Hidden Order: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  There wasn’t much Harvath could add to what the Old Man had been told, only his belief that the victim was Peter Whalen, the missing Fed chair candidate from Chicago.

  The information didn’t make the Old Man happy. Not that Harvath had expected it to. He wasn’t happy, either. Quite the contrary. They had been hired to try to help save four people and half them were now dead.

  “So besides another dinner and maybe some dancing with this female detective you’re playing footsy with,” the Old Man stated, “do you have any plans to actually solve this case, or should I expect to read about it when you get around to sending me a postcard?”

  Carlton was one of the most brilliant people Harvath knew, but he could be a real curmudgeon when he was pissed-off. In those instances it was a free-fire zone for his acerbic tongue. The only thing he could do was bite his own tongue and wait for the storm to pass.

  “The Bureau guys at the scene are proceeding on the assumption that the remaining two missing Fed candidates are here in Boston,” said Harvath. “And we agree.”

  “We?”

  “Detective Cordero and I.”

  “So what are they planning on doing about it?”

  “They’re going to go public with the names and photos of the last two missing persons. Their hope is that maybe somebody in Boston has seen something and will provide actionable intelligence.”

  “Are they going to publicize the Fed connection as well?”

  “No,” Harvath replied. “It sounds like they’re going to do a straight missing persons, believed to be in the Boston area approach.”

  “That should keep it out of the national media for a bit longer,” said Carlton. “But not much.”

  “Lewis and the Fed have been on borrowed time anyway. The only reason all the missing persons haven’t been linked together is that nobody really knows who they are.”

  “And the newest murder?”

  “Boston PD has the scene locked down pretty tight. Because of the smoke and the fire trucks, they’re going to allow people to assume there was a fire. They’re not taking the body out in a body bag. They’re going to drain the gang box and transport it with the corpse down to the ME’s office.”

  “How are they planning on putting the word out regarding the last two missing candidates?”

  “If they hustle, they can get it included in the morning police roll call briefings. All the detectives and all the patrol officers will be given the names and photos, along with a brief description and as much of the story as the FBI decides they want put out there. I think they’re going to connect it to the other murders.”

  “Then you can speed up the timetable of the national press getting hold of the story,” said the Old Man. “Police departments leak like sieves.”

  “Hopefully, they’ll keep it under wraps.”

  “What about beyond the PD?”

  “Names and photographs of Betsy Mitchell and Jonathan Renner to run on local television news along with the FBI’s one-eight-hundred number for tips. The names and photographs are also going to the local papers.”

  “Better late than never,” Carlton said.

  “With detectives and patrol officers out there beating the bushes, along with the public keeping their eyes open, we may get lucky.”

  “I hope it works.”

  “Me, too,” said Harvath. “I’m going to get cleaned up and then get back down to police headquarters. Is there anything else you need?”

  “Yeah. The client wants to speak with you.”

  “Monroe Lewis? What for?”

  “He wants an update from the field.”

  “I just gave you one.”

  “I know,” said the Old Man, “and even though he just spoke with the FBI, he wants to hear from you, too. He asked me for your cell phone number and I told him I’d give it to him after you and I spoke. Keep it short and keep it limited to the facts. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  CHAPTER 53

  The call with Monroe Lewis turned out to be a call not only with Lewis, but also with William Jacobson, the Fed’s head of security.

  While Lewis wanted Harvath’s overall thoughts and impressions of where the case was going and why they hadn’t developed any leads, Jacobson grilled Harvath for exacting and excruciatingly specific details. They were getting ready for the media firestorm they knew was on its way.

  Finally, Lewis resignedly asked, “There’s not going to be any ransom demand, is there?”

  “No,” Harvath replied. “I don’t think there will be. Not unless going public spooks whoever’s involved.”

  Lewis knew the Fed better than anyone else. He had risen to his position by dedicating his life to the organization. He had no family, no significant other. He could be found there nights and weekends. He knew that many saw him as cold and distant. He also knew that when he tried to be more convivial, it often came off as phony. Chairman Sawyer had been the first person to take a deep, personal interest in him. Sawyer had become his mentor and had helped orchestrate his promotion to where he was now. He had confided many things in Lewis, and it had been a particular shock when Sawyer suddenly died. Lewis had been forced to come to grips very quickly with what was important not only for the Fed, but also for his own career. None of it was easy, and the course they were charting was fraught with peril.

  “You think it’s possible to spook these people?” asked Jacobson. “After what they’ve done?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think the odds are of catching them?”

  “I have to be honest with you,” said Harvath, knowing full well the Old Man would hate him for saying this, “I don’t think the odds are very good. Not unless we catch some sort of a break. But that’s exactly what you hope for in a case like this.”

