Foreign Influence

by Brad Thor

  Shortly before eleven p.m., there was activity in the alley as a truck pulled up to the loading dock. A Pakistani-looking driver backed it in and one of the store’s large, overhead doors was raised.

  Casey looked at Harvath. “Seems pretty late for a delivery.”

  “Or a pickup,” he replied as he watched three medium-sized crates being wheeled on dollies into the truck.

  “Those are the two goons I met earlier,” said Cooper over the encrypted radio as the men, dressed in matching delivery uniforms, placed the crates in the back of the truck and then were joined by the plain-clothes driver. “And that’s the man who tried to take my phone,” she said as a fourth man appeared. He was wearing a matching uniform.

  Harvath and Casey watched from their vantage point in the KIA as the other team members held their positions.

  The young man stepped out onto the loading dock and took a slow look around. Satisfied, he pulled down the truck’s rear door, enclosing the two goons and the Pakistani man with the crates inside.

  He said something over his shoulder and the furniture store’s overhead door was closed. He then hopped off the loading dock, got inside the truck, and started it up.

  “What the hell are they up to?” said Ericsson. “Do we follow them?”

  As the truck’s engine rumbled to life and it began to pull away from the loading dock, Harvath had a decision to make.

  “No, you stay here,” he replied. “We’ll go.”

  Putting the KIA in gear, Harvath pulled out into traffic and kept as much distance as he could between themselves and the truck. As he drove, Casey reached into the backseat and flipped up the lid of one of the Storm cases. Removing a 4.6 mm Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun, she affixed its rectangular, Gem-Tech “Brick” suppressor, inserted a fresh magazine, and chambered a round. “Something tells me this is going to be a very long night.”

  CHAPTER 67

  Marwan didn’t need to tell him to drive carefully, but he did anyway. With two cops and a private eye boxed up in back, Rashid wasn’t exactly anxious to get pulled over.

  Traffic was light and the drive up to Nasiri’s apartment took half an hour. The truck was large and difficult to maneuver, but he nevertheless conducted several SDRs to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  In the alley behind Mohammed’s building, he stopped and walked around to the back of the truck. The exterior stairwell was just as Nasiri had described. It was going to be a bitch carrying the three crates up to the apartment, but without an elevator, they had no other choice.

  Rashid and Nasiri assisted, but Marwan’s goons did the bulk of the work. They were sweating and cursing quietly even before they got halfway up with the second crate. This was probably not how they had envisioned spending their final night alive. And that went for Nasiri as well. They all knew what tomorrow would bring and they probably wished to already have ritually bathed and shaved themselves for their journey to Paradise.

  Rashid had wondered if Aleem would lead the Shahid in prayers, but Marwan explained that the man had already left the city. It was important that he see to what was coming next. As usual, what that was, Marwan wasn’t disposed to say.

  When they got the third and final crate into the apartment, they closed the door and Rashid made sure the drapes were drawn as tight as possible. The odor in the kitchen was terrible. There was a plate of rotting food on the table, which Nasiri picked up and tossed into the garbage. He then pulled out some glasses and put on a pot of water for tea.

  Rashid closed the blinds in the living room while the goons caught their breath and then set to work opening up the crates. The plan had worked perfectly. They hadn’t seen any neighbors and even if one or two had been watching, it would have looked as if Mohammed Nasiri had purchased a three-piece bedroom set, as that’s what was spray-painted on the side of the crates, and was having it delivered. Sure it was late at night, but with America’s 24/7 culture, most of his immigrant neighbors wouldn’t know to think anything of it.

  Rashid arranged three chairs in the living room, just as he had diagrammed it for Marwan. They then tightly duct-taped the two cops and their detective colleague to them. The detective, whom he had shot at the mosque, had begun bleeding again.

  Rashid checked their vests and dismissed the goons to join Nasiri in the kitchen for tea. He was almost finished.

  After powering up the cell phone detonators, he adjusted their clothing to cover up the vests and then hid the camera ball between a couple of Nasiri’s books in the corner of the room.

  Satisfied that everything was exactly how he wanted it, Rashid joined the men for a fast cup of tea. Marwan would want them back as quickly as possible.

  They gathered up the crating material and Rashid made sure to wipe down everything he touched so as not to leave any fingerprints. The other men didn’t have to worry. Very soon, they wouldn’t even have fingers.

  As Nasiri and the goons threw the garbage in the back of the truck and climbed in, Rashid pulled down the door and checked his watch. It was after midnight. Wednesday had passed into Thursday. The day of the attack had come and now it was only hours away.

  Rashid climbed back into truck and started it up. As he drove off down the alley, he had no idea that Harvath and Casey had been watching him the entire time.

  CHAPTER 68

  As the truck exited the alley and disappeared from view, Harvath motioned to Casey and they stepped away from the Dumpster they’d been hiding behind.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Harvath looked up at the apartment. All of the lights had been turned out and the curtains were still drawn. “I think that they’ve got something very bad in those crates.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too. Whatever they’re planning, it’s big and they’ve got a lot of it.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  She put her hand on Harvath’s shoulder and said, “Wait a second. Shouldn’t we be sure there’s nobody else up there?”

