by Brad Thor
“I’m sorry to have to do this over the phone,” he said.
“What are you talking about, Sal? Where are you?” she asked. In the background, she could hear what sounded like noises from the harbor.
“I wanted to say goodbye to you and Marco in person.”
“Goodbye? Why? Where are you going, Sal?”
“Lara, I know you’re in my house. That means you must know everything.”
Cordero covered the phone’s mic and quickly whispered to Harvath, “He knows we’re here.”
“We need to get out. There could be a bomb. Keep him talking.”
“Tell me why you did it, Sal,” she said as they moved out of the living room and through the dining room. “Why did you kill all those people?”
“You weren’t supposed to be hurt,” the man replied. “I love you and Marco very much and I’m very angry about what happened tonight. You could have been killed.”
“You act like you didn’t know it was going to happen, Sal.”
“I didn’t. Betsy Mitchell was not my responsibility.”
“Whose responsibility was she, then, Sal?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
“Sal,” Cordero said firmly. “What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? What are you taking care of?”
The man was silent on the other end of the phone as Harvath and Cordero rushed out the kitchen door and into the backyard.
“Sal,” she demanded, “where’s the last hostage? Tell me. You can still make this right. Where’s Jonathan Renner?”
Finally, Cordero removed the phone from her ear.
“Where’s Renner?” Harvath asked. “Did he tell you?”
“No. He just hung up.”
“Damn it.”
“He said he was angry about what happened tonight, that I could have been hurt. He wanted me to know that Betsy Mitchell had not been his responsibility.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think somebody else was responsible for killing her,” she replied.
“Maybe suicide vests are someone else’s job. He didn’t deny killing the other victims, though, did he?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“We’ve got to find him. Where would he go for safety? Where do you think he’d try to hide?”
“I could hear ambient noise behind him,” she said. “I think he was at the harbor.”
“Is he running? Was he catching the ferry for Logan Airport?”
“He said he was going to ‘take care’ of the danger I was put in tonight. It sounded to me like he was going to take care of the person who put me in danger.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“I don’t know,” Cordero replied. “After that, he hung up.”
“He must have had some sort of monitoring system on his house or his computer that alerted his phone when we came in. He’s blown and he knows it. We need to get to the harbor as fast as possible.”
“He could be anywhere.”
“I don’t think so,” Harvath stated as he led her down the driveway and back toward where they had parked her car. “I think they’re out of time and they’re pulling out all the stops. They’re going to kill Renner tonight, too.”
“But where?”
“What’s the last significant historical event that also happens to take place at the harbor?”
Cordero stopped as she realized what it was. “The Boston Tea Party.”
• • •
The pieces were all coming together for her and made so much sense now. How the killer had been able to avoid being picked up on any CCTV cameras, how he’d not left any clues behind at the crime scenes, even the crazy contraption at the Liberty Tree site, as Sal had studied engineering in school before switching to criminology and had remained fascinated by it.
But for every piece that fell into place, it came attached to a thousand questions. Harvath had explained what Swim Club was and even how they may have recruited Sal, but Cordero still didn’t understand why they would be kidnapping and killing people. It didn’t make any sense. And as much as she wanted it to, she knew she had to focus her energies elsewhere. Sal and the people he was working with needed to be stopped.
When she got in her car and the Bluetooth synched with her phone, she pulled into the street and activated the speaker. There was no way they could risk using the police radio or their mobile data terminals. Sal had access to those and she and Harvath didn’t want to tip their hand.
She called her commander and filled him in on everything as she raced toward the harbor. She then told him what they needed and reminded him again to keep everything off the police network. They absolutely had to assume that Sal was listening.
Harvath listened to the conversation, and no sooner had she disconnected the call than his phone rang. It was Bill Wise. He was calling on his cell phone, rather than his blocked landline from D.C.
“Bill,” he said, answering the call. “It’s not a very good time right now.”
“We’ve got a positive ID on the killer. He’s definitely from Swim Club. His name is Salvatore—”
“Sabatini,” Harvath said, finishing the man’s sentence for him. “I know. We just left his house.”
“How did you—”
He cut him off again. “It’s a long story. Listen, where are you? Carlton said you were on your way up here to help us catch these guys.”
“We’re here now. And we’ve already caught one of them.”
Harvath looked at Cordero and said, “They’ve already caught one of them.” Turning his attention back to his phone, he said, “Bill, I’m putting you on speaker with me and Boston PD detective Lara Cordero. She was Sabatini’s partner. You can trust her.”
“Who did you capture?” Cordero asked as Harvath pressed the button and held the phone out between them.
“A CIA operative named Stark,” said Wise. “We’ve been interrogating him, and apparently there are two more operatives with him in Boston somewhere. A man named Vaccaro, and another, the team leader named Tom Cushing.”
“I’ve got news for you, Bill,” Harvath interjected, as he reflected on the model plane in Marco’s room. It was the same model he’d been given after his first flight on the Fed’s Aerion SBJ. “I don’t think these guys are working against the Federal Reserve. I think they’re working for them.”
