Path of the Assassin (7 page)

“Do we have any leads at all?”

“We know that the FRC has made several recent attempts to retrieve funds that Abu Nidal thought he had hidden beyond anyone’s detection. Each of those attempts has been thwarted. The organization is desperately trying to raise cash, and our intelligence indicates that whatever they’re planning, it’s coming up fast.”

“So what’s the operation?” asked Scot.

Mraz spoke up. “The goal of Operation Phantom is to identify and eliminate Hashim Nidal before he can carry out his next attack, and hopefully dismantle his organization once and for all.”

“Operation Phantom?” asked Harvath.

“Yes, Abu Nidal’s son is, for all intents and purposes, a ghost. We don’t know his date of birth, how tall he is…not even what he looks like.”

“Do you guys actually pay someone to sit around and think these names up?”

“Often, it’s the mission directors who develop the code names. In this case, the mission director is Mr. Morrell.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

“Regardless of your feelings about Mr. Morrell, I can guarantee you we chose the best man for the job.”

“That’s highly debatable,” replied Scot. “But as long as you have me along, at least I can keep an eye on him and try to keep him from screwing things up too badly.”

“And what makes you think you will have anything to do with this operation, Agent Harvath?”

“Because you wouldn’t have spent all this time spilling what you know if you didn’t plan on bringing me in. Let’s also not forget that I am operating under direct orders from the president of the United States, who has the utmost confidence in my abilities, and who with one phone call would have me put on this team, whether you like it or not.”

“You are an arrogant man, Agent Harvath,” said Mraz.

“No, it’s not arrogance, Mr. Mraz, I’m just very good at what I do,” replied Harvath evenly.

“Well, I want you to know that I don’t think you belong on this team and neither does Director Vaile. But, as you mentioned, the president does have every confidence in your ability, and therefore we have grudgingly decided to put you under Mr. Morrell’s command.”

“Under
his
command? No way. I command myself, and that’s final.”

“Agent Harvath, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. If you wish to be a part of this operation, these are the conditions under which it will happen. You’re a former SEAL. You, of all people, should appreciate the need for a clear and definite command.”

“You left out ‘capable,’” said Harvath.

“It will please you to hear that Mr. Morrell is not at all happy about you being added to the team and that he tried very hard to stop it from happening.”

“Thanks. That does make me feel better.”

“Per Director Vaile’s agreement with the president, you will be on Mr. Morrell’s team for the ID and termination of Hashim Nidal, after which you will return to your duties at the White House. Is this understood?”

“There’s no plan to try and grab him?” asked Harvath.

“No. Our projection is that if we’re lucky, we’ll only get one opportunity to put him out of business. If we fail, which is far more likely in a snatch operation than with a sniper team, he’ll go so far underground we won’t see him again until the dust has settled from whatever major event he has brewing. This is precisely why we cannot afford any interference from Mr. Schoen and the Israelis, especially if Schoen’s involvement is more personal than professional. That’s how mistakes happen. Now, we’re going to need to keep you overnight for observation, and then—”

“No you’re not. I feel fine. I’m going home now,” said Harvath as he began to raise himself up from the bed.

“Agent Harvath, please don’t—”

Now it was Lawlor who interrupted. “Do me a favor and just cooperate, would you, Scot? Okay? I’ll come pick you up tomorrow and drive you home.”

“And then what am I supposed to do? Sit around and watch
Oprah?
”

“You’re free to do whatever you want, Agent Harvath,” said Mraz. “You’ll be provided with a beeper. As soon as Mr. Morrell’s team is ready to move out, you’ll be contacted and told where to meet them.”

“How can I get a hold of Morrell if I need to?” asked Scot.

“You won’t need to. Besides, I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I’d rather you two stay away from each other. Just wait until he contacts you. Be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

“What about gear?”

“Mr. Morrell will handle all of that from here.”

“They’re not going back to the embassy in Jerusalem?”

“No, we’ve got another team there now. Mr. Morrell and his team will wait here until we have gathered further intel as to the whereabouts of Hashim Nidal.”

“Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“We believe his base of operations is somewhere in Indonesia.”

“That would figure, wouldn’t it? The Muslims love that warm weather.”

