The First Commandment: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  “I think we wanted Mexico to equal two plus two,” said Harvath, “but it wasn’t that easy.”

  “So is the Troll playing us?”

  Harvath shook his head. “I think we jumped the gun. We have no idea which way our guy went after he left the San Diego Harbor. He might even have stayed within the U.S. But in our minds, Mexico made the most sense, and when the Troll handed us Palmera, we jumped.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe we shouldn’t jump anymore.”

  “You went with your gut,” clarified Parker. “You didn’t jump. Instinct is part of good investigative technique.”

  “Yeah? So is evidence,” replied Harvath.

  “Well, this guy doesn’t leave a lot of evidence behind.”

  “Let’s face it,” said Finney, “we’re not being left with anything.”

  Harvath studied the countries of origin of the remaining three men on their list: Syria, Morocco, and Australia. According to the Troll, one of those men was responsible for three horrific attacks, and there was every reason to believe there’d be more. Since whoever was preying upon the people close to Harvath was tying the attacks to the ten plagues of Egypt, Harvath wondered if maybe the answer lay within the plagues themselves.

  Then again, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it all had something to do with Egypt as a country. Still, there was no making sense out of any of it. And what terrified him was that there were six plagues left. Would this nut job combine them as he had with his mother? Or would they each be loosed individually? And behind all of it, what did the president have to do with releasing the four from Gitmo in the first place? Surely a release of this magnitude couldn’t have happened without his knowledge.

  Gathering up the folder and his notes, Harvath excused himself from the conference room and went to Tom Morgan’s office.

  He needed to check on his mother and Tracy. He dialed his mother’s hospital first. She was awake and he spent twenty minutes talking with her, reassuring her that everything was going to be all right and that he’d be back out to see her as soon as he could. As he was preparing to say good-bye, another of his mother’s friends arrived at her room, and he was heartened by the fact that she wasn’t alone. It would have been better if he could be there, but he couldn’t be in two places at once.

  He clicked over to a new line and called the hospital in Falls Church, Virginia. Tracy’s parents had already gone back to their hotel for the night. Her nurse, Laverna, was on duty, and she gave Harvath a full update on her condition. It wasn’t good. While her overall condition had not changed, small signs were materializing that suggested her situation was beginning to deteriorate.

  Glancing at the fly-fishing scene on Tom Morgan’s wall, Harvath asked Laverna for a favor. When she held the phone up to Tracy’s ear, he began to tell her about the wonderful vacation the two of them were going to take as soon as she got better.

  CHAPTER 45

  Leaning back in Morgan’s desk chair, Harvath closed his eyes. There had to be something he wasn’t seeing, some sort of thread strung just beneath the surface of everything.

  At this point, he knew of only one man who could answer his questions. Though already rebuffed by him once, Harvath decided enough had changed to warrant trying again. Picking up the phone, Harvath dialed the White House.

  He knew better than to ask for the president directly. No matter how much Rutledge liked him, he had multiple layers in place to prevent direct access. The best Harvath could hope for would be to reach the president’s chief of staff, and even then there was no knowing when or if Charles Anderson would pass the message along to the president.

  He needed someone he could trust and someone who would get the president on the line right away. That someone was Carolyn Leonard, head of Jack Rutledge’s Secret Service detail.

  Getting to an agent while she was working, much less getting her to step away from active protection to take a phone call, was a near impossible task. When Carolyn Leonard picked up the phone, she wasn’t happy. “You’ve got five seconds, Scot.”

  “Carolyn, I need to speak with the president.”

  “He’s not available.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s in the cement mixer,” replied Leonard, using the Secret Service codename for the Situation Room.

  “Carolyn, please. This is important. I know who carried out the attack on the U.S. Olympic facility in Park City today.”

  “Give it to me and I’ll have it run down.”

  Harvath took a deep breath. “I can’t do that. Listen, I need you to tell the president that you have me on the line and that I have important information for him regarding today’s attack. He’ll want to hear what I have to say. Trust me.”

  “The last time I let a man slip that one past me I ended up pregnant with twins.”

  “I’m being serious. People’s lives are at stake here.”

  Carolyn thought for a moment. Harvath was clearly violating the chain of command. He had come to her as a shortcut, which meant that either time was of the essence or other avenues were unavailable.

  He was a legend in the Secret Service, and his heroism and patriotism were above reproach, but Harvath was also known as a shoot-from-the-hip maverick who often chucked the rule book in favor of expediency. His “ends justifies the means” way of doing business had also become legendary in the Secret Service and was always held up as an example of what not to do.

  Often, Harvath was characterized as having more balls then brains, and agents were admonished not to follow his example. It had been made crystal clear throughout the organization that Harvath’s success as a U.S. Secret Service agent had been due more to luck than anything else.

  Leonard’s ass was on the line. Her job was to protect the president, not to decide what phone calls should get passed through to him. Going to the president with this would clearly be overstepping her bounds and could very well lead to a demotion, transfer, or worse.

