Takedown

“Shut them up,” said the assassin as he pointed his silenced Beretta at the Troll. “And drop your weapon.”

When the Troll hesitated, Ali turned his weapon on the nearest Caucasian Ovcharka and pulled the trigger.

The Troll felt the round just as surely as if it had pierced his own heart. He wanted to cry out, but he retained his composure and signaled his remaining animal to be still. Then he dropped his weapon.

Even from where he remained hidden, Harvath could see enough of the newest party crasher to recognize him. He was the man from the CCTV footage at Libya House. The man who had not only helped Mohammed bin Mohammed escape, but who was responsible for the deaths of the NSA employees, the marines, and all the other victims of the terrible terrorist attacks on New York. Even more important to Harvath, it was this man, the one the CIA was calling Abdul Ali, who had armed Mohammed bin Mohammed and helped him to kill Bob Herrington.

Harvath had expected a long, hard hunt for Ali, but now the man had been delivered right to him. The promise he had made to Bob the night he was murdered was going to be easier to carry out than he had thought.

With a silencer already affixed to his own weapon, Harvath raised his H amp;K pistol and took aim at the most logical primary target-the only other man holding a gun. Though it wasn’t the long and painfully drawn-out death he would have wished on Ali, it was what the circumstances dictated. Taking a deep breath, he squeezed the trigger and watched as Ali’s brains exploded out the other side of his head. And with that shot, pandemonium instantly erupted.

Mohammed bin Mohammed threw his considerable bulk to the ground and began crawling for the villa as fast as he could. To help slow him down, Harvath put a round in the back of each of his legs.

As the al-Qaeda operative screamed in pain, Harvath swept his pistol from left to right, searching for the dwarf, who had suddenly disappeared. At the last minute, he found him.

With the bizarre weapon slung over his shoulder, the tiny man had leapt onto his gargantuan dog and, holding on to the beast’s harness, was riding him as if he were a thoroughbred.

The last glimpse Harvath had of them was as the amazingly agile animal leapt the high wall at the other end of the veranda and disappeared once more from sight. While he didn’t have any immediate reason to kill the man or his dog, there were a lot of questions he would have liked to have had answered-questions he was sure that Mohammed bin Mohammed wouldn’t be willing to answer. On the other hand, Harvath wasn’t really in the mood to ask. What he was in the mood for was payback.

One Hundred Four

Grabbing bin Mohammed by the back of the neck, Harvath dragged him inside and threw him against a large white column. As he removed two pairs of Flexicuffs and secured the man’s hands behind the pillar, Harvath said, “Ten days ago, you killed a very good friend of mine. I’m here to repay the favor.”

The man looked up at Harvath. “I am not afraid to die.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” said Scot as he removed two glass vials from a pouch on his belt and showed them to Mohammed. “Each of these little things are known as Dermestes maculatus. Museums use them to strip flesh away from carcasses so the skeletons can be studied. Once they start eating, they just can’t seem to stop.”

Unscrewing the top of the first vial, Harvath grabbed Mohammed in a headlock and inserted the vial into his ear. Instantly, the man began screaming. Harvath removed a lighter from his pocket and heated the vial until the beetle ran, scurrying into Mohammed’s ear canal. Once he was sure the creature was in good and deep, he repeated the process on the other ear and stood back.

Like a rabbit trapped by a cave-in, beetles will dig furiously to try to extricate themselves. If they happen to be in someone’s ear, the resultant frenzy is enough to drive that person mad. Harvath had read about it in a book a long time ago, and though he wasn’t one to stay up late at night devising new means of torture, this had always been one of the things he thought would be exceptionally worth trying.

Stepping back, Harvath watched as the man writhed and shrieked, trying to shake the insects from his head. He was in the grip of sheer terror. Though it delivered a certain degree of satisfaction, it still wasn’t enough to make up for everything else the man had done.

Raising his pistol, Harvath pulled the trigger and sent one searing hot round into Mohammed’s stomach. It was considered one of the most painful ways a person could die, and victims could languish for many hours in unbearable agony until their bodies finally succumbed. As far as Harvath was concerned, it was still too good for Mohammed bin Mohammed.

He was contemplating kneecapping the al-Qaeda terrorist, when a noise from the veranda caught his attention.

Having affixed a makeshift pressure bandage to the wound in the dog’s chest, Harvath gently slung the enormous beast over his shoulders and stepped right over Mohammed’s twitching body as he carried it from the villa. Outside, he had the very real feeling that the only thing preventing a bullet from being fired at him from a rather bizarre weapon was that, hidden somewhere out in the dark night, the dying dog’s owner understood that Harvath was trying to save his animal.

One Hundred Five

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

And the dwarf?” asked Harvath as the meeting was drawing to a close. “What was his role in all of this?”

The president looked at his newly appointed director of National Intelligence, Ke

Wilson nodded his head and clearing his throat said, “We actually know very little about the man you saw in Gibraltar, but based upon your description of him, and in particular his two dogs, we believe he’s a figure known as the Troll.”

“The Troll?”

“Rumors of his existence have pervaded the intelligence world since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s said he deals in the purchase and sale of highly sensitive information. We think he’s the one who bought off Joseph Stanton to get the Athena locations in New York City.”

“What makes you think that?”

“After the sites were secured, a thorough sweep was conducted to search for any signs that the intelligence being gathered and analyzed there had been compromised.”

“And had it?” asked Harvath.

“Significantly. Everything the NSA had on their servers at those locations is gone.”

Nothing at this point surprised Harvath.

Removing a small silicon device from his pocket, Wilson held it up and said, “We found remnants of devices like this one here at each of the locations. They can be programmed to covertly transfer a server’s data to a remote location while making it look like the servers themselves are still carrying out their normal functions.”

“Which is why nobody at NSA suspected anything and the alarm was never raised.”

“Exactly. Our best explanation is that the Troll traded al-Qaeda the location of where Mohammed bin Mohammed was being held in exchange for them breaching the Athena Program locations and planting the devices for him. Which, by the way, self-destructed after the data was transferred and which is why we only found remnants.

“We also believe the Troll managed to get to someone inside the Defense Intelligence Agency who revealed where we were keeping Mohammed bin Mohammed. The circle of people in the know is pretty small, so we expect to have something soon.”

Director Wilson continued on, but Harvath was no longer listening. After killing Abdul Ali and Mohammed bin Mohammed, he thought he had fulfilled the promise he’d made Bob Herrington, but now there was one more name he was going to have to cross off his list-the Troll’s.