Текст книги "Hidden Order: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Brad Thor

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

CHAPTER 63

Harvath’s clothes were filthy. There were bits and pieces of things on them that neither he nor Cordero wanted to identify.

They spent twenty minutes looking for Sal, hoping they could grab some of the extra clothing he had in his vehicle. His cell phone was off and he wasn’t responding to any calls over the radio. They figured he was either with the head of the homicide unit, or more than likely debriefing with the FBI. It wasn’t a big deal. At least Cordero knew he was okay. His had been the first face she had seen after the explosion. In the chaos, he had helped her to her feet and then helped get her to a safe area. He had even found the EMT for her before she had sent him back to find Harvath.

When they got to her car, Harvath asked her if she was okay to drive. She nodded.

“I guess if you want to drop me at my hotel,” he said, “I’ll change into my old clothes there.”

“I have clothes I think will fit you,” she replied. “That is, if you don’t think it’s too weird.”

“No, I don’t think it would be too weird at all.”

At any other time, Harvath would have turned her invitation into a joke about an offer to wear her clothing, but he knew that wasn’t what she was inviting him to do. It was an incredibly vulnerable moment for her, and he treated it and her with all the respect that it deserved.

They drove through the Boston streets in silence. There wasn’t much to say. Not after what had just happened.

It was a goofy analogy, but as they got closer and closer to her house, Cordero was like a knight letting one piece of armor fall away at a time. You could almost hear them clanking onto the asphalt and receding behind them as they drove.

As each piece fell, she softened, and Harvath saw a different side of her, something he hadn’t even noticed over wine at dinner. The take-no-prisoners cop was sexy, but the woman beneath was even more so. It was like watching her turn into a completely different person. Which was exactly what was happening. She was shifting into becoming a mother, a daughter, and simply a person. The transformation was captivating. It was a depth he had never really appreciated in the women he had known before.

They arrived at her home and she parked her car in the garage. It was an attractive three-flat made from heavy blocks of stone.

“Is the whole place yours?” he asked.

Cordero nodded. “The whole building’s mine. I rent out the ground floor unit, Marco and I are on the second floor, and then my parents have the top.”

“Whose watching Marco now?”

“I’m guessing it’s my mom. Dad has probably already gone to bed.”

She checked the mail on her way in and then led Harvath up to the second floor. Just inside the front door, there was a closet with a small gun safe. Unloading her primary and backup weapons, she tucked them inside along with her cuffs, her badge, and her credentials.

“You don’t keep something next to the bed?” he asked.

“I absolutely do,” the detective replied. “Just not this one. Racking a twelve-gauge shotgun sounds a lot more intimidating than racking a Glock.”

Harvath smiled. He liked her, more than just a little bit. The female detective smiled back and led him into the living room, where her mother was watching TV.

She made the introductions in English and then spoke to her mother for a few moments in Portuguese. He had no idea what they were talking about but assumed, by the look on the older woman’s face, that she was giving her a quick rundown on everything that had happened. She seemed like the type who would try to spare her mother any unnecessary worry and had probably watered down a lot of what had transpired. At the end, both women had looked at Harvath and the mother had appeared impressed. He couldn’t tell why. He figured Cordero had told her how he had knocked her to the ground and thrown himself on top of her to protect her from the blast.

The female detective showed him down the hallway to the guest room.

“The guest bathroom is through that door,” she said. “There’s fresh towels in there. You can help yourself to anything you need. I’ll grab some clothes and leave them here on the bed for you.”

“Thank you,” said Harvath.

She lingered in the doorway. “You’re welcome.”

He smiled again. “I saw that look on your mother’s face.”

“What look?”

“At the end, when you were telling her what happened with the explosion and everything, how I knocked you to the ground. You didn’t have to tell her that.”

Cordero laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t.”

“What?”

“She asked me where you grew up. I told her Southern California. She said you look like a surfer. I told her that was impossible.”

“Why is that impossible?”

“Because you never learned how to swim.”

She was playing with him, and he liked it.

“There’s a neighborhood place around the corner that stays open late,” she added. “We can get a drink and something to eat there.”

“What about Marco?” he asked.

“My mother will stay. Now hurry up and take a shower. I’m getting hungry.”

 • • •

Cordero really put the “guest” in guest bathroom. There were razors, mouthwash, combs, everything he could possibly need. After taking a quick shower and grabbing a shave, he stepped out of the bathroom to find she had left clothes on the bed for him as promised. For the most part, it all fit pretty well.