  “Trust me,” he replied. “There’s nobody else up there.”

  “How do you know?”

  Harvath started down the alley. “Because if they had more men, they would have gotten those crates up into the apartment a lot faster.”

  Despite his confidence that the apartment was empty, Casey noticed that Harvath was still very careful about how he moved. He avoided motion lights and stayed close to large objects that could function as cover and concealment.

  It had been hot and humid ever since they had landed in Chicago. There wasn’t any breeze and the alley was thick with the odor of overripe garbage. Casey was sweating. Her shirt clung to her back as she followed him.

  Their target was a four-story brick building with a wooden set of fire stairs behind it. A section of chain-link fencing with a broken gate separated the property from the alley.

  They walked down the narrow gangway and were about to mount the stairs when Cooper’s voice came over their earpieces. “Two new trucks just pulled up to the loading dock.”

  “What are they doing?” Harvath whispered.

  “Bunch of Middle Eastern guys have come out of the store and are now loading cardboard boxes.”

  That place was like a clown car. Just when you thought it was empty, more of them crawled out, Harvath thought.

  “Do you want us to follow them?” she asked.

  “Only if you see someone matching Jarrah’s description. Other than that, hold your position and write down the license numbers, descriptions of the trucks, and anyone you see getting in.”

  “Roger that,” said Cooper.

  Looking at Casey, Harvath asked, “Ready?”

  She adjusted the laptop bag she was carrying and flashed him the thumbs-up.

  Harvath opened his messenger-style bag the rest of the way and wrapped his hand around the grip of his suppressed MP7 and led the way up the stairs.

  Though the weapon was extremely compact, it was difficult to conceal beneath casual, summer clothing
so they carried their MP7s in bags that wouldn’t look out of place in an urban environment. Beneath their shirts, each also carried a Glock 19 in a paddle holster.

  All of the apartments they passed were dark. When they reached the third-floor landing, they could hear a television through an open window somewhere off in the distance, but nothing from inside the apartment itself.

  They stepped carefully on the landing, just in case Harvath had been wrong about the unit being empty and a warped board gave them away. He moved to the door and pressed his ear against it while Casey covered him. He still heard nothing from inside.

  He checked the door frame for any alarms or trip devices and when he didn’t find any, he tried the knob. The door was locked.

  Harvath removed one of the lockpick guns that had been included with their gear and went to work. When the dead bolt slid back, he returned the device to his pocket, removed his MP7 completely from his messenger bag, and stood back so that Casey could grip the doorknob.

  He took a deep breath, then nodded, and Casey quietly pulled the door open. Harvath swept into the kitchen searching for hostile targets. Despite the drapes on the window being drawn, a certain amount of ambient light from the buildings on the other side of the alley illuminated the room. It also smelled like someone had forgotten to take out the garbage.

  With Casey behind him, he moved past a card table to the other side of the small kitchen. Across a narrow hallway, he could see through an open door into a bedroom. Next to that was a closed door, which he assumed led to the bathroom. To see any further, he needed to stick his head into the hallway, but suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

  Harvath hated hallways. They had a bad habit of funneling the gunfire of even the worst shooter right at you. But that wasn’t it; not completely at least.

  His sixth sense was trying to tell him something. Someone else was in the apartment. He could feel it now. He didn’t know if they were in the bedroom closet, behind the closed door to the bathroom, or at the end of the hallway where he couldn’t see. Wherever it was, there was danger in this apartment and his body was tensing up in anticipation of engaging it.

  He signaled Casey that he would cover the hallway while she crossed to clear the bedroom. When he was ready, he nodded and swung out into the hallway, and that’s when he saw it.

  In the eerie half-light of the living room was the outline of a hooded figure sitting in a chair. Harvath lit up the scene with a flash from his weapon light and saw that it wasn’t just one figure, but three.

  He held his position as Casey quickly exited the bedroom and cleared the bathroom, which was jammed with the shipping crates they had seen being carried upstairs.

  Together they moved into the living room and secured it, making sure no one was lurking beyond the apartment’s front door. Then and only then did they tend to the hostages.

  Their chairs had been duct-taped in a sort of circle and the men to them. Harvath removed their hoods and the hostages wildly gestured with their chins at their chests.

  He opened the shirt of the man nearest him and instantly understood. He didn’t need to see vests on the other two to know that they had them as well.

  “Everyone relax. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  Instead of calming down, the man who Harvath was standing in front of became even more agitated. He was gesturing even more urgently, but not at the vest anymore. He seemed to be nodding toward the corner of the room. Harvath turned and looked behind, but couldn’t understand what the man was trying to tell him.

  When Harvath couldn’t figure it out, the man became even more impatient. His eyes were wide and he was yelling from behind the layers of duct tape that had been wrapped around his head and over his mouth.