Mraz ignored him. “We have assets on the ground in Indonesia who are actively seeking his training camp and base of operations. Once we have located it, if time permits, we’ll build a mock-up and practice the assault.”

“And if time doesn’t permit?”

“We roll and we’ll just have to wing it.”

Mraz’s final comment scared Harvath more than anything else he had heard in the last forty-five minutes.

The next day Scot felt well enough to check himself out, and Gary Lawlor drove him home. On the way, they stopped at his favorite burger joint in Alexandria—Five Guys, on King Street. As much as Scot enjoyed traveling, he was always glad to come back home. There was something about seeing the United States from abroad that reaffirmed for him how proud and fortunate he felt to be an American. The other thing foreign travel did was give him an overwhelming craving for a good cheeseburger and fries.

They made one more stop at the deli-market around the corner from Scot’s apartment, where he bought a six-pack of Sam Adams, and then Lawlor dropped him in front of his building.

“Morrell is going to want to send a courier over with the file for you to look at. There’s not much in it, but it’ll put you on the same page as everybody else,” said Lawlor.

“Okay,” said Harvath as he closed the passenger side door behind him. “Have him send it over this afternoon.”

“Do you have a shredder?”

“Yup.”

“Good. He’ll want you to shred and then burn it when you’re through.”

“You don’t have to worry about my tradecraft,” said Harvath. “Let’s just hope Special Assholes Staff doesn’t botch things up.”

“Scot, you’ve got to give that a rest. There’s too much at stake. I know you don’t like Morrell, but you’re part of their team now, so start acting like it,” admonished Lawlor, who then rolled up the window and pulled out into the street.

Harvath didn’t like that Lawlor had the final word, but the aroma of his cheeseburger and fries, as it wafted up through the grease-stained bag, quickly made him forget about it.

He held the cold six-pack and burger bag in one hand as he fished in his pockets for his house keys. The few possessions he had on him when he was jumped by Morrell and his colleagues in Jerusalem had been returned. Just to make trouble for Morrell, Harvath had claimed his wallet was about two hundred bucks short. The CIA duty officer signing him out had almost believed him until Lawlor told him to stop screwing around. Harvath was told that his bags had already been retrieved from the Jerusalem Hotel and would be delivered to his apartment in Alexandria. When asked if there was anything else the CIA could do for him, Scot asked who really killed Kennedy, but then Lawlor jabbed him in the ribs and told him to get moving.

He stopped by the building manager’s apartment and picked up the shopping bag full of mail she had been collecting for him and then headed up the stairs to his third-floor apartment. He checked to see that the hair he’d wedged into the upper right corner of the doorframe was still there, indicating that the door to his apartment had not been opened in the weeks he had been gone.
Still there
.

Inside, the apartment was hot and muggy. Summers in D.C. could be unbearable. He walked over to his air-conditioning unit and switched it on full blast. He removed two bottles of beer from the carton, and put the rest of the beer in the fridge. He walked into his living room, sat down on the couch, and flipped on the TV while he began his meal.

It was the top of the hour and Fox News was running their top news stories. Scot recognized the façade of the Hotel Ritz in Paris immediately. It was surrounded by police cars and emergency vehicles. Apparently, the Prince Khalil assassination story had broken.

The reporter on the scene talked about a little-known toxic poison called Sadim, what dermal exposure was, and how death must have been for the Saudi prince and his two bodyguards. The Ritz was surely horrified by the publicity. The public still talked about how Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Al Fayed, had spent their last evening there and had died when their limousine crashed, a drunken Ritz chauffeur at the wheel.

Somehow, the reporter had obtained a copy of the letter in which the Hand of God organization claimed responsibility for the murders. After she had read it verbatim, the screen changed to a feed from Jerusalem and Fox’s Jerusalem bureau chief. The dark-haired man spoke for several minutes about escalating tensions and violence in Israel, then segued to a video package edited and narrated earlier that day. It showed footage of the carnage at Medina in Saudi Arabia, as well as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There was heavy troop and tank placement throughout villages along the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel had closed all of its border crossings in response to sixteen suicide bombings by Palestinians at crowded restaurants, shopping areas, and resorts popular with Israeli citizens. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were all taking credit for the attacks and stated that they were in retaliation for the Hand of God attacks. And so it went, with each subsequent attack ratcheting up the rhetoric and the violence. It was a vicious circle and it was spiraling out of control.

