Hidden Order: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  As Harvath continued to walk the building, his mind was drawn to the passage on the back of the card from John Hancock. As he had been laying out the time line for Cordero, the Boston Massacre was the next big event he was going to mention before her commander had interrupted them.

  What if the killer’s next murder scene wasn’t going to be Boston Common or Faneuil Hall, where the two regiments of British troops had stayed, but the actual site of the Boston Massacre?

  The more he thought about it, the more the idea began to crowd out all other possibilities. The line from Hancock had to be tied to where the killer was going to strike next. It had to be.

  The only question that remained was whether they should spend any more time at all in the warehouse or turn it over to the evidence techs and try to get a jump on the next location. Actually, there wasn’t any question at all.

  Giving up his search, Harvath turned around and walked quickly back to find Cordero. If they did this right, they might be able to set up a trap and have the killer walk right into it.

  CHAPTER 58

  A circle of cobblestones with a star carved into the center was all that marked the location of the Boston Massacre. It sat embedded in a downtown sidewalk, almost directly beneath the east balcony of the Old State House. It was one of the least glamorous but most important stops along Boston’s “Freedom Trail,” a two-and-a-half-mile-long red stripe that runs through the city and connects sixteen historically significant sites in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. On that spot, five Bostonians became the first to give up their lives for the cause of American liberty.

  Waiting for a group of tourists to pass, he looked at Cordero and her partner and said, “The symbolism here is pitch perfect. Right up their alley. This has got to be where the next one is going to happen.”

  “What do you think, Sal?” Cordero asked.

  “My smartphone isn’t so smart when it comes to predicting what people are going to do. I don’t know.”

  She looked back at Harvath. “Do you think they’d stage something from inside the Old State House? Another hanging maybe? Have the body come out over the balcony?”

  Harvath looked up and considered it. “We know they like to operate late at night. It gives them cover. They also like to limit their exposure. That’s why the Liberty Tree and Hutchinson sites were done inside. It’s pretty hard to kill somebody out in public.”

  Cordero’s partner looked up at all the office buildings surrounding them. “Maybe not. What if they used a sniper?”

  It was a good point. Harvath hadn’t thought of that and now looked up as well. There were plenty of places a sniper could be positioned. It would be dramatic and draw a lot of attention. It also felt like something the people he believed they were dealing with would be capable of.

  Playing devil’s advocate, he said, “If they did use a sniper, how would they get the victim to walk right up to where they wanted?”

  “If it were me,” Cordero mused, “I’d put a cop there.”

  “You would?”

  She nodded. “I’d call something into 911, wait until the cop was right where I wanted him, and then I’d turn the victim loose.”

  Harvath thought about that. “Make the victim think you were setting him free?”

  “Or her free,” she clarified. “Remember, we’ve got one man and one woman who are still missing.”

  “That’s correct. So you’d let him or her think they’re being set free, you’d dump them on the street someplace close, and then tell them to run for the cop.”

  “Then when they get to the cop,” Sal said, mimicking a sniper with an invisible rifle, “end of story.”

  It was an excellent theory, but just that—a theory. He looked up again at the buildings. It was a base worth covering. “How much of a SWAT presence could we get?”

  “We can reach out to the state guys to augment what we already have,” said Cordero as her eyes scanned the area. “But not knowing precisely what these people have planned, we also need to flood this entire zone with plainclothes cops. If the victim makes it to that historical marker, it could be too late.”

  Harvath agreed. “The Boston Massacre was all about British soldiers mowing innocent people down with muskets, so if they do go the sniper route, they’ll have the victim in the crosshairs the entire time. Nevertheless, we need to cover our other bases.”

  “Such as?”

  “We definitely want to have officers positioned inside the Old State House,” he said, as his mind sifted through the countless possibilities. When you had a location, particularly one out in the open, you learned how to defend it by envisioning how the bad guys would likely attack it. Looking down at the historical marker, he added, “Is there anything running underneath here? Sewers? The subway system?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Just in case this historical marker isn’t really on the site of the Boston Massacre, but actually above it, we’ll need cops down there covering it as well.”

  “That shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” Cordero replied. “What else do we need?”

  It was odd to have her suddenly defer to him, and it took a moment for him to realize that the shift had happened. Maybe it was because she knew that he had been a Secret Service agent, though she had no idea it was on the President’s detail, but somehow she sensed that this was in his wheelhouse and was something he was good at.

  He thought through all the other things he would like to have, knowing they’d never get there in time, and settled on the one thing they needed more than anything else. “If you can find us a whole busload of luck, that’d be all I’d ask for,” he said, forcing an optimistic laugh.

  Harvath heard Cordero’s partner laugh, but as he looked up, he couldn’t tell if the man was laughing with him, or at him.

