The First Commandment: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  He couldn’t blame Gosse for not wanting to be on tape. If the story he was telling was true, someone had already been killed to keep it quiet.

  Sheppard sat at his kitchen counter nursing a Fosters as he flipped through his notes. The funeral director was a solid guy. Several times during the interview, Sheppard backtracked and pretended to mess up the facts in order to trip him up, but Gosse was unflappable. There was no question in Sheppard’s mind that the man was telling him the truth.

  According to his story, about six months ago he’d been at the chief medical examiner’s office doing a pickup. While waiting for the body, he had hung out with a pal of his, an assistant ME named Frank Aposhian. According to Gosse, they were pretty good friends. Their boys attended the same high school and the men played cards together a couple of times a month.

  During Gosse’s pickup, his conversation with Aposhian was interrupted by two men who identified themselves as FBI agents and requested to speak to the assistant ME in private. As Frank was in charge of the office that night, the request didn’t strike Gosse as odd at all. Law enforcement officers came and went all the time in the ME’s office, and it definitely wasn’t for the coffee.

  One of the agents followed Aposhian into his office while the other began examining corpses. But not just any corpses—he only seemed interested in unclaimed bodies, more commonly referred to as John Does. Many of them were found in parks, under bridges, or in abandoned buildings, often half-eaten by rats or stray dogs by the time they were discovered.

  Their fingerprints were run through local and national databases and investigators were assigned to try to uncover their identities, but more often than not they went unidentified. Mortuary science students practiced their embalming techniques upon them, and the John and Jane Does were then placed in plywood coffins to be interred in the nearest potter’s field.

  What struck Gosse as odd was that the agent didn’t appear to know what he was looking for. He didn’t carry any photos with him. He simply moved from corpse to corpse checking them over as if he were shopping for a new set of golf clubs.

  When Aposhian appeared moments later with the man’s partner, the agent pointed at one of the bodies, and the assistant ME wrote down the number from the toe tag and went back to his office to process the paperwork.

  The body was bagged and loaded into a nondescript van, and the G-men disappeared.

  When Gosse asked his friend what the deal was, Aposhian told him that he’d been instructed not to speak about it. Apparently, the corpse wasn’t a John Doe at all, but rather a person who had been involved in a serious felony case.

  That’s where the story should have ended, but it didn’t. The FBI agents had presented the proper paperwork to claim the body, but had insisted that Aposhian hand over the ME file on it as well. They explained that the Bureau was involved in a complicated sting operation that would be jeopardized if the man’s death became public. It was an unusual request, but the men were polite and had all their paperwork in order, so Aposhian had no reason to get into a pissing match with them. It wasn’t until months later that the assistant ME realized his mistake.

  One of the mortuary science students working with him that night had retrieved the wrong file for him. When Aposhian called the local FBI field office to try to correct his mistake they told him they had no record of an Agent Stan Weston or Joe Maxwell ever being assigned there. He next contacted FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., but they informed him that they didn’t have any agents by those names in the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation and that maybe he had made a mistake.

  Aposhian checked his notes. There was no mistake. None of this was making any sense.

  He handed the John Doe’s fingerprint card to a woman named Sally Rutherford. Rutherford was one of the office investigators and Aposhian’s girlfriend of eleven months. The next day, there was an email printed out and waiting for Aposhian on his desk.

  According to Rutherford, there was some sort of mix-up. The prints came back as belonging to a man who had been killed in a shoot-out with police in Charleston, South Carolina, days after the FBI agents had taken the John Doe from their facility. The investigator had a call in to the Charleston Police Department and was waiting to hear back.

  Aposhian figured it was all just another bureaucratic screwup, but changed his mind the night his FBI agents paid him a return visit.

  Gosse, who was at his friend’s apartment for poker night, didn’t recognize the men at first. After all, it had been six months since he had first seen them at the ME’s office.

  They asked to speak to Aposhian outside, and when he returned, he was visibly shaken. Whatever these guys told him, it wasn’t good.

  Gosse asked his friend what was going on, but Aposhian didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, saying he didn’t feel well, the assistant ME cut their game short and sent his poker buddies home.

  When Gosse was back at the ME’s office for a pickup the next day, he was about to knock on Aposhian’s door when he heard an argument coming from within. He stepped away from the door just as it opened and Sally Rutherford stormed out. Gosse wasn’t one to pry, but his friend looked tremendously upset.

  It was obvious Aposhian needed to talk, but the man didn’t want to do it at the office. They decided to meet at the funeral home later that night.

  When his friend got there, Gosse transferred the phones to the answering service and broke out a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He set two glasses on his desk and poured a couple of ounces in each. Gosse was a born listener. He didn’t force the conversation. He waited for his friend to speak, and when he did, the man shared with him an incredible story.

  CHAPTER 21

  MONTROSE, COLORADO

  It had been several hours since Harvath had arrived at the resort. With the Sargasso staff monitoring the private chat room for any communication from the Troll, Harvath’s hosts decided to take him back down to the resort for dinner.