  “Scot, I could get fired for this,” she said.

  “Carolyn, the president is not going to fire you. He loves you.”

  “As did, supposedly, my ex-husband who left me with said twins, a mortgage, and over twenty-five thousand in credit card debt.”

  “For all I know, Jack Rutledge may be on this whackjob’s list as well. Please, Carolyn, this guy is a killer and he needs to be stopped. I need your help.”

  Leonard had always liked and admired Harvath. Regardless of what the powers that be said about him, he was a man who got things done, and never once had his motives been questioned. Everyone at the Secret Service knew that he put his country before all else. If there was ever someone more deserving of a favor, Leonard had never met him. “Hold on. I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 46

  WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

  Four and a half minutes later, Jack Rutledge picked up the phone. “Scot, I heard about your mother and I want to let you know how incredibly sorry I am.”

  Harvath let his silence speak for him.

  “Agent Leonard tells me you have information about today’s bombing that I should know about,” continued the president. “She says you know who’s behind it.”

  “It’s the same person who shot Tracy Hastings and who put my mother in the hospital.”

  Rutledge’s blood began to boil. “I told you to stay out of this.”

  Harvath was incredulous. “While this guy continues to prey upon the people I care about? Two are in the hospital, two more are dead, and plenty of others who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time have been killed or injured. I’m sorry, Mr. President, I can’t just stay out of this. I’m right in the middle of it.”

  Rutledge struggled to remain calm. “Scot, you have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Why don’t you help me? Let’s start with that group of detainees you released from Guantanamo Bay a little over six months ago.”

  Now it was the president’s turn to be silent. After a long pause, he spoke ve
ry carefully. “Agent Harvath, you’re treading on extremely thin ice.”

  “Mr. President, I know about the radioisotope that was supposed to track them and I know it was found in the blood above my doorway. One of those men is sending a message by targeting the people close to me.”

  “And my word that the people I have on this are doing all they can isn’t good enough for you?”

  “No, Mr. President. It isn’t,” replied Harvath. “You can’t shut me out any more.”

  Rutledge bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t have any choice.”

  Harvath didn’t believe him. “You’re the president. How’s that possible?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss any of this with you. You need to obey my orders or else you and I are going to have a very big problem.”

  “Then it looks like we’ve got a very big problem, because there’ve already been three attacks and they’re going to keep coming unless I do something.”

  The president paused as his chief of staff slid him a note. When he was done reading it he said, “Scot, I need to put you on hold for a minute.”

  Clicking over to the line where the director of Central Intelligence, James Vaile, was waiting, Rutledge said, “You’d better be calling me with some good news, Jim.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, I’m not. Actually, we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

  “That seems to be par for the course today. What is it?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “No, why?”

  “This has to do with Operation Blackboard.”

  Blackboard was a codename the president had hoped never to hear uttered again, but ever since Tracy Hastings’s shooting it seemed to be all he and the DCI talked about.

  Placing the receiver against his chest, Rutledge asked his chief of staff to clear the room and close the door behind him.

  Once everyone was out, the president said, “Now I’m alone.”

  CHAPTER 47

  The CIA director got right to the point. “Mr. President, you’ll recall that one of the Gitmo detainees exchanged in Operation Blackboard was a former Mexican Special Forces soldier turned Muslim convert who was helping to train Al Qaeda operatives. His name was Ronaldo Palmera.”

  Though the president normally remembered only the most significant names in the war on terror, the names of the five men released from Guantanamo had all stayed with him. At the time, it was because he harbored a fear in the deepest recesses of his soul that the names would one day come back to haunt him. Suddenly it looked as if that fear was about to become reality. “What about him?”

  “Palmera was struck and killed by a taxi cab in Querétaro, Mexico.”

  “Good.”

  “His wrists were Flexicuffed behind his back when it happened,” replied Vaile.

  “Not so good, but from what I recall the man had a lot of enemies. He was an enforcer for some of the big drug cartels down there, correct?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, but that’s not the problem. Apparently, Palmera jumped through a window and then ran out into the street. Three men, three white men,” Vaile added for emphasis, “were seen coming out of Palmera’s residence immediately afterward. One of them removed Palmera’s boots and then they disappeared.”

  “Removed his boots?”

  “Yes, sir. You’ll recall that Palmera was rumored to have made a pair of boots from the tongues of the Special Forces and CIA agents he killed in Afghanistan. When he was captured, we looked but never found the boots. He obviously had them stashed somewhere and picked them up after he was released from Guantanamo.”

  “Obviously,” replied the president, who could feel an intense headache coming on. He looked down and saw the blinking light of the line where Harvath was sitting on hold. “So according to your information, three gringos were responsible for Palmera exiting his home, through a window, with his arms Flexicuffed behind his back, at which point he ran into traffic and was run down by a taxi cab.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Then one of these men removed Palmera’s boots and the trio fled the scene?”

