Brad Thor - Takedown

As the team approached its next objective, Ali was supremely confident that its occupants had no idea they were coming. He girded himself with the hope that this might be the last assault they would have to conduct.

The vents for the Lincoln Tunnel vent shaft were located at the West Midtown Ferry Terminal, also known as Pier 79, on Manhattan ’s West Side. As Abdul Ali and his Chechen mercenaries arrived, the vent shaft towers were still belching plumes of acrid black smoke high into the air from the hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles burning in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.

Emergency personnel were everywhere as they tried to use the ventilation shafts to evacuate survivors. With over forty million vehicles passing through the tunnel each year, it was one of the busiest in the world and a perfect target. Ali quietly marveled at the chaos. Allah had indeed blessed their undertaking.

Attached to the north ventilation tower was a New York Waterway bus garage, and Ali instructed Sacha to park just past it alongside two large dumpsters. The men readied their weapons and then donned their gas masks and black tactical helmets. In practiced unison, they exited the vehicles and raced into the nearly empty garage accompanied by a very special Trojan horse.

Most of the bus staff had raced next door to try to help extricate survivors from the tunnel and only a handful remained behind. They were quickly dispatched by three of the Chechens who then dragged their bodies to the rear of the garage, where they could be hidden away out of sight.

The secondary stairwell secreted within the north ventilation tower had been constructed to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find without proper help. Once it was located, the team readied its secret weapon and sent “Ivan” hobbling down the stairs.

Via a fiber-optic camera mounted inside the animal’s collar, Ali and his Chechen handler watched as the small yet sturdy border collie with its brightly colored search-and-rescue vest, limped forward toward a large steel door. Three feet away, the handler depressed a button on his remote, which caused the dog’s collar to beep twice in quick succession. Immediately, the dog began whimpering and laid itself down.

For a moment, it appeared that their tactic was not going to work. Then the groan of metal on metal resounded through the corridor and up the stairwell as the steel door began to slowly open. Two men outfitted similarly to the marines at the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange appeared, and seeing no one else in the corridor, shouldered their weapons and cautiously approached the injured dog, wondering how it had made its way down there. They assumed it must have been part of the search-and-rescue efforts in the tunnel and had somehow lost its way.

What the marines should have been asking themselves was where the animal’s handler was.

Once the marines were close enough, Ivan received another cue, got up and limped inside the facility.

Having seen enough from Ivan’s collar-mounted camera, Ali nodded to the handler, who then signaled the rest of the team to get ready. The dog was then sent its final cue.

Ivan bit down on a tab at his right shoulder and pulled it forward, causing the heavy vest packed with plastique and ball bearings to activate and fall to the ground. The speedy dog was halfway to the stairs before anyone inside knew what had happened.

With the deafening roar of the explosion still ringing in the ears of those not instantly killed by the detonation, Abdul Ali and his men rushed inside with their weapons blazing. They plowed a bloody trail through the odd submarine-like structure as they searched for the man al-Qaeda was willing to risk anything to recover.

But once again, it was all in vain. Not only was Mohammed bin Mohammed nowhere to be found, there was no sign he had ever been there to begin with.

When they were safely inside the Tahoes and back out into the maddening traffic, Abdul Ali quietly went over the plan for taking down their next target. From everything he had read, this one was going to be their most difficult yet, and for the first time since they had started, he questioned his team’s chances for success.

SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

The Troll had gone through only a fraction of the information from the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange when the Lincoln Tunnel data began to stream in. It was time for another payment to Sacha’s account. The Chechen was easily worth his enormous weight in gold-especially when it was someone else’s. The fact that Abdul Ali had no idea what his al-Qaeda money was really buying made the transaction even more delicious for the Troll.

It could conceivably take a lifetime to sift through all of the information now gorging his servers. Each piece on its own had a certain amount of value, but the skill-the art, if you will-was in knowing how to join together just the right tidbits to create a true masterpiece. That was where the Troll excelled in his profession. It was quite amazing, especially for someone whose prospects in life had been seen as so negligible that even his parents had given up on him early in life.

When it became obvious the Troll was not going to grow any further, his godless Georgian parents made no attempt to find a suitable loving home for their son, nor did they try to find even a half-decent orphanage. Instead, they abandoned the boy, selling him as if he were chattel to a thriving brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There, the boy was starved, beaten, and made to perform unutterable sex acts that would have shamed even the Marquis de Sade himself.

It was there that the Troll learned the true value of information. The loose-lipped pillow talk of the powerful clients proved a goldmine once he had learned what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.

The whores, most of them life’s castoffs as well, felt a kinship with the dwarf and treated him well. In fact, they became the only family he ever knew, and he repaid that kindness by one day buying their freedom. Those who had been unkind to him were evicted to fend for themselves, a fate made even more unbearable when the Troll had the madam and her husband tortured and then killed for the inhuman cruelty he had spent years suffering at their hands.

He had indeed come a long way, and once his servers were full from this transaction, the world could go to hell, as far as he was concerned. The data he was now hoarding was the ultimate annuity. With the money he stood to make, he could do and buy anything he wanted.

As the Troll scanned the data coming in, he enjoyed a bouchée of escargots and morel mushrooms followed by a magret of Duck Martiniquaise with caramelized leg confit, all complemented by an exquisite bottle of Château Quercy St. Emilion Bordeaux from his cellar. Though many, many dots would need to be connected, if the data flow stopped right at this moment, the Troll couldn’t have been happier. The information being stored on his servers represented thousands upon thousands of man-hours, which he would never have to expend, but more importantly would never have to pay for.

Riding the heady wave of windfall, the Troll decided a little semi-retirement party was in order. There would be Kobe beef for Argus and Drako, and for himself, three of the most exquisite girls a certain mariscala he knew in Madrid would be more than happy to provide.

After e-mailing a request for the woman’s most recent catalog, the Troll placed an order for hampers full of the most outrageous delicacies London ’s Fortnum amp; Mason had to offer-caviar, aged cheeses, foie gras, charcuterie, pies, chocolate, and chutneys. It was going to be the party to end all parties. The Georgian castoff had hit the ultimate jackpot.