  Elk Mountain’s main building resembled a majestic hunting lodge from the nineteenth century. The trio sat outside on the heated terrace near an outdoor stone fireplace overlooking the resort’s lake.

  Finney’s penchant for perfection was evident everywhere, even down to how well his fires burned. When a staff member quietly appeared with a basket of logs, Finney explained that they used a precise mixture of walnut, beech, and eucalyptus, with just the right amount of seasoned pine for its aroma.

  Finney’s attention to detail was just as sharp, if not more so, when it came to Elk Mountain’s food. He had spared no expense snapping up one of the best chefs in the country. The man was a culinary powerhouse who had pioneered American Alpine cuisine and held more James Beard, Zagat, and Wine Spectator awards than the resort had wall space to display. It was the first time since Tracy’s shooting that Harvath had actually finished a meal.

  He even allowed himself an after-dinner drink. Like it or not, he knew that he had to relax. He was wound way too tight and wasn’t doing Tracy or himself any good in this state.

  After the plates were cleared, two waiters appeared at Finney’s side—one with a bottle of B&B and three snifters, the other with an elegantly carved humidor. Finney instructed the men to set everything down on the table and then they silently disappeared.

  “You know a bartender at the ‘21’ club in New York invented this?” queried Parker as he pulled the cork from the bottle. “Benedictine liqueur and cognac. It became so popular that the French started bottling the combination themselves. The guy never saw a dime of the profits. God, I hate the French.”

  Harvath smiled. Ron Parker had harbored a passionate dislike of the French for as long as he’d known him. Parker liked to say that they were the only army in the world with sunburned armpits.

  Finney offered Harvath a cigar but he shook his head. The after-dinner drink would be enough.

  When Parker handed it to him, Harvath raised the snifter to his nose and closed his eyes as he breathed in the spicy fragrance. For a mom
ent, he almost forgot his problems.

  As he sipped his liquor, he listened while Finney and Parker discussed the things they normally did—the state of world affairs, plans for improving the resort, Site Six, and Sargasso, as well as Parker’s predatory practices with the female guests of Elk Mountain—an amusing but necessary concession Finney had made when asking Parker to give up a great position back east and move to their minimally populated corner of Colorado.

  It was nice for Harvath to listen to the banter between his old friends. As his mind wandered, his thoughts were drawn to Tracy. He pulled his BlackBerry from its holster and checked its signal status. The terrace was usually the best place in the entire resort to get a signal, but he wasn’t getting anything.

  Finney asked him if he wanted to use one of the resort’s cordless phones, and when Harvath said yes, Parker used his radio to ask a staff member to bring one to the terrace.

  Harvath called the nurse’s station at the hospital back in D.C. and asked to speak with Laverna, Tracy’s night nurse.

  When the woman came on the line, she said, “Am I glad you called.”

  Immediately, Harvath feared the worst, and his entire body stiffened. “Why? What happened? Is Tracy okay?”

  “Tracy’s fine, but a Mr. Gary Lawlor is looking for you. He says it’s an emergency. I tried your cell phone, but all I got was your voicemail.”

  “I know,” replied Harvath. “I’m in an area that doesn’t have good coverage. Did Mr. Lawlor say what the emergency was?”

  “No. He just said that if I saw you or heard from you to have you call him right away.”

  Harvath thanked Laverna and gave her Tim Finney’s direct number at the resort before ringing off. His next call was to Gary, who picked up on the first ring.

  “Gary, it’s Scot. What’s going on?”

  “Where the hell are you?” demanded Lawlor. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.”

  “I’m at Tim Finney’s place in Colorado.”

  “Colorado? Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving town?”

  “It all happened kind of last-minute,” said Harvath. “What’s going on back there?”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” replied Lawlor. “You’ve got him working Tracy’s shooting, don’t you? You’re using his Sargasso group. Were you not listening to the president when he specifically told you to stay out of it?”

  “Finney’s people got a lead and I came out here to check up on it. Period. Now, what’s going on back in D.C. that’s so important you left an urgent message with Tracy’s nurse?”

  Lawlor was quiet for a moment as he tried to decide how to break the news. The minute Harvath heard what he had to say, there’d be absolutely no controlling him. Realizing there was no good way to say it, Lawlor just came out with it. “Your mother was attacked in Coronado tonight.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Harvath felt like throwing up as he listened to the details of his mother’s assault. When the police arrived at her home on Encino Lane they could hear her screaming.

  They kicked in the front door and followed the sound of her voice to the bathroom at the back of the house. It took two officers several minutes to break down the door, which had been screwed shut.

  They found her in her bathtub, naked and covered with locusts. The insects, most of them several inches in length, appeared to have been feeding off her. One of the forensics people at the scene later identified the substance Maureen Harvath had been covered with as “bug grub,” a product available in many pet stores for feeding locusts.

  She had no idea what the objects swarming over her body were, because she couldn’t see them. She had been blinded. Her eyes had been painted over with black ink, and the doctors at the hospital still were not sure if she would ever fully regain her eyesight. She had been incredibly traumatized and was under heavy sedation.

