The First Commandment: A Thriller

by Brad Thor

  “How did you know that?” asked Harvath.

  The Troll ran his hand through his short, dark hair and replied, “I’m the one who set up the account.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me. But it gets worse. Plain and simple, Abu Nidal was nothing more than a terrorist. Despite his father’s success as a businessman, he didn’t know anything about banking or protecting his assets.”

  “So you handled his money?” asked Harvath.

  “No. Not for his organization. He had people for that. Nidal asked me to do something different. He wanted this to be off the books, as it were. He didn’t want it tied to the FRC. If anything ever happened to him, he wanted to make sure this layer of protection was in place.”

  “Protection for whom?”

  The Troll looked at Harvath and said, “His daughter, Adara. It was set up to be her private, personal account.”

  Over four thousand miles away, an analyst at the National Security Agency had just tagged and compressed the audio file he was working on.

  Picking up his phone, he dialed a cell phone number. It was the second time in twenty-four hours he’d called the anonymous man on the other end.

  When the voice of his contact came on, the analyst said, “You wanted to know if Scot Harvath made any further attempts to speak with Kevin McCauliff, the analyst at the NGA?”

  “Go ahead,” replied the voice.

  “He just hung up with him less than three minutes ago.”

  “Did you get a fix on Harvath’s location?”

  “No,” said the NSA man, “but based on his conversation, I think I may know where he’s headed.”

  CHAPTER 101

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

  As he raced back toward the States, Harvath was consumed by conflicting emotions. Shortly after speaking with Kevin McCauliff, he’d contacted Ron Parker to ask for a favor, only to be filled in on the failed plot at the Bucket of Blood.

  Though the police hadn’t apprehended the suspect yet, based upon the description of the man they were looking for, he was a dead ringer for Philippe Roussard. The Bucket of Blood was a SEAL Team Two hangout, Harvath was a former SEAL, the SEALs were often referred to as frogmen, and the next-to-last plague had to do with frogs. It was enough to cement for Harvath that the Bucket had been Roussard’s target.

  Thanks to two sharp Virginia PD officers, the killer had been prevented from carrying out his attack. Score one for the good guys, even if it was the first time they had managed to put anything up on the board.

  Roussard had gotten sloppy, and Harvath wondered if maybe the killer was getting tired.

  That said, Harvath was pretty tired himself. It had taken him a full day to set everything up, and even though he’d had a couple of down days in Brazil before that, he hadn’t gotten any significant rest. He’d slept with one eye open the entire time. The Troll was someone he’d never be able to fully trust, and having to sit and wait while he plied his seamy trade in search of Roussard’s Brazilian connection had almost driven him crazy.

  When the info about the Wegelin & Company account came, he was happy to make plans for Switzerland. But the email about the attempted attack on the Bucket changed all of that. Harvath couldn’t be in two places at once. Roussard had returned to America, and Harvath knew his only chance of stopping him before his last and final plague was to return there too.

  But, actually, maybe there was a way he could be in two places at once.

  The Troll had gladly arranged for Harvath’s jet. Not only did he need him to remove the threat of Philippe Roussard, but if he wanted to live, he also needed Harvath to see him as an ally.

  For his part, Harvath was driven by the same two things since the beginning—a desire to prevent anything further from happening to the people he cared about, and a desire to make Philippe Roussard and whoever was behind him pay for what they had done.

  Before leaving Brazil, Harvath had contacted an old friend in Switzerland. It seemed ironic that with Meg Cassidy’s wedding only days away, he was now turning for help to one of the other good women he had pushed out of his life.

  Claudia Mueller was a lead investigator for the Swiss Federal Attorney’s Office and had helped him rescue the president when he’d been kidnapped and secretly held in her country. Harvath had enlisted her assistance on one other occasion, a dangerous assignment that had involved not only Claudia, but the man who was now her husband, Horst Schroeder—a police special tactical unit leader from Bern.

  Before she could act on Harvath’s latest request, there were a series of things she needed from him, not the least of which was a video statement from the Troll, complete with all the information regarding Abu Nidal and the bank account he had established for his daughter at Wegelin & Company. If what Harvath was telling her was true, and she had every reason to believe it was, this was something she wanted to secure a warrant for and do by the book.

  In spite of what everyone thought about the Swiss banking system, the world had changed since 9/11, even for them. They had no desire to help terrorists launder or hide money. Claudia felt confident that she could secure the proper paperwork to compel the bank to give her the information that Harvath needed. The only part she couldn’t guarantee was how long it would take. It could be a matter of hours, or depending on the judge, it could be a matter of weeks.

  Considering that lives were at stake, she hoped it would be the former.

  Before hanging up, Claudia had joked that this was the first time Harvath had ever asked her for a favor that didn’t involve putting her life in danger. While getting a Swiss bank to part with its records wasn’t exactly easy, it was definitely easier than having somebody shoot at you.

  The joke had made Harvath smile. Claudia was a good woman. She also knew him well enough not to be surprised when he told her there was a second favor he needed, and that it was going to be slightly more dangerous than her trip to the bank.

