Brad Thor - The First Commandment

It was good police work, but all Harvath had to do was gaze out toward the marina and the hundreds of boats parked along the docks to know that this guy was already long gone. He had a good idea how, but he still had to ask. “So he dumped the van here, and then what?”

Gold tilted her head in the direction of a hotel surveillance camera. “We’ve already pulled the footage. Like you said, this guy is a professional. He knew we were going to pull the tapes. He never looks directly into the camera. I’ll make sure you get a copy of everything, but I don’t think it’ll do much good. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled down so tight you can’t see his face. He’s also wearing baggy clothes and is walking hunched over so that we couldn’t get a good gauge of his height or his weight either.”

“Did he have a car waiting for him or did he go down to the docks?”

“He went down to the docks,” replied the detective. “The marina people are pretty strict about logging what boats are in what slips, registration numbers and all of that, but-”

“But by now he’s probably already in Mexico.”

Gold agreed. “If it was me I’d have a car waiting in Ensenada, if not someplace farther up the coast, and from there I’d just disappear.”

She was right. It was exactly what Harvath would do, and it pissed him off. They were only hours behind the man who had shot Tracy and had attacked his mother, but it might as well have been days. With a boat and nearly two thousand miles of coastline on the Baja Peninsula, this guy could be anywhere.

The only thing Harvath knew for sure was that he had not disappeared for good. He’d turn up again, and when he did, it wasn’t going to be over a cup of Constant Comment and a sob story about how he was misunderstood as a child.

At some point the two of them were going to have to square off, and when they did, only one of them was going to walk away from it alive.

ANGRA DOS REIS, BRAZIL

The Troll looked at the list again and then pushed the pad of paper away. In a word, he was stunned.

Getting hold of the list had been as close to impossible as he had ever come. The Troll had precious little to bargain with and was forced to call in the favor of a lifetime from someone extremely well placed whom he knew was sitting on a piece of information so hot, it was practically radioactive.

Once he had that information, he had enough currency to go after what he was really looking for. Though Harvath had taken almost everything from him, the Troll still had a couple of aces up his short sleeve, and he played them masterfully.

Picking up his empty coffee cup, he slid down from his chair and padded into the kitchen. A cold breeze moved through the house carrying upon it the promise of rain. That had been one of the few drawbacks of this private island paradise. On the infrequent occasions when it rained, it poured. This meant that all of his satellite transmissions had to be suspended until after the storm had passed.

The pots of sobering Turkish coffee were burning a hole in his stomach. Removing the remnants of a half-eaten baguette, a wedge of Camembert, and a bottle of mineral water, he set them on a tray and returned to the table, where he looked at the list once more.

A million different things were floating around his mind, and he found it hard to stay focused. With each piece he uncovered, the puzzle only grew bigger.

One of the most interesting items he had discovered was that a little over six months ago, the Americans had secretly released five of the most dangerous prisoners they held at Guantanamo Bay. They had used a radioactive isotope to taint their blood in order to track them, but it had failed, and the Americans had lost track of them.

That all formed the what of the equation. What the Troll couldn’t put together was the why.

Had it been some kind of a hush-hush trade? If so, who was it with and why track the men? Were they hoping to get them back, and if so, from whom? Who wanted them in the first place?

As far as the Troll could see, the prisoners were in no way connected. They all came from different organizations-even different countries. It didn’t make any sense.

He supposed an Al Qaeda connection probably could be established among the five, but not in such a way that the release en masse made any sense. And they certainly hadn’t been released because they had been model detainees or had been wrongly incarcerated in the first place. No, these were very rough, very dangerous men.

Their dossiers listed multiple escape attempts and multiple attacks on the Joint Task Force Guantanamo guards. While it was probably a relief to some of their captors to see them gone, the United States must have commanded a heavy price in return.

That had been the Troll’s theory, but no matter how hard he tried to find a link, he couldn’t. There was an absolute black hole of information-a very rare intelligence phenomenon, especially by his standards. Information could be hidden, but it never simply evaporated. The fact that he had to drill down so hard to get what was sitting in front of him right now told him one thing-the United States didn’t want word of the release of these five men ever getting out.

The soldiers who had been involved with releasing the prisoners that rainy night nearly six months ago had all been promoted and transferred out of Guantanamo. The United States had done a very good job tying up all its loose ends, but why? What were they hiding?

The Troll let that question spin in his brain for a bit while he focused on another piece that didn’t seem to fit-Agent Scot Harvath.

Over the last several hours, it had become quite apparent that Harvath had some exceptional resources at his disposal, but they weren’t resources that belonged to the U. S. government per se.

On the contrary, for some reason the United States regarded him as a liability and, according to the Troll’s sources, wasn’t allowing Harvath to pursue the investigation into who’d shot Tracy Hastings. Harvath was working alone.

Be that as it might, the man obviously had friends-and quite talented ones at that. The Troll was still chiding himself for having lost everything. His data, his fortune, all of it.

At first, he had entertained the idea of putting a contract out on Harvath, but not only would it have been prohibitively expensive, but if anything happened to Harvath, the Troll might very well never see his money or his data again. He had no choice, at least for the time being, but to let things play out. If an opportunity presented itself at some point in the future, and one always did, then he would make his move. But for the time being, he was going to have to give every appearance that he was playing ball.

Reaching across the table, he pulled the thin pad of paper back toward him and studied the list of five names again. What should his next move be?

As a clap of thunder roared from somewhere out over the bay, the Troll lifted his pen, crossed the top name off the list, and then logged back into the chat room. What Harvath didn’t know wouldn’t kill him.

SARGASSO INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM

ELK MOUNTAIN RESORT

MONTROSE, COLORADO

After talking with her doctors, Harvath had sat with his mother again and had watched her sleep. It was still too early to tell if the damage to her vision would be permanent, but they were hopeful that her eyesight would begin to return soon. The blows she had taken to her head during the attack were what concerned them the most at this point, and they wanted to hold on to her for at least the next several days for more testing and observation.

After a little while longer, Harvath had stood. He loved his mother dearly, but no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t just sit there by her bedside and wait for someone else to be attacked. He needed to act. So with a group of her friends on deck ready to sit vigil, he had climbed back aboard Tim Finney’s Citation X and had flown back to Colorado.