Brad Thor - The First Commandment

“Interesting,” replied Harvath, as he pulled a pen from his pocket. “How do you know he was Swiss?”

“He used a Swiss passport for ID. I assumed that meant he was from Switzerland. He spoke with an accent too.”

“Did you make a copy of his passport, by any chance?”

“Of course,” said Ramirez. “It’s standard bank procedure.”

“May I see the copy, please?”

Ramirez looked at Evans, who nodded.

He disappeared from the office and returned several minutes later with a photocopy of Roussard’s Boesiger passport.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about him?” asked Harvath.

Ramirez looked at him. “Like what?”

“Did he have anyone else with him?”

“No,” answered the portly teller. “He came in by himself.”

“How about his vehicle? Did you notice what he was driving?”

Ramirez shook his head, no. “Didn’t see it.”

“Did he make small talk with you at all? Did he mention where he was staying, anything like that?”

“Not that I can remember.”

At this rate, Harvath was quickly coming to the end of possible questions he could ask.

Then Ramirez said, “Wait a second. He asked me for directions. It was an address for a real estate office. It was near here, but I can’t remember which one. We talked about walking versus driving there. I told him that if he was already parked, he’d probably be better off walking it than trying to find a new spot once he got there.”

Having remembered the crucial piece of information, Ramirez’s broad face was cleaved with a wide grin.

As Harvath accepted a phone book from the bank manager, he wondered how many real estate offices there could be in a resort town like Lake Geneva.

When Rick Morrell and the members of his Omega Team arrived in the village of Fontana, they split into two squads and, posing as FBI agents, interviewed Todd Kirkland and Jean Stevens simultaneously.

Neither of them was able to provide any concrete leads to Scot Harvath’s whereabouts. Next, they visited the bar and restaurant where Harvath had been the night before, Gordy’s Boathouse. While the waitress remembered serving Harvath once Morrell had shown her his picture, she hadn’t spoken with him other than to take his order.

With only a handful of hotels in the village, Morrell and his team got to work trying to figure out where Harvath was staying. They started with the hotel in closest proximity to Gordy’s Boathouse, the Abbey Resort.

Very quickly, the resort looked like it was going to be a bust. There was no one registered under the name of Scot Harvath, or any of his known aliases. None of the front desk staff recognized his photograph. It was the same with the bell staff.

Morrell and one of his men were on their way back to the car when they passed the valet stand and handed Harvath’s picture around.

“Yeah, I know that guy,” one of the valets said. “I brought his car up to him this morning.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Morrell whipped out his cell phone and text messaged the rest of his team to come back from the other hotels they were investigating. They’d found where Harvath was staying.

With the valet’s recognition of Harvath, Morrell and his men began the slow process of piecing together where Harvath was in the hotel.

First, they sifted through the morning’s vehicle claim checks. Once they weeded out the ones the valet was certain hadn’t belonged to Harvath-two Porsches, an Audi, and a new Mercedes convertible-they took the rest inside.

With the help of the front desk manager, they were able to ascertain which checks belonged to guestrooms with guests who had checked in within the last twenty-four hours. Morrell doubted Harvath had been here longer than that.

The only guest to have checked in within the last twenty-four hours and to have had his vehicle go out first thing that morning was a man named Nick Zucker, registered in room 324. Having already established himself as an FBI agent pursuing a fugitive from justice, Morrell asked the front desk manager for a passkey.

The manager made up a keycard, and no sooner had he handed it to Morrell than he and his men moved quickly out of the lobby.

There was a housekeeping trolley at the end of the hallway, and flashing his badge, Morrell conscripted a young housekeeper. Outside 324, Morrell and his people took up positions on either side of the door, and he nodded for the housekeeper to knock.

She gave a loud rap, calling out, “Housekeeping.”

When no one answered, Morrell waved her away, slid his own keycard into the lock and opened the door.

He and his men swept inside, but the room was empty. They found a small toiletry kit in the bathroom with prescription medications labeled for a Nick Zucker from a pharmacy in Phoenix and a pilot’s uniform hanging in the closet that couldn’t possibly fit Harvath.

A small overnight bag contained a change of clothes, a worn paperback thriller, and a Sudoku workbook. Inside the workbook were several pictures of a man and his family, one of which showed him in his pilot’s uniform next to a plane with his teenaged daughter and son.

They’d made a mistake. Scot Harvath was not posing as Nick Zucker. Morrell had his men put everything back the way they’d found it.

They were halfway down the hallway when the front desk manager appeared and held up two additional keycards.

“I did a little more looking,” he stated when he reached Morrell. “Zucker checked in with another man named Burdic. According to their registration cards, they both work for the same aviation company. There was a third man who checked in at the same time; his name is Hans Brauner. He told the clerk last night that he would be paying for their rooms and also arranged for golf and lunch for them today.”

Burdic’s room was as useless as Zucker’s, and the one belonging to the supposed Hans Brauner had nothing. Morrell, however, knew they had zeroed in on Harvath.

Instead of having the desk clerk from the previous night come in to work to ID Harvath’s photo, they simply emailed it to him. Over the phone, he confirmed that the photo belonged to the man registered as Brauner who had shown up with the two pilots.

So now Morrell not only knew the alias Harvath was using, he also knew how Harvath was getting around, both in the air and on the ground. Through his contact at Langley, Morrell had credit reports pulled for Zucker, Burdic, and Brauner.

He wasn’t surprised that nothing came back for Brauner. Zucker and Burdic, though, were another story. Among the run-of-the-mill crap one would expect to find-mortgage payments, department store charges, and so forth-was a particularly serendipitous find. Zucker had rented a car at the airport yesterday.

Not only was the car from a national chain, but Morrell also knew that they used a GPS tracking system in their vehicles as part of something known as “fleet management.” It was beginning to look as if Harvath might not be that hard to catch after all.

As it turned out, there were eight real estate offices in downtown Lake Geneva, and each employed a multitude of agents. The proverbial needle in a haystack analogy didn’t even come close to what Harvath was facing.

It took him all morning and well into the afternoon to make his way through the offices and to track down the realtors who might have had contact with Roussard/Boesiger in the last two days.

He’d come up empty in all of the offices except one, Leif Realty, which had a sign in its window saying it was closed for the day and would reopen tomorrow. Harvath had left multiple messages on the Leif Realty voicemail system and finally managed to get the owner’s cell phone number from another realtor in a nearby office.