Brad Thor - The First Commandment

It was in the brothel 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. He had the madam and her husband tortured and then killed for the inhuman cruelty he had spent years suffering at their hands.

From the ashes of his youth, the Troll rose a fiery phoenix armed with a cutthroat business acumen and a gluttonous appetite for the best of everything in life.

In his palm-thatched living room, he cradled a glass of Château Quercy St. Emilion Bordeaux between his two small hands as he stared through the villa’s glass floor at the colorful starfish and vibrant sea life playing in the illuminated water below. He had indeed come a long way since the brothel in Sochi. But was it far enough?

Draco looked up as his master slid off his chair and padded across the room in his handmade Stubbs amp; Wootton Sisal Pajas. Argos remained in a deep sleep, still recovering from the wound he had suffered in Gibraltar. It was good for all of them to get away from his estate in the rainy Scottish Highlands. The weather was much more agreeable in Brazil. It was also a safer place.

Though few knew of Eilenaigas House, he would not feel safe there for some time. After what his clients had done in New York City, he knew the Americans were quite literally out for blood. He’d seen it for himself firsthand in Gibraltar. If he lived to be a thousand, he would never forget the horrifically macabre death the American operative Scot Harvath had visited upon Mohammed bin Mohammed. It was something no sane man could have ever devised. Yet it was perfect. Mohammed had deserved it a million times over, especially for the sadistic acts he had visited upon the Troll as a young boy in that brothel near the Black Sea.

Harvath had been incredibly cruel in meting out the punishment to Mohammed, but in almost the same breath he had shown himself to be incredibly compassionate. Argos would have surely died if Harvath had not given him medical attention himself and found him an able veterinarian. Harvath had even gone so far as to pay the doctor out of his own pocket for the animal’s surgery. Though the Troll had never been very fond of Americans, this was a man he respected. He was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer, who also possessed a marked degree of humanity.

Turning his mind to dinner, the Troll removed several large Kobe steaks from the refrigerator, part of a special shipment he’d had flown in from Japan.

The Japanese were famous for the beer-and-sake-laced diet they fed their premium cattle-and of course for the massages the cows received. Nothing was too good for Kobe cattle, and the painstaking efforts showered upon the animals yielded an incredible meat. It was finely marbled with fat that was less saturated than the fat in other beef, was significantly lower in cholesterol, and was without rival in flavor and tenderness.

As he set the steaks up on the counter, both of the dogs appeared by his side, their nostrils flaring at the scent of the beef. They both asked so little from him and yet gave so much in return. They were his ever-present companions, truer and more loyal than almost any human being he had ever known.

The Troll plated a steak for each of the dogs and set them down on the floor. Immediately, they fell upon them and the beef disappeared.

When his food was prepared, the Troll set it upon the dining table, uncorked another bottle of Château Quercy, and climbed into his chair to eat.

His steak was perfect. Cutting into it was like slicing into a piece of soft, ripened Brie.

He savored every bite of his meal, and when his plate was clean and his wine glass empty, he removed his dinnerware to the kitchen.

Pouring himself a snifter of Germain-Robin XO, he took a long sip and closed his eyes. For all of his accomplishments, the Troll’s life was a lonely place.

The living-room windows were on sliding tracks and had been pulled back to open the room onto the sea. A light breeze carried the smell of the ocean mixed with the tiny island’s exotic flowers. Only the Brazilians could create a night so perfect, mused the Troll as he climbed up to the table he used as a desk and opened his rugged General Dynamics XR-1 GoBook laptop. Via a small, inflatable satellite dish positioned outside, he was soon connected with his rack of dedicated servers secretly housed in a bunker deep within the eastern Pyrenees Mountains.

A British entrepreneur had rolled the dice on an idea that the Swiss approach to banking could be replicated in the digital realm.

The Brit’s facility in the European principality of Andorra boasted redundant power supplies, redundant network feeds, FM200 fire suppression, redundant air-conditioning, and multistage security identification processes. His servers were connected to generous bandwidth allocations, fully burstable, with multiple aggregated providers, ensuring 100 percent availability for maximum uptime.

It had all been music to the Troll’s ears. Relying on the servers at his estate was out of the question. Eilenaigas House was beyond dangerous, at least for now. If he kept a low enough profile, the U. S. intelligence services would give up on him eventually, but until they did, he’d have to stay far away from his home in Scotland.

When it was all said and done, there were much worse places to pass one’s time than a private island in Brazil. And he would know. He’d been to them.

Listening to the music of the waves as they gently washed against the rocks outside, the Troll logged on to his primary server and began the authentication process to gain access to his data. He still had not sifted through the windfall of intelligence he had gleaned from raiding the NSA’s top-secret files in New York during the Al Qaeda attack. The amount of data he’d stolen from the Americans had been beyond his wildest dreams.

The NSA program had been named Athena, after the Greek goddess of wisdom. Apparently the Greeks didn’t have a goddess of blackmail.

It had been a deep black data-mining operation. Using both the Echelon and Carnivore systems, the NSA had been gathering intelligence that could be used as leverage against various foreign concerns-governments, heads of state, and influential foreign business people.

In short, the Athena Program had been created to collect and sort extremely dirty laundry. Once they had their teeth into something particularly juicy, such as the Princess Diana crash, TWA 800, or the true cause of Yassir Arafat’s death, they assigned teams of operatives to flesh out the big picture and uncover as much supporting data as possible. That way, when it came time to use it, they had the victim pinned against the wall so tightly, there was absolutely no room for him or her to wiggle free.

And when they uncovered a conspiracy involving several powerful foreign figures, it was like hitting the jackpot.

The Troll had to smile. It was devious, deceitful, and utterly unAmerican. And now, all of the NSA’s data belonged to him. The gift that will keep on giving. There was enough in there to keep him busy for three lifetimes. The biggest risk was jumping the gun and selling off the pieces of information too quickly. He would have to study all of it and understand how it interrelated before he began assigning values. Fortunately, the Athena analysts had already done a lot of his work for him.

The Troll clicked on the subgroup folder he’d been working in and waited for its contents sheet to appear. It didn’t.