Foreign Influence

by Brad Thor

  The men shared the food and water that the priest had purchased and waited for the sun to go down. They made very little small talk.

  When it was dark, Harvath pulled the night vision monocular from his pack along with the other items he was going to need.

  “Don’t shoot him until I get there unless you absolutely have to. I want him to see my face,” said Nicholas. He turned to look at Peio, but the priest turned away.

  Harvath stepped quietly out of the van. It was an overcast, moonless night and it was unseasonably cold, just like it had been back in Spain. So much for global warming, he thought as he turned up the collar of his coat.

  Using his night vision device to help guide him, he carefully moved from one outcropping of rock to another.

  When he got to the weather-beaten cowshed about one hundred meters from the chalet, he stopped and caught his breath. This was the last piece of concealment available until he hit the house. As he traversed the remaining distance, he would be completely in the open.

  He would have given his eye teeth for a sniper providing overwatch for him. There was a chance that this quarry had night vision as well and had observed Harvath’s entire approach. He could be inside at this very moment waiting for Harvath to step out into the open, waiting for him to get close enough to mow him down.

  Harvath pushed the thought from his mind as he drew his Glock and prepared to run. Counting to three, he was about to charge the house when he heard the scatter of gravel behind him.

  He spun just in time to see what looked like two enormous wolves barreling down on top of him. He leapt out of the way as Argos and Draco sped past. He recognized the lump clinging to the bizarre harness on Draco’s back. It was Nicholas; he had jumped the gun and was going to screw everything up.

  With nothing he could do to stop him, short of shouting, which would tip Tsui off, Harvath had no choice but to take off after them.

  Owning a Caucasian Ovcharka of his own, he knew how fast the breed was, but Nicholas’s dogs were amazing. He was still at least fifty yards behind them when the front door burst open and the shooting began.

  CHAPTER 32

  Tsui was an idiot. He opened the door and silhouetted himself against the light from inside. As Nicholas and his two dogs barreled down upon him, he raised his shotgun and fired.

  The odd thing was, the gunfire didn’t come from Tsui. It came from somewhere to his right. There were sharp cracks as rounds splintered the doorframe around Tsui’s head. He ducked just as Argos leapt into the air.

  The enormous animal landed right on top of the man and knocked him backward into the chalet. Right behind came Draco and Nicholas.

  Harvath hit the side of the structure and pulled up short. He pulled out his night vision device and was just able to catch a flash of a person taking cover nearby. Tsui must have had a sentry of some sort. Whoever it was, he had done a very good job of remaining hidden while Harvath had been doing his surveillance of the chalet. He had never seen the man.

  Harvath snuck around the back of the chalet and over some rocks behind it. He tried to make as little noise as possible. He used his night vision device to guide him.

  Finally, he located the outline of the shooter, taking cover behind a large store of firewood. Creeping up behind him, Harvath leveled his Glock and said, “Don’t move,” and then repeated himself in French just in case.

  Turning his head, the figure replied, “It’s me.”

  Harvath recognized the voice immediately. It was Peio.

  There was no time to say anything as a scream was raised inside the chalet. It was Tsui, and Harvath knew what was happening. Nicholas was exacting his revenge.

  “The balls! The balls!” the Troll was yelling at Argos in Russian. “Bite his balls!”

  Tsui was kicking wildly at the dog trying to get him off. His pants were shredded, and the man was bleeding badly.

  “Nicholas,” Harvath yelled as he burst into the chalet. “Enough!”

  On top of the kitchen table was a terrified Yorkshire terrier with a rhinestone collar and a ridiculous blue bow atop its head yipping wildly. Draco circled the table growling, holding the smaller animal at bay.

  The Troll ignored Harvath and taunted his victim as Argos tore into him. “Look at my face, you motherfucker. Look! Look what you have done to me.”

  Tsui was screaming for help, the tears streaming down his face as he continued kicking at the dog and thrashed to get away.

  Harvath grabbed for Argos and the animal turned and tried to bite him, his snout covered in blood.

  “Call him off or I’ll kill him,” Harvath ordered.

  The dwarf didn’t comply, so Harvath lifted his pistol and put a round through the wall.

  Reluctantly, Nicholas complied. He stepped away from Tsui and called his dogs to him. From the top of the table, the tiny Yorkie jumped down and ran to its injured master.

  Peio stepped through the doorway. Harvath spun and leveled his pistol at the man’s head before recognizing it was him again. “Jesus, Padre.”

  The priest let the remark slide. He tucked his pistol into his waistband and picked up Tsui’s shotgun from the floor. He checked the breech and then turned it around for Harvath to see. “Empty.”

  In the corner, Tsui was crying and writhing in pain. Harvath grabbed a couple of dish towels sitting near the sink and threw them to Peio. “Make sure he doesn’t have any other weapons on him and then see if you can stop the bleeding.”

  Harvath turned to Nicholas. “You were going to kill him.”

  “More like maim, actually.”

  “You told Argos to bite his balls off. He could have bled to death.”

