, aren’t you? Nothing but you and the slab. Boy if the guys from BUDs could see you now, eh?”
Roussard politely nodded his head and pulled the motorbike the rest of the way from its carrier platform.
“You haven’t been drinking, have you?” asked the female officer as Roussard removed a set of keys from his front pocket.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I just have a few errands to run. I’ll be back soon.”
There was something about this guy she didn’t like. Sure, he was well-built and good-looking, but those characteristics alone didn’t make a SEAL. “Doc sure is generous when it comes to you guys parking your rigs here.”
“He sure is,” said Roussard, beginning to sense that something might be wrong.
“How long you staying?” the woman asked.
“What difference does it make,” asked her partner. “You interested in this guy or something?”
“Maybe,” the female officer replied. Turning back to Roussard, she asked, “So are you going to be around for a couple of days?”
“No,” said Roussard. “I have to leave tomorrow.”
The woman looked disappointed. “Too bad.”
“Don’t mind her,” replied her partner. “When you come back, we’ll be inside. We’ll buy you a beer.”
Climbing onto the motorcycle, Roussard said, “Sounds good.”
With the bike started, he slipped on his helmet and was about to pull away when the woman placed her hand on his handlebars and said, “What’s your purge procedure?”
“Excuse me?” he responded, anxious to get going.
“Your purge procedure,” the female officer responded.
Roussard’s mind raced for an appropriate answer to the question. He had no idea what the woman was talking about. The way she was touching his handlebars, it had to have something to do with the motorcycle. Having been taught that the simplest lie was always the best, Roussard admitted his ignorance. “I’ve only had this thing about a week. I’m still learning its ins and outs.”
The female Virginia Beach PD officer smiled and stepped away from the motorbike.
As Roussard drove away, her partner asked, “What the hell was that all about? Purge procedure? You don’t really know anything about motorcycles, do you?”
“No, but I know something about SEALs, and that guy wasn’t one. If he was, he’d have known what I was talking about.”
“C’mon,” replied the other cop. “You’re off-duty. Give it a rest.”
The woman looked at him. “That guy didn’t bother you at all?”
“I was in the Army. And judging from his bumper stickers he was or is a squid, so of course he bothers me, but as a resident of Virginia Beach, I’ve learned to live with them.”
The woman shook her head. “What about him parking his van here? Dockery hates RVs. He and Dall’au never let anyone park here overnight. If you’re dumb enough to get shit-faced in their joint, you’d better have come with a plan to get yourself and your car the hell outta here.”
“So what?”
“So something isn’t right.”
The woman’s partner shook his head. “I’m going inside to get a beer.”
“Well, while you’re there,” she said, “find Doc and tell him to come outside. I want to talk with him.”
“And in the meantime what are you going to be doing?”
Pulling a lockpick set from her coat pocket, the female officer replied, “I’m just going to take a little look around.”
Chapter 100
T hough Kevin McCauliff was emboldened by the email Harvath had sent him, he still had qualms about carrying out the hack in the light of day. He decided to do it that night when there was lighter traffic on their servers, as well as fewer personnel around who might stumble on to what he was doing and begin asking questions.
The Troll had done the hardest work of all, narrowing in on who had set up the operation in Brazil. He’d even gone so far as to provide a list of banks and a date range as well as an approximate amount of money that McCauliff should be looking for.
It wasn’t easy by any stretch, but the NGA operative eventually found it. The payments had been broken up and wired through a series of intermediary banks in Malta, the Caymans, and the Isle of Man, but they all had one thing in common. Each payment could be traced back to a single account number at Wegelin & Company, the oldest private bank in Switzerland.
That was as far as McCauliff got. Wherever Wegelin & Company kept its records, they weren’t on any of their servers, at least not any that could be accessed from outside. McCauliff tried every trick he knew to no avail. Whoever these people were Harvath was hunting, they were extremely careful about covering their tracks. Extremely careful, but not perfect. It was nearly impossible to move large sums of money without leaving some sort of trail.
The only problem for Harvath at this point was that the trail dead-ended at Wegelin & Company, the archetype for Swiss banking discretion. If he wanted answers, he was going to have to go to Wegelin & Company directly.
