by Brad Thor
Seeing the Polaris approaching the Harvard Club, Roussard peered beneath the ski tube to make sure the weapon was “hot” and ready to fire.
Satisfied that everything was exactly as he wanted it, he straightened up and focused on the target.
As the steamship neared the Harvard Club, Roussard bumped the throttles farther forward and began to pick up speed again.
When the Polaris pulled even with the Harvard Club’s swim pier, Roussard threw the ski tube overboard and pushed the Cobalt’s throttles all the way forward.
It took only a moment for the speedboat to pop out of the hole, and once the craft was on plane, it accelerated like a jet off an aircraft carrier.
He’d already opened the boat all the way up earlier in the day, but the sensation was nothing like what he was feeling now. He rose from his seat, feeling his body become one with the craft. With the Vulcan, the three of them combined to create the perfect killing machine.
Roussard watched as the distance between him and his unknowing victims aboard the slow-moving Polaris narrowed.
As he got within a thousand meters of the steamship he began to count down in bite-sized chunks. Seven hundred meters. Six hundred meters. Five hundred.
He wanted to shout the attack cry of his ancestors as his boat ripped through the water and he closed in on the final several hundred meters. Already he could see passengers on the Polaris taking notice. At first their faces reflected bewilderment and then terror as they realized what was happening and comprehended that they were powerless to stop it.
He was within a hundred meters of where he needed to bring the boat to a stop so that he could man the Vulcan. Seventy-five. Now fifty meters!
As Roussard cut back the throttles, the engines failed to quiet. Instead they roared and grew louder.
It took the killer but a fraction of a second to comprehend what was happening, and by then it was too late.
Chapter 120
T he hull of the bright-red Cigarette boat sliced right through Roussard’s Cobalt. At the moment he realized what had happened, the deed was done. Roussard was barely able to throw his hands up in front of his face before impact.
Passengers aboard the Polaris began screaming as soon as they saw that the low-slung Cigarette boat was doing nothing to avert an impending collision with the bright-yellow Cobalt.
The sound of the impact was sickening. Fiberglass was ripped apart and rent asunder as the Cigarette plowed right through its victim and kept going, grazing the stern of the Polaris.
The Cigarette finally stopped when it ran aground halfway up the rolling hill that met the thin strip of rock, sand, and grass that composed the Harvard Club’s shorefront.
The first thing Harvath heard as he came to were the terrified screams from the Polaris. Blood was dripping into his right eye, and he raised his hand to his forehead and felt a gash several inches long. Looking to his left, he couldn’t find Morrell and assumed he’d been ejected.
Smoke was pouring from the engine compartment. Harvath cut the engines and the wildly spinning props soon fell silent. Stumbling from the boat, he looked for Morrell and found him lying near a rock wall over thirty feet away. He was barely conscious, and Harvath knew better than to move him. He told Morrell to stay still and that he’d be back with help soon.
What he didn’t share with him was that he had something else he had to do first.
Off the end of the Harvard Club boat pier, Harvath could see the two halves of Roussard’s boat upturned and bobbing just above the water line. Ignoring the splitting pain from his head, Harvath took off running down the pier, launching himself at the end of it in a flying leap over the water.
When he plunged beneath the surface, he opened his eyes and began looking for Roussard. He stayed down as long as he could, until he had no choice but to come up again for air. Circling the wreckage in search of the terrorist, he ignored the burning sensation of spilled gasoline that was pouring into his wound.
He was about to submerge himself again when he heard coughing from about seventy-five yards away. It had come from a fleet of moored sailboats. Swimming as quietly as he could, Harvath made for the sound.
From Fontana, the village air raid siren was calling the police, volunteer fire, and rescue workers to duty.
Unobserved, he moved closer to the sailboat, and then, taking a deep breath, Harvath slipped once more beneath the surface of the water.
When he got beneath the sailboat’s heavy, fixed keel he looked up and saw a pair of legs feebly treading water. Sliding his Benchmade from where it was clipped in his pocket, Harvath depressed its lone button and the blade swung up and locked into place.
Like a great white shark circling its prey, Harvath made a loop beneath Roussard and headed upward, quietly breaking the surface behind him.
The man must have sensed Harvath’s presence, because all of a sudden he spun, his eyes wide with fear. Blood was running from his nose as well as both of his ears. When he coughed, great gobs of it came out, and as Harvath positioned himself for the kill, he noticed that one of Roussard’s eyeballs must have become detached, as it remained stationary and didn’t track the way the other one did.
There was no mercy in Harvath’s heart for this terrorist, this killer of innocent men and women. Roussard was beyond rehabilitation, and Harvath knew the greatest gift he could give the American taxpayers was to prevent Roussard from ever standing trial and living out the next twenty years on appeal after appeal in some prison somewhere.
Harvath swung the knife with one fluid slash, and its blade tore through the soft flesh of Roussard’s throat. That which has been taken in blood, can only be answered in blood, he thought to himself.
Watching him die, Harvath began to realize that he’d made a mistake. The blade was so razor-sharp that Roussard probably hadn’t even felt it. Bleeding to death was too good for him. Harvath wanted him to be filled with terror as he died, just as so many of his victims had.
