Hidden Order: A Thriller (39 page)

“What can I do?” asked Harvath.

“Do you have any forensics experience?”

He shook his head. “Not much.”

“Then I have the perfect job for you,” she replied. “Go out to the car and bring those two Rubbermaid bins in.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’re really going to prove your worth to this investigation.”

“How?” he asked.

“You’re going to find us coffee somewhere in this neighborhood.”

T
o his credit, Harvath not only didn’t mind going out for coffee, he actually found some and it wasn’t half bad. He returned with three cups in a cardboard tray.

The evidence techs still hadn’t arrived yet, but Cordero had made a significant find.

“Check this out,” she said, holding up a clear plastic bag. Inside, there was a piece of black card stock the size of a business card. On one side, printed in blood red, was a skull and bones with a floating crown. On the other side were the words
I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.

It was followed by the letters
S.O.L
.

“I think that’s a line from John Hancock,” said Harvath.

Sal held up his smartphone. “Correct. Part of the speech he gave on the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre.”

“Why is it printed on a card? And why leave it here?”

“Maybe it was left by accident,” said Cordero.

“Where’d you find it?”

“Behind where the crates were stacked up against the wall.”

She had a point. Maybe it had been left by accident. One thing was for certain, though: finding this warehouse was a huge breakthrough. At least he hoped it would be.

“What else have you been able to find?” he asked.

“Other than that card and the blouse,” replied the female detective, “nothing.”

“There’s got to be something more here. We just haven’t found it yet.”

“You’re welcome to look around,” said the male detective. “If you find anything, just don’t touch it. Call one of us or one of the FBI agents.”

Harvath nodded and went to the other end of the warehouse. He was used to hitting terrorist safe houses where the kind of evidence he was expected to collect were things like thumb drives, CDs, and written documents, not hair and fiber samples.

Finding the card with the Hancock quote, though, had been huge. They were definitely in the right spot. The only question was, had any other clues been left behind?

Once the crime scene techs arrived, they would go through the laborious process of dusting for prints. Undoubtedly, they’d find a ton and he didn’t envy the person or persons who would be charged with having to run all of them down. Considering a building of this size with this many surfaces, the question wasn’t what to dust, but what not to?

He figured they’d do the obvious items like the crates, the chain attached to the wall near where the blouse was found, the door handles, the light switches, and any bathroom surfaces. Other than that, it was anybody’s guess, though he knew there was a strict procedure both the police and FBI followed.

What he was looking for as he walked through was something out of the ordinary, something that didn’t belong or something that was conspicuous because it wasn’t there.

Whoever had been using this location had probably been here since the early hours of Monday morning. That was only two days ago. If they were careless enough to leave one of those cards behind, where else had they screwed up?
Was the blouse a mistake? Or was it left on purpose? Or did they simply not care about it?

The fact that the metal thief had seen multiple males in the warehouse
backed up the theory that they were dealing with a team. The fact that they were carrying what looked like submachine guns bolstered the hypothesis that they were well trained, possibly even aligned with a military or intelligence organization. Add to that the way in which the victims had been killed, particularly the ear removal of Claire Marcourt and Kelly Davis, and it looked like Bill Wise’s Swim Club was a real potential factor in this entire thing.

As Harvath continued to walk the building, his mind was drawn to the passage on the back of the card from John Hancock. As he had been laying out the time line for Cordero, the Boston Massacre was the next big event he was going to mention before her commander had interrupted them.

What if the killer’s next murder scene wasn’t going to be Boston Common or Faneuil Hall, where the two regiments of British troops had stayed, but the actual site of the Boston Massacre?

The more he thought about it, the more the idea began to crowd out all other possibilities. The line from Hancock had to be tied to where the killer was going to strike next.
It had to be
.

The only question that remained was whether they should spend any more time at all in the warehouse or turn it over to the evidence techs and try to get a jump on the next location. Actually, there wasn’t any question at all.

Giving up his search, Harvath turned around and walked quickly back to find Cordero. If they did this right, they might be able to set up a trap and have the killer walk right into it.

A
circle of cobblestones with a star carved into the center was all that marked the location of the Boston Massacre. It sat embedded in a downtown sidewalk, almost directly beneath the east balcony of the Old State House. It was one of the least glamorous but most important stops along Boston’s “Freedom Trail,” a two-and-a-half-mile-long red stripe that runs through the city and connects sixteen historically significant sites in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. On that spot, five Bostonians became the first to give up their lives for the cause of American liberty.

Waiting for a group of tourists to pass, he looked at Cordero and her partner and said, “The symbolism here is pitch perfect. Right up their alley. This has got to be where the next one is going to happen.”