Harvath thanked McCauliff for the information and logged off their call. Removing the ear bud from his ear, he turned to the Troll and shared with him the news that the funds had been traced back to a ban
k outside Zurich called Wegelin & Company.
The minute the name was out of his mouth, a pall fell across the Troll’s face and he held up his index finger.
His stubby fingers rattled across his laptop. When he found what he was looking for, he recited a string of numbers. They were a perfect match for the account McCauliff had just identified.
“How did you know that?” asked Harvath.
The Troll ran his hand through his short, dark hair and replied, “I’m the one who set up the account.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. But it gets worse. Plain and simple, Abu Nidal was nothing more than a terrorist. Despite his father’s success as a businessman, he didn’t know anything about banking or protecting his assets.”
“So you handled his money?” asked Harvath.
“No. Not for his organization. He had people for that. Nidal asked me to do something different. He wanted this to be off the books, as it were. He didn’t want it tied to the FRC. If anything ever happened to him, he wanted to make sure this layer of protection was in place.”
“Protection for whom?”
The Troll looked at Harvath and said, “His daughter, Adara. It was set up to be her private, personal account.”
Over four thousand miles away, an analyst at the National Security Agency had just tagged and compressed the audio file he was working on.
Picking up his phone, he dialed a cell phone number. It was the second time in twenty-four hours he’d called the anonymous man on the other end.
When the voice of his contact came on, the analyst said, “You wanted to know if Scot Harvath made any further attempts to speak with Kevin McCauliff, the analyst at the NGA?”
“Go ahead,” replied the voice.
“He just hung up with him less than three minutes ago.”
“Did you get a fix on Harvath’s location?”
“No,” said the NSA man, “but based on his conversation, I think I may know where he’s headed.”
Chapter 101
SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC
A s he raced back toward the States, Harvath was consumed by conflicting emotions. Shortly after speaking with Kevin McCauliff, he’d contacted Ron Parker to ask for a favor, only to be filled in on the failed plot at The Bucket of Blood.
Though the police hadn’t apprehended the suspect yet, based upon the description of the man they were looking for, he was a dead ringer for Philippe Roussard. The Bucket of Blood was a SEAL Team Two hangout, Harvath was a former SEAL, the SEALs were often referred to as frogmen, and the next-to-last plague had to do with frogs. It was enough to cement for Harvath that the Bucket had been Roussard’s target.
Thanks to two sharp Virginia PD officers, the killer had been prevented from carrying out his attack. Score one for the good guys, even if it was the first time they had managed to put anything up on the board.
Roussard had gotten sloppy, and Harvath wondered if maybe the killer was getting tired.
That said, Harvath was pretty tired himself. It had taken him a full day to set everything up, and even though he’d had a couple of down days in Brazil before that, he hadn’t gotten any significant rest. He’d slept with one eye open the entire time. The Troll was someone he’d never be able to fully trust, and having to sit and wait while he plied his seamy trade in search of Roussard’s Brazilian connection had almost driven him crazy.
When the info about the Wegelin & Company account came, he was happy to make plans for Switzerland. But the email about the attempted attack on the Bucket changed all of that. Harvath couldn’t be in two places at once. Roussard had returned to America, and Harvath knew his only chance of stopping him before his last and final plague was to return there, too.
But, actually, maybe there was a way he could be in two places at once.
The Troll had gladly arranged for Harvath’s jet. Not only did he need him to remove the threat of Philippe Roussard, but if he wanted to live, he also needed Harvath to see him as an ally.
For his part, Harvath was driven by the same two things since the beginning—a desire to prevent anything further from happening to the people he cared about, and a desire to make Philippe Roussard and whoever was behind him pay for what they had done.
Before leaving Brazil, Harvath had contacted an old friend in Switzerland. It seemed ironic that with Meg Cassidy’s wedding only days away, he was now turning for help to one of the other good women he had pushed out of his life.
Claudia Mueller was a lead investigator for the Swiss Federal Attorney’s Office and had helped him rescue the president when he’d been kidnapped and secretly held in her country. Harvath had enlisted her assistance on one other occasion, a dangerous assignment that had involved not only Claudia, but the man who was now her husband, Horst Schroeder—a police special tactical unit leader from Bern.
