Hidden Order: A Thriller (12 page)

B
ill Wise looked like Santa Claus crossed with one of the toughest bikers the Hell’s Angels had ever produced. He had white hair, a thick white beard, and towered over Harvath by a good five inches and an additional seventy-five pounds.

He wore dark jeans, a pair of black Frye boots, and a faded Dallas Cowboys jersey. On his right wrist was a copper bracelet—the kind used for warding off arthritis, and on his left was an expensive Panerai diver’s watch.

As Harvath stepped inside, Wise stole a quick glance toward the street, closed the door, and then offered his hand.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Mr. Wise.”

“First of all, it’s
Doctor
Wise and second of all, give me a break with all the formalities,” he replied with a smile. “If Peaches says you’re okay, then that’s good enough for me.”

Peaches
was the nickname the Old Man had been known by back in the day. According to legend, he was one of the roughest interrogators the Central Intelligence Agency had ever produced. He had a reputation for taking the hardest cases, the worst of the worst, and could be absolutely
brutal with the enemy. It was said that if lives hung in the balance and time was of the essence, Reed Carlton was the man you wanted on the job. The fact that he was willing to go to some pretty extraordinary lengths in his interrogations had earned him the amusing and also chilling sobriquet of Peaches. He was anything but sweet.

Signaling for Harvath to follow, Wise led him into the warehouse. They passed through a small reception area, its walls covered with pictures. In addition to noticing that Wise had traveled the world, often heavily armed and in the presence of indigenous fighters, he discerned that the man was a scuba diver, private pilot, Eagle Scout, photographer, motorcyclist, NASCAR and IndyCar fan, and a hunter with a ranch in San Saba County, Texas.

“Do you hunt?” Wise asked after noticing Harvath admiring his ranch photos.

“Strictly bipeds these days.”

Wise chuckled and led him through a heavy sliding door into the main section of the building. It was a large, loftlike space with thick metal trusses and a pristine, epoxy-coated concrete floor. Parked near a wide roll-up door was a trio of perfectly restored vintage SUVs—a green 1960s Land Rover, a metallic gray 1970s International Harvester Scout, and a white 1980s Jeep Grand Wagoneer with wood paneling. Beyond them were a handful of older motorcycles in varying states of refurbishment. Harvath could make out a Triumph Bonneville as well as an Indian and what looked like a Crocker.

“Are you the force behind all of these restorations?” Harvath asked.

“I am,” Wise replied. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved taking things apart and putting them back together.”

As Harvath admired the machines, the man added. “Don’t ever retire. You’d be surprised how expensive ‘puttering’ turns out to be.”

This time, Harvath chuckled. He still had no idea what Wise had done for a living, but if he was like any of the other retired spooks he’d met in his lifetime, Wise had probably done his share of consulting after leaving the Agency and had made quite a few bucks doing it.

The garage portion of the warehouse ended at an enormous floor-to-ceiling glass display case. Inside was row after row of vintage typewriters
and antique sewing machines. The display delineated the beginning of Wise’s living area.

There was a stainless steel kitchen, a massive library with columns of twelve-foot-high bookshelves that went all the way to the structure’s rear wall, and a giant drafting table that served as the man’s desk. Hanging on the wall near it were a myriad of degrees, one of them a Ph.D. in psychology, as well as several diplomas and commendations from the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and 5th Special Forces Group. Next to those was a sleeping area, then a living room with a sectional couch, and finally a wooden bar that looked like it had been salvaged out of some small Irish pub.

“Something to drink?” Wise asked, walking around behind the bar.

“What do you have?” said Harvath, regretting the question almost as soon as he had asked it.

“Whiskey or ice tea.”

“I guess I’ll have an ice tea.”

“Whiskey it is,” said Wise, removing two glasses and setting them atop the bar. “I’m all out of ice tea.”

There was a brightly colored oil painting collage of George Washington hanging behind the bar. Harvath thought he recognized the artist. “That’s a Penley, isn’t it?”

“It is,” the man answered as he handed Harvath his drink. “Great artist and an even greater American. I stumbled onto him a few years ago and now try to get to all of his exhibits.”

“A body in motion,” Harvath offered.

“Tends to stay in motion. Words to live by in retirement.”

“What exactly is it that you retired from?”

Wise took a sip of his drink. “The best way I ever heard it described was ‘armed anthropology.’ I was in the Army for a long time, predominantly the Special Operations community. The Army put me through undergrad and grad school, where I made the art of killing my focus.”

“You mean how soldiers kill?”

“Not just soldiers: anyone or any organization. Soldiers, law enforcement officers, gang members, contract killers and assassins, psychopaths, nation-states, terrorists—you name them and I studied them.”

“Sounds very interesting.”

“Fascinating stuff and I didn’t leave a stone unturned. From how our kill rate in combat skyrocketed once the Army switched from bull’s-eye targets to silhouettes, all the way to how and why mass murderers select their victims and places of attack.

“What I uncovered is that there is a particular mental makeup that excels in combat. Certain aspects of that makeup could be taught, so that day-to-day soldiers are more efficient on the battlefield, but there are other aspects that can’t be learned. You have to come wired a certain way. As we drilled down and began identifying what those mental markers were, our results began to shape the screening process for certain compartments within the Special Operations community.”

Compartments
. Harvath found the word choice interesting, as if it were something that needed to be contained. “So the military was looking to select for its most lethal killers.”

