Takedown

“Listen to me and I’ll tell you.”

Harvath tossed the file onto the seat next to him and prayed the man had a good answer. If not, he was going to rip his throat out right in the back of that limousine.

Hilliman took a deep breath and replied, “Nobody can withstand torture indefinitely, not even a man like Mohammed bin Mohammed. The problem lies in knowing when you’ve truly broken them. To know that, you have to verify the intel a subject gives you, and that can take time. Time was not something we had on our side in Mohammed’s case. Making matters even more difficult were his extensive dialysis treatments.

“Therefore, it had been agreed that if we couldn’t make measurable progress within a certain window, we were going to transport him to another nation that collaborates with us in interrogations, a nation we knew his associates might be likely to subvert to help facilitate his escape.”

“I still don’t understand why you’d do that.”

“So we could track him.”

“But it took you guys years to find him in the first place. What makes you so sure you wouldn’t lose him?” demanded Harvath.

“That’s the thing. We were over ninety percent certain we wouldn’t lose him-and in our business, that’s a percentage we were willing to bet the house on.”

“How were you going to track him?”

“Through a radioisotope we’d been administering as part of his dialysis treatments. It creates a very specific signature which can be tracked via satellite.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The secretary held up both hands and said, “So help me. It’s a very new technology, but it works. We’d seen the data, but we went a step further and did a slew of comprehensive tests ourselves. The bottom line is that it works.”

“Ninety percent of the time,” clarified Harvath.

“Correct.”

“So, do you know where Mohammed bin Mohammed is now?”

Hilliman looked at him. “Yes, we do.”

“So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you grab him?”

“Because we need to know who al-Qaeda is about to get their nuclear material from.”

“And once you do? What then?”

Hilliman pulled two more files from his briefcase, handed them across to Harvath, and said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

Ninety-Nine

GIBRALTAR

THREE DAYS LATER

Of all the places Harvath had ever traveled to, he’d never had a reason or a desire to see Gibraltar. As his plane circled on its approach, he quickly realized that he’d been missing something extraordinary.

The enormous limestone Rock of Gibraltar rose dramatically from the Mediterranean Sea, forming one of the two ancient Pillars of Hercules, which once marked the very edge of the known world.

Staring out the plane’s window, Harvath could make out the various grassy glens that were home to the only free-ranging monkey in Europe, the barbary ape. He could almost smell the aloes, capers, cacti, and asparagus that grew wild along the nearly 1400-foot-high rock. And though he barely knew her, he could already tell this was the kind of place Tracy Hastings would like-a lot.

After the secretary of defense had dropped Harvath at the ferry, he had joined her, along with Rick Cates and Paul Morgan, to make the somber trip across the East River to Manhattan. As a way to ignore the search-and-recovery efforts happening up and down the river, they staked out a piece of turf on the aft deck and cracked open the bottle of Louis XIII the minute the ferry set sail. Cates, ever the procurement specialist, had secured small plastic cups and by the time they reached Manhattan, the bottle was half empty.

The balance of it was drained as they made their way up First Avenue and deposited Paul Morgan back at the VA. From there, Harvath, Hastings, and Cates proceeded to Bob’s favorite watering hole, the same tavern he and Harvath had been on their way to when all hell had originally broken loose. There, already well lubricated, and fueled by their shared sense of loss, they toasted Bob’s memory again, and again, and again.

The next morning when Harvath awoke, he did so as slowly as possible. It was unlike him to tie one on so bad that he couldn’t remember where he was or what he had done. Knowing that the moment he opened his eyes the wicked machinery responsible for ushering in his inevitable hangover would kick into gear, he lay there and tried to figure out where he was. The first thing he noticed were the silk sheets, and because he could feel the sheets with all of his body, he was relatively confident that he was naked. That fact made his next observation a little more uncomfortable-the smell of perfume.

Reaching out his hand, he had first felt a well-toned calf and then a firm yet feminine thigh. As his hand slid farther up his bedmate’s body, he felt a taut midriff leading to a pair of perfectly sculpted shoulders. Slowly opening his eyes, he saw Tracy Hastings lying next to him and instantly decided she had one of the most beautiful bodies he had ever seen.

For all of the jokes she made about her face, Harvath found it just as beautiful. Looking into her eyes, he saw that she was awake, and they both smiled.

After recounting the balance of the evening and telling him that he was indeed a good dancer, but that their conversation had been a bit below sparkling, they laughed and made love again. They spent the next forty-eight hours together and were inseparable right up until Harvath had to leave for his operational rendezvous point in Europe.

For his part, Harvath’s only regret about the entire experience was that after being patched up at the VA, he had blown a whole week recuperating in his hotel room-alone. Tracy had offered him the guest room at her parents’ house, as they had decided to remain overseas while Manhattan got back on its feet, but Harvath had politely declined. Somehow, somewhere inside himself he had known this was bound to happen. Now that it had, they were both okay with it. Whether there was a future for them was another question. Harvath knew well enough not to get his hopes up, but he also knew that he was looking forward to spending more time with Tracy and getting to know her much better.

As the plane came in for its landing, Harvath saw traffic being halted in both directions, as one of Gibraltar ’s main thoroughfares actually cut right across the airport’s landing strip. A rocky promontory at the southernmost tip of Spain, Gibraltar occupied an area of only 2.5 square miles, but what it lacked in measurable terra firma the minuscule British dependency more than made up for in the size and scope of its international intrigues.

It was one such intrigue that had brought Scot here. A joint CIA/DIA team had been tracking Mohammed bin Mohammed since he had returned to Africa. They had followed him up to Tangiers and onto a ferryboat for the quick jaunt across the straits to Gibraltar. They now had him under surveillance in a sumptuous, yet discreet villa near the harbor-not far from the hotel where Harvath was booked. Once Mohammed’s deal for the rogue nuclear material went down, the team had their orders to immediately back off. From that point forward, the al-Qaeda terrorist belonged to Scot Harvath and Scot Harvath only. No bullshit, no bureaucracy, and absolutely nobody but himself to answer to.

For two days, Mohammed played the merry holidaymaker, hitting the beaches by day and then prowling the open-air restaurants and discos for young boys at night. It made Harvath sick. He couldn’t wait to put a bullet in this scumbag. The only thing worse than seeing him pick up the boys was joining the CIA/DIA team in its daily sweep of his villa while he basked on the beach and the staff ran errands. The man was quite the budding cinematographer, and watching him actually in the act made Harvath want to vomit.