by Brad Thor
CHAPTER 2
FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
SIX MONTHS LATER
A crack of thunder shook the walls and the bedroom windows exploded in a hailstorm of broken glass. Powered completely by instinct, Scot Harvath reached for his girlfriend, Tracy, and rolled off the bed.
He landed hard on his bad shoulder. Shifting his weight, he reached up and yanked the drawer free of his nightstand. It came down with a crash. Foreign coins, a bottle of painkillers, a set of keys to locks he had yet to locate on the property, pens, and a pad of paper from the Ritz in Paris all spilled onto the wood floor.
Everything was there, except what he desperately needed to find—his gun.
Harvath rolled onto his stomach and breaststroked wildly beneath the bed. All he came up with was an empty box of hollow-point ammunition and an equally empty holster.
His instincts screamed at him to find a weapon while his conscience screamed at him for going to bed without one. But he had gone to bed with a weapon. He always did. He had placed it in the drawer right next to him. He was sure of it.
Maybe Tracy had gotten to it first. He turned to her, but she wasn’t there. In fact, in his groggy grab and roll, he wasn’t quite sure if she’d even been in the bed at all. Nothing was making sense.
Getting to his feet, Harvath stayed low and made for the hallway and the stairs at the far end. With every step, his trepidation mounted. His gut was trying to tell him something. Then, on the final landing, he saw the blood. The floors, the walls, the ceiling … they were all covered with it.
There was so much of it everywhere. Where had it come from? Who had it come from?
Despite the adrenaline pumping through his body, his legs felt like two blocks of solid granite. It took all of his willpower to inch forward toward his entryway and the open front door.
When he stepped outside, what he saw came in quick, sharp stabs of vision—bloody brushstrokes painted above the doorway, an upturned picnic hamper, and collapsed upon the threshold next to a small white dog was the body of the woman he had been falling in love with.
Harvath thought he saw movement somewhere along the tree line at the edge of the property. He was looking for anything he could use as a weapon when a long, black knife swung over his shoulder from behind and the blade was pressed against his throat.
CHAPTER 3
FAIRFAX HOSPITAL
FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA
Harvath’s head snapped back so suddenly that the shock startled him awake. It took several seconds for his heart rate to slow and for him to recognize where he was.
He looked around the hospital room and saw that everything was just as he’d left it before he’d drifted off to sleep. The bedrail he’d intended only to rest his forehead against was still there, as was the bed’s occupant, Tracy Hastings.
Harvath’s eyes scanned the length of her body, searching for any sign that she’d moved during his nap, but Tracy remained in her coma. She was the victim of an anonymous assassin’s bullet five days ago, and she hadn’t moved since; not even a fraction of an inch.
The ventilator continued its rhythmic cycle of woosh, pop … woosh, pop. Harvath couldn’t bear to see her like this. She had already suffered so many traumas. But the worst part was knowing that her current suffering was his fault.
In spite of what the world had thrown at her—in particular an IED in Iraq that had exploded in her face, taking one of her beautiful blue eyes and her career as a top Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal tech—she had managed to maintain an incredible sense of humor. Though it had taken him a while to admit it, Harvath had fallen for Tracy the minute he first saw her.
They had been thrown together quite by accident just under a month ago in Manhattan. Harvath had traveled to the Big Apple to spend the Fourth of July weekend with his good friend, Robert Herrington. Robert, or “Bullet Bob” as he was known to his buddies, was a storied Delta Force operative who’d recently been medically discharged from the Army due to an injury he’d suffered in Afghanistan.
Harvath and Herrington had a jam-packed weekend of drinking and carousing planned when New York City came under a horrific terrorist attack. Little did either of them know that Bob would be killed later that night.
With the island of Manhattan completely sealed off and police, fire, and EMS units stretched to the breaking point, Bob had helped Scot assemble his own team to hunt down the perpetrators.
The team was composed of special operations personnel from the Manhattan VA facility who, like Bob, had all been recently discharged for various injuries suffered overseas. Harvath had been standing on top of the VA building along the East River when Tracy and two other pals of Bob’s had stepped onto the roof.
At twenty-six, Tracy was ten years younger than Harvath, but there was a wisdom and worldliness about her that made their ages irrelevant. When Harvath later shared this observation with her, she joked that deactivating deadly explosive devices for a living had a way of aging a person, fast.
She might have carried herself like a woman older than her twenty-six years, but she certainly didn’t look it. She was the picture of fitness. In fact, she had the most sculpted body of any woman Harvath had ever known. Tracy joked she had a body to die for and a face to protect it. It was her way of dealing with the scarring she had suffered as a result of the IED detonation in Iraq. The plastic surgeons had done a fabulous job in matching the pale blue of her surviving eye to a replacement, but no matter how Tracy applied her makeup, she still couldn’t completely hide the thin facial scars.
None of that mattered to Harvath. He thought she was gorgeous. In particular, he loved how she wore her blond hair in pigtails. Pigtails were for little girls, but there was something decidedly sexy about them when worn by a woman.
