Takedown

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, Kenneth Wilson, and said, “Do you want to take this?”

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.

Once Wilson had wrapped up, the president asked Scot if he had any other questions. This was a relatively rare event. Because he was not always privy to the entire intelligence picture, there were many instances when he was unaware of the full impact of the success of his assignments. Sometimes, out of sheer gratitude, he was allowed access to information that otherwise never would have been made available to him. On days when this magnanimous flow of intelligence occurred, Harvath was able to forget, if only for a moment, how fed up he was with Washington politics. Today had turned out to be just such a day.

The president didn’t have to gather his top people to spend an hour and a half spelling everything out and answering all of Harvath’s questions, but he had, and Harvath appreciated it. He did, though, have one final question. “How is Amanda?”

Rutledge smiled and said, “She’s doing much better, thank you.”

“A collapsed lung is pretty serious.”

The president nodded. “I think the death of her friends and so many of the agents on her detail was harder for her to handle than anything else.”

“I’m sure it was,” replied Harvath.

“I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Always uncomfortable with the president’s fulsome praise of his efforts on behalf of his country, Scot thanked him for both his time and his candor and then prepared to stand up.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to stay for a few more minutes,” said Rutledge as he excused the rest of the people in the Oval Office.

Once they had gone, the president removed an envelope from his desk and handed it to Harvath.

“What’s this?”