  “If he lives long enough to tell us what we need to know, who cares?”

  Harvath shook his head. He was going to have it out with both Nicholas and Peio, but now wasn’t the time.

  The Yorkie had started barking again and was trying to bite Peio as he attended to Tsui. Harvath was getting a headache. Walking over to Peio, Harvath reached down and grabbed the dog by the back of the neck. Gently, he picked it up along with its water bowl, moved it to the furthest room in the chalet, and locked it inside.

  When he came back, the priest was helping Tsui into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Nicholas stood off to the side with his two dogs, both of which were growling.

  Harvath leaned up against the sink and set his pistol on the counter next to him. “This is either going to be fast and easy or it’s going to be long and very painful.”

  “I’m going to wait outside,” said Peio as he wiped off his hands and stepped away.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Tsui sobbed, his crying beginning again in earnest. “I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Look at my face!” the Troll yelled again. “You did this to me.”

  “No I didn’t! I didn’t!”

  The man was hysterical. Harvath studied his face for any indication he was lying, but there was nothing. “What’s your name?”

  “Please, I need a doctor.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Michael Lee. I need a doctor. Please get me to a doctor,” he begged.

  “Tell me about Tony Tsui,” said Harvath.

  “I don’t know anyone named Tsui.”

  “You’re a liar,” spat Nicholas.

  Harvath waved him off. “We know you were washing your Internet traffic through Lars Jagland’s computer lab at the University of Geneva. We know about everything.”

  “Washing my traffic? What traffic?”

  “Just kill him and let’s get this over with,” said Nicholas.

  “Shut up,” replied Harvath.

  Lee looked at him and pleaded. “I need to see a doctor. Please.”

  “Not until you answer our questions.”

  Lee was whimpering. “You’re not asking me anything I know the answers to.”

  “Why wasn’t your gun loaded?”

  “I don’t know,”
he said emphatically. “It belonged to Lars.”

  “You were expecting us, weren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone. When Sugar started barking, I looked outside and saw someone coming toward the house. I just wanted to scare you away.”

  “How long have you known Gaston Leveque?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Gaston Leveque.”

  “Why did you hire him to contact Dominique Fournier?”

  “I don’t know any of these people,” stated Lee. “Please, you have to call an ambulance for me.”

  Harvath had continued to watch for any sign that Lee was lying. There wasn’t any; not one single tic, tell, or facial cue. He had a very bad feeling that they had the wrong person.

  “How long have you known Lars Jagland?”

  “I am in a lot of pain.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Six years, okay? I was a graduate student of his before I became his TA.”

  “When did you start hacking?” asked Harvath.

  Lee didn’t respond.

  “Answer the question.”

  “Screw the question,” interjected the Troll. “Kill him.”

  “If you don’t zip it,” Harvath warned, “I’m sending you outside.”

  “I started when I was sixteen.”

  “And what did Lars think of your hacking?”

  “What do you think he thought? He was Mr. Straight Arrow. He hated it.”

  “But you kept doing it.”

  “Is that why you’re here? Is this how companies get even now?” replied Lee. “Like casinos? Is this payback time? Are you the leg breakers?”

  “We’re much worse than that,” said the Troll.

  “Why didn’t you go to Jagland’s funeral?”

  Lee looked at Harvath. “None of your business.”

  Pointing to the dogs he said, “You can tell me, or I bring them over and put them back to work.”

  “What about a doctor? I think I’m going to pass out.”

  “As soon as you answer my questions, we’ll get you a doctor.”

  Lee readjusted himself in the chair and winced. “His family hated me. It was bad enough for them that Lars was gay, but to have an Asian boyfriend was too much for them. They always made comments about searching for a cure for Lars’s yellow fever. They were the most hateful people I’d ever met. I brought some of Lars’s ashes up here so I could say good-bye to him alone.”

  “What was his financial situation?”

  “For a university professor I guess he was paid okay.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Lars? No. Not at all.”

  Harvath watched his face very closely. “Did you have access to his university computer network?”

  “No,” he replied. “I mean yes. Well, not anymore.”

  “Which is it?”

  “I told you he was lying,” said the Troll.

  “I’m not. I just want to answer your questions so I can get a doctor.”

  “So which is it?” asked Harvath. “Either you did or didn’t have access to his university network.”

  “When I was his teaching assistant, I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “I did some things I shouldn’t have done.”

  “Finally, some truth,” snapped the Troll.

  “What kind of things?” asked Harvath.

  “I made a stupid mistake that got traced back.”

  “A mistake on a hack?”

  Lee nodded. “It cost me my job at the university. Lars made me promise never to do it again.”

  “But you kept on hacking, didn’t you?”

  “It was dishonest, but in my mind I was promising not to make the same stupid mistake again, not to stop hacking.”

  “So you lied to Jagland.”

  “Yes. Now, please can I see a doctor?”

  “I don’t believe that your access to Jagland’s network was cut off.”

  “It was. He started changing his password and didn’t even access the university system from home.”