After getting dressed, he threaded his holster through his belt, double-checked his weapon, and then put on the jacket she had picked for him. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He thought his pistol would print through the material, but it didn’t. All in all, she had done very well.

He transferred the contents of his pockets into the clothes he was now wearing, exited the guestroom, and walked up to the front of the apartment.

He made small talk with the detective’s mother until Lara emerged from her room wearing jeans, boots, and a very flattering top. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had gone light on the makeup, focusing mostly on a shade of lipstick that drew attention to her attractive, full lips.

“It all fits,” she said. “You look good.”

“Thank you. So do you.”

“Are we ready to go?”

“What about that hug for your son?”

Cordero smiled. “I gave him one while you were in the shower, but I do want to kiss him goodbye. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Sure. I’d love to.”

Harvath followed her down the hall, past the guest room to a small room off the master bedroom. With enormous stuffed bears, airplanes suspended from the ceiling, and bright blue walls, it was the perfect little boy’s room. And asleep in his race car bed, complete with rails that made sure he didn’t fall out, was the perfect little boy.

Marco had sandy blond hair and was tan like his mother. He had cheeks that probably got pinched, a lot. He looked so peaceful, so unaware of what had happened in the world tonight. It was the way it should be. Harvath was immediately taken by the little guy. He was even cuter than the photo Cordero had shown him.

As she walked in to kiss her son, Harvath’s eyes scanned the shelves above the little boy’s bed. There were lots of great children’s books, a bunch of stuffed animals, several Fisher Price vehicles, and something that stopped Harvath’s heart cold.

Cordero spotted the look on his face instantly. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

Harvath leaned over the bed and grabbed the object off the shelf. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s just an airplane. Why?”

“Lara, where did this come from?” he demanded, as his other hand began to reach for his gun.

“It was a gift from Sal. What’s this all about?”

Placing the detailed display model of the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet back on the shelf, Harvath said. “I’ll explain in the car, but we need to move. Now.”

CHAPTER 64

They had argued the entire above-the-speed-limit drive to Sal Sabatini’s home. No matter how strenuously she defended him, though, Harvath knew she was entertaining the possibility. Over their years together, she had seen something, perhaps even several things that either she had chosen to ignore or that hadn’t made sense until this evening. The bottom line was that she was cooperating and that was the most important thing at this point. Coming to grips with it was something he could help her with later.

As he stood in the backyard and peered through the kitchen window, he could hear the phone ringing inside. After dialing the number a second time and letting it ring, Harvath signaled for Cordero to put her phone away. Sal was home and waiting for this to happen, in which case Harvath regretted showing up without the SWAT team, or he’d already offed himself, or maybe was someplace else entirely, preparing to kill the remaining hostage. Having looked in the garage and finding it empty, he figured Sal was dead or someplace else.

That said, he had fooled a lot of people for a long time and had been exceptionally well trained. For all Harvath knew, he could have parked his car around the corner to give anyone considering entry a false sense of security. Harvath’s mind was doing flips trying to sort out all the possibilities. There was only one way to approach this—prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

With his weapon out and ready, he said to Cordero, “Good to go?”

She nodded, and removed her picks from the lock. He hadn’t seen any signs that the house had an alarm system. That was the funny thing about cops. Some were extremely security conscious, while there were others who were incredibly lax. Sal Sabatini, though, was also nuts, so who knew what his deal was.

Harvath counted in a whisper, backward. “Three, two, one.”

On one, she turned the handle and quietly pushed the door open so Harvath could slip inside. The kitchen was thirty years out of date, but clean and smelled faintly of spices. There was a door to the basement and Harvath made a quick command decision. They’d save that for last.

Grabbing one of the vinyl-backed, lime-green kitchen chairs, he tucked it under the knob and made sure the door was securely closed. If Sal or anyone else was hiding down there and tried to come back up, they were going to make quite a ruckus trying to get out.

With Cordero covering his six o’clock, Harvath swept in and cleared the dining room, living room, and the front hall closet. Next were the bedrooms, which he hated almost as much as basements. The tiny bungalow-style dwelling only had two bedrooms, which were clear. There was no one in the closets or under the beds. The bathrooms were also clear, as was a tiny attic space above that they accessed from a set of pull-down stairs. That just left the basement. Lord how he hated basements.

Weighing the odds that there might be a teachable, I-told-you-so-moment in the kitchen, he opened the freezer, but it was devoid of severed heads or any other body parts. Time to face the real music.

Cordero put her hand on his arm this time. “I’ll do it,” she said.

Harvath shook his head.

“He might not shoot me, but if this is all true, he’ll definitely shoot you. I’m doing this, so get out of my way.”

