Hidden Order: A Thriller (42 page)

“Sir, I understand you were unconscious. I’d like you to follow this light with your eyes.”

Harvath took out his credentials. “I’m fine. Please go help someone else.”

The EMT treating Cordero looked at his colleague and said, “I got this. Don’t worry.”

The man nodded and went off to treat the next victim of the blast.

Cordero looked over at Harvath. “You saved my life.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m alive. A little bit beaten up, but alive. You, though, look terrible.”

Harvath reached up and touched his forehead. When he drew his fingers away, they were slick with blood.

“I’m good,” Cordero said to the EMT. “Why don’t you see to my partner for a minute here.”

Partner.
It hurt his sides to laugh, but Harvath did anyway. “What the hell happened?” he said. It was a rhetorical question.

“Our guys have cross-trained with the Israeli police and military for years. We always wondered when we’d see our first suicide bomber. I guess we don’t need to wonder anymore.”

Harvath looked at the EMT. “Do you have a pair of forceps by any chance?”

The man looked at him askance for a moment and then removed a pair and handed them to him. He placed his hand gently on Cordero’s arm and had her tilt a little bit to her right. Using the forceps, he managed to extract a deformed metallic object from the wall behind her.

“Ball bearing?” she asked.

Harvath shook his head. “It looks like lead. I think it’s supposed to be a musket ball.”

Cordero closed her eyes and shook her head. “How many dead?”

“Ten? Twenty? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, there’s scores more wounded. Are you okay, though?”

She looked at the EMT, who nodded and said, “She’s going to be fine.”

Cordero then looked at Harvath. “All the macho bullshit aside, are you sure
you’re
okay?”

Harvath looked at the EMT, who shrugged and said, “You got your lights turned out. You should let us transport you to the hospital so you can get a full workup.”

“Not really a big fan of hospitals,” he replied.

“You took a good blow to your head,” the EMT stated. “I’m not kidding. You really should let us take you in.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Sir, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Harvath forced a smile and held up his fist. “Now how many fingers am I holding up?”

Cordero shook her head.

“It’s up to you,” the EMT said. “I can’t force you to go.”

Harvath looked around. The devastation was amazing. “And here we were so sure it was going to be a sniper.”

“We were half right,” she replied, picking up the forceps with the deformed lead ball. “How many of these things do you think were packed in that suicide vest? Hundreds? Thousands?”

Harvath had no idea. “Almost done?” he asked the EMT.

“Just about,” the man responded as he affixed the gauze over Harvath’s left eyebrow and taped it in place. “Now we’re done.”

He thanked the man, and after he and Cordero signed off on paperwork refusing to be transported to the hospital for further evaluation, the EMT stood up and moved on to treat other people.

“Now what?” Cordero asked.

“Pretty serious crime scene. Multiple homicides. I’d imagine you want to investigate.”

“No,” she said, looking at how filthy she was. “You know what I want? I want to change my clothes, hug my son, and have a drink.”

He understood how she felt. They were both in shock.

“You want company?” he asked.

Cordero looked at him.

“For the
have a drink
part.”

He didn’t need to clarify his remark. She knew what he meant.

“I’d like that,” she replied.

Harvath helped her to her feet, and they leaned against each other for a moment. It felt good. It also felt wrong. They shouldn’t be going for a drink. They should be working this crime scene, trying to find clues, something that would lead them to who had done this so that they could prevent any further deaths.

He also knew that this entire investigation had gone to a completely new level. This was beyond a homicide investigation now. This was going to be classified as terrorism. Boston PD, the FBI, ATF, DHS, all the alphabets in the soup were going to be involved. They would comb every square millimeter of space looking for clues, and they would bring to bear the most sophisticated technology available.

This wasn’t the place for them now. If something broke, they’d be notified. Besides, after what they had just been through, cheating death like that, they needed some downtime. Nevertheless, Harvath felt guilty about leaving.

Cordero seemed to be able to read his thoughts.

“This wasn’t our fault,” she said.

She was right, but it didn’t change the way he felt. This was the first time that they had been ahead of the killers, but it hadn’t made any difference. It hadn’t stopped anything. There were even more people dead now.

They walked in silence, showing their credentials when they had to duck under crime scene tape to get out of the blast area.

Just past where Betsy Mitchell had been detonated, they stopped at one of the corpses. It had been covered with a plastic tarp. Cordero leaned over and pulled it back. It was a mass of cloth and bloody flesh. There was no human form to it all. The man had been so close when the explosion
happened. The only possible means of identifying him was the half-melted nameplate that still read
KACZYNSKI.

Cordero lowered the tarp. “He was a good cop,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion. “A
really
good cop.”

“We’re going to get the people who did this. I promise you.”

She turned and faced him. “How can you promise something like that?”

“You wanted to know what I do? What I
really
do? That’s what I do. I
get
people. And I promise you, I
will
get the people who did this.”

H
arvath’s clothes were filthy. There were bits and pieces of things on them that neither he nor Cordero wanted to identify.