  “So no one had access to it but Jagland?”

  “And his TA. The one he hired when I left.”

  “The woman with the glasses?” asked Harvath.

  “That’s her. Dripping with talent, but cold. Ice cold.”

  At that moment, Harvath realized that they had made a very big mistake. Rechecking Michael Lee’s wounds he said, “We’re going to get you to a doctor, but first I’m going to need you to do something for me.”

  CHAPTER 33

  MONDAY

  Adda Sterk awoke from a strange dream. In it, she had purchased a very expensive new car, but couldn’t remember where she had parked it. There was something about the car that wouldn’t allow her to go to the police or friends for help. As she continued to search her neighborhood, she became more and more distraught.

  When she opened her eyes, the nightmare should have been over, but it was just beginning.

  The man standing over her bed was rough and very strong. His face was covered by some sort of mask. He placed a piece of tape over her mouth and bound her hands painfully behind her back. She felt certain that he was going to rape her until he bound her feet and then placed a hood over her head. She struggled, but it made no difference to her situation.

  As he lifted her from the bed, he pulled off the top sheet and covered her with it. She wanted to believe that this was an act of decency on his part, an attempt to conceal her nakedness because of the goodness, the humanity in his soul, but she knew that wasn’t why he was doing it. He was doing it to conceal her altogether. And with that realization, she knew in her core that whatever was in store for her was going to be worse than rape.

  Adda Sterk fought to purge her mind of the fear and to focus. If she knew who was doing this to her perhaps she could negotiate her way out of it. After all, she had only been the messenger. One didn’t kill the messenger.

  The man carrying her paused near the glass doors to her balcony and her heart seized in her chest. He was going to drop her to the pavement!

  The man then bent down and picked something up with his other hand. They were close to her desk. Was it her laptop? Was that what this was about? Did he want information? Maybe she would be able to bargain with him after all.

  In the hallway, he moved quickly past the elevator and into the stairwell. He was very strong indeed to be able to carry her down so many flights of stairs. He was obviously being careful too. He hadn’t risked the elevator. The chance he could have bumped into a neighbor, even at this early-morning hour, would have been too great. In addition to being strong, he was intelligent, or at least experienced.

  If only she had been more attractive, she might have also been able to use her body to entice the man to spare her life, but she had been born with neither good looks nor an attractive physique. The only thing God seemed to have blessed the teaching assistant with was an incredible mind.

  That said, how had this man found her? As an average citizen, she had no value as a kidnap victim. He, or the people he was working for, somehow knew what she really did for a living and therefore understood her true value. And for that to have happened, somewhere along the line, despite all of her safeguards to prevent this very thing, she had made a mistake.

  In the parking structure, she was placed facedown inside a van with a sliding door. The man bent her legs upward and secured the restraints around her ankles to those around her wrists. The vehicle’s metal floor was cold and the thin sheet did little to insulate her body.

  There was a faint, lingering odor as well. Something she vaguely recognized. As her lungs constricted and she began having trouble breathing, she knew what it was—dog hair. Underneath the hood, her eyes wide with terror, Sterk’s greatest fear rushed to the front of her mind. She was going to suffocate to death.

  After leaving the garage, the van made so many turns she would have given up trying to follow its path had she been paying attention. Instead, she
was trapped within a horrific nightmare. She felt a warm, wet sensation grow beneath her stomach and realized that she had wet herself.

  Outside the van’s thin metal sides, she could hear the din of morning traffic. She wanted to scream. She wanted to yell for someone to save her, but even without the hood and tape over her mouth she would have been unable. She was in the midst of a full-blown asthma attack.

  When the van pulled into the empty warehouse on the outskirts of the city, Sterk was only semi-conscious. The pungent scent of urine and sweat greeted Harvath as he opened the vehicle’s door. The fact that she wasn’t moving told him something wasn’t right.

  Hopping inside, he pulled back the sheet and snatched off her hood. He tried to hold her head up, but it just lolled to the side.

  “And you told me I went too far with Lee,” admonished Nicholas from just outside the van.

  Harvath tore the tape from her mouth and checked her breathing and vital signs. She was on the verge of death.

  “Her purse is on the front seat,” said Harvath. “Get it.”

  Nicholas climbed up into the van, retrieved the purse, and brought it back. Harvath unzipped the bag and dumped its contents on the floor. He found her inhaler, shook it, opened her airway, and injected the inhalant. Because he was administering it to her without her being able to actively breathe in the medication, he repeated the process two more times before pulling her from the van, cutting the restraint that bound her hands to her feet, and laying her on the cement floor.

  When her breathing began to normalize, he picked her up and moved her to the center of the facility where he secured her to a column and waited for her to fully regain consciousness.

  The first person she saw was Michael Lee. He lay with his legs akimbo and his arms bound behind another support column. His trousers were tattered and he was covered in blood. To his left stood two enormous dogs, their faces also covered in blood. Sterk knew who the beasts belonged to. Had she any question, it was all but settled when the little man waddled into her field of vision and spoke.