Brad Thor - Foreign Influence

He walked over to Eyebrows and demonstrated how he wanted him to secure his friend. When Scarface was zipped up, Harvath had Eyebrows lie facedown in the dirt and he returned the favor.

With their ankles zipped together and wrists bound behind their backs, Harvath had them hop over to the car and helped load them in the trunk facedown. Once they were in, he chained a couple more Tuff Ties together so he could hog-tie the men. It was cramped quarters in the trunk and neither of them was going to be able to move until they were cut loose.

After gagging the men, he slammed the lid shut and climbed into the driver’s seat. He removed the GPS unit, fired it back up, and once it had acquired the satellites, planned an alternate route to the destination, which he quickly memorized.

The reason he had been able to ID Eyebrows and Scarface coming out of Bilbao was that they had been following close enough to be seen. If the GPS unit or the Opel he had been driving contained some sort of a tracking device, they should have been able to stay back and out of sight. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to gamble that the GPS device might give him away to whoever had sent the two geniuses in the trunk, and so as he pulled back out onto the country road and headed for the motorway, he dropped the unit out the window.

He had no idea that the car he was now driving was the biggest giveaway of all.

CHICAGO

After leaving Area Five headquarters, Sergeant John Vaughan drove to the intersection where Alison Taylor had been struck. He parked his vehicle and surveyed the entire area on foot.

Beyond the lone Chicago Police Department blue light camera used to discourage street crime, Vaughan located five other privately owned security cameras that might have footage of the hit-and-run.

The first belonged to Alison Taylor’s apartment building. Vaughan scared up the resident manager, who had “already” spoken to the Area Five detectives. John mollified the man and explained that he was simply following up.

The manager told him exactly what he had told the detectives. The building’s exterior camera provided a 24/7 feed so that residents could see who was buzzing them from the front door. Unfortunately, the feed wasn’t recorded.

Was it possible that a resident could have had their TV switched to the video loop when the accident occurred? Yes, but at three o’clock on a weekday morning, he doubted it. The majority of his renters were young professionals like Ms. Taylor. What’s more, he assumed that if anyone had seen something, they would have alerted the police.

The manager agreed to send an e-mail to his residents asking if they had seen anything and took Vaughan ’s card.

The next three cameras belonged to merchants near the intersection, all of whom had previously spoken with the detectives. Of the businesses, one’s camera had not been turned on that evening, another stated that her camera was a fake and only there to deter crime, and the third merchant replied that unless he’d been broken into during the night, he automatically erased the footage every morning when he came in and started anew.

The fifth camera was from a bank ATM, and they still had their footage from the night in question. Though the Area Five detectives had already screened the footage, the bank manager was happy to let Vaughan see it.

Considering the camera’s field of view, it should have been perfect. In fact, it would have been perfect if not for a large delivery truck that had parked on the street just in front of the ATM that evening. All of the bank’s customers had been recorded perfectly, but seeing beyond the truck to the intersection was impossible.

Vaughan had figured it was a long shot, but sometimes those were the ones that paid off. His hopes of catching the act on tape now were all but gone.

After dinner at home with his family, homework, and baths for the kids, Vaughan returned to the intersection and went into the subway station. He wanted to re-create the scene for himself as closely as possible to the way it had happened.

Coming out of the subway, he turned to the right, exactly as Alison and her friends would have, and retraced their steps along the sidewalk.

He spent hours studying the intersection and its flow of pedestrians and traffic. He watched the timing of the lights and how many vehicles rushed the reds. He charted the vehicles that turned into the crosswalk where Alison had been struck and noted their rates of speed.

For most people it would have been mind-numbing tedium, but for Vaughan it was a challenge; a puzzle. He was convinced that he could find the answers he was looking for here. He just needed to keep looking.

At 5:30 in the morning, he went home in time to shower and change into a new suit before the children were up and wanting breakfast. Thirty minutes, four kisses, and one family hug later, his wife took their son off in one direction to his school, while he took their daughter to hers.

As a Marine who had seen hundreds of firefights in Iraq, he was no stranger to sleep deprivation. In fact, he’d often joked that he could handle sleep deprivation in combat. It was the sleep deprivation of parenthood that was the real killer.

Because there was no Dunkin’ Donuts near his daughter’s school, he broke one of his hardest and fastest rules and stepped into a Starbucks. The minute he did, he could hear the giant sucking sound of money being vacuumed out of customers’ pockets. Starbucks had good coffee, and as a capitalist, he didn’t fault them for getting the most they could for their product. He just disliked the whole vente/grande, mocha-frappu-B.S.-cino, coffee-as-art shtick. Hot, black, and in a cup-that’s the complete extent of the relationship he wanted with the beverage.

Instead of taking his large cup of house blend back to the car, he found a table and took a seat. His eyes were glazed over as he stared absently out the window and there were probably multiple customers who found the sight of a man with a pistol on his hip and a thousand-yard stare more than a little disturbing.

If people were looking, he didn’t notice. The weapon was so much a part of who he was that he never really thought about it. It was just one of several tools necessary for doing his job.

As his mind wandered, he watched a Yellow taxi drive by outside. He watched as it neared the corner and slowed to a stop. A uniformed crossing guard directed the cab to stay where it was while she crossed a group of kids with backpacks and skateboards.

He had never liked cabbies very much. The fact that they were predominantly immigrants wasn’t what bothered him. As long as they had come in the front door like everybody else, he was okay with it. What bothered him was what lousy drivers they tended to be.

It didn’t make any sense. A rational person would be correct in thinking that the more one performed a task, the better one would become at it. But that didn’t seem to apply to cab drivers.

He seriously doubted the cab would have even stopped for the kids if the guard hadn’t been there.

At that moment, he got an idea. Pulling out his notebook, he turned to a fresh page and clicked his pen. He removed his cell phone and dialed the main number for the CPD. When the operator answered, he asked to be connected to the Public Vehicles Division.

“Public Vehicles. Officer Brennan,” said the voice who answered.

“Good morning, Officer Brennan. This is Sergeant John Vaughan from Organized Crime.”

“It was all my wife and mother-in-law’s idea. I had nothing to do with it. Put me in the witness protection program and I’d be happy to testify.”