Foreign Influence

“Answer the question.”

“Screw the question,” interjected the Troll. “Kill him.”

“If you don’t zip it,” Harvath warned, “I’m sending you outside.”

“I started when I was sixteen.”

“And what did Lars think of your hacking?”

“What do you think he thought? He was Mr. Straight Arrow. He hated it.”

“But you kept doing it.”

“Is that why you’re here? Is this how companies get even now?” replied Lee. “Like casinos? Is this payback time? Are you the leg breakers?”

“We’re much worse than that,” said the Troll.

“Why didn’t you go to Jagland’s funeral?”

Lee looked at Harvath. “None of your business.”

Pointing to the dogs he said, “You can tell me, or I bring them over and put them back to work.”

“What about a doctor? I think I’m going to pass out.”

“As soon as you answer my questions, we’ll get you a doctor.”

Lee readjusted himself in the chair and winced. “His family hated me. It was bad enough for them that Lars was gay, but to have an Asian boyfriend was too much for them. They always made comments about searching for a cure for Lars’s yellow fever. They were the most hateful people I’d ever met. I brought some of Lars’s ashes up here so I could say good-bye to him alone.”

“What was his financial situation?”

“For a university professor I guess he was paid okay.”

“Did he have any enemies?”

“Lars? No. Not at all.”

Harvath watched his face very closely. “Did you have access to his university computer network?”

“No,” he replied. “I mean yes. Well, not anymore.”

“Which is it?”

“I told you he was lying,” said the Troll.

“I’m not. I just want to answer your questions so I can get a doctor.”

“So which is it?” asked Harvath. “Either you did or didn’t have access to his university network.”

“When I was his teaching assistant, I did.”

“What happened?”

“I did some things I shouldn’t have done.”

“Finally, some truth,” snapped the Troll.

“What kind of things?” asked Harvath.

“I made a stupid mistake that got traced back.”

“A mistake on a hack?”

Lee nodded. “It cost me my job at the university. Lars made me promise never to do it again.”

“But you kept on hacking, didn’t you?”

“It was dishonest, but in my mind I was promising not to make the same stupid mistake again, not to stop hacking.”

“So you lied to Jagland.”

“Yes. Now, please can I see a doctor?”

“I don’t believe that your access to Jagland’s network was cut off.”

“It was. He started changing his password and didn’t even access the university system from home.”

“So no one had access to it but Jagland?”

“And his TA. The one he hired when I left.”

“The woman with the glasses?” asked Harvath.

“That’s her. Dripping with talent, but cold. Ice cold.”

At that moment, Harvath realized that they had made a very big mistake. Rechecking Michael Lee’s wounds he said, “We’re going to get you to a doctor, but first I’m going to need you to do something for me.”

CHAPTER 33

MONDAY

Adda Sterk awoke from a strange dream. In it, she had purchased a very expensive new car, but couldn’t remember where she had parked it. There was something about the car that wouldn’t allow her to go to the police or friends for help. As she continued to search her neighborhood, she became more and more distraught.

When she opened her eyes, the nightmare should have been over, but it was just begi

The man standing over her bed was rough and very strong. His face was covered by some sort of mask. He placed a piece of tape over her mouth and bound her hands painfully behind her back. She felt certain that he was going to rape her until he bound her feet and then placed a hood over her head. She struggled, but it made no difference to her situation.

As he lifted her from the bed, he pulled off the top sheet and covered her with it. She wanted to believe that this was an act of decency on his part, an attempt to conceal her nakedness because of the goodness, the humanity in his soul, but she knew that wasn’t why he was doing it. He was doing it to conceal her altogether. And with that realization, she knew in her core that whatever was in store for her was going to be worse than rape.

Adda Sterk fought to purge her mind of the fear and to focus. If she knew who was doing this to her perhaps she could negotiate her way out of it. After all, she had only been the messenger. One didn’t kill the messenger.

The man carrying her paused near the glass doors to her balcony and her heart seized in her chest. He was going to drop her to the pavement!

The man then bent down and picked something up with his other hand. They were close to her desk. Was it her laptop? Was that what this was about? Did he want information? Maybe she would be able to bargain with him after all.

In the hallway, he moved quickly past the elevator and into the stairwell. He was very strong indeed to be able to carry her down so many flights of stairs. He was obviously being careful too. He hadn’t risked the elevator. The chance he could have bumped into a neighbor, even at this early-morning hour, would have been too great. In addition to being strong, he was intelligent, or at least experienced.

If only she had been more attractive, she might have also been able to use her body to entice the man to spare her life, but she had been born with neither good looks nor an attractive physique. The only thing God seemed to have blessed the teaching assistant with was an incredible mind.

That said, how had this man found her? As an average citizen, she had no value as a kidnap victim. He, or the people he was working for, somehow knew what she really did for a living and therefore understood her true value. And for that to have happened, somewhere along the line, despite all of her safeguards to prevent this very thing, she had made a mistake.

In the parking structure, she was placed facedown inside a van with a sliding door. The man bent her legs upward and secured the restraints around her ankles to those around her wrists. The vehicle’s metal floor was cold and the thin sheet did little to insulate her body.

There was a faint, lingering odor as well. Something she vaguely recognized. As her lungs constricted and she began having trouble breathing, she knew what it was-dog hair. Underneath the hood, her eyes wide with terror, Sterk’s greatest fear rushed to the front of her mind. She was going to suffocate to death.

After leaving the garage, the van made so many turns she would have given up trying to follow its path had she been paying attention. Instead, she was trapped within a horrific nightmare. She felt a warm, wet sensation grow beneath her stomach and realized that she had wet herself.

Outside the van’s thin metal sides, she could hear the din of morning traffic. She wanted to scream. She wanted to yell for someone to save her, but even without the hood and tape over her mouth she would have been unable. She was in the midst of a full-blown asthma attack.

When the van pulled into the empty warehouse on the outskirts of the city, Sterk was only semi-conscious. The pungent scent of urine and sweat greeted Harvath as he opened the vehicle’s door. The fact that she wasn’t moving told him something wasn’t right.

Hopping inside, he pulled back the sheet and snatched off her hood. He tried to hold her head up, but it just lolled to the side.

“And you told me I went too far with Lee,” admonished Nicholas from just outside the van.

Harvath tore the tape from her mouth and checked her breathing and vital signs. She was on the verge of death.