The video then cut to street scenes in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the attack on the Temple Mount. Palestinian youths threw stones at Israeli Defense Forces who returned fire with tear gas and rubber bullets. Jewish shopkeepers pushed and assaulted Palestinian customers and vice versa. It was sheer pandemonium.

Man-on-the-street interviews were volatile, with each side calling for war and the extermination of the other. Not only did the citizens of Palestine and Israel seem to overwhelmingly agree that they should go to war and settle things once and for all, but they were all sure their “God” would lead them to victory.

Just when Harvath could barely stand it any longer and was about to turn the TV off, the piece turned to a man walking through a rubble-strewn Palestinian village. People lined the streets to greet him. When the camera pulled back to reveal the Fox reporter, Scot recognized her right away. It was Jody Burnis, the former CNN reporter who had broken the story of the president’s kidnapping and had implicated him as her inside source. He turned up the sound on the remote as a montage of images filled the screen.

“…Ali Hasan, chief Palestinian negotiator and a rising star on the Palestine political landscape. He grew up on these same mean Ramallah streets, only a stone’s throw away from PLO headquarters. He has been a vigorous proponent for an independent Palestinian homeland and establishing a lasting peace with neighboring Israel—a difficult and, some would say, impossible dream.

“As violence worsens here in the wake of the Hand of God terrorist attacks, Hasan’s voice is one of the few still calling for calm. It has been his steadfast refusal to condemn terrorism that his detractors most often cite. But by the same token, observers far and wide agree that in the tumultuous arena of Palestinian politics, if he hopes to lead his people, he could not come down on what is seen by most Palestinians as the only tool which allows them to be taken seriously on the world stage.

“Hasan has been a frequent guest speaker at the League of Arab Nations and is on very good terms with most of the region’s leaders, both secular and religious alike. He has been compared to a coin flipped high into the desert air. On one side of the coin is the barbed specter of war, the other, the white dove of peace. On which side will the coin fall? Only time will tell, though many here believe that with the European-sponsored peace summit only weeks away,
time
is quickly running out.

“Reporting from Ramallah in the West Bank, this has been Jody Burnis for Fox News.”

Scot clicked off the television and walked into his bedroom to change into some workout clothes. After he found a clean pair of white socks and his Nikes, he grabbed a cold bottle of water from the fridge and clipped the CIA beeper to his waist. He locked the apartment door behind him, placed a hair in the upper-right-hand corner of the doorframe, and made his way down to the basement, where the landlady had let him set up his workout gear in an unused corner.

If there was one thing Harvath couldn’t stand, it was sitting on his ass. While he couldn’t control how long he would have to wait until Morrell paged him, he could control what he did with his time. Workouts always helped Harvath relax and clear his mind. As he slapped the forty-five-pound plates onto the bar and got ready to do a warm-up set of bench presses, the rest of the world and everything in it began to fade away.

An hour later, Scot had a good sweat going and was on his last set of hammer curls. He felt the satisfying fatigue and burn in his muscles. It was good to get back to the weights. Though he had been relegated to push-ups, dips, and crunches in hotel rooms and Claudia’s apartment over the last several weeks, he was still in excellent shape. In fact, he was in just as good shape, if not better, as when he had been in the SEALs. There were few who would dare mess with him, and those that did found him to be extremely lethal.

After putting the dumbbells back where they belonged, Scot did a few exercises to work his obliques and then stretched out his legs. Though he had a treadmill in the basement, when the weather was nice, he preferred to run outside.

Despite the humidity in the summertime, Harvath enjoyed living in Alexandria. Its architecture and layout still retained its historic port city charm. It was the hometown of George Washington, and oftentimes Harvath wondered what the former president would think of Alexandria if he came back and saw how well preserved it was today.

Harvath jogged to the Chinquapin Park Recreation Center, where he was greeted by Tera, one of the front-desk staffers, who knew him on sight. She checked him in and agreed to hold on to his pager and come find him if it went off.

