The First Commandment: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  “I’ve kept my word and will continue to do so. The outcome of this situation is completely in your hands. If you cooperate with me, I’ll let your wife and your son go.”

  “What about my nurse?”

  “Him too.”

  “And me?” asked Al-Tal as if he already knew the answer.

  “That, I am going to leave up to Najib,” said Harvath.

  CHAPTER 56

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  President Rutledge was angry. “I don’t want any more excuses, Jim,” he said to his director of Central Intelligence as he balanced the phone on his shoulder and bent over to tie his running shoes. “You should have had this guy by now. If you can’t start showing me results, I’ll replace you with somebody who can.”

  “I understand sir,” replied James Vaile. He deserved the admonishment. The team he had fielded to apprehend the terrorist stalking Scot Harvath was more than qualified to do the job. The problem was that the hunted was outsmarting his hunters at every turn. The only evidence he left behind was what he wanted his pursuers to find. While Vaile had no intention of admitting defeat, certainly not while American lives were at stake, everyone—including the president—knew that they were chasing a formidable quarry.

  “Now what about the alert?” demanded Rutledge as his mind turned to the people behind the killer and the threats they had made against America.

  “I don’t think it’s necessary,” replied the DCI, “not yet.”

  “Explain.”

  “Even if the terrorists can ID Harvath from the closed-circuit footage from the airport in Mexico, we still have complete deniability. He’s gone off the reservation and we’re doing everything we can to apprehend him. And at the end of the day, they’re the ones who provoked him.”

  “And we’re the ones who couldn’t control him,” stated the president. “Frankly, I’m having trouble seeing any downside here. We quietly send the alert out to state and local law enforcement agencies and ask them to keep their eyes open. We don’t have to say we have specific intelligence of an imminent terrorist action, because we don’t. We won’t raise the national threat level. We’ll just leave it at that.”

  The DCI was silent as he composed his response.

  “With that many cops and state troopers on the lookout, we might get lucky and thwart any potential attack,” added Rutledge.

  “We might,” said Vaile, conceding the point. “We might also get a lot of questions, and I guarantee you someone is going to connect it to what happened in Charleston.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Mr. President, cops talk to each other, and they’re very good at connecting dots. Lots of them are going to draw the same conclusion. And the press is going to pick up the thread eventually too. Once word starts circulating about this alert, we won’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle.”

  “So your plan is to do nothing?”

  “Absolutely, if for no other reason than if the terrorists get wind of the alert, they could take it as an admission of guilt on our part. If they saw us girding for the exact type of attack that they had threatened, they’d know we were behind Palmera’s death.”

  That was an angle Rutledge hadn’t considered. “But what if they do attack and we did nothing to prevent it? Could you live with the consequences—especially in this case? I know I couldn’t.”

  “I probably couldn’t either,” replied the DCI. “But, we’re not at that point yet. This is about one man out of five. A man who, I might add, had a lot of enemies and who probably would have died a violent death sooner rather than later.”

  Vaile’s reasoning made sense. Though the president’s gut was telling him not to go along with the DCI’s plan, he decided to trust his intellect. “What about Harvath, though? He’s the wild card in this that could push everything into all-out chaos.”

  “That’s where we have some good news,” Vaile assured the president. “We’ve already got a line on him. If he doesn’t turn himself in by your deadline, we’ll have him in custody soon after.”

  “Good,” said Rutledge as he prepared to leave for his run. “I just hope we get him before he puts the nation any further at risk.”

  CHAPTER 57

  AMMAN, JORDAN

  Harvath had spent the next hour and a half interrogating Tammam Al-Tal, allowing only an occasional small dose of morphine to be pumped into the man’s cancer-ridden body.

  As good as Harvath was, Al-Tal was a tough read. Undoubtedly, the man had a lot of experience in interrogation, as well as counterinterrogation, and that made Harvath question everything he was able to extract from him.

  Harvath kept the questions coming—doubling and tripling back to try to snag the man in a lie, but it never happened. Al-Tal appeared to be telling the truth. He had no idea who had targeted Tracy or Scot’s mother or the ski team.

  Harvath was preparing to go at Al-Tal again when, his body wracked with fatigue and the mind-numbing pain that even morphine couldn’t assuage, the man drifted off into unconsciousness.

  Al-Tal was beyond the point of any usefulness.

  It was now time to focus on Najib.

  The distance from Damascus to Amman as the crow flies was about 110 miles. With only light traffic and a speedy entrance at the border crossing from Syria into Jordan, Harvath had at least another hour before Najib showed up at the apartment. It would be more than enough time for him to get ready.

  Harvath used Al-Tal’s wife to answer the intercom downstairs, and when Abdel Salam Najib entered the apartment, he was greeted by the butt of Harvath’s Taurus 24/7 OSS pistol as it slammed into the bridge of his nose.

  The man was taken completely by surprise. There was a spray of blood as he collapsed to his knees. Harvath drew the pistol back and swung again hard. It connected with a sickening crack alongside Najib’s jaw. His head snapped back and he fell the rest of the way to the floor unconscious.