“You’re right, and wait’ll you hear why. Someone at the CIA named Phil Durkin put all of this together with the previous Federal Reserve chairman.”
“Chairman Sawyer? The one who just died?”
“Yes,” Wise replied. “It’s a long story, but the Saudis blackmailed Sawyer into doing something for them. The only way Sawyer could pull it off was to hire Durkin for the job. Durkin agreed, but only as long as Sawyer would fund several of his black-ops projects. It worked until Sawyer started having second thoughts and, with his tenure at the Fed coming to a close, crafted a list of potential replacements he thought might be able to make things right.”
“Which was the last thing Durkin probably wanted if ‘making things right’ meant he was going to get his funding cut off.”
“Exactly. And before he could get his own candidate installed as the new Fed chair, he needed to get rid of the five others who were actively being considered.”
“Where are you?” Harvath asked.
“We’ve got Stark at a hotel near the harbor.”
“That’s where we think Sabatini is. We’re headed there now.”
“Scot, you’ve got to hurry,” Wise insisted. “Stark says they have the last hostage and they’re going to kill him, now.”
CHAPTER 66
When Cordero’s vehicle screamed to a stop at the edge of the harbor in full lights and sirens mode, the head of the Boston PD’s Rescue/Recovery Dive Team rushed up from the dock to meet them.
“The rest of the team is inbound,” the man said. “Five minutes we’ll be on the water.”
“We don’t have five minu
tes, Sergeant,” Harvath replied. “We have to get going now. Where’s your boat?”
The dive team commander led Harvath and Cordero down a gangplank to a thirty-foot-long rigid inflatable boat that belonged to the Boston Fire Department. A bunch of dive gear was already loaded on board. It would have to do. Spinning his finger in the air, he gave the boat’s pilot the signal to get the craft’s twin, 225-horsepower Evinrude E-TEC engines fired up.
As the sergeant untied the boat, Harvath helped Cordero on board, stepped into the pilothouse, and told the man captaining the vessel what they were looking for. He also reasserted that they were to maintain strict radio silence, as the men they were chasing had access to police communications. Thirty seconds later, they were away from the dock and roaring into Boston Harbor.
The dive team leader unpacked two scopes, one thermal, the other night vision, and offered Harvath his choice. Harvath took the night vision device, and both men moved forward as the boat slammed through the water.
There was a ton of traffic in the harbor. Any one of the boats they were seeing could be the one they were looking for. The CIA man whom Wise had been interrogating supposedly had no idea what the boat’s name was or what kind it was. He was never intended to be part of what was happening in the harbor. His job had been to prep Betsy Mitchell to look and sound like a mentally disturbed homeless person, track her progress via the remote camera she’d been outfitted with, and get her to the site of the Boston Massacre and remotely detonate the suicide vest she had been forced to wear.
When Harvath asked how Wise had been so successful in getting so much information out of the man so quickly, he explained that it had been Reed Carlton’s idea. Apparently, the Old Man had his own Swim Club assassin in custody back in D.C. The man’s name was Samuel. Carlton had Samuel driven to Stark’s home and then a phone call was placed. When Samuel got done describing the exterior of Stark’s home and what he could see his family doing inside, Stark had completely caved and told them everything.
Harvath’s mind was still reeling from what Wise had told him about the former Fed chairman being blackmailed by the Saudis. When he asked how Sawyer had ever crossed paths with Durkin, Wise explained that the relationship had been facilitated through the chairman’s security chief, William Jacobson.
What bothered Harvath the most was the way it all fit together; how much sense it made. Actually, that wasn’t what bothered him the most. What bothered him the most was that by doing the right thing, he might end up actually hastening his own country’s collapse.
There had to be a way around it. There had to be a way to prevent it all from happening and using their own plan against them.
If there was, it wasn’t coming to mind at the moment, which was just as well, because through the night vision scope, he picked up something floating off their starboard bow, a hundred meters out. He quickly relayed the information to the crewman in the pilothouse, who adjusted course and headed right for it.
Harvath handed the night vision scope to the sergeant, told him to relay the information on the vessel that was speeding away, and then rushed to the back of the boat, where Cordero was.
“What are you doing?” she said as she watched him rapidly get undressed.
“They’ve already dumped the body.”
The sergeant, upon seeing what Harvath was doing, yelled, “Hey, you can’t do that! You’re not qualified.”
He already had the weight belt around his waist, had tested the regulator, and had swung the tank onto his back. He lowered the mask over his face and grabbed a knife and flashlight just as the fire department boat coasted to a stop. A large wooden box, made to look like a crate of British tea, was bobbing on the surface. As Harvath switched on his light and went over the side into the water, the last thing he noticed was the skull, bones, and crown that had been painted on its side.
The water was cold, but Harvath had been in much worse and didn’t pay any attention. It was also dark. There was no light at all except for the beam from his underwater flashlight.
The crate on the surface was meant as a marker and he followed the rope attached to it deeper and deeper into the water. There were no air bubbles rising up to meet the beam of his flashlight. All he could think was Please don’t let Jonathan Renner be dead. Let us have at least saved one of the victims. Soon thereafter a form began to take shape at the end of the line.