“That was part of it, but as you know, Special Operations is about a lot more than just killing the enemy. In my case, we were also trying to teach the Army’s SF teams what to screen for when they infiltrated foreign countries and worked with insurgent groups. Our Green Berets needed mini-Ph.D.s that would help them evaluate the potential in the combatants they were supporting. In essence, they needed to be able to rapidly assess if they were helping elevate and train the right people, or if there were better candidates for certain positions. Like I said, I found it to be fascinating work.”

“The Agency must have thought so, too, at some point if you ended up over there, right?”

“They did,” said Wise, taking another sip of his drink. “It was at a time when they were experimenting with a lot of
interesting
programs. They made me an offer that the Army couldn’t even come close to matching, so I moved over to Langley.”

“Where you continued what you had been doing for the Army?”

“But with much bigger budgets.”

“Off book or on?” asked Harvath, referring to where the money had come from for these
interesting
programs.

“What do you think?”

Completely black and off the books,
thought Harvath. Wise’s area of expertise was not something the CIA would have likely wanted congressional input on. The politicians would have only watered it down, if not shut it down completely. Members of Congress barely understood the complexities of the military battlefield. What they knew of the intelligence battlefield you could fit in a shot glass.

“Okay, so you’re Dr. Kill, armed anthropologist,” Harvath continued. “Why am I here?”

Wise had been called that so many times, he’d lost count. Normally, it made him smile. This time, though, his face was dead serious. “You’re here because Reed Carlton thinks I might be able to help with your case.”

“Can you?”

“Maybe, but first I want to see how much you know about your victim.”

“Victims,”
Harvath replied. “Plural.”

Wise shook his head. “There may be hostages,
plural,
and a dead body,
singular
,” he said, gently chastising Harvath for correcting him, “but the object of all this is a singular victim and the sooner you understand that, the closer you’ll be to solving your case.”

B
OSTON

M
ASSACHUSETTS

H
e had spent the afternoon taking pictures. He liked taking pictures. He took shots of King’s Chapel, the Old North Church, and the Paul Revere House. In the Granary Burying Ground, near the grave of Sam Adams, he found a Gothic-inspired woman with black lipstick and nail polish who let him photograph her posing provocatively against several of the headstones. After the fourth one, she offered to take him someplace nearby and perform a sex act on him for fifty dollars.

She was a junkie who wanted to get high. He offered her ten dollars just to see what she’d say. She told him to fuck himself and flipped him the middle finger as she walked off. She came back ten minutes later as he was getting ready to leave and told him she’d do it for twenty. She didn’t know it then, but she had been smart to approach him in broad daylight in an open, public space. Had this happened at night, had he been drinking or off his medication, things would have ended much differently.

He didn’t know what her drug of choice was or how much it cost, but he removed a dollar bill from his wallet and extended it, telling her to get something to eat. “What? A box of Tic Tacs?” she demanded in her
Southie accent. “Go fuck yourself,” she told him again, which sounded more like
go faak yaself
.

She was angry, real angry, and that made him smile. Seeing him smile made her even angrier and she tried to slap him. The speed with which he caught her wrist and twisted her arm behind her back startled her. She was going to scream, but the man sensed it and twisted her arm even tighter as he drew her against him. It was so painful all the air rushed from her lungs.

Her eyes flicked from side to side for anyone who could help her, but the few people she could see were paying attention only to the historic grave markers. He could smell the fear oozing from her pores and feel the exquisite trembling of her body. There was no telling how many diseases she carried, but he didn’t care. He was interested in only one thing from her. Closing his eyes, he listened until he could hear the thumping of her terrified heart as it pounded against the wall of her chest. It sounded like a rabbit running from a wolf.

He pulled up on her arm, right to the precipice of breaking it, and then he let her go. She stood for a moment, frozen in place by fear, and then like the little rabbit she was, she ran away as fast as she could from the big bad wolf.

He smiled as he watched her run. Broad daylight, a public space and commitment to his pills: the trinity that had saved her life that late afternoon in the graveyard and which had given him an appetite.

He was wary about where he should and shouldn’t go, should and shouldn’t eat. Though he had taken steps to disguise his appearance, there were certain risks that were not to be taken. He walked south to the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, where he ate in a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant that couldn’t afford matching chairs, much less a CCTV system.

The best thing to be said about the food was that it was edible. He gorged himself on fried rice and egg rolls, washing it all down with a syrupy sweet Asian soda he had pulled out of the cooler. Impulse control was something the medication was supposed to help, but when he overloaded on stimuli the way he had in the graveyard, he found his cravings harder to control.

In addition to his eating binge, he also had to contend with the fact that
his sexual arousal hadn’t dissipated. Smelling the terror on the woman as well as feeling her fluttering body pressed tightly against his was a heady combination of sensations made only more acute by the danger of it all.

He was drifting into choppy water and being pulled further and further from shore. He fingered the pillbox in his pocket as he stared over at the cooler with its beer and sodas. If he took more medication he could become dopey and slip up. But if he didn’t take any, and he gave in to one of his nastier impulses, he could also slip up. He felt damned either way, which suddenly brought on an additional sensation,
anxiety
.

He decided to write his own prescription. Walking over to the cooler, he removed two Yanjings, paid the old Chinese woman with the whiskers behind the counter, and sat back down at the table.

He drank the first beer in one long swallow. With the second, he took his time and willed himself to relax. It took several minutes, but eventually the warmth of the alcohol crept into his bloodstream and he began to feel himself relax. The benefit of the anxiety, if you could call it that, was that it was an arousal killer. His erection had completely gone away.