That was Tracy in a nutshell. There was nothing ordinary about her. Her wit, her compassion, her persistence in the face of injury were all traits Harvath admired deeply, but those weren’t what had made him fall in love with her. His reason for falling in love was much more selfish.
The reason Harvath cared for her so deeply was that for the first time in his life, he’d found someone who truly understood him for who he was. She saw beyond the waves of constant wisecracks, through the never-ending stream of jokes, and over the pile of rocks that Harvath had stacked to wall himself off from the rest of the world. He didn’t need to play games with her and she didn’t need to play games with him. From the moment they met, they could each be themselves. It was a feeling Harvath had never thought he would experience.
As he looked down at Tracy in her hospital bed, he knew it was a feeling he would never experience again.
Gently, he untwined his hand from hers and stood.
CHAPTER 4
In the hospital room’s private bath were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, deodorant, and shaving cream. Laverna, the night nurse, had dropped them off shortly after Harvath had arrived on the morning of Tracy’s shooting. It had been quite obvious that he had no intention of leaving. He was ready to stay for as long as it took to get her better.
Closing the door, Harvath took off his clothes and turned on the shower. When the water was good and hot, he climbed inside and let it pound against his body. When he closed his eyes, pieces of his nightmare came back and he fought to banish them to the far reaches of his psyche. Scrubbing himself with a tiny bar of courtesy soap, he tried to think of something else.
It was working, but he knew the demons would be back. They’d been hovering over him every day and night since Tracy had been shot.
One of the doctors who’d been standing in the room when Harvath came out of a particularly bad version of the dream suggested that he seek some therapy, but Harvath politely laughed him off. The doctor obviously didn’t know who he was talking to. Men in Scot’s line of work didn’t seek therapy. Who in the world could ever begin to comprehend the life he led, much less the incredible toll it had taken on him over the years?
Throwing the temperature selector
all the way to cold, Harvath shocked his body awake and climbed out.
Wrapping a towel around his waist, he leaned against the sink and wiped a patch of fog from the mirror. For once in his life, he actually looked the way he felt—horrible. His normally bright blue eyes were dull and bloodshot, his handsome face drawn and haggard. His sandy brown hair, though not long by any stretch, was in need of a haircut. And though his taut, muscular five-foot-ten frame would have been the envy of men half his age, he’d barely eaten in the last five days and it was sadly undernourished.
Only once before had Harvath ever been filled with as much doubt and self-loathing as he was now.
Eighteen years ago, he had defied his father, a SEAL instructor at the Naval Special Warfare School near their home in Coronado, California. He had tried out for and been accepted to the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team. Though his father knew his son was an exceptional skier, he had wanted him to go to college after high school, not enter the world of professional athletics. Father and son were equally stubborn, and neither talked to the other for a long time afterward. It was Scot’s mother, Maureen, who managed to keep the family together. And though there was some communication between the two men, things were never really the same again. Father and son were more alike than either cared to admit, which was what made the tragedy of the elder Harvath’s death even more unbearable.
When Michael Harvath was killed in a training accident, Scot was never the same again. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his head back into competitive skiing. As much as he loved the sport, it didn’t seem that important to him anymore.
With a portion of his substantial winnings, he bought a backpack and traveled through Europe, eventually settling in Greece on a small island called Paros. There he found a job as a bartender, working for two mismatched, expat Brits. One was a former driver for a south London crime family, the other a disgruntled ex-SAS soldier. After a year, Harvath knew what he wanted to do.
He returned home and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied political science and military history. Upon graduating three years later, cum laude, he joined the Navy, eventually trying out for and being accepted to Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school (BUD/S) and a specialized program known as SQT or SEAL Qualification Training. Though the selection process and subsequent training were grueling beyond measure, his mental and physical conditioning as a world-class athlete, his refusal to ever give up on anything, and the belief that he had finally found his true calling in life propelled him forward and earned him the honor of being counted as one of the world’s most elite warriors—a U.S. Navy SEAL.
With his exceptional skiing ability, Harvath was tasked to the SEALs’ cold-weather experts, SEAL Team Two. There, despite a tragic loss on one of his first assignments, Harvath had excelled.
Eventually, he caught the attention of the members of the Navy’s famed SEAL Team Six, who helped hone his skills not only as a warrior, but also as a linguist, improving upon his rudimentary knowledge of French and teaching him Arabic.
It was while he was with Team Six that Harvath assisted a presidential security detail in Maine and caught the eye of the Secret Service. Wanting to bolster their antiterrorism expertise at the White House, they eventually succeeded in wooing him away from the Navy and up to D.C. Harvath soon distinguished himself even further, and after a short time was recommended for an above-top-secret program at the Department of Homeland Security being spear-headed by an old family friend and former deputy director of the FBI named Gary Lawlor.
The program was called the Apex Project. It was buried in a little-known branch of DHS called the Office of International Investigative Assistance, or OIIA for short. The OIIA’s overt mission was to assist foreign police, military, and intelligence agencies in helping prevent attacks against Americans and American interests abroad. In that sense, Harvath’s mission was partly in step with the official OIIA mandate. In reality, he was a very secretive dog of war enlisted post–9/11 to be unleashed by the president upon the enemies of the United States to help prevent any future terrorist attacks on America.