Removing the chair from underneath the doorknob, she flicked on the lights and waited. Nothing. She then did something Harvath hadn’t thought of. Noticing there were no risers, she lay down on her stomach and peered between the first and second stair. After that, she used her flashlight to illuminate the far corners.

Satisfied, she stood up and went down to clear the basement. Two minutes later she was back in the kitchen.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Everything must have taken place via that warehouse.”

“I’ll bet he’s the one that tipped them to clear out before we hit it.”

Cordero didn’t comment. She was still having trouble wrapping her mind around everything. She felt guilty and disloyal, doubly so by agreeing to accompany Harvath and break into her partner’s home.

“Why don’t we see what else is here,” he said, heading back toward the living room, a small corner of which had been set up with a desk and appeared to function as the man’s home office.

Sal was meticulous. There were records and receipts for everything, just nothing attaching him to anything illegal. While Harvath had hoped against hope that there would be something here, he wasn’t surprised. A detective would hopefully be much too smart to leave anything directly tying himself to a crime.

Harvath powered on the computer and waited for it to boot up. Once it did, he was greeted with a password screen.

“Try REDSOXFAN7,” Cordero said from behind him. “All caps. All one word. That’s what he uses at the office.”

Harvath entered the password and was granted access.

“It worked,” he said.

“I’m sure after all these years he knows mine, too.”

“What is it?”

“None of your business,” she replied.

“All caps? All one word?” he said as he tried to pull up Sal Sabatini’s recent Web browsing history. There was nothing there. It had all been scrubbed. There was nothing in his email history, either, though he doubted that was how Sal conducted clandestine communications. He would have received better training than that.

Harvath looked at his Word documents as well as his iTunes folders. It was all very pedestrian and boring, right down to the wallpaper on his desktop. It looked like Sal had chosen the factory default, which was a little odd, as Harvath didn’t know anyone who didn’t monkey around with their desktop at least a little bit to try to make it more personal.

Going into the settings area, he opened the folder that held sample photos for the desktop. They were typical stock landscape shots. He then clicked over to the screen saver folder, and that’s when he saw it.

Cordero was looking through some of Sal’s books on the other side of the living room.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Harvath said. “Recognize this young lady?”

There were a series of shots of a Goth-type woman posing around headstones at the Granary Burying Ground. “That’s Brittany Doyle. The one you paid four hundred dollars to for her bracelet cuff.”

“From which we got a full and a partial print.”

“But if those were Sal’s prints, why didn’t we get a hit on them?”

“Because whatever prints the Boston PD has on file for Detective Sal Sabatini, they don’t belong to Sal Sabatini.”

She was about to ask who was capable of making prints disappear from the Boston PD database when her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. Looking at the caller ID, she froze.

“Who is it?” Harvath asked.

Cordero held the phone up so Harvath could see. “It’s him. Sal.”

CHAPTER 65

Cordero activated the call and waited. She didn’t know what to say. How do you greet the man you’ve just learned is a cold-blooded killer? As it turned out, she didn’t have to say anything. He started the conversation himself.

“I’m sorry to have to do this over the phone,” he said.

“What are you talking about, Sal? Where are you?” she asked. In the background, she could hear what sounded like noises from the harbor.

“I wanted to say goodbye to you and Marco in person.”

“Goodbye? Why? Where are you going, Sal?”

“Lara, I know you’re in my house. That means you must know everything.”

Cordero covered the phone’s mic and quickly whispered to Harvath, “He knows we’re here.”

“We need to get out. There could be a bomb. Keep him talking.”

“Tell me why you did it, Sal,” she said as they moved out of the living room and through the dining room. “Why did you kill all those people?”

“You weren’t supposed to be hurt,” the man replied. “I love you and Marco very much and I’m very angry about what happened tonight. You could have been killed.”

“You act like you didn’t know it was going to happen, Sal.”

“I didn’t. Betsy Mitchell was not my responsibility.”

“Whose responsibility was she, then, Sal?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

“Sal,” Cordero said firmly. “What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? What are you taking care of?”

The man was silent on the other end of the phone as Harvath and Cordero rushed out the kitchen door and into the backyard.

“Sal,” she demanded, “where’s the last hostage? Tell me. You can still make this right. Where’s Jonathan Renner?”

Finally, Cordero removed the phone from her ear.

“Where’s Renner?” Harvath asked. “Did he tell you?”

“No. He just hung up.”

“Damn it.”

“He said he was angry about what happened tonight, that I could have been hurt. He wanted me to know that Betsy Mitchell had not been his responsibility.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think somebody else was responsible for killing her,” she replied.