As he got closer, he saw it was some sort of bag or a sack made of canvas and big enough to hold a body and be weighted down with rocks or cannonballs, as was historically seen with burials at sea.
Harvath reached out and touched the bag. He could feel Renner inside it. Placing the tip of his knife at the top of the canvas, he plunged the blade through and ripped open the biggest hole he could.
He saw the man’s hair in the beam of flashlight and pulled furiously at the fabric until he could access his face. Removing the regulator from his mouth, he moved it toward the man and hit the purge button, preparing to deliver lifesaving air.
That’s when he noticed two things—that the man was dead, and that he was also not Jonathan Renner.
CHAPTER 67
Bill Wise had no intention of leaving Stark alone in the hotel room. Ryan and McGee, though, wanted to be part of taking down Cushing and his people, so Wise had asked Harvath to take them along. Harvath had agreed, provided they made it to the dock by the time he got there. He had been crystal clear that he wouldn’t wait for them, and he didn’t. He and Cordero had hopped onto the Boston FD boat and taken off immediately.
Ryan and McGee got there just in time to see the boat speeding away into the harbor. They weren’t the only ones left behind. Several members of the dive team showed up minutes later and were without a boat.
Maintaining their operations security, one of the divers got on his phone and made a call. Minutes later, a Boston PD Harbor Patrol boat raced up to the dock; the divers loaded their gear and sped back out after their teammates.
By the time they caught up with the thirty-foot Boston FD boat, Harvath had just surfaced. As the Harbor Patrol boat pulled up alongside, they shined a powerful spotlight on him.
“It’s not Renner,” he yelled after removing his regulator. “It’s somebody else. Shot point-blank.”
Climbing back into the boat, he told Cordero and the dive team leader what he had seen. The sergeant barked a series of rapid orders, and once they had cleared off the Harbor Patrol boat, Harvath and Cordero hopped on. They introduced themselves quickly to Ryan and McGee.
Cordero flashed her credentials to the two Boston PD officers operating the boat and told them the last known direction of the vessel they needed to catch.
“It’s all over the radio now,” one of the men said.
“There’s not supposed to be any radio traffic.”
“The way these guys were moving through the harbor, they caught the Coast Guard’s attention. They’re now in pursuit. If you’ll sit down and hold on, we’ll see if we can get you close. It sounds like they’re going to cross our path about a mile from here.”
Cordero nodded, everyone held on, and the Harbor Patrol officers threw the throttles all the way forward.
Their boat was even faster than the fire department’s and it sliced through the choppy harbor. Cordero leaned in close so Harvath could hear her above the roar of the engines and the wind rushing by them.
“If it wasn’t Renner’s,” she said, “whose body did you find down there?”
“I have no idea,” Harvath said. “But I have a feeling Sal made good on his promise.”
“What promise was that?” Ryan yelled.
“Sabatini said he didn’t have anything to do with the bombing tonight. Said it made him angry. He claimed he was going to settle up with who was responsible.”
“Fat chance of that,” McGee replied. “The guy responsible is cinched up back at the hotel with an MP5 pointed at his chest.”
“Then who’s bouncing along the bottom of Boston Harbor right now?�
��
Ryan had an idea and was about to respond, when a deafening roar overtook them like a tidal wave from behind.
They all spun at once to see a giant Sikorsky MH-60T Coast Guard “JayHawk” helicopter race right above them, headed in the same direction.
“They’ve already got eyes on the target,” one of the Harbor Patrol officers shouted from the pilothouse. “Suspect is wearing a Boston PD raid jacket.”
Ryan got Harvath’s attention and yelled over the engines, “Sabatini?”
Harvath nodded.
When the large, oceangoing cabin cruiser came into view, they counted five other boats in hot pursuit—three from the Boston PD and two from the U.S. Coast Guard, all of which were keeping it lit up with their spotlights. Up on the fly bridge, Harvath could just make out Sal’s Boston PD jacket.
The Sikorsky banked to come around and Harvath saw that its door was open and its interior blacked out. The Coast Guard didn’t goof around and that door hadn’t been left open for the breeze. Though he couldn’t see him, Harvath knew there was a sniper in there.
As soon as the helicopter was in place another round of commands were issued over one of the Coast Guard vessel’s PA systems for the driver of the cabin cruiser to bring his boat to a full and immediate halt.
When the cabin cruiser didn’t respond, two earsplitting cracks that sounded like thunder erupted from the Sikorsky and two heavy .50-caliber rounds were loosed to pierce the boat’s engine blocks.
Within seconds, smoke began to billow from the stern and the boat lost power. It eventually came to an eerie stop and just bobbed up and down on the water. No matter how many commands were given over the PA system to the man on the fly bridge, he refused to move. The boarding teams on their respective vessels made ready while the helicopter with its sniper hovered nearby.
McGee tapped one of the harbor patrolmen on the shoulder and said, “Make sure they know that in addition to the rogue Boston PD detective, we believe there are two accomplices and a hostage on board. The accomplices are very well trained and will be well armed.”
