He walked home through the rain with grocery bags in each arm, wondering why he hadn’t been called in yet by his boss. Surely, Lawlor had made a big enough fuss that people would be standing in line to chew him out. His pager and cell phone had been with him all day, but no one had tried to contact him.
It was all for the best anyway. He was in no mood to deal with anything at this point. All he wanted to do was get back to his apartment, unpack the groceries, and dig into his Reuben sandwich.
After the Reuben and a half pint of chicken soup, Harvath thought about calling Agent Palmer at the command center in Park City to see if anything new had popped up, but decided against it. He lay down on the couch to rest his eyes for a moment and quickly fell into another deep sleep.
In the darkness of sleep, he could make out what sounded like the faint drumming of jackhammers on wet cement. The thudding was soon joined by a high-pitched screeching that somewhere in his mind he knew he recognized. He lay in a trancelike state in the warm void halfway between sleeping and waking until his mind began to assemble different explanations for what he was hearing, and he felt himself being forcibly dragged upward toward the surface world of the wakeful.
His pager, cell phone, and home phone were all going off at the same time. Startled, Scot reached for the cordless phone first.
“Harvath,” he said.
“Harvath, this is Shaw,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
Scot sat straight up, trying to shake the cobwebs from his head.
Reaching to silence his vibrating phone and the pager on the coffee table, he responded to the director of Secret Service Operations for the White House. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“The director wants to see you. How soon can you be ready?”
Scot looked at his watch. “I just need to grab a quick shower. I can be ready to go in twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” said Shaw. “There’ll be a car coming to pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later on the dot, Agent Harvath was showered, shaved, and wearing a perfectly pressed dark Brooks Brothers suit under his lined trench coat as he stood outside his apartment building. By the looks of it, the rain had been falling all day. Large puddles were everywhere.
Watching his warm breath rise into the cold, damp air he saw a pair of headlights turn the corner and slow as they approached him. The car Scot had been expecting to take him to his meeting would have been a typical domestic four-door, like a Crown Victoria-something that screamed government vehicle. Instead, a long black limousine slowed, and the rear window rolled down as it drew even with him.
“Get in,” said Stan Jameson, director of the Secret Service.
The door opened, and Scot did as he was told. He had met the director on only two occasions. The man had aged incredibly since then. The job must be taking its toll, he thought. As soon as Scot was in and had closed the door, the heavy, armor-plated limo growled away from the curb and headed toward D.C.
“It’s been a helluva couple of days,” began the director.
“Yes, sir, it has,” said Harvath.
A uniformed man was sitting to the director’s right, and motioning toward him, the director said, “Agent Scot Harvath, I’d like you to meet General Paul Venrick, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said Scot as he shook the man’s hand. With his broad shoulders, square jaw, and flattop haircut, the general was the picture of military rectitude.
“Likewise, Agent Harvath,” said the general with a strong Louisiana drawl, returning Scot’s grip.
“We don’t have a lot of time, Agent, so I want to make this quick,” said the director. “Both General Venrick and I have read your debriefing report, but something is missing, isn’t it?”
Scot was confused. If he was going to get his ass chewed out and then fired, why didn’t the director have him come to his office? Why do it in his limo with the JSOC commander along for the ride?
“If you’re referring, sir, to what happened with the story on CNN, I was recalled before I could type up a report and-”
“Son, I wouldn’t bother betting a bicycle basket full of cow chips against what any reporter has to say. Never have trusted them, never will. At this point, I’m not judging whether you said anything to her or not. Although I’d be willing to guess, after reviewing your service file, that wherever she got her story, it didn’t come from you,” said the general.
Before Scot could voice his thanks, the director jumped back into the conversation. “Yes, let’s hold off on the discussion of where the information came from. It does seem that there is a leak somewhere inside the organization, and that in itself is very bad, but first things first. I want to hear your version of events and what you think happened.”
As the armor-plated car rolled down the rain-slicked streets, Harvath recounted his story. Not knowing if the director had been informed of his exploits at Squaw Peak or the Maddux farm, he glossed over them, implicating himself as little as possible. When he had finished, the general removed a file folder from the briefcase by his feet.
“Agent Harvath, are you familiar with a terrorist organization known as the FRC?”
“You mean the Fatah RC?” asked Scot.
“Yes.”
“Sure I am. FRC stands for ‘Fatah-Revolutionary Council,’ also known as the Abu Nidal Organization. It was classified not too long ago by the State Department as the most dangerous terrorist group in the world. They were founded in the mid seventies by Sabri Khalil al-Banna, aka Abu Nidal, and blazed a bloody path across the Mideast, Asia, South America, and Europe throughout the 1980s. Though the organization has struck at targets of many different nationalities, if you’re a high-profile PLO member and aren’t aggressive enough toward Israel, you move to the top of their hit list pretty quickly.
“There was some activity up until the early nineties, but after that the organization pretty much dropped out of sight. Nidal is rumored to be very ill, if not dead already, and hiding somewhere in Libya under that country’s protection-even though they deny it. For the most part, they’ve been quiet, and it’s been said by some that they’re out of business.”
“That’s what we thought too, until we saw this,” said the general as he withdrew a newspaper clipping from The International Herald Tribune and handed it to Harvath. “On January fourteenth, the Austrian Police announced the arrest of a high-ranking Fatah-Revolutionary Council member, Halima Nimer. They grabbed her as she was attempting to withdraw about seven point five million dollars from a bank in Vienna.”
“Where did the FRC ever get that kind of money?” asked Scot.
“They have always been extremely well financed. For a long time Iraq and Libya were two of its biggest contributors, and they have always been very judicious with their assets. That seven point five is probably only the tip of their iceberg.”
“So what does this have to do with anything?”
Now it was the director’s turn to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “We’ve received a ransom demand for the president.”
Harvath was shocked. “From the FRC? What are the demands? Are you sure they’re legitimate?”
“Yes,” continued the director, “we’re very sure. There’s no question. Even if there were, the demands were already en route before the leak to CNN about the kidnapping. So, we know it’s not a hoax.”
“En route? What do you mean?” Scot looked from the director to the general, who was letting Jameson run this part of the show.
“This morning, a prepaid Airborne Express pouch arrived at my office. It had the appropriate routing codes to bypass the usual screenings and get right to me. As the Salt Lake City Field Office’s address was listed as the return address and its special agent in charge as the sender, I figured the SAC had come across something that didn’t make the courier flight or wasn’t important enough for it. These are copies of what was inside.”
He pulled three sheets from the folder that had been sitting on his lap and handed them to Scot.
As Harvath looked at the three photocopies, the director narrated for him, “Page one is, as you can see, a Polaroid photo of the president. You can’t tell in the photocopy, but his eyes are very glassy and appear unfocused. In his hands is a copy of Sunday’s USA Today. You notice the president is not wearing any gloves?”
Scot nodded his head.