  “Don’t move,” Harvath said as he pulled out his knife. The man didn’t listen and Harvath had to sling his weapon and grab the man’s face as he carefully made an incision along the left side of the tape.

  Peeling enough of it away to get a good grip, he then pulled back—hard.

  “The camera!” John Vaughan shouted as the tape came free. “There’s a camera between the books! The vests are triggered to remote detonate!”

  It took Harvath a second but he found the camera and spun it so it faced the wall.

  When he turned back around, Casey had opened the shirts of the other men, revealing their explosive vests.

  “Get out of here, before they detonate!” said Vaughan.

  “Easy,” replied Harvath. “The men who brought you here drove off in their truck. That’s a wireless camera with a limited range. If somebody was watching us, they would have already detonated.”

  “I’m Sergeant John Vaughan with the Chicago Police. There’s going to be a terrorist attack.”

  “We know,” said Casey as she examined the man’s vest with her flashlight, “but I need you to be still for a minute. Don’t talk, okay?”

  Vaughan fell silent as she examined his vest and then looked under and behind his chair.

  “Are you looking for the trigger?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something in the small of my back. I think it’s a cell phone.”

  Casey put her flashlight between her teeth, bent down, and very carefully slid one of her hands behind the police officer. “I feel it.”

  “Can you disarm it?” Harvath asked.

  “I won’t know till we get him out of the chair and I see it.” Straightening back up, she looked at Vaughan and said, “There’s something called a mercury switch. The way it works is—”

  “I’m a Marine. I was in Iraq,” interrupted the policeman. “I know what a mercury switch is.”

  “I’m trying to figure out if moving you will trigger this vest.”

  “We got the crap jostled out of us in those crates. Trust me, there’s no mercury switch.”

  “So all they did was tape you to the chairs?”

  “Yes,” said Vaughan.

  Casey took out her knife. “Let’s cut him loose.”

  Once Vaughan was free, Harvath helped him stand, while Casey studied his vest. “It’s similar to the mechanism they used in London; probably how the vests in Amsterdam were set up.”

  “Who are you?” asked Vaughan.

  “That’s not important,” said Harvath.

  “Don’t worry,” added Casey. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Thank God, because—”

  “Done,” she replied, having disconnected the cell phone trigger.

  “What?”

  Casey raised her finger to her lips for him to be quiet as she studied the buckles on the vest. She then put the flashlight back in her mouth and carefully unfastened them.

  “Now very slowly,” she ordered, nodding at Harvath to grab the opposite side of the vest, “we’re going to lift up and I want you to slide out of it. If you feel even the slightest tug, a snag, even if you think you’re imagining it, I want you to freeze. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Vaughan.

  “Good. Now on three and remember, slowly. Here we go. One. Two. Three.”

  The policeman slowly slid out of the vest and backed away from it. Harvath then took it from Casey and held it up for her to examine.

  Her eyes narrowed as she moved in to look at something. “What the heck is this?”

  “What did you find?” asked Harvath.

  “I’ll tell you after we look at the other two vests. Let’s hurry up.”

  CHAPTER 69

  Everything went okay?” asked Jarrah when Rashid returned.

  “No problems,” he replied. “Everything is in place.”

  “And Mohammed Nasiri?”

  “Mohammed is ready, as are the rest of our brothers. He told me to thank you and that he is sorry for any trouble he may have caused.”

  Jarrah smiled and looked up at the two men behind Rashid. “You have done very well. Go and prepare yourselves. We will pray together shortly.”

  When the two men had
left, Marwan motioned for his protégé to sit with him. “Come and take tea with me.”

  “I think caffeine is probably the last thing I need right now,” said Rashid as he sat down and dried his palms on his thighs. He looked at the empty tables where the suicide vests had been constructed and the reloading equipment he had used to build his special ammunition. “Did you think about what I asked?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “And how are your testicles, from where the woman kicked you?”

  “For the tenth time, Marwan, I’m fine. And in case I didn’t make myself clear the other nine times I said it, if you ever want something that stupid done again, you can do it yourself.”

  Jarrah pointed at the closed circuit television set near him. “We have it recorded on video, if you would like to watch.”

  “Have you been replaying it for everyone? Is that what you’ve been doing? You think that’s funny?”

  “She kicks hard, like a donkey,” the man said with a chuckle. It took him a minute to compose himself. When he had, he reached into his pocket and set a pill bottle on the table. “Here.”

  Rashid picked it up and read the label. “Valium? You think I’ve got some sort of an anxiety disorder?”

  “It has nothing to do with a disorder. It will help you to relax. Trust me, you need it.”

  “The hell I do.”

  “There’s two left. Take them.”

  “No. And what do you mean there’s two left? What happened to the rest of them?”

  “I gave them to the Shahid.”

  “Without asking me?”

  “I don’t need your permission, Shahab.”

  “What about your shooters? Did you give them Valium too?”

  “Of course not. They’ve been given amphetamines.”