The First Commandment (36 page)

JERUSALEM

Tracking down the puppeteer pulling Philippe Roussard’s strings began with a visit to Dei Glicini e Ulivella, the exclusive private hospital in Florence where payments from Roussard’s mother’s Wegelin amp; Company account had been made.

Harvath didn’t know what to expect. Part of him thought he might find a badly burned Adara Nidal sitting up in her hospital bed waiting for him, her silver eyes unmistakable behind a mask of charred flesh.

What he discovered was that the payments weren’t for Adara Nidal. Instead, they were for a male patient with a name Harvath had never heard before and who had recently up and left.

All Harvath’s suppositions had been wrong. Adara was not the person behind Roussard’s release from Gitmo and his subsequent attacks within the United States. It was somebody else-a man with a false name who had simply vanished.

The first person who entered Harvath’s mind was Hashim, Adara’s brother and Philippe’s uncle. But when the hospital administrator finished touring Harvath through the patient’s abandoned room and showed him into his office, Harvath realized how wrong he’d been in assuming Adara or her brother were behind the monster that had been Philippe Roussard. Sitting on the credenza behind the administrator’s desk was something that pointed to another person-someone far more complex, far more twisted, who had a reach long enough to fake his own death, even for a second time.

When asked about it, the administrator claimed it had been a gift from the patient whom Harvath was looking for. It was all the identification Harvath needed.

Harvath’s taxi cab pulled up in front of an old, four-story building in Jerusalem ’s popular Ben Yehuda district. The storefront was composed of two large windows crammed full of antique furniture, paintings, and fixtures. The gilded sign above the entryway read
Thames amp; Cherwell Antiques,
followed by translations in Hebrew and Arabic.

A small brass bell above the door announced Harvath’s arrival.

The dimly lit store was still packed with tapestries, furniture, and no end of faded bric-a-brac. It had been preserved exactly as it was on his first visit here years before.

He neared a narrow mahogany door and pulled it toward him to reveal a small, wood-paneled elevator. Pressing a button inside, he watched as the door closed and he felt the elevator rise.

When it arrived on the uppermost floor, the door opened onto a long hallway, its floor covered by an intricately patterned Oriental runner. The walls were painted a deep forest green and were lined with framed prints of fox hunting, fly fishing, and crumbling abbeys.

As Harvath walked forward, he remembered the infrared sensors placed every few feet and guessed that there still were pressure sensitive plates beneath the runner. Ari Schoen was one man who took his security very seriously.

At the end of the hall, Harvath found himself in a large room, more dimly lit than the shop downstairs. It was paneled from floor to ceiling, like the elevator, with a rich, deeply colored wood. With its fireplace, billiards table, and overstuffed leather chairs, it felt more like a British gentleman’s club than the upper-floor office of a shop in West Jerusalem.

Sitting up in a mechanical hospital bed near a pair of heavy silk draperies drawn tight against the windows was the man himself.

“I knew one of you would eventually come,” said Schoen as Harvath stepped into the room. He was even more hideously deformed than before, his nonexistent lips barely able to shape the words emanating from his charred hole of a mouth. “I assume Philippe is dead.”

Harvath nodded.

“How did you know it was me?” asked Schoen.

“Adara’s bank account at Wegelin.”

“The payments to the clinic,” mused Schoen, as medical instruments clicked and buzzed around him. “I think you’re lying, Agent Harvath. That was a completely clean alias I was registered under. There was nothing to tie anything back to me. It had never been used before and hasn’t been used since.”

“It wasn’t the alias, it was your whiskey,” Harvath said, pointing at the antique globe that hid Schoen’s bar beneath its hinged lid. “The 1963 Black Bowmore. ‘Black as pitch,’ you once told me. You must have thought very highly of the hospital’s director to have given him such an expensive present.”

Schoen raised his hand to brush the thought away as if it was nothing. “You are more intelligent than I gave you credit for.”

“Tell me about the other men you had released from Guantanamo. What was their connection to you?”

“There was no connection,” said Schoen with a laugh. “That was the point. They were background noise that Philippe could be lost in. They were randomly selected to keep anyone in your government’s intelligence services who might come investigating, guessing.”

“And the plot with the children?”

“An unfortunate, but extremely effective motivator. When I discovered I had a grandson, I reached out to him, but our relationship was understandably strained. He wanted very little to do with me, but somewhere inside him he understood that we were the only family each other had.

“When he was captured and taken to Gitmo, I decided I would do anything to get him back.”

Slowly, all of the madness was beginning to make sense. “I want the names of your people who kidnapped and killed the school bus driver. I also want to know all of the other bus routes you had targeted.”

