Hidden Order: A Thriller (40 page)

When the voice on the digital recorder asked her to repeat the rhyme she had been taught, she did, repeating it perfectly, word for word. Once he was satisfied that she was ready, he had loaded her into the vehicle and they departed.

She lost track of how long they had been driving. It could have been an hour. It could have been ten. All she could think about was doing everything he demanded, exactly as he had demanded it. All she wanted was her freedom. All she wanted to do was go home.

The vehicle turned for the umpteenth time, but began to slow and then eventually pulled over to the side and stopped. The man with the mask joined her in the back of the van and removed her hood. His eyes bored into hers for several moments before he produced the digital recorder and pressed
PLAY
. The words she had first heard it speak poured forth again.

“Please repeat after me. Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

Betsy dutifully complied. The man then rewound the recording and played it again. Betsy repeated the phrase again. In fact, she kept repeating it. It was her mantra. If she said it enough times, she would be free.

The man in the mask produced a knife and cut the nylon EZ Cuffs from her wrists and ankles. Then tapping her chest to remind her of the camera, he slid open the door and gestured for her to step out onto the sidewalk.

Wherever in the world she was, it was evening. That was all she knew. Her instructions had been quite specific. With her hand first in the right pocket of her coat and then the left, she began walking away from the van.
As she walked, she continued to repeat the rhyme over and over again, hoping the man in the mask hadn’t lied to her.

“Lucy Lockett lost her pocket, Sally Fisher found it. Not a penny was there in it, just a ribbon ’round it.”

 • • • 

“Here you go,” Cordero said, handing Harvath a bottle of water she had just purchased for him. “See anything new?”

Harvath took the water from her and screwed off the cap. “Nothing yet. What did the SWAT commander say?”

“He asked the same thing he did an hour ago. How much longer do we think this is going to go on.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him not to worry. His team will be home for Christmas.”

Harvath smiled. At least she still had her sense of humor, but it was fading. It had taken all day to set the operation up, most of it with the FBI going back and forth with their headquarters in Washington as to how everything should be handled. A lot of time, in Harvath’s opinion, had been wasted on where everyone should be placed, how many Boston PD versus FBI agents should be in plainclothes, et cetera. By the time everything was settled, it was already late afternoon.

“These kinds of ops aren’t easy,” he said, referring to Cordero’s interaction with the SWAT team leader. “Scanning rooftops and windows is mind-numbing work. You can burn out fast and lose your edge. The commander is just looking out for his guys.”

“Like I said, they’ll all be home for Christmas.”

Harvath nodded. Everyone was on edge, their nerves a bit frayed. They were anxious for something to happen. And unlike other types of stakeouts, they had to keep moving.

Cordero’s partner had helped coordinate changes of clothes so she and Harvath could rotate in and out of the area with different appearances. He was also coordinating the plainclothes cops and FBI agents.

There had already been a couple of false alarms as people bearing a
similar resemblance to Jonathan Renner or Betsy Mitchell had passed by. It had sent everyone into high-alert mode, only to turn out that it wasn’t the people they were looking for.

As the evening wore on, Harvath could see the fatigue begin to eat away at the corners of Cordero’s mind.

“What if somehow we tipped our hand?” she asked. “What if they figured out we’re here?”

Harvath looked at his watch. “It’s still way too early for you to be going soft on me.”

“I’m not going soft. But what if I’m right?”

“You know, I once lay in a hole, not much bigger than the trunk of a car, for four days waiting for the right guy to go past. I didn’t have a café half a block away with cold sodas and a bathroom so clean, people from the third world would think they were at the Ritz-Carlton.”

“I guess it could be worse,” she admitted.

“Yeah. There could be snakes and truckloads of guys shooting at you.”

Cordero looked at him. “At some point, you and I are going to have a long talk about who you actually are.”

Harvath took a sip of his water and screwed the cap back on. “We’ll have to do it over coffee. You’ll need it to keep you awake.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.”

Harvath was just about to change the subject when a voice crackled over their earpieces. It was Sal.

“We just got a heads-up from a patrol officer in the area,” he said.

“What is it?” Cordero asked.

“Seems he found a couple of cards like the one you found in the warehouse.”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on,” said Sal. “I’ll get him on this frequency.”

A moment later, the male detective said, “You’re on with Detective Cordero. Go ahead.”

“Detective Cordero?” a voice said. “This is Officer Kaczynski.”

“What have you got, Kaczynski?”

“We were told to keep our eyes peeled for anything with a skull and crossbones on it with a crown on top. I’ve found several black cards with
the skull and bones on one side and the sentence
I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny,
followed by the letters
S.O.L
.”

Harvath tucked his water bottle into his pocket and looked at Cordero.

“What’s your location?” she asked the patrolman.

“I’m headed north on Devonshire, almost at Quaker Lane.”

She looked at Harvath and said, “He’s about half a block south.”

“There’s a whole bunch of these things, like a trail of bread crumbs. I’ve been picking them up in case your guys can get a print off one of them.”

“Officer Kaczynski,” Harvath interrupted. “Leave the rest of them. We need to know who is dropping them.”

“Okay, stand by. Let me see what I can do.”

Cordero started to move in Kaczynski’s direction, but Harvath gently grabbed hold of her arm. “Somebody may be trying to smoke us out. Let’s wait a second.”

“We may not have a second,” she said as she radioed the other teams and told them what was going on and to be ready.

Seconds later, one of the SWAT officers came over the radio and said, “I think we’ve got it. Looks like some kind of a homeless person, possibly female. Brown hair, heavy brown coat, dark pants. She’s dropping something from her pockets.”