  “You’re right,” said Lewis. “We have to remain positive. We’ve got to do everything we can to solve this thing.”

  “As far as we know, the last two are still alive.”

  “Jon and Betsy,” he said, distraught.

  “I’m going to do everything I can to find them.”

  “Please do, Mr. Harvath. And make sure to keep us abreast of everything that’s happening.”

  “We will.”

  After hanging up, Harvath showered, changed, and then picked up another coffee in the lobby. It was just under two miles to 1 Schroeder Plaza and police headquarters. Rush hour was in full swing and there were already several people lined up for taxis, so he decided to walk it. The fresh air and uninterrupted time to think would both do him good.

  He was bothered by how little he’d been able to develop in the way of actionable leads. Granted, he had been on the case less than forty-eight hours, but so much had happened. He had never believed in the perfect crime. There was no such thing. Criminals always left clues, always.

  That said, even the prints they’d been able to recover had been a bust. Their killer was a ghost. What was worse, Harvath was relegated to playing catch-up. He wasn’t even on defense, fending off an attack. It was like being blindfolded and shoved in a dark room with fifty people wielding bats. You knew you were going to be hit, you just had no idea where the next blow was going to come from.

  As he walked, he tried to sort through the facts of the case. The Federal Reserve chairman had died from heart failure just over a week ago. Days later, the top five candidates to replace him had been abducted. That was Sunday, today was Wednesday, and in between a woman named Claire Marcourt, a man named Herman Penning, and another man named Peter Whalen had all been brutally murdered.

  Despite knowing the approximate times of day and the areas he had passed through, neither the police nor the FBI had been able to catch the killer on a single CCTV camera. It was as if cameras couldn’t capture his image, like he was some sort of vampire whose reflection was never cast in a mirror. Whoever the killer was, he was exceptionally skilled.

  Which brought Harvath to Bill Wise and the idea that the man they were lookin
g for was highly trained, possibly even created by the CIA. He certainly wasn’t operating alone, but the idea that Agency personnel could be behind something like this was almost too much for Harvath to swallow. There was, though, more than one person at work here, and whoever they were, they felt justified in committing murder. It was all Harvath needed to know about them. It helped frame how he would deal with them, if he got the chance.

  When Harvath arrived at police headquarters, Cordero was already upstairs in her office.

  “This just went out,” she said, handing him the police bulletin on their last two missing persons.

  Harvath read it over and handed it back.

  “The Federal Reserve,” she said. “That’s what they were all being considered to head, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “How’d you figure it out?”

  “If you hadn’t told me about Claire Marcourt, I might not have. But when you combine her background in economics and banking with the death of the recent Fed chairman and what I learned from a five-minute Web search about Jekyll Island, it doesn’t take a detective to put it all together.”

  “I didn’t tell you about Jekyll specifically, though.”

  “No, you said an island off the coast of Georgia. One of the FBI agents mentioned it by name this morning.” Changing tack, she said, “You could have told me that this was about the Fed.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Orders.” Looking at his watch, he asked, “Did the bulletin on Renner and Mitchell make it in time to be included in the morning roll calls?”

  “It did. What do you think our next move should be?”

  “Well, short of going back to church and lighting a candle, there’s only one thing I can think of to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  Harvath took a deep breath and exhaled. “We map out every major historical location in Boston and try to figure out where he’s going to strike next.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Betsy Mitchell had tried all the tricks she knew in order to stay calm. The conditions under which she had been kept were terrible. She didn’t remember much from her abduction. She had been on her way back home from having dinner with friends. There’d been an accident. She had stopped to help. The rest was a blur. Whoever had kidnapped her must have drugged her, too.

  She had been kept in some sort of a crate, like a large dog kennel. It was dark most of the time and she was wearing restraints. Every once in a while, a small panel opened in the top and a water bottle and power bars were thrown in. She had not been allowed out to exercise or use the facilities. She figured out fairly quickly that was why the plastic bags had been left in the crate. Despite having double- and triple-bagged her waste, the crate smelled putrid. She could only imagine what she smelled and looked like at this point.

  Though she’d been drugged, she remembered the splitting pain in her ears. She had never done well equalizing pressure when flying and normally wore custom earplugs that helped her avoid barotraumas. Wherever they had transported her, they had made multiple stops along the way. When they had reached their destination, the crate had been placed inside some sort of a truck. It had been a diesel vehicle. She could tell by the sound of the engine and the smell of the fumes. The truck had driven for some time until it finally ended up where she was now.

  Without a watch or any natural light with which to mark the passage of time, she had no idea what day it was or how long she had been gone. Surely people were looking for her by now. Hopefully they had started looking when she didn’t show up for work Monday morning. The CEO of a successful hedge fund didn’t just go missing without people noticing.

