Brad Thor - Blowback

“Ozan, I have no time and even less patience. Regardless of how you see yourself, you’ve blackmailed my government into a corner, and I’ve been instructed to work with you and do anything within my power to facilitate this exchange, so enough beating around the bush. What kind of trouble are we talking about here? Spit it out already.”

As Kalachka looked at Harvath, it was difficult to tell whether it was sweat or tears rimming the older man’s eyes. “My nephew has been kidnapped.”

“By whom?”

Kalachka hesitated. “I have my suspicions, but I can’t be positive about anything.”

“You’d be surprised how accurate suspicions can be in these situations. Let’s back up a second, though. How do you know he’s been kidnapped? Has there been a ransom demand?”

“No, but there were witnesses. Dozens of them,” said the Turk. “He was grabbed off a street in Bangladesh in broad daylight. Three men wearing ski masks and carrying automatic weapons plucked him off the sidewalk near his office in Dhaka and then drove him away.”

“What about the car?” asked Harvath, still skeptical.

“Stolen. The police found it abandoned the next day.”

“Any idea why somebody would want to take him?”

Kalachka wiped his face yet again and replied, “I think it has something to do with what he was working on.”

“Which was what?”

“He’s a scientist, neuromolecular biology something or other. I have never pretended to understand it. Suffice it to say that he’s a very intelligent young man.”

“Ozan, what was he working on?” repeated Harvath, who was starting to get a very bad feeling.

Kalachka couldn’t stall any longer. He threw up his hands and answered, “He was one of the scientists working on the sword of Allah project.”

Harvath was beyond shocked. “Your nephew is responsible for all of this?”

“Trust me,” said Kalachka, “when he accepted the position with the Islamic Institute for Science and Technology, he did so intending to do great things for the Muslim world. The scientists there had no idea what they were working on. Everyone on the project was kept separate from one another. It wasn’t until they were nearing the end that Emir was able to fit the pieces together. But by then, someone had begun silencing all of the people involved. It had to be someone from the institute.”

Harvath took a towel and wiped the back of his neck. “I think you’re wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?” replied Kalachka. “It makes perfect sense. He put the pieces together, they found out that he was going to expose them, and so they kidnapped him.”

“To do what? Scare him to death? Put him in a room with nothing to do and bore him to death? Think about it, Ozan. All the other scientists were killed. Not kidnapped. The only reason that would have happened was if he was of value to someone. Did anyone else know what your nephew was working on?”

Kalachka was silent for several moments. “I asked him the same thing right before he disappeared.”

“And?”

“He was e-mailing someone.”

“Who?”

“Another scientist. Someone he went to university in England with. She’s a specialist who Emir thought might be able to help him better understand what he was dealing with.”

“So why are you talking to me? Why not this woman?” asked Harvath.

“Because she’s not an operator. She’s not in the business of recovering hostages.”

“But she’s your only lead.”

“There’s something else,” said Kalachka, as he reached next to him and lifted several photos that had been encased in clear plastic sleeves.

“Pictures of your nephew,” said Harvath, resigning himself to what he was going to have to do. “I suppose they would be helpful.”

“They might be more helpful than you think,” stated Kalachka. “Look at them carefully.”

Harvath studied the first two photographs. They showed the actual kidnapping in perfect detail. “Where’d you get these?”

“There was a newly installed security camera on the exterior of the bank across the street. What do you see?”

“I see what looks like the kidnapping of your nephew,” replied Harvath.

“Look at the last picture in the series, as Emir is being shoved into the car. The Mercedes’s windows are blacked out, but in the frame when the door opens, you can see that there’s a man inside.”

As Harvath looked closer at the photo, he saw that Kalachka was right. There definitely was a man sitting inside the Mercedes, and he wasn’t wearing anything to disguise his appearance. It wasn’t a tight enough shot, though, to make a positive identification. Harvath was just about to mention that, when Kalachka handed him the final photograph and said, “I had it digitally enhanced. Tell me what you see now.”

Harvath looked at the photo and saw a face he had hoped never to see again. It was now apparent why Kalachka had asked for him. “You know goddamn well who that is, “He said.

Kalachka’s eyes sparkled as he replied, “And so do you, don’t you?”

Harvath’s head was awash with images. Timothy Rayburn was ex-Secret Service. He had been one of the agency’s best and also one of its most dangerous. He had been Harvath’s earliest mentor, and Harvath had personally seen to it that the man’s employment was terminated and that he could never work for another federal, state, or local law enforcement agency ever again.

“Find Rayburn,” said Kalachka, pulling Harvath’s mind from the past, “and you’ll find the information you need to stop the illness.”

As his dented taxicab crawled through the crowded streets of Nicosia, Harvath’s mind spun. After the Secret Service had effectively barred Rayburn from ever working in law enforcement again, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the man had found a way to ply his trade overseas. Harvath reminded himself that there were people out there who would pay big money for what Rayburn could do for them, regardless of his ethics. Based on what Harvath had seen, the man would sell his services to the highest bidder and relegate any pangs of conscience to a remote and dark corner of his psyche. If nothing else, at least Rayburn remained consistent. He had always been about the money, and that was what had gotten him cut from the Secret Service.

Harvath remembered the affair, and more importantly the betrayal, in vivid detail. Ex-military himself, Rayburn had taken a shine to Harvath the moment the new recruit had transferred from the SEALs to the Secret Service. Like many federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service often rotated highly skilled field agents through the classrooms at their training facility in Beltsville, Maryland. That was where Harvath and Rayburn had met. Not only did the two become close friends, but Rayburn became somewhat of an older brother figure to Harvath, riding him harder than the other students and saying he owed it to Harvath to be tough on him. Insiders like Rayburn knew why Harvath had been recruited to the Secret Service. They were all very well aware that it was because of his vast counterterrorism background and that he was headed for a special post at the White House.

A self-confessed “old dog in need of some new tricks, “Rayburn took a keen interest in Harvath’s SEAL career and the current way things were being done in the world of counterterrorism. The two spent many late nights bonding over pitchers of beer in several Beltsville taverns. Though Harvath hadn’t noticed it at the time, Rayburn was slowly and methodically picking his brain. And it didn’t end in Beltsville. When Harvath graduated, Rayburn had himself assigned to spend time with the freshly minted field agent.