  Harvath relieved the operative of all his weapons, which included a 9mm Beretta pistol, a stiletto knife, and a razor in his left shoe.

  He stripped him all the way down to his shorts and duct-taped him to one of the dining-room chairs. He wasn’t going to repeat any of the mistakes he had made with Palmera.

  After spending several moments peering through the curtains to make sure there was no one outside waiting for Najib, Harvath headed into the kitchen where he located a bucket and filled it with cold water.

  Back in the dining room, he hit Najib in the face with the water full force. The man came to almost instantly.

  He began coughing as his head instinctively swung from side to side to get away from the water. When his eyes popped open, it took his brain a moment to process everything that had happened, but he soon put it together.

  Working his jaw back and forth to see if it was broken, Najib looked up at the masked man standing in front of him and spat a gob of blood at his feet.

  Harvath smiled. Spitting to Middle Easterners was like giving someone the finger in the West. It was a macho show of bravado meant to exhibit a person’s fearlessness.

  Harvath didn’t move a muscle. He stood there like a statue as Najib’s eyes scanned the room. Harvath counted silently to himself, one one-thousand, two one-thousand … and then Najib saw it.

  The body of Tammam’s bodyguard lay on top of the dining-room table—just to Najib’s right. It had been laid out as if part of some horrific banquet. Horrible things had been done to it. Skin had been flayed off the arms and legs, the chest cavity was wide open and gaping, black holes were the only remnants of where vital human organs used to be.

  Najib was a hard man, but he was clearly shaken by what he saw.

  “Let’s talk about your release from Guantanamo,” said Harvath, breaking the silence.

  Najib spat at him again and cursed him in Arabic, “Khara beek!”

  Al-Tal had told Harvath that Najib was one of the best operatives he had ever had, better even than Asef Khashan. He promised that Harvath woul
d have a very hard time breaking him. As far as Al-Tal knew, the man wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. He had been sent into Iraq to assist in coordinating the insurgency. His reputation was known far and wide. Those who resisted his commands or, worse yet, failed him in their assignments, were dealt unspeakable punishments that Najib carried out personally.

  He was one of the most feared men in Iraq. His skill on the battlefield was rivaled only by his skill in a torture chamber. It was said that the use of short knives, purposely dulled, for videotaped beheadings of Westerners was his idea. To him, the scimitar was too efficient a tool. Victims needed to be shown being slaughtered like animals. One or two whacks with a long sword weren’t enough. They needed to suffer righteous agony at the hands of the brave warriors of the Prophet, and Najib was a master of agony.

  Harvath knew his type all too well. The only way to get a psychological advantage over him was to shock him so hard that he was thrown completely off balance. The body on the table was a good start, but Harvath knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  Still, he asked his question again, and this time more specifically in Arabic. “The night you were freed from Guantanamo you boarded an airplane. Tell me about it.”

  “Fuck you,” Najib replied in English. “I will tell you nothing.” His voice was even more unsettling in person.

  The man was well over six feet tall and twice as wide as Harvath. His arms were enormous and he looked like one of those people who was naturally muscular and didn’t need to work out in a gym. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a thin scar running beneath his chin from one ear to another, which Harvath figured he didn’t get from tying his neckties too tight.

  All and all, Najib was a very nasty character and Harvath was glad to have gotten the jump on him. No matter how good a fighter you were, this was not somebody you would ever want to meet on an equal footing.

  Harvath stepped to the table and withdrew a cordless drill from his duffel bag. He fitted it with a thick, Carbide-tipped masonry bit and gave the drill’s trigger a squeeze to make sure the bit rotated properly.

  Next, Harvath took a gauze pad he had found in the nurse’s supply and coated it with Betadine antiseptic solution. Knowing that having an area prepped for injection was often more frightening to most people than the actual injection, Harvath bent and took his time in cleaning Najib’s right kneecap.

  Harvath didn’t need to take the man’s pulse to know that his heart was racing. He had only to look at his throbbing carotid artery and the sweat forming on his forehead and upper lip to see that he was scared shitless.

  But being scared didn’t mean he was going to cooperate. Harvath decided to give him one last chance. “Tell me about the plane. Who was on it with you?”

  Najib focused his eyes on an object across the room and began reciting verses from the Koran. Harvath had his answer.

  He shoved a gag in the man’s mouth to prevent his screams from being heard outside the apartment and then snugged his chair sideways up against the wall and pinned him there to keep him from flipping over once the pain began.

  Harvath wrapped his arm around the inside of Najib’s thigh, placed the masonry bit at the side of his kneecap and squeezed the drill’s trigger.

  The operative’s entire body went stiff. Tears welled in his eyes and as the fluted bit tore into his flesh he began to scream from behind his gag.

  He writhed against his restraints, but the duct tape and Harvath’s weight pinning him to the wall allowed him little room to move, much less escape from the incredible pain he was experiencing.

  Harvath continued, slowly. When he hit bone, the drill bit created a sickening cloud of smoke, which poured forth from the bloody entrance wound. Najib’s body shuddered, every fiber in his being straining to escape the madman whose drill bit was laying waste to his knee.

