Brad Thor - The First Commandment

It was a hopeless task. There was no telling where Roussard was going to strike next. The U. S. Ski Team facility in Park City and the Bucket of Blood in Virginia Beach were almost as random as Carolyn Leonard, Kate Palmer, Emily Hawkins, and his dog. They were all significant to him, but they were not people or places he would ever have anticipated being attacked.

After the jet had made its descent into Houston ’s Intercontinental Airport and Harvath had made his way through passport control and customs, he proceeded to the private aviation business center.

The first thing he did, after building his layers of proxy servers, was to plug in his ear bud and make hospital calls. Finney’s security teams were still in place and Harvath spoke with their captains. Ron Parker had updated each of them on the failed attack in Virginia Beach.

As a precaution, the team watching Harvath’s mother had her moved to another room, which didn’t face the street. From a car bomb perspective, Tracy was already protected.

Harvath spoke with her father, who told him that they had run additional tests and the results weren’t good. The new EEG suggested further decreased brain activity, and they had been attempting to wean her off the ventilator without any luck. Tracy was still not able to breathe on her own. There was a double downside to that, as not only could she not breathe on her own, but as long as she was on a ventilator there was still no way to conduct a full MRI to look for the exact cause of her coma and the true extent of the damage.

There was a tone of fatalism in Bill Hastings’s voice that Harvath didn’t like. “This is not what Tracy would have wanted,” he said. “All these tubes and wires. The ventilator. Remember Terri Schiavo?” Bill asked. “We had talked about her once, and Tracy told us she would never want to live like that.”

Bill and Barbara Hastings were Tracy’s parents and her next of kin, so that gave them the power to make medical decisions on Tracy’s behalf, but it sounded as if they were considering throwing in the towel.

As long as Tracy was alive, there was still hope that she might pull through, and Harvath told them so.

Bill Hastings was not as optimistic. “If you’d spoken to the doctors, Scot. The neurologists. If you’d heard what they had to say, you might feel differently.”

The man didn’t have to say it. Harvath knew he and his wife were seriously considering removing their daughter from life support. He asked them not to do anything until he could come back and be there. It seemed like a reasonable request. Though he and Tracy hadn’t been together long, their relationship was intensely close and committed.

The elder Hastings ’s response took Harvath completely off-guard. “Scot, you’re a good man. We know you cared for Tracy, but Barbara and I feel this is a family decision.”

Cared? They were talking about her as if she were already dead. Immediately, Harvath knew what he had to do. He’d find a way to get into the hospital without being apprehended. He had to. He had to be with Tracy and more important, he needed to speak with Tracy ’s father, man-to-man.

Harvath was ready to alert his pilots to file a flight plan for D. C. when an email appeared in his gmail account that changed everything.

Claudia had found a judge with a real thing against terrorists who used Swiss bank accounts to fund their actions. The judge moved quickly, granting Claudia everything she asked for.

Attached to the email was a transaction history for the Wegelin amp; Company account. Harvath scanned through it, paying close attention to activity that had taken place subsequent to the night Adara Nidal was supposedly killed. One of the first things he noticed was a series of payments to something called the Dei Glicini e Ulivella in Florence.

Harvath did a Google search and discovered that Dei Glicini e Ulivella was an exclusive private hospital. It had an elite plastic surgery team billed as “one of the best” in Europe. Among their many specialties was the treatment of severe burn victims, including reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation, and recuperation.

He didn’t know how she had done it, but Adara Nidal had somehow survived. She had not only managed to get away from the scene of the explosion, but she had also managed to get to someone inside the Italian law enforcement apparatus to sign off on one of the charred corpses from the scene as being hers. It was an elaborate vanishing act, but she had done it. Harvath didn’t want to believe it, but the proof was right in front of his face, and he had learned a long time ago not to underestimate any of the terrorists he went up against.

Skipping ahead to the most recent transactions, he came to something even more troubling. Shortly before each of the attacks, money had been transferred to a nearby bank. Harvath scanned the list and ticked off the dates and locations of all the attacks so far-Bank of America in Washington, D. C.; California Bank amp; Trust in San Diego; Wells Fargo Bank in Salt Lake City, Utah; Washington Mutual Bank in McLean, Virginia; Chase Bank in Hillsboro, Virginia; First Coastal Bank in Virginia Beach, Virginia; and finally, U. S. Bank in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

As the pilots were filing their flight plan and readying the plane for takeoff, Harvath contacted Ron Parker and gave him instructions to overnight the items he’d left at Elk Mountain to the Abbey Resort in Fontana, Wisconsin.

After Parker took down the information, he asked Harvath how much longer Finney’s jet and its two pilots had to remain in Zurich. Finney had an important guest for whom he needed the plane and its crew.

Harvath told Parker to thank Finney again on his behalf and to assure him that he wouldn’t need it too much longer.

It had all been part of that second favor he’d asked Claudia for. When Kevin McCauliff had sent Harvath a follow-up email from outside the NGA with additional details he’d pulled about Wegelin amp; Company’s being the source of the money routed to Brazil, he’d included a warning. Though he couldn’t prove it, he had a sense that both his phone and his work computer were being monitored and suggested Harvath be on his guard.

From that email, Harvath had devised a plan of how to be in two places at once and how to make it work to his advantage.

His country club chat with Jim Vaile, the director of the Central Intelligence, notwithstanding, he had no illusions about what would happen to him the next time Morrell and his team caught up with him.

At best, they’d take him back into custody, and if that happened, Harvath knew Morrell’s men would see to it that he didn’t escape. And at worst, one of Morrell’s people would put a bullet in him.

Either would remove him from the game and give Roussard an open field to finish his rampage. Harvath couldn’t let that happen. As far as he could see, he was the only chance the people in his life had. The president was mired in gridlock and regardless of his promises to the contrary, wasn’t capable of stopping Roussard.

Morrell and his people were good, and Harvath was tired of looking over his shoulder for them. They needed to be drawn off-guard and taken out of play. That was why Harvath had gotten Tim Finney to send his empty jet to Zurich.

Harvath knew the FAA would be monitoring the jet’s flight plans. After Kevin McCauliff’s word of caution it seemed like the only way to go. If Morrell and his team knew about the Wegelin amp; Company account, and if they saw Finney’s jet heading for Zurich, it might be enough to make them believe Harvath was on it.

To make the bait even more attractive, Harvath had Claudia register him at a Zurich hotel under one of his DHS aliases, and the Troll established an electronic credit card trail around the city that would all but confirm his presence. While his professional aliases were in no way public knowledge, he was confident that Morrell and his people would be looking for him to pop on the grid with one of them. It was exactly what he would do in their place.