  With the majority of the Swiss operation entrusted to Claudia and a small percentage to the Troll, Harvath had proceeded to a private airport outside São Paulo to meet his plane.

  The entire time, he was wrestling with a very bad feeling as he put together a picture of who might be behind Philippe Roussard. Of course, there was the very real possibility that Roussard had access to his mother’s account at Wegelin & Company, but that wouldn’t explain who had gotten him out of Gitmo. There was more to this. There was someone else involved.

  The Troll had been thinking the exact same thing, but their shared conclusion was impossible. Harvath had been there the night Adara Nidal was killed, and he had seen her die.

  CHAPTER 102

  Though Harvath was traveling on his German passport as Hans Brauner and could go anywhere in the world he wanted, he had been marked a traitor, which made him a man without a country, and what was worse, he had absolutely no idea where he should be going.

  In Roussard’s twisted countdown, the Bucket of Blood might have been meant for the final two plagues, but Harvath doubted it. He had a very bad feeling there was still one attack to go, and that it would represent the plague in which the waters were turned to blood.

  Harvath tried to run through all of the people he knew who lived on or near water. He had grown up in California, spent a significant amount of time in the Navy, and lived on the East Coast for the last several years; the list was long. It was so long, in fact, that Harvath couldn’t keep track of all the names inside his head and had to find a pen and paper to write them all down.

  It was a hopeless task. There was no telling where Roussard was going to strike next. The U.S. Ski Team facility in Park City and the Bucket of Blood in Virginia Beach were almost as random as Carolyn Leonard, Kate Palmer, Emily Hawkins, and his dog. They were all significant to him, but they were not people or places he would ever have anticipated being attacked.

  After the jet had made its descent into Houston’s Intercontinental Airport and Harvath had made his way through passport control and customs
, he proceeded to the private aviation business center.

  The first thing he did, after building his layers of proxy servers, was to plug in his ear bud and make hospital calls. Finney’s security teams were still in place and Harvath spoke with their captains. Ron Parker had updated each of them on the failed attack in Virginia Beach.

  As a precaution, the team watching Harvath’s mother had her moved to another room, which didn’t face the street. From a car bomb perspective, Tracy was already protected.

  Harvath spoke with her father, who told him that they had run additional tests and the results weren’t good. The new EEG suggested further decreased brain activity, and they had been attempting to wean her off the ventilator without any luck. Tracy was still not able to breathe on her own. There was a double downside to that, as not only could she not breathe on her own, but as long as she was on a ventilator there was still no way to conduct a full MRI to look for the exact cause of her coma and the true extent of the damage.

  There was a tone of fatalism in Bill Hastings’s voice that Harvath didn’t like. “This is not what Tracy would have wanted,” he said. “All these tubes and wires. The ventilator. Remember Terri Schiavo?” Bill asked. “We had talked about her once, and Tracy told us she would never want to live like that.”

  Bill and Barbara Hastings were Tracy’s parents and her next of kin, so that gave them the power to make medical decisions on Tracy’s behalf, but it sounded as if they were considering throwing in the towel.

  As long as Tracy was alive, there was still hope that she might pull through, and Harvath told them so.

  Bill Hastings was not as optimistic. “If you’d spoken to the doctors, Scot. The neurologists. If you’d heard what they had to say, you might feel differently.”

  The man didn’t have to say it. Harvath knew he and his wife were seriously considering removing their daughter from life support. He asked them not to do anything until he could come back and be there. It seemed like a reasonable request. Though he and Tracy hadn’t been together long, their relationship was intensely close and committed.

  The elder Hastings’s response took Harvath completely off-guard. “Scot, you’re a good man. We know you cared for Tracy, but Barbara and I feel this is a family decision.”

  Cared? They were talking about her as if she were already dead. Immediately, Harvath knew what he had to do. He’d find a way to get into the hospital without being apprehended. He had to. He had to be with Tracy and more important, he needed to speak with Tracy’s father, man-to-man.

  Harvath was ready to alert his pilots to file a flight plan for D.C. when an email appeared in his gmail account that changed everything.

  CHAPTER 103

  Claudia had found a judge with a real thing against terrorists who used Swiss bank accounts to fund their actions. The judge moved quickly, granting Claudia everything she asked for.

  Attached to the email was a transaction history for the Wegelin & Company account. Harvath scanned through it, paying close attention to activity that had taken place subsequent to the night Adara Nidal was supposedly killed. One of the first things he noticed was a series of payments to something called the Dei Glicini e Ulivella in Florence.

  Harvath did a Google search and discovered that Dei Glicini e Ulivella was an exclusive private hospital. It had an elite plastic surgery team billed as “one of the best” in Europe. Among their many specialties was the treatment of severe burn victims, including reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation, and recuperation.

  He didn’t know how she had done it, but Adara Nidal had somehow survived. She had not only managed to get away from the scene of the explosion, but she had also managed to get to someone inside the Italian law enforcement apparatus to sign off on one of the charred corpses from the scene as being hers. It was an elaborate vanishing act, but she had done it. Harvath didn’t want to believe it, but the proof was right in front of his face, and he had learned a long time ago not to underestimate any of the terrorists he went up against.