  More than once during her ordeal she had chastised herself for not taking her board up on its suggestion that she have bodyguards. She’d always thought the idea ridiculous. If she were a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, she might have considered it, but she was Betsy Mitchell. She was an approachable, popular-cause-promoting finance guru. People didn’t want to harm her; they wanted to hug her. Besides, she used to joke, when was the last time you ever heard of an American executive being kidnapped in the United States? When knowledgeable people ran the stats down for her, she’d laugh them off. Betsy Mitchell was all about budgets and bottom lines, not bodyguards. Until, that is, she was taken.

  As little as she knew about being kidnapped, she did know that if your kidnappers hid their faces that was a good sign. It meant that you would be free at some point and they didn’t want you to be able to identify them.

  When the door to her crate was opened, she found the sight of the powerfully built man, crouched on his haunches with a green glow stick, jarring. He wore coveralls and a smiling Guy Fawkes mask, the kind popular in anticapitalist movements.

  Though the mask was unsettling, its choice told her something about the people who had taken her. If they had done their homework into who she was, which they very likely had, they would know that she supported many popular causes likely aligned with theirs. Whatever their beef, she was not their enemy. She had simply been chosen because her company would pay to get her back. It was an easy score. In desperate economic times, people turned to desperate measures. She hoped that they understood that she appreciated their struggle. Under different circumstances, she might have even freely contributed to whatever their cause was.

  That made little difference now. She was their prisoner. And while the tough businesswoman in her wanted to see if she could talk them into letting her go, there was something about the eyes behind the mask that shook her self-preservation instinct to the core and told her to keep her mouth shut and do what she was told.

  He beckoned her out of the cage with his gloved hand. She did as she was instructed.

  In the corners of the room, he had placed other chemical lights, which cast the space in an eerie, green pall. It was difficult to tell where she was. The space was dirty and industrial, constructed of brick and concrete.

  As she neared the front of the cage, he grabbed a fistful of her thick brown hair and twisted so hard she could hear her scalp begin to pop as it tore away. She screamed and he struck her across the face with the glow stick.

  He slammed her face against the floor and then slid something underneath her neck. She had no idea what it was until he let go of her hair and she could feel him fumbling with a buckle of some sort. She was being fitted with a collar. Why? Was he trying to humiliate her? Were they going to make some sort of a video to send with their ransom demand? There were a million questions flying through her mind, not one of which she dared to ask. The side of her face where she had been struck with the glow stick still hurt. She had no desire to incur the man’s wrath any further. For right now, she would keep her questions to herself. Whoever this man was, he meant business.

  Inside the cage, she had been free to move around, but now, once the collar was attached, the man jerked her the rest of the way out and restrained her hands behind her back again. Her legs, though, were left alone. This brought even more questions to her mind, most too hideous even to contemplate, and she tried to block all of them out. She would know the man’s intent soon enough.

  After being cooped up in the cramped cage, her legs were sore and her joints stiff. She had trouble walking, and this angered the man in the Guy Fawkes mask, who had to half drag her to the far side of the room, where a metal ring had been bolted into the wall.

  There was a length of chain hanging from it, which he then affixed to her collar. With her hands secured behind her back, there was no possible way she could free herself. She was able to at least stand and move around a little bit, and it felt good to be on her feet again once more and no longer folded up inside the fetid metal box.

  The man in the mask stood back and stared at her, assessing her. Slowly, he put his hands out in front of himself and began to do calisthenics. He started with squats and he motioned for her to follow suit. He was encouraging her to limber up. Why? Were they letting her go? The thought was too good to be true, but instead of banishing it from her mind,
she embraced it. They are going to let me go! She repeated the thought over and over again in her mind.

  Once she had gone through the series of exercises, the man in the mask removed what looked like a small digital audio recorder. He held it out so she could see it clearly and he activated its PLAY button.

  The male voice that came from the speaker was upbeat and dramatic as it overaccentuated its words. “Please repeat after me,” it said. “Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

  She had no idea what bizarre game the man in the mask was playing at. Her silence aggravated him. Rewinding the message, he forcefully extended the recorder out to her and played it again.

  “Please repeat after me,” the digital voice said. “Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

  She was understandably scared and her mind wasn’t working as well as it normally did. “Sally Fisher lost her locket,” she stammered.

  Drawing his free hand back, the man in the mask struck her across the face again. He rewound the message and thrust the recorder at her once more.

  “Please repeat after me,” the digital voice said. “Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

  She could taste blood in her mouth this time. The man’s violence terrified her. She now knew what she had seen in his eyes that was so unsettling. The man was a killer and as sure as she was standing there, if he felt her life needed to be ended, he would do it.

  Please let me get this right. Please, God, let me get it right. I just want to leave. I just want to go home.

  “Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it,” she said, picking up speed right at the end as she knew she had it.