The rationale was that if the terrorists weren’t playing by any rules, then neither would the U.S. But because of sensitive PC biases that existed in America, which seemed to suggest our nation was the only one that should abide by the rules, the president realized that Harvath’s true mission could only be known by a key few, namely the president himself and Harvath’s boss, Gary Lawlor.
Harvath was to be backed by the full weight of the Oval Office, as well as the collective might of the U.S. military and the combined assets of the U.S. intelligence community. The program sounded fantastic on paper, but reality, especially in bureaucratic Washington, often turned out to be something else entirely.
Harvath didn’t want to think about his job now. It was because of it, because of him, that Tracy had been shot. He didn’t need the results of any investigation to tell him that. He knew it as surely as he knew that the woman lying in that hospital bed didn’t deserve any of what had happened to her.
The FBI had been able to piece together some of what had happened. They had discovered the hiding spot the shooter had used in the woods at the edge of his property. Their assessment was that whoever the assassin was, he’d dug himself in sometime during the evening, probably several hours before daylight.
The killer had left behind a shell casing with the message—That which has been taken in blood, can only be answered in blood.
There had also been the bizarre act of painting his doorframe with blood. The first run of analyses ruled out its being Tracy’s. It had been painted there sometime during the night and had already dried before Tracy was shot.
Then there was the dog that had been placed on the doorstep as a gift in a picnic basket. Harvath had only to take one look at the thank-you note that had been left with it to know who it was from. But if someone was going to target him or Tracy, why leave such a blatant calling card?
Weeks earlier, on a covert operation in Gibraltar, Harvath had saved the life of an enormous dog known as a Caucasian Ovcharka—the same breed as the one that had been left on his doorstep. The owner of the dog in Gibraltar was a contemptible little man—a dwarf, actually—who dealt in the purchase and sale of highly classified information. He had also helped plan the attack on New York. He was known simply as the Troll.
But how had the Troll found him? Only a handful of people knew about the historic church and grounds named Bishop’s Gate that Harvath now called home. He found it hard to believe that the Troll would be so careless or stupid as to announce that he was behind Tracy’s shooting.
The timing, though, stank, and Harvath wasn’t a person who believed in coincidences. There had to be a connection, and he was determined to find out what it was.
CHAPTER 5
When Harvath came back into the hospital room, Tracy’s parents, Bill and Barbara Hastings, were sitting on either side of her bed.
Bill Hastings was a large man, about six-foot-four and over two hundred pounds. He’d played football at Yale and looked like he could still play. His hair was gray and Harvath put him in his mid to late sixties. Seeing Harvath enter the room, he looked up and asked, “Any change?”
“No, sir,” replied Harvath.
Barbara smiled at him. “You were here all night again, weren’t you?”
Harvath didn’t reply. He simply nodded. Having to deal with Tracy’s parents was one of the more difficult aspects of keeping vigil at her bedside. He felt so damn responsible for what had happened to her. He couldn’t believe how kind they were to him. If they blamed him at all for what had happened to their daughter, they didn’t show it.
“How’s the hotel?” Harvath managed. The silences in the room could be unbearable, and he knew he had to start carrying some of the conversational weight.
“It’s fine,” replied Barbara as she reached for Tracy’s hand and began stroking her forearm. Tracy’s mother was a stunningly elegant wom
an. Her deep red hair was perfectly coifed and her fingernails were perfectly manicured. She wore a silk blouse, an Armani skirt cut just above the knee, stockings, and expensive pumps.
Though Harvath would never have uttered such a trite line, it was obvious where Tracy got her good looks.
The Hastings made a very attractive pair. With the fortune that Bill Hastings had amassed in the hedge fund arena, it was no surprise that they were almost permanent fixtures on the Manhattan society pages.
After the July 3 attack on New York City, they had debated cutting their summer in the south of France short, but Tracy had convinced them to stay. Manhattan was going to be a nightmare to get back to and to get around in for some time to come, so the longer they could delay their return, the better. Their plans had changed the minute Tracy had been shot. They had chartered a private plane and rushed to Washington to be by their daughter’s side.
Harvath was struggling to come up with something else to say when a nurse stuck her head in the door and said, “Agent Harvath? There is a gentleman here to see you. He’s waiting in the lounge.”
“Okay, I’ll be right out,” replied Harvath. He was happy to give the Hastingses some time alone with their daughter.
Stepping around Mr. Hastings, Harvath bent down and whispered in Tracy’s ear that he’d be back in a little bit. He gave her hand a loving squeeze, then headed for the door.
Just as he was reaching for the handle, Bill Hastings said, “If that’s the fellow from the Bureau again, make sure you tell him that we never did find Tracy’s ID in her personal effects.”
Harvath nodded and exited. Outside the room, he slid Tracy’s driver’s license from his pocket and looked at it. God she was beautiful. He didn’t have the heart to tell Bill Hastings that he was the reason her ID was missing. In the short amount of time he and Tracy had been together, they’d never stopped to take any photos.
