The First Commandment

“Did he make small talk with you at all? Did he mention where he was staying, anything like that?”

“Not that I can remember.”

At this rate, Harvath was quickly coming to the end of possible questions he could ask.

Then Ramirez said, “Wait a second. He asked me for directions. It was an address for a real estate office. It was near here, but I can’t remember which one. We talked about walking versus driving there. I told him that if he was already parked, he’d probably be better off walking it than trying to find a new spot once he got there.”

Having remembered the crucial piece of information, Ramirez’s broad face was cleaved with a wide grin.

As Harvath accepted a phone book from the bank manager, he wondered how many real estate offices there could be in a resort town like Lake Geneva.

Chapter 112

When Rick Morrell and the members of his Omega Team arrived in the village of Fontana, they split into two squads and, posing as FBI agents, interviewed Todd Kirkland and Jean Stevens simultaneously.

Neither of them was able to provide any concrete leads to Scot Harvath’s whereabouts. Next, they visited the bar and restaurant where Harvath had been the night before, Gordy’s Boathouse. While the waitress remembered serving Harvath once Morrell had shown her his picture, she hadn’t spoken with him other than to take his order.

With only a handful of hotels in the village, Morrell and his team got to work trying to figure out where Harvath was staying. They started with the hotel in closest proximity to Gordy’s Boathouse, the Abbey Resort.

Very quickly, the resort looked like it was going to be a bust. There was no one registered under the name of Scot Harvath, or any of his known aliases. None of the front desk staff recognized his photograph. It was the same with the bell staff.

Morrell and one of his men were on their way back to the car when they passed the valet stand and handed Harvath’s picture around.

“Yeah, I know that guy,” one of the valets said. “I brought his car up to him this morning.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Morrell whipped out his cell phone and text messaged the rest of his team to come back from the other hotels they were investigating. They’d found where Harvath was staying.

With the valet’s recognition of Harvath, Morrell and his men began the slow process of piecing together where Harvath was in the hotel.

First, they sifted through the morning’s vehicle claim checks. Once they weeded out the ones the valet was certain hadn’t belonged to Harvath-two Porsches, an Audi, and a new Mercedes convertible-they took the rest inside.

With the help of the front desk manager, they were able to ascertain which checks belonged to guestrooms with guests who had checked in within the last twenty-four hours. Morrell doubted Harvath had been here longer than that.

The only guest to have checked in within the last twenty-four hours and to have had his vehicle go out first thing that morning was a man named Nick Zucker, registered in room 324. Having already established himself as an FBI agent pursuing a fugitive from justice, Morrell asked the front desk manager for a passkey.

The manager made up a keycard, and no sooner had he handed it to Morrell than he and his men moved quickly out of the lobby.

There was a housekeeping trolley at the end of the hallway, and flashing his badge, Morrell conscripted a young housekeeper. Outside 324, Morrell and his people took up positions on either side of the door, and he nodded for the housekeeper to knock.

She gave a loud rap, calling out, “Housekeeping.”

When no one answered, Morrell waved her away, slid his own keycard into the lock and opened the door.

He and his men swept inside, but the room was empty. They found a small toiletry kit in the bathroom with prescription medications labeled for a Nick Zucker from a pharmacy in Phoenix and a pilot’s uniform hanging in the closet that couldn’t possibly fit Harvath.

A small overnight bag contained a change of clothes, a worn paperback thriller, and a Sudoku workbook. Inside the workbook were several pictures of a man and his family, one of which showed him in his pilot’s uniform next to a plane with his teenaged daughter and son.

They’d made a mistake. Scot Harvath was not posing as Nick Zucker. Morrell had his men put everything back the way they’d found it.

They were halfway down the hallway when the front desk manager appeared and held up two additional keycards.

“I did a little more looking,” he stated when he reached Morrell. “Zucker checked in with another man named Burdic. According to their registration cards, they both work for the same aviation company. There was a third man who checked in at the same time; his name is Hans Brauner. He told the clerk last night that he would be paying for their rooms and also arranged for golf and lunch for them today.”

Burdic’s room was as useless as Zucker’s, and the one belonging to the supposed Hans Brauner had nothing. Morrell, however, knew they had zeroed in on Harvath.