“Maybe suicide vests are someone else’s job. He didn’t deny killing the other victims, though, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“We’ve got to find him. Where would he go for safety? Where do you think he’d try to hide?”

“I could hear ambient noise behind him,” she said. “I think he was at the harbor.”

“Is he running? Was he catching the ferry for Logan Airport?”

“He said he was going to ‘take care’ of the danger I was put in tonight. It sounded to me like he was going to take care of the person who put me in danger.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“I don’t know,” Cordero replied. “After that, he hung up.”

“He must have had some sort of monitoring system on his house or his computer that alerted his phone when we came in. He’s blown and he knows it. We need to get to the harbor as fast as possible.”

“He could be anywhere.”

“I don’t think so,” Harvath stated as he led her down the driveway and back toward where they had parked her car. “I think they’re out of time and they’re pulling out all the stops. They’re going to kill Renner tonight, too.”

“But where?”

“What’s the last significant historical event that also happens to take place at the harbor?”

Cordero stopped as she realized what it was. “The Boston Tea Party.”

 • • •

The pieces were all coming together for her and made so much sense now. How the killer had been able to avoid being picked up on any CCTV cameras, how he’d not left any clues behind at the crime scenes, even the crazy contraption at the Liberty Tree site, as Sal had studied engineering in school before switching to criminology and had remained fascinated by it.

But for every piece that fell into place, it came attached to a thousand questions. Harvath had explained what Swim Club was and even how they may have recruited Sal, but Cordero still didn’t understand why they would be kidnapping and killing people. It didn’t make any sense. And as much as she wanted it to, she knew she had to focus her energies elsewhere. Sal and the people he was working with needed to be stopped.

When she got in her car and the Bluetooth synched with her phone, she pulled into the street and activated the speaker. There was no way they could risk using the police radio or their mobile data terminals. Sal had access to those and she and Harvath didn’t want to tip their hand.

She called her commander and filled him in on everything as she raced toward the harbor. She then told him what they needed and reminded him again to keep everything off the police network. They absolutely had to assume that Sal was listening.

Harvath listened to the conversation, and no sooner had she disconnected the call than his phone rang. It was Bill Wise. He was calling on his cell phone, rather than his blocked landline from D.C.

“Bill,” he said, answering the call. “It’s not a very good time right now.”

“We’ve got a positive ID on the killer. He’s definitely from Swim Club. His name is Salvatore—”

“Sabatini,” Harvath said, finishing the man’s sentence for him. “I know. We just left his house.”

“How did you—”

He cut him off again. “It’s a long story. Listen, where are you? Carlton said you were on your way up here to help us catch these guys.”

“We’re here now. And we’ve already caught one of them.”

Harvath looked at Cordero and said, “They’ve already caught one of them.” Turning his attention back to his phone, he said, “Bill, I’m putting you on speaker with me and Boston PD detective Lara Cordero. She was Sabatini’s partner. You can trust her.”

“Who did you capture?” Cordero asked as Harvath pressed the button and held the phone out between them.

“A CIA operative named Stark,” said Wise. “We’ve been interrogating him, and apparently there are two more operatives with him in Boston somewhere. A man named Vaccaro, and another, the team leader named Tom Cushing.”

“I’ve got news for you, Bill,” Harvath interjected, as he reflected on the model plane in Marco’s room. It was the same model he’d been given after his first flight on the Fed’s Aerion SBJ. “I don’t think these guys are working against the Federal Reserve. I think they’re working for them.”

“You’re right, and wait’ll you hear why. Someone at the CIA named Phil Durkin put all of this together with the previous Federal Reserve chairman.”

“Chairman Sawyer? The one who just died?”

“Yes,” Wise replied. “It’s a long story, but the Saudis blackmailed Sawyer into doing something for them. The only way Sawyer could pull it off was to hire Durkin for the job. Durkin agreed, but only as long as Sawyer would fund several of his black-ops projects. It worked until Sawyer started having second thoughts and, with his tenure at the Fed coming to a close, crafted a list of potential replacements he thought might be able to make things right.”

“Which was the last thing Durkin probably wanted if ‘making things right’ meant he was going to get his funding cut off.”

“Exactly. And before he could get his own candidate installed as the new Fed chair, he needed to get rid of the five others who were actively being considered.”

“Where are you?” Harvath asked.

“We’ve got Stark at a hotel near the harbor.”

“That’s where we think Sabatini is. We’re headed there now.”

“Scot, you’ve got to hurry,” Wise insisted. “Stark says they have the last hostage and they’re going to kill him, now.”