  CHAPTER 59

  Betsy Mitchell felt the vehicle, probably a van of some sort based on the sliding sound the door had made once they had gotten into it, bump and jostle along through traffic. She had no idea where they were. Based on the drugs she had been given and all of the takeoffs and landings of the plane she had been on after her abduction, she had no idea if she was even in the United States anymore. She could hear car horns outside, but she couldn’t see anything. A hood had been placed over her head.

  Despite a split lip and an eye that felt painfully swollen from the blows she had suffered, the rape Betsy had feared back at the warehouse never happened. After tearing away her blouse, the man in the mask had left the room. He came back with a small camera and microphone combination, a third the size of a lipstick tube, and showed it to her. He then taped it to her chest, and that was when he had placed the hood over her head.

  As he removed the collar from around her neck and began to dress her, he used the digital recorder to relay a message explaining what was about to happen.

  Her ransom had been agreed on. Within a matter of hours she would be free, if she did everything she was supposed to do. That was the purpose of the video camera and microphone. Though she couldn’t see it with the hood over her head, she could feel him adjusting her clothes around it. He explained that he would be able to see and hear everything she did. He also explained what would happen if she veered even one inch from her instructions. Her blood froze in her veins. Once she found her voice again, she swore she would do exactly as he asked. She promised them that in no condition would she waver from what she had been told to do.

  When the voice on the digital recorder asked her to repeat the rhyme she had been taught, she did, repeating it perfectly, word for word. Once he was satisfied that she was ready, he had loaded her into the vehicle and they departed.

  She lost track of how long they had been driving. It could have been an hour. It could have been ten. All she could think about was doing everything he demanded, exactly as he had demanded it. All she wanted was her freedom. All she wanted to do was go home.

  The vehicle turned for the umpteenth time, but began to slow and then eventuall
y pulled over to the side and stopped. The man with the mask joined her in the back of the van and removed her hood. His eyes bored into hers for several moments before he produced the digital recorder and pressed PLAY. The words she had first heard it speak poured forth again.

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

  Betsy dutifully complied. The man then rewound the recording and played it again. Betsy repeated the phrase again. In fact, she kept repeating it. It was her mantra. If she said it enough times, she would be free.

  The man in the mask produced a knife and cut the nylon EZ Cuffs from her wrists and ankles. Then tapping her chest to remind her of the camera, he slid open the door and gestured for her to step out onto the sidewalk.

  Wherever in the world she was, it was evening. That was all she knew. Her instructions had been quite specific. With her hand first in the right pocket of her coat and then the left, she began walking away from the van. As she walked, she continued to repeat the rhyme over and over again, hoping the man in the mask hadn’t lied to her.

  “Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

  • • •

  “Here you go,” Cordero said, handing Harvath a bottle of water she had just purchased for him. “See anything new?”

  Harvath took the water from her and screwed off the cap. “Nothing yet. What did the SWAT commander say?”

  “He asked the same thing he did an hour ago. How much longer do we think this is going to go on.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him not to worry. His team will be home for Christmas.”

  Harvath smiled. At least she still had her sense of humor, but it was fading. It had taken all day to set the operation up, most of it with the FBI going back and forth with their headquarters in Washington as to how everything should be handled. A lot of time, in Harvath’s opinion, had been wasted on where everyone should be placed, how many Boston PD versus FBI agents should be in plainclothes, et cetera. By the time everything was settled, it was already late afternoon.

  “These kinds of ops aren’t easy,” he said, referring to Cordero’s interaction with the SWAT team leader. “Scanning rooftops and windows is mind-numbing work. You can burn out fast and lose your edge. The commander is just looking out for his guys.”

  “Like I said, they’ll all be home for Christmas.”

  Harvath nodded. Everyone was on edge, their nerves a bit frayed. They were anxious for something to happen. And unlike other types of stakeouts, they had to keep moving.

  Cordero’s partner had helped coordinate changes of clothes so she and Harvath could rotate in and out of the area with different appearances. He was also coordinating the plainclothes cops and FBI agents.

  There had already been a couple of false alarms as people bearing a similar resemblance to Jonathan Renner or Betsy Mitchell had passed by. It had sent everyone into high-alert mode, only to turn out that it wasn’t the people they were looking for.

  As the evening wore on, Harvath could see the fatigue begin to eat away at the corners of Cordero’s mind.

  “What if somehow we tipped our hand?” she asked. “What if they figured out we’re here?”

  Harvath looked at his watch. “It’s still way too early for you to be going soft on me.”

  “I’m not going soft. But what if I’m right?”

  “You know, I once lay in a hole, not much bigger than the trunk of a car, for four days waiting for the right guy to go past. I didn’t have a café half a block away with cold sodas and a bathroom so clean, people from the third world would think they were at the Ritz-Carlton.”

  “I guess it could be worse,” she admitted.

  “Yeah. There could be snakes and truckloads of guys shooting at you.”

  Cordero looked at him. “At some point, you and I are going to have a long talk about who you actually are.”

