Foreign Influence

“Her purse is on the front seat,” said Harvath. “Get it.”

Nicholas climbed up into the van, retrieved the purse, and brought it back. Harvath unzipped the bag and dumped its contents on the floor. He found her inhaler, shook it, opened her airway, and injected the inhalant. Because he was administering it to her without her being able to actively breathe in the medication, he repeated the process two more times before pulling her from the van, cutting the restraint that bound her hands to her feet, and laying her on the cement floor.

When her breathing began to normalize, he picked her up and moved her to the center of the facility where he secured her to a column and waited for her to fully regain consciousness.

The first person she saw was Michael Lee. He lay with his legs akimbo and his arms bound behind another support column. His trousers were tattered and he was covered in blood. To his left stood two enormous dogs, their faces also covered in blood. Sterk knew who the beasts belonged to. Had she any question, it was all but settled when the little man waddled into her field of vision and spoke.

“You are much more intelligent than I ever gave you credit for,” said the Troll as he came closer. “Here I thought Tsui was some little hacker operating out of his parents’ basement somewhere. I was obviously very wrong. I shouldn’t have let my prejudice get the better of me.”

Sterk turned her eyes away.

“Why so shy, my dear? Don’t you want to see what you have accomplished? Granted, as friends remind me, I wasn’t very pretty to begin with, but I’m downright hideous now, wouldn’t you agree?”

The woman who had built a burgeoning intelligence dynasty as Tony Tsui remained silent.

“Own it!” the Troll screamed. “Look at me and own what you have done!”

Sterk looked up at him and as she did a tear rolled down her left cheek.

“Oh that’s good,” said Nicholas. “That’s very, very good.”

With a calm and perfectly placid expression, he drew back his small arm and struck her across the side of the head with the wrench he had removed from the van’s emergency toolkit. Harvath, who was standing behind Sterk, looked at Nicholas and drew a hash mark on the dusty support column she was tethered to.

“My, what a horrible gash,” said Nicholas as he studied the wound he had inflicted upon her.

Sterk had never had any of the bones in her face broken, but she was fairly certain that her cheekbone had just been shattered. “You like to hit women. You’re pathetic.”

The Troll wound up and hit her again, this time on the other side. Sterk cried out from the intensity of the pain.

Harvath ticked off another hash mark on the column.

“You’ve been a very, very bad girl, Adda,” said Nicholas as he hit her again.

Harvath put yet another hash mark on the board and was fairly certain the little man was going to start popping stitches.

Blood was rolling freely down both sides of her face. “I hope the woman I sent was a good lay, because she was obviously a terrible assassin.”

Nicholas was about to hit Sterk again, but he stopped. Michael Lee had been right about her; about both her asthma and her pride.

He dropped the wrench, and without a hint of irony, smiled and said, “Now we can speak freely.”

“If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “get it over with.”

Nicholas got a considerably good laugh out of that. “Kill you? You’re worth much more to me alive than dead.”

Sterk looked at him.

“I have big plans for you. First I’m going to cut out your tongue and seal your rather bland face inside an iron mask. Then I’m going to sell you to an unusually perverse Saudi prince who will chain you outside his tent in the middle of the desert, naked. Between the Arabs and the camels, you’re going to be the belle of the Bedouin ball.”

“And the award for S &M fiction goes to the man with the world’s smallest penis,” said Sterk.

Nicholas lunged for his wrench and struck the woman again. This time he tore open a wound along her forehead.

Harvath tallied his fourth hash mark. Nicholas would be allowed only one more swipe at her before he stepped in.

The Troll set the wrench down, quietly this time. “Do you know that man across from you?”

The woman didn’t reply.

“Of course you do. That’s Michael Lee,” Nicholas continued. “He’s the man you set up to take the fall as Tony Tsui if the heat ever got too close to you.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Do I need to pick the wrench back up, Adda? Or perhaps you would like to meet my dogs?” Nicholas snapped his fingers and the dogs began growling. “In fact, I’m going to even go so far as to suggest that the untimely demise of Lars Jagland wasn’t an accident, but that he somehow stumbled on to what you were up to and you killed him.”

To frighten the woman, Lee had been bound to the other column facing her. And in order to make him look like a real hostage, which in part he was, and also to make sure he didn’t say anything he shouldn’t, Harvath had placed a piece of duct tape across his mouth. The man now struggled against it. His eyes bulged as he cursed her and yelled from behind the tape.

“I agree with you. I think Lars was probably murdered, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I don’t believe you,” said the Troll. “I think he discovered what you were up to and you killed him. Didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I have to hand it to you. The Tsui persona was exceptional. You not only had me fooled, but you covered your tracks quite well. And the icing on the cake was positioning Michael Lee to take the fall if things ever got bad. Brava.”

“I didn’t kill Lars,” Sterk insisted.

“But you’re not denying you set up Michael, are you?”

Sterk said nothing.

“I have no reason to believe anything you say. You tried to have me killed. What’s one more?”

Sterk remained silent.

“You always have a fallback, don’t you?” said Nicholas. “When the assassin you sent after me failed, you implicated me in the bombings in Rome. What about Paris? Are my fingerprints going to surface there too?”

At that moment, something in the woman’s face shifted.

Nicholas motioned his dogs over. “You really have been a very, very bad girl.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Sterk demanded.

“That depends on how you answer my questions.”

CHAPTER 34

Is there another assassin looking for me?” asked Nicholas.

Sterk didn’t respond, and Nicholas bent down and picked up the wrench again.

“No,” she responded.

“None at all?”

“I’m sure you have plenty of enemies, but when Leveque’s woman in Spain failed to return, I assumed you had killed her and had gone deeper to ground.”

“So you moved to plan B: implicating me.”

The woman shook her head. “Alive or dead, you were always going to be implicated.”

“Why? Why implicate me?”

“My employers wanted a diversion.”

“Who hired you?”

“Someone I fear much more than you.”

Nicholas tapped the head of the wrench in his tiny palm. “I’ll give you one more chance.”

Sterk shook her head.

Nicholas brought back his tiny arm and swung.

The wrench met its target and blood began to pour from a tear behind the woman’s ear.

Harvath tallied his fifth and final hash mark on the column and stepped out from behind her. It was time for him to take over. Producing a roll of duct tape, he tore off a piece and placed it across her mouth. He then put the bag back over her head as Nicholas said to Sterk, “Oh my. Things are about to get very bad for you indeed.”

Harvath cut the rope binding her wrists to the support column, stripped the sheet from her naked body, and carried her back to the van. He had no idea what had triggered the asthma attack the first time. He suspected it was stress, though it could have been something else. Either way, he was determined to re-create the circumstances as closely as possible to bring about another one.