The First Commandment

It wasn’t the reception Harvath had expected. There wasn’t a police car or an unmarked government sedan in sight. Even so, he remained on guard.

The plane taxied off the runway into a holding area. When the aircraft came to a stop, the emergency vehicles surrounded it and their teams got to work.

Harvath unbuckled his seatbelt and moved to the other side of the jet to see what was going on.

As he did, the main cabin door opened and the high-pitched whine of the Citation’s Rolls-Royce engines filled the aircraft.

A moment later, several firefighters clambered up the airstairs and entered the cabin. Their walkie-talkies belched with orders being barked back and forth between emergency perso

Beneath their Nomex turnout gear, they looked like every other firefighter Harvath had ever met. They were lean and athletic, with serious, hard-set faces that communicated they had a job to do.

The only problem was that they bore the same look as many of the elite military and law enforcement perso

Harvath stood up and started moving toward the front of the cabin. That was when he saw it. The second “firefighter” had something pressed up against the back of the man in front of him.

In the reflection from the highly polished cabinetry of the galley, Harvath could make out the unmistakable color and size of a Taser X26 pulsed energy weapon. It was the same device he’d used on Ronaldo Palmera just days before.

Harvath was trapped.

Chapter 63

As part of his training years ago, Harvath had taken a hit from the Taser to see what it was like. In a word, it was intense-more intense than anything he had ever experienced. He had no desire to ride the bull again, so now he simply sank to his knees and interlaced his fingers behind his head. His twenty-four hours had evaporated a lot faster than he’d anticipated.

With a knee against his neck and his face pressed against the jet’s carpeted cabin floor, Harvath felt the burn of the Flexicuffs as they zipped his wrists up behind his back.

They were being exceptionally rough with him, and their message was clear-Screw with us and things are going to get much worse.

A black Yukon Denali was waiting at the bottom of the airstairs. Harvath’s feet never even touched the ground.

He was thrown into the backseat and bracketed by two men who slammed their doors in unison. One of them buckled him in as the other told the driver to get moving.

He didn’t see the hood until it was placed over his head and everything went black.

It was a long ride. Every minute of sensory deprivation in that impenetrable darkness felt like an hour. When the SUV finally came to a halt, one of Harvath’s minders opened his door and then jerked him from the Denali.

Harvath heard birds and what sounded like a motor of some sort off in the distance. It might have been a lawn mower, but based on the Doppler effect it had produced he guessed it was a boat of some sort. They were probably near the water.

A rough set of hands grabbed hold of him on the other side and he was ushered forward. The smooth pavement under his feet gave way to grass and then to wooden steps.

He was directed up them and made to stop as a door of some sort was opened. The air inside smelled musty, with a faint trace of Pine Sol.

Harvath was steered down a long hallway and stopped in front of another door. His hood was removed and he was shoved inside as the door was closed and locked behind him.

At first, all he could see was the color white. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out some blues, as well as the dark color of the distressed-wood floor. A clutch of hand-painted lobsterman buoys were the first objects he could actually focus on. From there, the entire room began to open up.

The décor was straight out of Coastal Living magazine-bead-board walls, model ships, pillows created from old nautical flags. While Harvath had envisioned many kinds of cells the president might have him thrown into, none of them had resembled this.

Skirting a small daybed, Harvath walked over to the window. He wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t open it. What did surprise him was that it appeared to be made out of bullet-resistant glass, about an inch and a half thick. This was definitely no ordinary room.

Harvath figured he was in some sort of safe house. The first agency that popped into his mind as being its likely owner was the CIA, though it could have belonged to any number of others.

Harvath had seen a lot of safe houses in his day, and all things being equal, the quality of the décor in this one suggested the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement over any other group.

The closet was empty, as was the bureau against the far wall. In the nightstand was a Bible with a stamp claiming the Gideons had placed it there, which was obviously someone’s idea of a clever joke.

Harvath noted that the model ships throughout the room were named for Ivy League universities. He was definitely in an Agency safe house, but why? Why bring him here?

There were two doors on either side of the room. One led to a bathroom, conspicuously missing the normal hardware such as a shower rod or mirror that could be fashioned into a weapon. Harvath turned on the tap and took several servings of water from a small paper cup before returning to the bedroom.

The other door presumably led to the interior of the house, but it was locked. No big surprise there. Harvath figured that there was at least one, maybe two guards posted on the other side. Knowing the penchant of the CIA for electronic surveillance, he also assumed his room was wired for both sound and video.

With nothing else to do, he removed the Bible from the nightstand and sat down on the bed. A product of the Sacred Heart school system as a boy, Harvath was embarrassed that it had been so long since he had held, much less read, a Bible.

He respectfully leafed through the pages until he arrived at the second book of the Old Testament, Exodus.

The book was broken into six sections, all of which Harvath was familiar with. He read about the Israelites’ enslavement and escape from Egypt, the ten plagues bearing especially painful significance for him now.

If the attack on the ski team and its facility in Park City was meant to represent hail and fire, there were six more plagues that were yet to come. He read through them in their reverse order-boils, pestilence, beasts or flies, fleas or lice, frogs, and lastly a river of blood.

While some of them sounded tame by modern standards, Harvath knew the man responsible for all of these attacks, the man he believed to be the fifth terrorist released from Guantanamo, would find an exceptionally deviant and terrifying way to incorporate them into his attacks.

The thought of any more attacks made Harvath’s present situation an even more bitter pill to swallow. He had to find some way to get out of here and stop the person who was responsible for all of it.

Placing the Bible atop the nightstand, Harvath rose from the bed. He would take another look around the room. There had to be something here that could aid in his escape. He didn’t care if they had him under surveillance or not. Just sitting there doing nothing was not an option.

After checking the closet over thoroughly, he was on his way back into the bathroom when he heard voices outside his door. Looking down he saw the knob slowly begin to turn and he knew that he’d run out of time.