  Skipping ahead to the most recent transactions, he came to something even more troubling. Shortly before each of the attacks, money had been transferred to a nearby bank. Harvath scanned the list and ticked off the dates and locations of all the attacks so far—Bank of America in Washington, D.C.; California Bank & Trust in San Diego; Wells Fargo Bank in Salt Lake City, Utah; Washington Mutual Bank in McLean, Virginia; Chase Bank in Hillsboro, Virginia; First Coastal Bank in Virginia Beach, Virginia; and finally, U.S. Bank in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

  As the pilots were filing their flight plan and readying the plane for takeoff, Harvath contacted Ron Parker and gave him instructions to overnight the items he’d left at Elk Mountain to the Abbey Resort in Fontana, Wisconsin.

  After Parker took down the information, he asked Harvath how much longer Finney’s jet and its two pilots had to remain in Zurich. Finney had an important guest for whom he needed the plane and its crew.

  Harvath told Parker to thank Finney again on his behalf and to assure him that he wouldn’t need it too much longer.

  It had all been part of that second favor he’d asked Claudia for. When Kevin McCauliff had sent Harvath a follow-up email from outside the NGA with additional details he’d pulled about Wegelin & Company’s being the source of the money routed to Brazil, he’d included a warning. Though he couldn’t prove it, he had a sense that both his phone and his work computer were being monitored and suggested Harvath be on his guard.

  From that email, Harvath had devised a plan of how to be in two places at once and how to make it work to his advantage.

  His country club chat with Jim Vaile, the director of the Central Intelligence, notwithstanding, he had no illusions about what would happen to him the next time Morrell and his team caught up with him.

  At best, they’d take him back into custody, and if that happened, Harvath knew Morrell’s men would see to it that he didn’t escape. And at worst, one of Morrell’s people would put a bullet in him.

  Either would remove him from the game and give Roussard an open field to finish his rampage. Harvath couldn’t let that happen. As far as he could see, he was the only chance the people in his life had. The president was mired in gridlock and regardless of his promises to the contrary, wasn’t capable of stopping Roussard.

  Morrell and his people were good, and Harvath was tired of looking over his shoulder for them. They needed to be drawn off-guard and taken out of play. That was why Harvath had gotten Tim Finney to send his empty jet to Zurich.

  Harvath knew the FAA would be monitoring the jet’s flight plans. After Kevin McCauliff’s word of caution it seemed like the only way to go. If Morrell and his team knew about the Wegelin & Company account, and if they saw Finney’s jet heading for Zurich, it might be enough to make them believe Harvath was on it.

  To make the bait even more attractive, Harvath had Claudia register him at a Zurich hotel under one of his DHS aliases, and the Troll established an electronic credit card trail around the city that would all but confirm his presence. While his professional aliases were in no way public knowledge, he was confident that Morrell and his people would be looking for him to pop on the grid with one of them. It was exactly what he would do in their place.

  The idea was to lure Morrell and his team to the hotel where Claudia’s husband, Horst, and his tactical team would be waiting to take them into custody.

  Claudia had assured him that under Switzerland’s rigid antiterrorism laws, if any of Morrell’s men were carrying weapons of any kind, she could hold them for quite some time before actually filing any charges. The only hitch was that she had to catch them first.

  CHAPTER 104

  CAMP PEARY, VIRGINIA

  Rick Morrell didn’t like any of it. It had fallen right into his lap. It was too sloppy, especially for a guy like Harvath, and that’s why he decided to pull the plug.

  Standing his team down, he put up with all their bullshit complaints as he had them unload the plane and stack their g
ear back in the two trucks they had used to drive out to the CIA’s private airstrip.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Mike Raymond as they passed the final checkpoint and headed toward the highway. “It’s almost like you don’t want to catch this guy.”

  “If that’s what you believe then you are just as stupid as Harvath thinks you are,” replied Morrell.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Harvath completely disappearing from the grid. Nobody sees him, nobody hears from him, and then suddenly, whammo, he pops back up.”

  “Correction,” stated Raymond. “Suddenly he gets in contact with someone the NSA already has under surveillance. That’s how we got our lead.”

  Morrell looked at his subordinate and realized he was going to have to connect the rest of the dots for him. “And it doesn’t bother you that McCauliff started back-scrubbing all of his data trails and had the DOD do a pickup sweep on all his phone lines? He might not have known when he was talking to Harvath that someone was peeping on him, but he figured it out pretty fast.”

  “You’re paranoid. Even if McCauliff did know about it, it didn’t change the nature of the intel he gave Harvath.”

  “Meaning?” asked Morrell.

  “Meaning Harvath has been off the grid because he went to ground. It wasn’t until he got something actionable that he popped back up.”

  “And the fact that he popped back up using one of his known DHS aliases and a credit card doesn’t bother you?”

  Mike Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “Switzerland is fucking expensive. Show me one hotel that doesn’t expect you to present a credit card upon check-in.”

  “How about a hostel?” offered Morrell. “Or a Gästezimmer in a private house? He could use a campground. He could even pick up some unwitting woman and shack up at her place. This is tradecraft 101.”