“What do you think, Sal?” Cordero asked.

“My smartphone isn’t so smart when it comes to predicting what people are
going
to do. I don’t know.”

She looked back at Harvath. “Do you think they’d stage something from inside the Old State House? Another hanging maybe? Have the body come out over the balcony?”

Harvath looked up and considered it. “We know they like to operate late at night. It gives them cover. They also like to limit their exposure. That’s why the Liberty Tree and Hutchinson sites were done inside. It’s pretty hard to kill somebody out in public.”

Cordero’s partner looked up at all the office buildings surrounding them. “Maybe not. What if they used a sniper?”

It was a good point. Harvath hadn’t thought of that and now looked up as well. There were plenty of places a sniper could be positioned. It would be dramatic and draw a lot of attention. It also felt like something the people he believed they were dealing with would be capable of.

Playing devil’s advocate, he said, “If they did use a sniper, how would they get the victim to walk right up to where they wanted?”

“If it were me,” Cordero mused, “I’d put a cop there.”

“You would?”

She nodded. “I’d call something into 911, wait until the cop was right where I wanted him, and then I’d turn the victim loose.”

Harvath thought about that. “Make the victim think you were setting him free?”

“Or
her
free,” she clarified. “Remember, we’ve got one man and one woman who are still missing.”

“That’s correct. So you’d let him or her think they’re being set free, you’d dump them on the street someplace close, and then tell them to run for the cop.”

“Then when they get to the cop,” Sal said, mimicking a sniper with an invisible rifle, “end of story.”

It was an excellent theory, but just that—a theory. He looked up again at the buildings. It was a base worth covering. “How much of a SWAT presence could we get?”

“We can reach out to the state guys to augment what we already have,” said Cordero as her eyes scanned the area. “But not knowing precisely what these people have planned, we also need to flood this entire zone with plainclothes cops. If the victim makes it to that historical marker, it could be too late.”

Harvath agreed. “The Boston Massacre was all about British soldiers mowing innocent people down with muskets, so if they do go the sniper
route, they’ll have the victim in the crosshairs the entire time. Nevertheless, we need to cover our other bases.”

“Such as?”

“We definitely want to have officers positioned inside the Old State House,” he said, as his mind sifted through the countless possibilities. When you had a location, particularly one out in the open, you learned how to defend it by envisioning how the bad guys would likely attack it. Looking down at the historical marker, he added, “Is there anything running underneath here? Sewers? The subway system?”

“Probably. Why?”

“Just in case this historical marker isn’t really
on
the site of the Boston Massacre, but actually
above
it, we’ll need cops down there covering it as well.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard to find out,” Cordero replied. “What else do we need?”

It was odd to have her suddenly defer to him, and it took a moment for him to realize that the shift had happened. Maybe it was because she knew that he had been a Secret Service agent, though she had no idea it was on the President’s detail, but somehow she sensed that this was in his wheelhouse and was something he was good at.

He thought through all the other things he would like to have, knowing they’d never get there in time, and settled on the one thing they needed more than anything else. “If you can find us a whole busload of luck, that’d be all I’d ask for,” he said, forcing an optimistic laugh.

Harvath heard Cordero’s partner laugh, but as he looked up, he couldn’t tell if the man was laughing with him, or at him.

B
etsy Mitchell felt the vehicle, probably a van of some sort based on the sliding sound the door had made once they had gotten into it, bump and jostle along through traffic. She had no idea where they were. Based on the drugs she had been given and all of the takeoffs and landings of the plane she had been on after her abduction, she had no idea if she was even in the United States anymore. She could hear car horns outside, but she couldn’t see anything. A hood had been placed over her head.

Despite a split lip and an eye that felt painfully swollen from the blows she had suffered, the rape Betsy had feared back at the warehouse never happened. After tearing away her blouse, the man in the mask had left the room. He came back with a small camera and microphone combination, a third the size of a lipstick tube, and showed it to her. He then taped it to her chest, and that was when he had placed the hood over her head.

As he removed the collar from around her neck and began to dress her, he used the digital recorder to relay a message explaining what was about to happen.

Her ransom had been agreed on. Within a matter of hours she would
be free, if she did everything she was supposed to do. That was the purpose of the video camera and microphone. Though she couldn’t see it with the hood over her head, she could feel him adjusting her clothes around it. He explained that he would be able to see and hear everything she did. He also explained what would happen if she veered even one inch from her instructions. Her blood froze in her veins. Once she found her voice again, she swore she would do exactly as he asked. She promised them that in no condition would she waver from what she had been told to do.