  “Exactly,” replied Vaile. “We think they may have come in via Querétaro’s international airport, and we’re working on getting hold of the aviation logs as well as customs information and security tape footage now. I don’t need to tell you what this is starting to look like.”

  “I know exactly what it looks like. It looks like we broke our word. None of those men from Gitmo were supposed to be touched. Ever.”

  “In all fairness, Mr. President, if we’d been able to track them, we might have been able to prevent this from happening.”

  “I’m not going to rehash that, Jim,” replied the president, growing angrier. “Secretary Hilliman and the folks at DOD had every reason to believe the isotope tracking system would work. We still don’t know how the terrorists found out about it.”

  “Well, they did. The blood transfusions probably began the minute that plane left Cuban airspace.”

  They’d had this argument ad nauseam. The DOD blamed the CIA for losing the five terrorists released from Gitmo, and the CIA blamed the DOD for betting the farm on the isotope tracking system. Each was sure the other was where the leak about the ultrasecret tracking system had come from. The whole plan had been based upon being able to track the five men, and it had fallen apart. Now, it was coming back to haunt them all.

  Switching gears, the president said, “How come I haven’t had any updates on your progress locating the terrorist stalking Harvath?”

  “Because unfortunately there hasn’t been much progress. Not yet, at least.”

  “Damn it, Jim. How the hell is that possible? You’ve got every available resource at your disposal. You told me the people you put on this were seasoned counterterrorism operatives. You promised me, and I promised Harvath, that this would be taken care of.”

  “And it will be, Mr. President. We’re doing everything we can to hunt this guy down. We’ll get him, I assure you.”

  Vaile was sounding like a broken record, but Rutledge let it go for the moment. He had other problems to deal with. “So how do we fix this problem in Mexico?”

  “It’s going to take a lot of work. We’ll have to create a pretty damn convincing deception and even then I don’t know if it will fly. We were warned what would happen if anything befell any one of the five.”

  The president didn’t need to be reminded of the penalty terms of their agreement. He’d been forced to make a deal with the devil, and he’d agonized over violating the nation’s first commandment in the war on terror. “Let’s just get to the bottom line here.”

  “For starters,” replied the DCI, “we need to figure out who was chasing Palmera.”

  The president once more looked down at the flashing light on his phone. “And then?”

  “Then we make sure that person can in no way, shape, or form be associated with you, this administration, or the United States government,” replied Vaile.

  “And then?”

  “Then we pray to God the people we had to deal with six months ago don’t see right through us and make good on their threats.”

  CHAPTER 48

  SARGASSO INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM

  ELK MOUNTAIN RESORT

  MONTROSE, COLORADO

  Harvath hung up the phone in utter disbelief. He had no idea who the president had spoken to while he’d had him on hold, but when Jack Rutledge got back on the line he was beyond angry, and their conversation went from bad to worse.

  The president told him point-blank to back off the investigation, and when Harvath refused, the president said he had no choice but to order his arrest on grounds of treason.

  Treason? Harvath was shocked. How could trying to save the lives of people who were important to him, people who were American citizens, be an act of treason?

  The president gave him twenty-four hours to get back to D.C. and turn himself in. “And if I do
n’t?” Harvath had asked.

  “Then I cannot and will not be responsible for your well-being,” Rutledge had answered.

  And there it was. The cards were all on the table and Harvath now knew exactly where he stood.

  He ended his conversation with the president by saying, “I guess we’ve each got to do what we feel is right,” and hung up the phone.

  It was a moment Harvath could never have foreseen. The president of the United States had actually threatened his life. It was incomprehensible—just as incomprehensible as being labeled a traitor. For a moment, Harvath wondered if this was all some sort of bad dream, but the stark reality of the situation was too much to be anything but real.

  His standing was now clear. In spite of years of selfless service to his country, he was disposable. His expertise, his track record, even his loyalty, were nothing more than items on a balance sheet to be weighed and disposed of at will.

  Though Harvath wanted to give the president the benefit of the doubt, he could not bring himself to; not now. Not after having been taken into the president’s confidence so many times in the past. Never once had Harvath betrayed that confidence. His loyalty and his discretion were above reproach, but those apparently mattered little if at all anymore to Jack Rutledge.

  Harvath felt betrayed and abandoned. The president had actually chosen the terrorists over him. It was absolutely surreal.

  Be that as it might, the one thing Harvath didn’t feel was hopeless. The president could threaten him with arrest for treason, or worse, but the threats carried weight only if he got caught. And with a twenty-four-hour head start, the last thing he planned on doing was being apprehended.

  Looking down at the folder he’d put on Tom Morgan’s desk, he pulled out the latest smattering of data he’d been given before leaving the conference room.

  As he studied the list of aliases used by the released detainees, he came across one that he actually knew from his past, but it had belonged to a man he had killed and whom he had most definitely watched die. There was no way he could still be alive. The discovery could only mean one thing. Somebody was using his alias.