“Can you see patrol officer Kaczynski?” Cordero asked.

“Roger that,” the SWAT officer replied. “He’s approximately ten meters behind her.”

“Kaczynski,” Cordero said over her radio. “Do you see a female homeless woman approximately ten meters ahead of you? Brown hair, brown coat?”

“That’s affirmative,” Kaczynski replied. “Not only can I see her, I can smell her. Sweet Jesus, it’s terrible.”

“Do not engage. I repeat. Do not engage. They may be trying to smoke us out,” the female detective ordered as she looked at Harvath. “What the hell is going on?”

“I’ve got no idea,” he said, “but I don’t like it. Something feels very wrong about this.”

Cordero radioed the other team members. “Everybody on your toes.
The woman in the coat might be a decoy. Keep your eyes peeled on our other ingress points. If one of our targets is being sent in, we don’t want to miss him or her.”

Harvath’s eyes continued to scan the area. He paid particular attention to the historical marker and kept looking toward Devonshire Street. Suddenly, he saw the woman in the brown coat.

Kaczynski’s voice came back over their earpieces. “This woman is crackers. I can hear her repeating some rhyme about someone called Lucy Lockett or something.”

“Officer Kaczynski,” Cordero warned. “Do not engage her. Is that clear?”

“Ten-four.”

“She’s headed our way,” said Harvath.

The female detective could see her now. The woman’s hair was a rat’s nest. She walked with her head down. Like many homeless people, she was overdressed for the warm weather in a winter coat.

“She’s almost to you,” said Kaczynski.

“We see her,” Cordero replied.

Both she and Harvath could now clearly see her reaching into her pockets, pulling out the black cards and dropping them in her wake.

Harvath’s feelings of unease were continuing to build. His gut was telling him
something
. He just couldn’t put his finger on it.

The woman walked like she was in a dream, mumbling as she moved forward, placing one foot in front of the next. Harvath had seen this before.
Where? Why was it so familiar?
The alarm bells were going off full force in his head now.

Cordero took a step in the direction of the woman. Harvath reached out and grabbed her arm again.

They watched as the woman stepped out into the street. As she did, a car speeding through the intersection slammed on its brakes. The woman looked up.

One of the SWAT team members watching through a spotting scope identified her first. “Target A. Target A. The woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell. All teams, the woman in the brown coat is Betsy Mitchell.”

Cordero shook off Harvath’s hand and began running. So did Officer Kaczynski.

Kaczynski got to Betsy Mitchell first, knocking her to the ground and throwing himself on top of her.

Harvath got to Detective Cordero just as the suicide vest Betsy Mitchell was wearing was remotely detonated.

“W
hat the hell was that?” Bill Wise asked as Ryan and McGee rushed to the hotel room window.

Ryan got there first. “It sounded like an explosion.”

“It sure as hell felt like one,” McGee added.

They could see an enormous, roiling fireball climbing up into the night sky. The shock wave had been so powerful, it had almost blown out their windows, and as best they could tell, they were a good four or five blocks away. Moments later, the sound of emergency vehicles racing to the scene began to fill the air.

“I hope that wasn’t a bomb,” said Wise. “That’s the last thing Boston needs. We should check it out.”

“No way,” replied McGee. “If it was a bomb, there could be a secondary waiting to go off as first responders get there. Besides, it’s not our problem.”

“Give it time,” Ryan stated as they stood looking out the window. “You’d be surprised how fast problems metastasize when Tom Cushing is around.”

“Speaking of Cushing,” Wise replied, “can we finalize everything now that we’re here?”

After interrogating Samuel, Wise had contacted Reed Carlton, who showed up with two rather large men and a female operative named Sloane. Samuel had admitted that he had a second target—a former Swim Club doctor named Jim Gage. While Sloane and one of the men were dispatched to take Gage into protective custody, Wise warned Carlton about Samuel and provided detailed instructions for where and how he should be held. He then shared what they had learned from the interrogation.

One of the most significant elements, but hardly the most surprising, was that Phil Durkin had held on to several covert programs after the Agency had ordered them shut down. He would go through the steps of firing everyone and closing up shop, but then he’d go back out and rehire the personnel he wanted while he shoved each operation further into the shadows, taking them all full black.

Through some untraceable funding source, he had managed to keep everything afloat and operational. Those who didn’t know anything figured Durkin was providing plausible deniability for his superiors. No one knew exactly how many programs he was overseeing, but the whisper on the black-ops side was that he had cobbled together his own shadow agency.

Bill Wise didn’t know how much of what Samuel shared was actual fact and how much was office gossip. Nevertheless, RUMINT, or rumor intelligence, was something any good operative was expected to be attuned to.

Another significant piece of intelligence was that Ryan’s old team was still active and still being led by a man named Tom Cushing. Samuel admitted to having conducted a handful of operations for them.

According to Samuel, Phil Durkin liked the way Cushing operated and had elevated his status in the black-ops community, feeding him more and more assignments and entrusting him with more and more responsibilities.

Cushing, though, wasn’t Bill Wise’s concern, at least he hadn’t thought
so until he asked Samuel if he knew anything about what was going on in Boston. That was when Ryan had stiffened.

When the interrogation was complete, Wise had asked to speak to her privately. When he confronted her, Ryan admitted that she and McGee had traced Cushing, along with two other team members, there. Now that they had arrived in Boston, Wise wanted to know how they were going to nail them.

Ryan stepped away from the window and pulled a large envelope from her bag. “We’re going to nail them with this.”