  With the last piece of information from the crime scene, Harvath’s feelings of anguish turned to rage. A note had been found scribbled in red on the bottom of one of the buckets they believed the attacker had used to carry the locusts into the house. The note read: That which has been taken in blood, can only be answered in blood.

  From watching Harvath’s face and hearing only his side of the conversation, Finney and Parker assumed Tracy had taken a turn for the worst. When they heard that Harvath’s mother had been attacked, they said the only thing that good friends can and should say in such a situation, “What do you need?”

  What Harvath needed was the resort’s jet, and Finney was on his radio arranging it before he even finished asking.

  Parker had friends in the San Diego Police Department who could liaise with the Coronado cops, so he headed for Sargasso to get the intel ball rolling.

  They had every reason to believe that the man who had attacked Maureen Harvath was the same person who had shot Tracy.

  Harvath had been right. This was personal.

  CHAPTER 23

  Something the Troll had said during their chat room session kept replaying in Harvath’s mind as the Elk Mountain Cessna Citation X raced toward Coronado.

  He had pointed out that the lamb’s blood above Harvath’s door was very “biblical.” Harvath didn’t disagree, but ever since it had happened, he couldn’t connect it to anything—at least in a way that made sense. Now his mother had been attacked and subjected to a veritable “plague” of locusts. Also biblical.

  Harvath fired up Finney’s onboard laptop and accessed the internet. He entered lamb’s blood and locusts as his search terms. Over half a million results came back. The first was from Wikipedia, and the summary line said it all. The lamb’s blood and locusts were from the ten plagues of Egypt. Harvath opened the link.

  The plagues were recounted in the book of Exodus. They were the ten calamities visited upon Egypt by God in order to convince Pharaoh to release the Israelite slaves.

  The first plague was the rivers of Egypt and other water sources turning to blood. It was followed by reptiles, or more specifically frogs, overrunning the land. Then there were lice, flies, and a disease on livestock. Next came a plague of unhealable boils, followed by hail mixed with fire. There were locusts, then darkness, and finally the death of every first-born male, except those of Israelites whose doorposts were painted with the blood of the Paschal lamb.

  Whoever had shot Tracy and attacked his mother was definitely using the ten plagues as a bizarre kind of playbook, but in reverse order.

  The tenth plague was the killing of all the first-born males in Egypt. Only the Israelite houses with the blood of a sacrificial lamb smeared on their lintels and doorposts were spared. God literally “passed over” their houses, and from this the festival of Passover had been born. It marked the release of the Israelites from their bondage under Pharaoh and the birth of the Jewish Nation. How it applied to Harvath and the shooting of Tracy Hastings was beginning to seem a little clearer.

  The shooter apparently saw himself as the angel of death. He had passed over Harvath’s house and spared him, but had tried to take Tracy instead.

  The ninth plague dealt with darkness, hence the deliberate blinding of his mother. God had instructed Moses to stretch his hand over Egypt, and it brought about a plague of “complete and utter” darkness lasting for three days.

  The eighth plague, meant to “harden Pharaoh’s heart,” was the plague of locusts. Neither Harvath’s heart nor his resolve needed any further hardening at this point. Targeting both Tracy and his mother was enough. Regardless of what the president or anyone else said, his mind was made up. Whoever was behind these attacks had to not only be stopped, but killed, and that was exactly what he was going to do.

  Harvath continued reading. The rest of the plagues were equally unpalatable, and he had no desire to imagine what their modern-day equivalents would look like. His only hope was to stop whoever was behind them before he could strike again.

  That led Harvath to an even worse thought. Whom would this nutbag target next? First it was Tracy.
Then it was his mother. Was this guy only targeting women who were close to him, or would he target men too? Should Harvath warn all of his friends? Even if he wanted to, what would he say? There’s a plague of biblical proportions with your name on it? No, the key here was to stop this guy before he could strike again. But to do that, they were going to need a break—a big one.

  CHAPTER 24

  When Harvath walked into the hospital room and saw his mother lying there he was overcome with rage. Her face was badly battered and bruised. Who the hell would do something like this?

  Though he wanted to go to his mother, he couldn’t. The emotion of it all—the guilt he felt for being the reason she’d been targeted and the primal anger he felt in reaction to such an audacious violation—was crushing. Harvath found himself choking up. When the tears came, he did nothing to wipe them away.

  Finally, he forced himself to walk over to the side of her bed. As he stared at his mother’s swollen face, Harvath gently took one of her hands in his and said, “Mom, I’m so sorry.”

  He stood there like that for several minutes and finally pulled a chair alongside the bed and sat down. As he smoothed his mother’s hair, an unwelcome twinge of déjà vu surged through him. It was almost like being in Tracy’s hospital room.

  Why the hell was this going on? Why, when he was finally getting his life together, was someone trying to rip it apart?

  It was a good question and one that he’d asked himself many times since Tracy’s shooting.

  Out of everything Harvath had mastered in his life, relationships with women wasn’t one of them. For a long time, he blamed his occupation and the demands his career placed on him. But when he met Tracy, he swore he wouldn’t let his job be an excuse for another failed relationship.