The First Commandment

The man struggled violently for almost a minute. Then his body fell quiet and Harvath knew he was dead.

Chapter 121

Harvath remained at the scene with Rick Morrell until an ambulance arrived. Though the CIA operative insisted he’d be fine, the EMTs put him in a cervical collar, placed him on a backboard, and transported him to the hospital for evaluation. Once Morrell was gone, Harvath made his way back down to the water.

The Polaris had docked at the end of the Abbey Springs boat pier, and when Todd Kirkland saw Harvath making his way to where all the passengers were gathered, he thought for sure he was coming for him. But he wasn’t. Nor was he coming for Meg. Instead he spoke briefly with Meg’s two Secret Service agents and then took Jean Stevens by the hand and led her away.

After walking back along the lake path to her cottage to pick up extra clothes and her car, Jean drove Harvath to the Abbey Resort. Still soaking wet, he walked straight past the gaping-mouthed stares of the front desk staff to his room.

He called the pilots and told them to be ready to move in five minutes, then quickly changed into the clothes Jean Stevens had given him. As she drove them to the airport, Harvath informed Zucker and Burdic that they were flying to D. C. His one hope was that he would make it there before Tracy ’s parents could remove her from life support.

When the plane touched down it was raining. Through the rain-soaked windows of his cab, he could see by the light of the D. C. streetlights that the leaves were already begi

Tracy ’s night nurse, Laverna, was the first one to notice him when he stepped into the ICU. “I tried to call you. Didn’t you get any of my messages?” she asked.

Harvath shook his head. “I’ve been out of pocket for a few days. How’s Tracy?”

The nurse gripped his arm. “Her parents took her off the ventilator this afternoon.”

The tide of emotion that welled up inside him was overwhelming, and he was too exhausted to try to fight it. He could not believe that Bill and Barbara Hastings had done it. They could have at least waited for him to return. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and he did nothing to try to hide them.

“She’s strong,” stated the nurse, “she’s a fighter.”

Harvath couldn’t understand what she was saying. He was too exhausted. He just stared at her blankly.

“She’s still alive.”

Harvath turned and moved quickly away from the nurse’s station.

When he entered Tracy ’s room, her parents looked up from where they were sitting. Neither of them knew what to say.

Ignoring them, Harvath walked to the other side of the bed and picked up Tracy ’s hand. He gave it a squeeze and said, “It’s me, honey. It’s Scot. I’m here now.”

There was a movement, and at first Harvath thought he was imagining it. Then it happened again. It was weak, but Tracy had squeezed his hand. She knew he was there.

At that moment, everything came flooding out of him. He buried his head in her hair and as she squeezed his hand again he began to cry.

Chapter 122

JERUSALEM

Tracking down the puppeteer pulling Philippe Roussard’s strings began with a visit to Dei Glicini e Ulivella, the exclusive private hospital in Florence where payments from Roussard’s mother’s Wegelin amp; Company account had been made.

Harvath didn’t know what to expect. Part of him thought he might find a badly burned Adara Nidal sitting up in her hospital bed waiting for him, her silver eyes unmistakable behind a mask of charred flesh.

What he discovered was that the payments weren’t for Adara Nidal. Instead, they were for a male patient with a name Harvath had never heard before and who had recently up and left.

All Harvath’s suppositions had been wrong. Adara was not the person behind Roussard’s release from Gitmo and his subsequent attacks within the United States. It was somebody else-a man with a false name who had simply vanished.

The first person who entered Harvath’s mind was Hashim, Adara’s brother and Philippe’s uncle. But when the hospital administrator finished touring Harvath through the patient’s abandoned room and showed him into his office, Harvath realized how wrong he’d been in assuming Adara or her brother were behind the monster that had been Philippe Roussard. Sitting on the credenza behind the administrator’s desk was something that pointed to another person-someone far more complex, far more twisted, who had a reach long enough to fake his own death, even for a second time.

When asked about it, the administrator claimed it had been a gift from the patient whom Harvath was looking for. It was all the identification Harvath needed.

Harvath’s taxi cab pulled up in front of an old, four-story building in Jerusalem ’s popular Ben Yehuda district. The storefront was composed of two large windows crammed full of antique furniture, paintings, and fixtures. The gilded sign above the entryway read Thames amp; Cherwell Antiques, followed by translations in Hebrew and Arabic.

A small brass bell above the door a

The dimly lit store was still packed with tapestries, furniture, and no end of faded bric-a-brac. It had been preserved exactly as it was on his first visit here years before.

He neared a narrow mahogany door and pulled it toward him to reveal a small, wood-paneled elevator. Pressing a button inside, he watched as the door closed and he felt the elevator rise.

When it arrived on the uppermost floor, the door opened onto a long hallway, its floor covered by an intricately patterned Oriental ru

As Harvath walked forward, he remembered the infrared sensors placed every few feet and guessed that there still were pressure sensitive plates beneath the ru

At the end of the hall, Harvath found himself in a large room, more dimly lit than the shop downstairs. It was paneled from floor to ceiling, like the elevator, with a rich, deeply colored wood. With its fireplace, billiards table, and overstuffed leather chairs, it felt more like a British gentleman’s club than the upper-floor office of a shop in West Jerusalem.

Sitting up in a mechanical hospital bed near a pair of heavy silk draperies drawn tight against the windows was the man himself.

“I knew one of you would eventually come,” said Schoen as Harvath stepped into the room. He was even more hideously deformed than before, his nonexistent lips barely able to shape the words emanating from his charred hole of a mouth. “I assume Philippe is dead.”

Harvath nodded.

“How did you know it was me?” asked Schoen.

“Adara’s bank account at Wegelin.”

“The payments to the clinic,” mused Schoen, as medical instruments clicked and buzzed around him. “I think you’re lying, Agent Harvath. That was a completely clean alias I was registered under. There was nothing to tie anything back to me. It had never been used before and hasn’t been used since.”

“It wasn’t the alias, it was your whiskey,” Harvath said, pointing at the antique globe that hid Schoen’s bar beneath its hinged lid. “The 1963 Black Bowmore. ‘Black as pitch,’ you once told me. You must have thought very highly of the hospital’s director to have given him such an expensive present.”

Schoen raised his hand to brush the thought away as if it was nothing. “You are more intelligent than I gave you credit for.”

“Tell me about the other men you had released from Guantanamo. What was their co