Schoen looked at him for a moment and then said, “The school bus we hijacked in South Carolina was the only one. There are no others. The photos of other buses were ploys to gain your government’s acquiescence, nothing more.”

His face was a mass of twitches and spasms, which made him nearly impossible to read. “How do I know you’re not lying?” asked Harvath.

“You don’t,” replied Schoen. “Only time will tell.”

“What about the names of the operatives who hijacked the bus?”

“I will take them to my grave,” said the man.

Harvath wasn’t surprised, but that would be for someone else to take up. He had other questions at this point. Glancing at the silver-framed photographs positioned on an adjacent console table, he asked, “So why me? Why
my
family and the people I care about?”

“Because Philippe wanted the man responsible for his mother’s death.”

“Which was his uncle, Hashim.”

“But his uncle was dead,” said Schoen. “The very idea of your being responsible for it all filled him with rage. Rage is a very powerful emotion. If a man has enough of it he loses his self-control. And when a man loses his self-control he is much more susceptible to the control of another.”

“So you pinned it on me,” responded Harvath.

“As I said. It was nothing personal.”

Harvath looked at him. “What was in all of this for you?”

Schoen sat up from his bed and spat, “Revenge!”

“Revenge against whom?” demanded Harvath. “Against me?”

“No,” hissed Schoen. “Against Philippe’s mother.”

“For what? The first time a Nidal blew you up, or the second?”

“It was for taking my son away from me,” he replied as he sank back into his bed.

“But Adara Nidal was dead,” said Harvath who was beginning to wonder if Roussard’s warped psychopathology was a condition inherited not from his mother, but rather from his paternal grandfather.

“It made no difference to me. Stealing her son from her and turning him to my cause would have been the ultimate act of revenge.”

“How could you expect an Arab, a Palestinian Arab at that, to renounce Islam and pick up the Israeli cause?”

“You forget that after my Daniel died I studied everything I could about Abu Nidal, his organization, and most important, his family. I knew more about them than they even knew about themselves. Philippe lacked a masculine role model.”

“And that was going to be you?” said Harvath facetiously.

“Half of my blood, my Daniel’s blood, ran through his body. He was half Israeli and I believed I could appeal to that side of him. But before he would listen to anything I had to say-”

“He wanted me dead,” stated Harvath, finishing Schoen’s sentence for him.

“Precisely. But he didn’t only want you dead. He wanted you to suffer. He wanted you to feel the pain he had felt at losing his mother. I knew I could use this incredible rage to draw him closer to me.”

“And the plagues and running them in reverse order?”

Schoen was wheezing, and stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Finally he said, “The plagues were a tribute to his mother, who devoted her career as a terrorist to igniting a true holy war against Israel. Her attacks were often tinged with Jewish symbolism.

“As for running the plagues in reverse, you must already comprehend what a disturbed individual Philippe was. In his mind, the first plague was the most shocking and dramatic, so he ran the plagues backward, conducting himself as God’s opposite, the devil, if you will, who was saving his favorite plague for last.”

“And you thought you could reprogram this monster?” said Harvath.

“For a while, yes. If I could convince him to follow my orders, I would not only have beaten Adara, but in a small way, I would have regained my son. But I realized eventually that he was out of control and likely would have come after me. Which is why I left the hospital in Italy and returned here.”

The man was absolutely pitiful, and Harvath shook his head and turned to walk away.

“Where are you going?” demanded Schoen.

“Home,” replied Harvath, who hoped to never gaze upon Ari Schoen’s hideous face again.

Schoen laughed. “You don’t even have the courage to pull out your gun and shoot me.”

“Why should I?” replied Harvath as he turned back to face him. “As far as I’m concerned, a bullet is too good for you. And as for courage, if you had any you would have already shot yourself. The worst thing I can do for you is to wish you a long life and walk right out that door.”

And that was exactly what Harvath did.

As he exited the shop he noticed a black SUV with heavily tinted windows parked across the street. It was strangely out of place.

Reaching beneath his jacket, Harvath’s hand hovered just above the butt of his pistol.

The SUV’s rear window rolled partway down and in the sea of black, there was suddenly a flash of white. It belonged to a long white nose and was followed by a pair of dark eyes and two long white ears.

Harvath crossed the street and held his hand up for the dog to smell. As he scratched Argos behind his ear, the SUV’s window rolled the rest of the way down.

“Did you have a nice visit?” asked the Troll, who was sitting inside between his two Caucasian Ovcharkas.

“Hello, Nicholas,” replied Harvath. “Why am I not surprised to see you here?”

“We have unfinished business between us.”

Harvath removed his hand from the dog’s head and said, “No we don’t. I made good on my promise to you. You cooperated and I didn’t kill you.”