Before she could act on Harvath’s latest request, there were a series of things she needed from him, not the least of which was a video statement from the Troll, complete with all the information regarding Abu Nidal and the bank account he had established for his daughter at Wegelin & Company. If what Harvath was telling her was true, and she had every reason to believe it was, this was something she wanted to secure a warrant for and do by the book.
In spite of what everyone thought about the Swiss banking system, the world had changed since 9/11, even for them. They had no desire to help terrorists launder or hide money. Claudia felt confident that she could secure the proper paperwork to compel the bank to give her the information that Harvath needed. The only part she couldn’t guarantee was how long it would take. It could be a matter of hours, or depending on the judge, it could be a matter of weeks.
Considering that lives were at stake, she hoped it would be the former.
Before hanging up, Claudia had joked that this was the first time Harvath had ever asked her for a favor that didn’t involve putting her life in danger. While getting a Swiss bank to part with its records wasn’t exactly easy, it was definitely easier than having somebody shoot at you.
The joke had made Harvath smile. Claudia was a good woman. She also knew him well enough not to be surprised when he told her there was a second favor he needed, and that it was going to be slightly more dangerous than her trip to the bank.
With the majority of the Swiss operation entrusted to Claudia and a small percentage to the Troll, Harvath had proceeded to a private airport outside São Paulo to meet his plane.
The entire time, he was wrestling with a very bad feeling as he put together a picture of who might be behind Philippe Roussard. Of course, there was the very real possibility that Roussard had access to his mother’s account at Wegelin & Company, but that wouldn’t explain who had gotten him out of Gitmo. There was more to this. There was someone else involved.
The Troll had been thinking the exact same thing, but their shared conclusion was impossible. Harvath had been there the night Adara Nidal was killed, and he had seen her die.
Chapter 102
T hough Harvath was traveling on his German passport as Hans Brauner and could go anywhere in the world he wanted, he had been marked a traitor, which made him a man without a country, and what was worse, he had absolutely no idea where he should be going.
In Roussard’s twisted countdown, the Bucket of Blood might have been meant for the final two plagues, but Harvath doubted it. He had a very bad feeling there was still one attack to go, and that it would represent the plague in which the waters were turned to blood.
Harvath tried to run through all of the people he knew who lived on or near water. He had grown up in California, spent a significant amount of time in the Navy, and lived on the East Coast for the last several years; the list was long. It was so long, in fact, that Harvath couldn’t keep track of all the names inside his head and had to find a pen and paper to write them all down.
It was a hopeless task. There was no telling where Roussard was going to strike next. The U. S. Ski Team facility in Park City and the Bucket
of Blood in Virginia Beach were almost as random as Carolyn Leonard, Kate Palmer, Emily Hawkins, and his dog. They were all significant to him, but they were not people or places he would ever have anticipated being attacked.
After the jet had made its descent into Houston’s Intercontinental Airport and Harvath had made his way through passport control and customs, he proceeded to the private aviation business center.
The first thing he did, after building his layers of proxy servers, was to plug in his ear bud and make hospital calls. Finney’s security teams were still in place and Harvath spoke with their captains. Ron Parker had updated each of them on the failed attack in Virginia Beach.
As a precaution, the team watching Harvath’s mother had her moved to another room, which didn’t face the street. From a car bomb perspective, Tracy was already protected.
Harvath spoke with her father, who told him that they had run additional tests and the results weren’t good. The new EEG suggested further decreased brain activity, and they had been attempting to wean her off the ventilator without any luck. Tracy was still not able to breathe on her own. There was a double downside to that, as not only could she not breathe on her own, but as long as she was on a ventilator there was still no way to conduct a full MRI to look for the exact cause of her coma and the true extent of the damage.
There was a tone of fatalism in Bill Hastings’s voice that Harvath didn’t like. “This is not what Tracy would have wanted,” he said. “All these tubes and wires. The ventilator. Remember Terri Schiavo?” Bill asked. “We had talked about her once, and Tracy told us she would never want to live like that.”
Bill and Barbara Hastings were Tracy’s parents and her next of kin, so that gave them the power to make medical decisions on Tracy’s behalf, but it sounded as if they were considering throwing in the towel.
As long as Tracy was alive, there was still hope that she might pull through, and Harvath told them so.
Bill Hastings was not as optimistic. “If you’d spoken to the doctors, Scot. The neurologists. If you’d heard what they had to say, you might feel differently.”
