Brad Thor - Foreign Influence

He was just beginning to stand when he heard something behind him. Vaughan had no idea who it was and had learned a long time ago that discretion wasn’t always the better part of valor. He was in a dark alley in a bad neighborhood on the trail of even worse people. He went for his Glock.

The move was met with a searing pain in his right hand as he was struck with a piece of rebar and his wrist was broken.

Vaughan spun and came up with his left hand in a fist. He connected with his attacker’s jaw and sent him stumbling backward. At that moment, the barrel of a gun was shoved into his face and a flashlight was shined in his eyes.

Though it hurt like hell on his right side, Vaughan raised his hands. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m a police officer.”

The light was taken out of his eyes and, for a moment, he thought he was going to be let go, until he felt his Glock being removed from his holster and saw the man he had punched out gather himself off the pavement and come forward. The man was Middle Eastern. This wasn’t good.

Walking over to him, the man drew his fist back and struck him right in the gut. Vaughan doubled over.

The man grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head up. Vaughan had been in plenty of fistfights in his time and he readied himself either for a knee to the face or for the man to punch down at his head. Either way, he knew it was going to hurt.

Suddenly, he heard a voice from behind his attackers. “This isn’t even a fair fight. You assholes didn’t bring enough guys.”

Vaughan looked past the man with the gun to see Davidson right behind him with his own gun pressed up against the back of the man’s head.

The man holding him by his hair let go and Vaughan straightened himself up. His relief at seeing Davidson was short-lived. Four other men were now standing behind him with weapons pointed right at him.

“Well, it looks like maybe you did bring enough guys,” said Davidson. “Why don’t we put our guns down and settle this like men?”

One of the men stepped forward and struck him in the kidneys with the butt of a rifle. Davidson’s knees buckled from the pain and he collapsed to the ground.

As his gun was taken away from him, Davidson looked up and said, “That’s it. You’re all under arrest.”

The man who had broken Vaughan’s wrist smiled and punched Davidson in the mouth.

Someone gave a series of orders in rapid Arabic and the two police officers were dragged from the alley and into the building.

As the heavy metal door clanged shut, Vaughan wondered what was going to happen, but part of him already knew. All of the bad feelings he’d had since going after Nasiri came flooding back. This was no longer Chicago, and he was no longer a cop or a lawyer working for the family of a young woman who’d been struck by a fleeing taxi. He was a Marine and he was being dragged into a terrorist hellhole worse than anything he had ever seen.

GENEVA

The speed with which Reed Carlton worked was a testament to the efficiency of the private sector. Within hours, he had not only helped plug the holes in Harvath’s plan, he had gotten the train on the tracks and out of the station.

It was agreed that Michael Lee had seen and heard too much to be let go. For the time being, he was going to have to be held on to. And while Peio was a decent field medic, he wasn’t a trauma doc. Lee was stable, but he needed a professional to look at his wounds. There was an American surgeon based in Paris who was being flown in. She had some sort of relationship with the Department of Defense, but other than that, Carlton didn’t elaborate. All he added was that she was equipped to keep an eye on Lee until they decided what to do with him. Harvath had trouble imagining what a surgeon could do, short of keeping Lee drugged up, but he figured Carlton knew best and let it go. There were several more pressing items that needed to be worked out anyway.

As the attempted murder of the Troll had been orchestrated from within Switzerland, the United States didn’t have any jurisdiction. They also didn’t have any jurisdiction over the alleged murder of Lars Jagland. Not that anyone in the United States cared very much about either. All they cared about were the Rome and Paris attacks. That and Sterk’s material support of terrorism and how it had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American citizens.

Harvath was a big believer in the merits of enhanced interrogation. He also had no problem with torture when the situation called for it, which this one definitely did. There were very likely more attacks on the horizon, and Sterk possessed information that could help stop them. The key lay in applying as much pressure as was necessary to get her to play ball. Once she began cooperating, the pressure could be dialed back, but the threat of it ramping back up needed to hover over everything they did in order to ensure her continued collaboration.

If they’d had more time to interrogate her, Carlton and the higher-ups at the DOD might not have been so willing to cut a deal. But as it was, everyone, including Harvath, agreed that preventing further attacks was more important than prosecuting her.

Painting Sterk as a covert intelligence source for another agency, an immunity agreement was drafted. So long as she cooperated, Sterk would not be prosecuted.

With that demand met, they set to work on “closing out” Tony Tsui.

Sterk had been dead set against having it happen in the United States. “Too suspicious,” she had argued, believing that it would raise too many questions and sow too many seeds of doubt.

The woman preferred that it take place in an Asian or Latin American country.

That made things difficult for the Old Man. It had to be done correctly and with people he knew he could trust. The best was if it could be done through someone who owed him a favor. There were several of those scattered around the globe, but not all of them could lay their hands on a fresh “John Doe” Asian corpse.

The woman finally agreed to the closeout taking place outside Frankfurt, Germany. The gun battle between Tony Tsui and an elite GSG9 team began shortly before eleven o’clock local time and raged for over forty-five minutes. When the unit finally stormed the small house, news vehicles from every media outlet in Frankfurt were already stacked three deep behind the police cordons. None of them had any clue that the man returning fire from inside the house was not Tony Tsui, but was one of the GSG9 counterterrorism operatives from the German Federal Police force.

As dead bodies do not bleed, the operative inside the house had pumped plenty of fresh blood through the corpse as he simultaneously pumped it full of rounds from his MP5. A forensics team was brought in, and a big show was made of a single laptop being removed from the house. It was placed into an official police vehicle along with the GSG9 team and driven away in one of the longest and most secure convoys any of the media had ever seen. One reporter remarked that not even foreign heads of state traveled with that much security; not even the American president.

The first piece of disinformation was leaked to the popular German weekly Der Spiegel and appeared on their Web site within the hour. German counterterrorism forces had decided to move on a known espionage figure who dealt in the sale and trade of highly classified state secrets. This figure was reported to have had wide-ranging ties, including several high-level terrorist contacts. The suspect had been shot and killed by German counterterrorism forces.