The First Commandment

Chapter 122

JERUSALEM

Tracking down the puppeteer pulling Philippe Roussard’s strings began with a visit to Dei Glicini e Ulivella, the exclusive private hospital in Florence where payments from Roussard’s mother’s Wegelin amp; Company account had been made.

Harvath didn’t know what to expect. Part of him thought he might find a badly burned Adara Nidal sitting up in her hospital bed waiting for him, her silver eyes unmistakable behind a mask of charred flesh.

What he discovered was that the payments weren’t for Adara Nidal. Instead, they were for a male patient with a name Harvath had never heard before and who had recently up and left.

All Harvath’s suppositions had been wrong. Adara was not the person behind Roussard’s release from Gitmo and his subsequent attacks within the United States. It was somebody else-a man with a false name who had simply vanished.

The first person who entered Harvath’s mind was Hashim, Adara’s brother and Philippe’s uncle. But when the hospital administrator finished touring Harvath through the patient’s abandoned room and showed him into his office, Harvath realized how wrong he’d been in assuming Adara or her brother were behind the monster that had been Philippe Roussard. Sitting on the credenza behind the administrator’s desk was something that pointed to another person-someone far more complex, far more twisted, who had a reach long enough to fake his own death, even for a second time.

When asked about it, the administrator claimed it had been a gift from the patient whom Harvath was looking for. It was all the identification Harvath needed.

Harvath’s taxi cab pulled up in front of an old, four-story building in Jerusalem ’s popular Ben Yehuda district. The storefront was composed of two large windows crammed full of antique furniture, paintings, and fixtures. The gilded sign above the entryway read Thames amp; Cherwell Antiques, followed by translations in Hebrew and Arabic.

A small brass bell above the door announced Harvath’s arrival.

The dimly lit store was still packed with tapestries, furniture, and no end of faded bric-a-brac. It had been preserved exactly as it was on his first visit here years before.

He neared a narrow mahogany door and pulled it toward him to reveal a small, wood-paneled elevator. Pressing a button inside, he watched as the door closed and he felt the elevator rise.

When it arrived on the uppermost floor, the door opened onto a long hallway, its floor covered by an intricately patterned Oriental runner. The walls were painted a deep forest green and were lined with framed prints of fox hunting, fly fishing, and crumbling abbeys.

As Harvath walked forward, he remembered the infrared sensors placed every few feet and guessed that there still were pressure sensitive plates beneath the runner. Ari Schoen was one man who took his security very seriously.

At the end of the hall, Harvath found himself in a large room, more dimly lit than the shop downstairs. It was paneled from floor to ceiling, like the elevator, with a rich, deeply colored wood. With its fireplace, billiards table, and overstuffed leather chairs, it felt more like a British gentleman’s club than the upper-floor office of a shop in West Jerusalem.

Sitting up in a mechanical hospital bed near a pair of heavy silk draperies drawn tight against the windows was the man himself.

“I knew one of you would eventually come,” said Schoen as Harvath stepped into the room. He was even more hideously deformed than before, his nonexistent lips barely able to shape the words emanating from his charred hole of a mouth. “I assume Philippe is dead.”

Harvath nodded.

“How did you know it was me?” asked Schoen.

“Adara’s bank account at Wegelin.”

“The payments to the clinic,” mused Schoen, as medical instruments clicked and buzzed around him. “I think you’re lying, Agent Harvath. That was a completely clean alias I was registered under. There was nothing to tie anything back to me. It had never been used before and hasn’t been used since.”

“It wasn’t the alias, it was your whiskey,” Harvath said, pointing at the antique globe that hid Schoen’s bar beneath its hinged lid. “The 1963 Black Bowmore. ‘Black as pitch,’ you once told me. You must have thought very highly of the hospital’s director to have given him such an expensive present.”

Schoen raised his hand to brush the thought away as if it was nothing. “You are more intelligent than I gave you credit for.”

“Tell me about the other men you had released from Guantanamo. What was their connection to you?”

“There was no connection,” said Schoen with a laugh. “That was the point. They were background noise that Philippe could be lost in. They were randomly selected to keep anyone in your government’s intelligence services who might come investigating, guessing.”

“And the plot with the children?”