  Harvath took a sip of his water and screwed the cap back on. “We’ll have to do it over coffee. You’ll need it to keep you awake.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that.”

  Harvath was just about to change the subject when a voice crackled over their earpieces. It was Sal.

  “We just got a heads-up from a patrol officer in the area,” he said.

  “What is it?” Cordero asked.

  “Seems he found a couple of cards like the one you found in the warehouse.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Hold on,” said Sal. “I’ll get him on this frequency.”

  A moment later, the male detective said, “You’re on with Detective Cordero. Go ahead.”

  “Detective Cordero?” a voice said. “This is Officer Kaczynski.”

  “What have you got, Kaczynski?”

  “We were told to keep our eyes peeled for anything with a skull and crossbones on it with a crown on top. I’ve found several black cards with the skull and bones on one side and the sentence I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny, followed by the letters S.O.L.”

  Harvath tucked his water bottle into his pocket and looked at Cordero.

  “What’s your location?” she asked the patrolman.

  “I’m headed north on Devonshire, almost at Quaker Lane.”

  She looked at Harvath and said, “He’s about half a block south.”

  “There’s a whole bunch of these things, like a trail of bread crumbs. I’ve been picking them up in case your guys can get a print off one of them.”

  “Officer Kaczynski,” Harvath interrupted. “Leave the rest of them. We need to know who is dropping them.”

  “Okay, stand by. Let me see what I can do.”

  Cordero started to move in Kaczynski’s direction, but Harvath gently grabbed hold of her arm. “Somebody may be trying to smoke us out. Let’s wait a second.”

  “We may not have a second,” she said as she radioed the other teams and told them what was going on and to be ready.

  Seconds later, one of the SWAT officers came over the radio and said, “I think we’ve got it. Looks like some kind of a homeless person, possibly female. Brown hair, heavy brown coat, dark pants. She’s dropping something from her pockets.”

  “Can you see patrol officer Kaczynski?” Cordero asked.

  “Roger that,” the SWAT officer replied. “He’s approximately ten meters behind her.”

  “Kaczynski,” Cordero said over her radio. “Do you see a female homeless woman approximately ten meters ahead of you? Brown hair, brown coat?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Kaczynski replied. “Not only can I see her, I can smell her. Sweet Jesus, it’s terrible.”

  “Do not engage. I repeat. Do not engage. They may be trying to smoke us out,” the female detective ordered as she looked at Harvath. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” he said, “but I don’t like it. Something feels very wrong about this.”

  Cordero radioed the other team members. “Everybody on your toes. The woman in the coat might be a decoy. Keep your eyes peeled on our other ingress points. If one of our targets is being sent in, we don’t want to miss him or her.”

  Harvath’s eyes continued to scan the area. He paid particular attention to the historical marker and kept looking toward Devonshire Street. Suddenly, he saw the woman in the brown coat.

  Kaczynski’s voice came back over their earpieces. “This woman is crackers. I can hear her repeating some rhyme about someone called Lucy Lockett or something.”

  “Officer Kaczynski,” Cordero warned. “Do not engage her. Is that clear?”

  “Ten-four.”

  “She’s headed our way,” said Harvath.

  The female detective could see her now. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest. She walked with her head down. Like many homeless people, she was overdressed for the warm weather in a winter coat.

  “She’s almost to you,” said
Kaczynski.

  “We see her,” Cordero replied.

  Both she and Harvath could now clearly see her reaching into her pockets, pulling out the black cards and dropping them in her wake.

  Harvath’s feelings of unease were continuing to build. His gut was telling him something. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.

  The woman walked like she was in a dream, mumbling as she moved forward, placing one foot in front of the next. Harvath had seen this before. Where? Why was it so familiar? The alarm bells were going off full force in his head now.

  Cordero took a step in the direction of the woman. Harvath reached out and grabbed her arm again.

  They watched as the woman stepped out into the street. As she did, a car speeding through the intersection slammed on its brakes. The woman looked up.

  One of the SWAT team members watching through a spotting scope identified her first. “Target A. Target A. The woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell. All teams, the woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell.”

  Cordero shook off Harvath’s hand and began running. So did Officer Kaczynski.

  Kaczynski got to Betsy Mitchell first, knocking her to the ground and throwing himself on top of her.

  Harvath got to Detective Cordero just as the suicide vest Betsy Mitchell was wearing was remotely detonated.

  CHAPTER 60

  “What the hell was that?” Bill Wise asked as Ryan and McGee rushed to the hotel room window.

  Ryan got there first. “It sounded like an explosion.”

  “It sure as hell felt like one,” McGee added.

  They could see an enormous, roiling fireball climbing up into the night sky. The shock wave had been so powerful, it had almost blown out their windows, and as best they could tell, they were a good four or five blocks away. Moments later, the sound of emergency vehicles racing to the scene began to fill the air.