Quickly swimming around behind him, Harvath placed both of his hands upon Roussard’s shoulders and pushed him beneath the surface of the water.
The man struggled violently for almost a minute. Then his body fell quiet and Harvath knew he was dead.
Chapter 121
H arvath remained at the scene with Rick Morrell until an ambulance arrived. Though the CIA operative insisted he’d be fine, the EMTs put him in a cervical collar, placed him on a backboard, and transported him to the hospital for evaluation. Once Morrell was gone, Harvath made his way back down to the water.
The Polaris had docked at the end of the Abbey Springs boat pier, and when Todd Kirkland saw Harvath making his way to where all the passengers were gathered, he thought for sure he was coming for him. But he wasn’t. Nor was he coming for Meg. Instead he spoke briefly with Meg’s two Secret Service agents and then took Jean Stevens by the hand and led her away.
After walking back along the lake path to her cottage to pick up extra clothes and her car, Jean drove Harvath to the Abbey Resort. Still soaking wet, he walked straight past the gaping-mouthed stares of the front desk staff to his room.
He called the pilots and told them to be ready to move in five minutes, then quickly changed into the clothes Jean Stevens had given him. As she drove them to the airport, Harvath informed Zucker and Burdic that they were flying to D. C. His one hope was that he would make it there before Tracy’s parents could remove her from life support.
When the plane touched down it was raining. Through the rain-soaked windows of his cab, he could see by the light of the D. C. streetlights that the leaves were already beginning to turn color. Summer was officially over.
Tracy’s night nurse, Laverna, was the first one to notice him when he stepped into the ICU. “I tried to call you. Didn’t you get any of my messages?” she asked.
Harvath shook his head. “I’ve been out of pocket for a few days. How’s Tracy?”
The nurse gripped his arm. “Her parents took her off the ventilator this after
noon.”
The tide of emotion that welled up inside him was overwhelming, and he was too exhausted to try to fight it. He could not believe that Bill and Barbara Hastings had done it. They could have at least waited for him to return. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and he did nothing to try to hide them.
“She’s strong,” stated the nurse, “she’s a fighter.”
Harvath couldn’t understand what she was saying. He was too exhausted. He just stared at her blankly.
“She’s still alive.”
Harvath turned and moved quickly away from the nurse’s station.
When he entered Tracy’s room, her parents looked up from where they were sitting. Neither of them knew what to say.
Ignoring them, Harvath walked to the other side of the bed and picked up Tracy’s hand. He gave it a squeeze and said, “It’s me, honey. It’s Scot. I’m here now.”
There was a movement, and at first Harvath thought he was imagining it. Then it happened again. It was weak, but Tracy had squeezed his hand. She knew he was there.
At that moment, everything came flooding out of him. He buried his head in her hair and as she squeezed his hand again he began to cry.
Chapter 122
JERUSALEM
T racking down the puppeteer pulling Philippe Roussard’s strings began with a visit to Dei Glicini e Ulivella, the exclusive private hospital in Florence where payments from Roussard’s mother’s Wegelin & Company account had been made.
Harvath didn’t know what to expect. Part of him thought he might find a badly burned Adara Nidal sitting up in her hospital bed waiting for him, her silver eyes unmistakable behind a mask of charred flesh.
What he discovered was that the payments weren’t for Adara Nidal. Instead, they were for a male patient with a name Harvath had never heard before and who had recently up and left.
All Harvath’s suppositions had been wrong. Adara was not the person behind Roussard’s release from Gitmo and his subsequent attacks within the United States. It was somebody else—a man with a false name who had simply vanished.
The first person who entered Harvath’s mind was Hashim, Adara’s brother and Philippe’s uncle. But when the hospital administrator finished touring Harvath through the patient’s abandoned room and showed him into his office, Harvath realized how wrong he’d been in assuming Adara or her brother were behind the monster that had been Philippe Roussard. Sitting on the credenza behind the administrator’s desk was something that pointed to another person—someone far more complex, far more twisted, who had a reach long enough to fake his own death, even for a second time.
When asked about it, the administrator claimed it had been a gift from the patient whom Harvath was looking for. It was all the identification Harvath needed.
Harvath’s taxi cab pulled up in front of an old, four-story building in Jerusalem’s popular Ben Yehuda district. The storefront was composed of two large windows crammed full of antique furniture, paintings, and fixtures. The gilded sign above the entryway read Thames & Cherwell Antiques, followed by translations in Hebrew and Arabic.
A small brass bell above the door announced Harvath’s arrival.
The dimly lit store was still packed with tapestries, furniture, and no end of faded bric-a-brac. It had been preserved exactly as it was on his first visit here years before.
He neared a narrow mahogany door and pulled it toward him to reveal a small, wood-paneled elevator. Pressing a button inside, he watched as the door closed and he felt the elevator rise.
When it arrived on the uppermost floor, the door opened onto a long hallway, its floor covered by an intricately patterned Oriental runner. The walls were painted a deep forest green and were lined with framed prints of fox hunting, fly fishing, and crumbling abbeys.