“I want my data and the rest of my money back,” responded the Troll. “
All
of it.”

The man had balls, big ones. “And I want my friend Bob and the other Americans killed in New York back,” stated Harvath. “
All
of them.”

The Troll leaned back and conceded. “Touché.” Slowly, the little man’s eyes drifted up to the apartment above the antique store. “What about Schoen?” he asked. “Did you kill him?”

Harvath shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

“After everything he did to you. Why not?”

Harvath thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Death would have been too good for him.”

“Really?” stated the Troll, raising an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you feel that way.”

“If you could see what he’s been reduced to,” said Harvath, “you’d understand. Life is a much crueler punishment for Schoen. He’s already been blown up on two occasions.”

The Troll withdrew a small beige box, extended its antenna, and depressing its lone red button replied, “Then maybe the third time’s the charm.”

The explosion blew the windows out of the top-floor apartment and shook the entire block. Shards of broken glass and flaming debris rained down onto the street.

Harvath picked himself up off the ground just in time to see the Troll’s SUV recede into the distance.

Harvath had refused all the president’s invitations to come and meet with him at the White House.

Though the charges of treason against him had been dropped, Rutledge still wanted to have a serious heart-to-heart so that they could put the past behind them and move forward.

To his credit, Harvath was smart enough not to deny the president’s requests outright. Since Tracy ’s release from the hospital, she had been living at his place. He told everyone that taking care of both her and his recovering puppy kept him busy around the clock.

The president knew Harvath was lying, but let it go. Harvath had been through a lot. He’d been thrown under the proverbial bus, and not only had the president not helped him out from under, but he had ordered him to stay there while the bus’s tires rolled right over him.

Rutledge didn’t blame Harvath for not wanting to see him, but enough was enough. The president called Gary Lawlor and told him in no uncertain terms that he wanted Harvath standing in front of his desk inside the Oval Office by the end of the day or it was going to be Lawlor’s ass on the line.

Ever the good soldier, Lawlor had his assistant clear the rest of his day, and he went to drag Scot in to meet with the president.

When he arrived at Bishop’s Gate, he didn’t see Harvath’s car and figured he had gone out to pick up groceries or medications for Tracy or the dog, which they had named Bullet, after their mutual friend, Bullet Bob, who had been killed during the attacks on New York City.

Lawlor parked his car and walked up the front steps. Looking down at the threshold, he wondered for the umpteenth time what it must have been like for Harvath to come down and find Tracy lying there in a pool of blood. It was a horrible image, and he tried to shake it from his mind as he raised the heavy iron knocker and let it slam against the thick wooden door.

As he waited, he thought how ironic it was that Harvath should live in a former church. The man had become a devout penitent to the people whom Roussard had harmed. He visited his mother repeatedly in California, and as her eyesight began to return, he made sure she had the best of care once she was ready to come home. He visited both Carolyn Leonard and Kate Palmer at their hospital in D. C. as often as he could and kept their rooms filled with fresh flowers until they were well enough to be discharged. After that, he bombarded them with more flowers and basket upon basket of food. No matter what anyone said to him, Harvath wouldn’t stop. This was his self-imposed penance, and until the guilt was lifted from his soul there was no stopping him.

When it became known that Kevin McCauliff had used the NGA’s DOD computers on Harvath’s behalf, the young analyst was brought up on discipline charges. Harvath called in every favor ever owed him and pulled every string imaginable to have the charges dropped and for McCauliff to be honorably discharged from his position at the NGA. Tim Finney and Ron Parker offered McCauliff a job at Sargasso the very next day.

Lawlor knocked upon the heavy door once more, but no one answered. There wasn’t even the sound of Bullet’s barking which was a given lately.

Having been told where Harvath kept his spare key, Lawlor retrieved it and opened the front door.

“Hello?” he shouted as he poked his head inside. “Anybody home?”

Lawlor waited, but there was no response. Coming the rest of the way inside, he closed the door behind him.

He walked into the kitchen first and found that everything had been cleaned and put away. Normally, it was a chaotic jumble of pots, pans, dishes, and glasses as Scot and Tracy moved from one culinary undertaking to the next. Something definitely wasn’t right.

Opening the fridge to help himself to a beer, Lawlor found it completely empty. None of this was making any sense.

He strolled out of the kitchen and into the large area that functioned as Harvath’s living room. Everything here had been straightened and put in its place as well.

Suddenly, Lawlor noticed something on the stone mantelpiece above the fireplace. Walking over, he found Harvath’s BlackBerry and his DHS credentials. Next to them was a crisp piece of Tracy ’s stationery folded in half.

Opening it, he read a simple two-word message that had been written in Harvath’s hand.

Gone fishing.