  Suddenly, there was a pop as Najib’s kneecap exploded in a mass of shattered bone and the man finally passed out from the pain.

  CHAPTER 58

  Harvath opened an ammonia inhalant and waved the pad beneath the man’s nose. In a matter of seconds, Najib was coughing and rearing his head.

  Harvath held up a syringe and tried to get the operative to focus on it. “This is morphine,” he said. “All you have to do is talk to me and you can have all you want.”

  His head spinning, Najib looked down and saw his knee swollen to twice its normal size. Averting his eyes, he then saw that his other knee had recently been swabbed with Betadine. It was too much. His head began to wobble as he once again started to pass out.

  “Stay with me,” ordered Harvath as he grabbed Najib’s face and forced another ammonia inhalant pad under his nose.

  The man’s head reared backward once more and he shook it back and forth to escape the fumes irritating the membranes of his nose and lungs.

  Harvath knew that the fumes also triggered a reflex, causing the muscles that control breathing to work faster, and he waited a moment for the operative to catch his breath.

  Holding up the syringe again he said, “It’s up to you.”

  With pain etched across his battered, furious face, Najib slowly nodded yes.

  Harvath inserted the needle into the man’s thigh. He depressed the plunger, but stopped before all the drug had been injected. “When you tell me everything I want to know, I’ll give you the rest.”

  He reached for the gag and added, “If you stall me or try to call out, I will go to work on your other knee. Then I will do your elbows and then I will move on to the individual vertebrae in your back and your neck. Are we clear?”

  Najib nodded and Harvath removed the gag.

  He fully expected some sort of tough guy pronouncement—a promise to hunt him and everyone he cared about to the ends of the earth or some such thing, but instead Najib surprised him. He stammered a question, “Is Al-Tal still alive?”

  The question was all too human and Harvath didn’t like it, not one single bit. It made things difficult. It made them complicated.

  It was much easier when scum like Najib spewed their hatred about America and asserted their unequivocal belief that it was only a matter of time before they would be victorious and all the nonbelievers would see Muslims tap dancing atop the White House.

  Though it helped to dehumanize the enemy, Harvath could still do what he had come here to do. All he needed to do was think about the atrocities Najib had orchestrated in Iraq against American soldiers and Marines to know that there was nothing human about this animal.

  And the thought that he might never be able to hold Tracy again and feel her hold him back steeled his heart and filled his soul with rage.

  “Al-Tal’s fate is up to you.”

  “So he’s alive?” demanded Najib. “Prove it. I want to see him.”

  “That’s not part of our deal.”

  “You show me Al-Tal or I will tell you nothing.”

  So much for our deal, thought Harvath as he left the dining room and walked into the kitchen. He came back a moment later with the bowl filled with lemons, removed his knife from his pocket and sliced one in half.

  He walked over to Najib, held the lemon above the entry wound in his knee and squeezed. As the citric acid seared his torn flesh, a howl built up in Najib’s throat. Harvath covered the operative’s mouth with the gag just in time.

  Once the pain had somewhat receded and the man had settled back down, Harvath removed his gag and said, “I will not warn you again. Now, tell me about the plane.”

  Najib didn’t look as if he had any intention of complying, but when Harvath picked the drill back up, placed it against his left knee, and squeezed the trigger, the man started to talk. “It was a commercial airliner. A 737.”

  “Who was on it?” asked Harvath, releasing the trigger.

  “Two pilots and a medical crew dressed like flight attendants.”

  “Had you ever seen any of them before?”

  Najib shook his head no. “Never.”

  “What language did they speak?”r />
  “English mostly.”

  “Mostly?” asked Harvath.

  “And some Arabic.”

  “What was the medical crew for?”

  “We were told that our blood had been polluted. Some sort of radioactive material had been introduced into our systems so the United States could track us. Once the planes reached a certain altitude, we received transfusions.”

  “Who told you your blood had been tainted?” asked Harvath, his rock-steady hand holding the drill in place.

  “The medical personnel.”

  “And how did they know?”

  “I have no idea,” replied Najib. “They were getting us out. That’s all I cared about.”

  “And you just went along with it? What if it was a trick?”

  “We thought of that. They had two devices that looked like radiation detectors. When they passed them over our bodies, the devices registered the presence of radiation. When passed over the bodies of the crew, there was no indication. We all had been feeling nauseated for a day or two leading up to leaving Guantanamo. We thought it was food poisoning, but the medical crew said it was a side effect of the radiation that had been introduced into our bodies.”

  Harvath watched for any cues that Najib was lying to him, but he didn’t see any. “Who arranged for your release?”

  “Al-Tal.”

  “Someone came to Al-Tal,” clarified Harvath, “and offered to help arrange your release. Who was that person?”

  “I never knew. Neither did Al-Tal.”

  “Why would someone have wanted to help get you released?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who was powerful enough to do that for you?” demanded Harvath.

  “I don’t know,” replied Najib.

  “Of all the prisoners at Guantanamo, why did this magical benefactor choose you?”

  Najib felt the drill bit pushing against his kneecap. He watched as the tip broke the skin. “I swear I don’t know,” he screamed. “I don’t know. I don’t know!”