As Harvath walked forward, he remembered the infrared sensors placed every few feet and guessed that there still were pressure sensitive plates beneath the runner. Ari Schoen was one man who took his security very seriously.
At the end of the hall, Harvath found himself in a large room, more dimly lit than the shop downstairs. It was paneled from floor to ceiling, like the elevator, with a rich, deeply colored wood. With its fireplace, billiards table, and overstuffed leather chairs, it felt more like a British gentleman’s club than the upper-floor office of a shop in West Jerusalem.
Sitting up in a mechanical hospital bed near a pair of heavy silk draperies drawn tight against the windows was the man himself.
“I knew one of you would eventually come,” said Schoen as Harvath stepped into the room. He was even more hideously deformed than before, his nonexistent lips barely able to shape the words emanating from his charred hole of a mouth. “I assume Philippe is dead.”
Harvath nodded.
“How did you know it was me?” asked Schoen.
“Adara’s bank account at Wegelin.”
“The payments to the clinic,” mused Schoen, as medical instruments clicked and buzzed around him. “I think you’re lying, Agent Harvath. That was a completely clean alias I was registered under. There was nothing to tie anything back to me. It had never been used before and hasn’t been used since.”
“It wasn’t the alias, it was your whiskey,” Harvath said, pointing at the antique globe that hid Schoen’s bar beneath its hinged lid. “The 1963 Black Bowmore. ‘Black as pitch,’ you once told me. You must have thought very highly of the hospital’s director to have given him such an expensive present.”
Schoen raised his hand to brush the thought away as if it was nothing. “You are more intelligent than I gave you credit for.”
“Tell me about the other men you had released from Guantanamo. What was their connection to you?”
“There was no connection,” said Schoen with a laugh. “That was the point. They were background noise that Philippe could be lost in. They were randomly selected to keep anyone in your government’s intelligence services who might come investigating, guessing.”
“And the plot with the children?”
“An unfortunate, but extremely effective motivator. When I discovered I had a grandson, I reached out to him, but our relationship was understandably strained. He wanted very little to do with me, but somewhere inside him he understood that we were the only family each other had.
“When he was captured and taken to Gitmo, I decided I would do anything to get him back.”
Slowly, all of the madness was beginning to make sense. “I want the names of your people who kidnapped and killed the school bus driver. I also want to know all of the other bus routes you had targeted.”
Schoen looked at him for a moment and then said, “The school bus we hijacked in South Carolina was the only one. There are no others. The photos of other buses were ploys to gain your government’s acquiescence, nothing more.”
His face was a mass of twitches and spasms, which made him nearly impossible to read. “How do I know you’re not lying?” asked Harvath.
“You don’t,” replied Schoen. “Only time will tell.”
“What about the names of the operatives who hijacked the bus?”
“I will take them to my grave,” said the man.
Harvath wasn’t surprised, but that would be for someone else to take up. He had other questions at this point. Glancing at the silver-framed photographs positioned on an adjacent console table, he asked, “So why me? Why my family and the people I care about?”
“Because Philippe wanted the man responsible for his mother’s death.”
“Which was his uncle, Hashim.”
“But his uncle was dead,” said Schoen. “The very idea of your being responsible for it all filled him with rage. Rage is a very powerful emotion. If a man has enough of it he loses his self-control. And when a man loses his self-control he is much more susceptible to the control of another.”
“So you pinned it on me,” responded Harvath.
“As I said. It was nothing personal.”
Harvath looked at him. “What was in
all of this for you?”
Schoen sat up from his bed and spat, “Revenge!”
Chapter 123
R evenge against whom?” demanded Harvath. “Against me?”
“No,” hissed Schoen. “Against Philippe’s mother.”
“For what? The first time a Nidal blew you up, or the second?”
“It was for taking my son away from me,” he replied as he sank back into his bed.
“But Adara Nidal was dead,” said Harvath who was beginning to wonder if Roussard’s warped psychopathology was a condition inherited not from his mother, but rather from his paternal grandfather.
“It made no difference to me. Stealing her son from her and turning him to my cause would have been the ultimate act of revenge.”
“How could you expect an Arab, a Palestinian Arab at that, to renounce Islam and pick up the Israeli cause?”
“You forget that after my Daniel died I studied everything I could about Abu Nidal, his organization, and most important, his family. I knew more about them than they even knew about themselves. Philippe lacked a masculine role model.”
“And that was going to be you?” said Harvath facetiously.
“Half of my blood, my Daniel’s blood, ran through his body. He was half Israeli and I believed I could appeal to that side of him. But before he would listen to anything I had to say—”
“He wanted me dead,” stated Harvath, finishing Schoen’s sentence for him.
“Precisely. But he didn’t only want you dead. He wanted you to suffer. He wanted you to feel the pain he had felt at losing his mother. I knew I could use this incredible rage to draw him closer to me.”
“And the plagues and running them in reverse order?”
Schoen was wheezing, and stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Finally he said, “The plagues were a tribute to his mother, who devoted her career as a terrorist to igniting a true holy war against Israel. Her attacks were often tinged with Jewish symbolism.