The center had a fully equipped locker room, where Scot kept a swimsuit, a pair of goggles, and some assorted toiletry items. After a quick shower, he jumped into his suit and hit the twenty-five-meter indoor pool.

Having already performed a full weight workout, Harvath felt himself, understandably, growing tired much quicker than he normally would, but he simply adjusted his pace and kept going. Scot liked to push himself. Both in the SEALs and then later when he was recruited into the Secret Service, Harvath was known by his code name, Norseman. It referred to a string of Scandinavian flight attendants he had dated while going through his SEAL training, but seeing him in action suggested another meaning. Whenever he thought he couldn’t go any further, he reminded himself of the SEAL motto, “The only easy day was yesterday,” and would push himself some more.

After an hour in the pool, Harvath’s body was beyond fatigued and his mind was numb. He didn’t have the energy to compose a thought any more complicated than grabbing a shower. He stood under the needlelike spray and let the water bounce off his body as he leaned against the wall for support. After twenty minutes of
hot,
he turned the faucet all the way to
cold
and forced himself to stand beneath the spray until his blood was racing through his body and every nerve ending was tingling.

Harvath toweled off and put on his running clothes again. He picked up his pager from Tera, stopped by the snack bar, and chugged down a large bottle of Gatorade before leaving the complex. Morrell hadn’t called, and it didn’t surprise Harvath. It could easily be weeks before he heard from him.

When he returned to his apartment, he checked the hair before opening the door and letting himself in. He needed to get out of his running clothes and take another shower. Just walking home, he had broken a sweat in the lovely July humidity. As Harvath made his way past the kitchen toward his bathroom, something in the kitchen caught his eye. The refrigerator door was standing wide open.
That was odd
. He wouldn’t have left it that way.
Maybe the seal was going,
he thought to himself. As he went to close the fridge, he noticed something else—his remaining four bottles of Sam Adams were gone. He knew he didn’t do that. Someone had been in his house, but whoever they were, they’d been clever enough to replace the hair in his doorframe. Coming through a window was out of the question. Entry could have been gained only through the front door.

Because his sidearm was in his bedroom, the best he could do for a weapon was the Louisville Slugger he kept in the hall closet. Quietly he retrieved the baseball bat and crept toward the rear of the apartment. The living room was clear, as was his bathroom. His bedroom door was closed, something he never did, and as he approached it, he tightened his grip around the bat. He took a deep breath and freed his left hand to turn the knob. When the door gave way, he put all of his weight behind it, charged into the bedroom, and fell flat on his face. He had tripped over something.

Harvath quickly spun into a sitting position and raised the bat above his head with both hands, ready to come down hard on the intruder. Then he saw what he had tripped over. He set the bat down and hopped up onto his feet. Sitting on the floor in front of him was his bag from the Jerusalem Hotel. He quickly glanced around his room and noticed that his bed had been turned down. On his pillow was a smiley face with two Hershey’s chocolate Kisses for the eyes and four Sam Adams bottle caps for the smile.

“Asshole,” Harvath said out loud.

He knew it had to have been Morrell who had gotten into his apartment and placed his bag in the bedroom. Out of all the many distasteful things he remembered about the former Navy SEAL turned CIA assassin, was that he was a fiend for candy. The smiley face was his calling card, all right. On top of getting his ass kicked, Rick Morrell now owed Harvath a six-pack of Sam Adams.

Harvath was just about to unpack his bag when he heard a knock at the front door. He pulled his SIG Sauer from underneath his nightstand and held it behind his back as he approached the front door.

“Who is it?” he asked as he stood to the right of the doorframe.

“Special courier. I have a delivery for Mr. Scot Harvath,” said a man’s voice.

Harvath stepped in front of the peephole and peered out. Standing in the hall was a tall, blond kid about twenty-five years old. Harvath was only in his early thirties, but any young CIA hard-ons, which this one obviously was, were referred to by guys in the Special Operations community as snot-nosed CIA
kids
. Harvath opened the door.

“Do you have any ID?” Harvath asked the kid, who, now that he could see him full on, looked more like a muscle-bound southern California surfer than a CIA operative.