They spent twenty minutes looking for Sal, hoping they could grab some of the extra clothing he had in his vehicle. His cell phone was off and he wasn’t responding to any calls over the radio. They figured he was either with the head of the homicide unit, or more than likely debriefing with the FBI. It wasn’t a big deal. At least Cordero knew he was okay. His had been the first face she had seen after the explosion. In the chaos, he had helped her to her feet and then helped get her to a safe area. He had even found the EMT for her before she had sent him back to find Harvath.

When they got to her car, Harvath asked her if she was okay to drive. She nodded.

“I guess if you want to drop me at my hotel,” he said, “I’ll change into my old clothes there.”

“I have clothes I think will fit you,” she replied. “That is, if you don’t think it’s too weird.”

“No, I don’t think it would be too weird at all.”

At any other time, Harvath would have turned her invitation into a joke about an offer to wear her clothing, but he knew that wasn’t what she was inviting him to do. It was an incredibly vulnerable moment for her, and he treated it and her with all the respect that it deserved.

They drove through the Boston streets in silence. There wasn’t much to say. Not after what had just happened.

It was a goofy analogy, but as they got closer and closer to her house, Cordero was like a knight letting one piece of armor fall away at a time. You could almost hear them clanking onto the asphalt and receding behind them as they drove.

As each piece fell, she softened, and Harvath saw a different side of her, something he hadn’t even noticed over wine at dinner. The take-no-prisoners cop was sexy, but the woman beneath was even more so. It was like watching her turn into a completely different person. Which was exactly what was happening. She was shifting into becoming a mother, a daughter, and simply a person. The transformation was captivating. It was a depth he had never really appreciated in the women he had known before.

They arrived at her home and she parked her car in the garage. It was an attractive three-flat made from heavy blocks of stone.

“Is the whole place yours?” he asked.

Cordero nodded. “The whole building’s mine. I rent out the ground floor unit, Marco and I are on the second floor, and then my parents have the top.”

“Whose watching Marco now?”

“I’m guessing it’s my mom. Dad has probably already gone to bed.”

She checked the mail on her way in and then led Harvath up to the second floor. Just inside the front door, there was a closet with a small gun safe. Unloading her primary and backup weapons, she tucked them inside along with her cuffs, her badge, and her credentials.

“You don’t keep something next to the bed?” he asked.

“I absolutely do,” the detective replied. “Just not this one. Racking a twelve-gauge shotgun sounds a lot more intimidating than racking a Glock.”

Harvath smiled. He liked her, more than just a little bit. The female
detective smiled back and led him into the living room, where her mother was watching TV.

She made the introductions in English and then spoke to her mother for a few moments in Portuguese. He had no idea what they were talking about but assumed, by the look on the older woman’s face, that she was giving her a quick rundown on everything that had happened. She seemed like the type who would try to spare her mother any unnecessary worry and had probably watered down a lot of what had transpired. At the end, both women had looked at Harvath and the mother had appeared impressed. He couldn’t tell why. He figured Cordero had told her how he had knocked her to the ground and thrown himself on top of her to protect her from the blast.

The female detective showed him down the hallway to the guest room.

“The guest bathroom is through that door,” she said. “There’s fresh towels in there. You can help yourself to anything you need. I’ll grab some clothes and leave them here on the bed for you.”

“Thank you,” said Harvath.

She lingered in the doorway. “You’re welcome.”

He smiled again. “I saw that look on your mother’s face.”

“What look?”

“At the end, when you were telling her what happened with the explosion and everything, how I knocked you to the ground. You didn’t have to tell her that.”

Cordero laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t.”

“What?”

“She asked me where you grew up. I told her Southern California. She said you look like a surfer. I told her that was impossible.”

“Why is that impossible?”

“Because you never learned how to swim.”

She was playing with him, and he liked it.

“There’s a neighborhood place around the corner that stays open late,” she added. “We can get a drink and something to eat there.”

“What about Marco?” he asked.

“My mother will stay. Now hurry up and take a shower. I’m getting hungry.”

 • • • 

Cordero really put the “guest” in guest bathroom. There were razors, mouthwash, combs, everything he could possibly need. After taking a quick shower and grabbing a shave, he stepped out of the bathroom to find she had left clothes on the bed for him as promised. For the most part, it all fit pretty well.

After getting dressed, he threaded his holster through his belt, double-checked his weapon, and then put on the jacket she had picked for him. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He thought his pistol would print through the material, but it didn’t. All in all, she had done very well.

He transferred the contents of his pockets into the clothes he was now wearing, exited the guestroom, and walked up to the front of the apartment.

He made small talk with the detective’s mother until Lara emerged from her room wearing jeans, boots, and a very flattering top. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had gone light on the makeup, focusing mostly on a shade of lipstick that drew attention to her attractive, full lips.

“It all fits,” she said. “You look good.”

“Thank you. So do you.”

“Are we ready to go?”

“What about that hug for your son?”

Cordero smiled. “I gave him one while you were in the shower, but I do want to kiss him goodbye. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Sure. I’d love to.”

Harvath followed her down the hall, past the guest room to a small room off the master bedroom. With enormous stuffed bears, airplanes suspended from the ceiling, and bright blue walls, it was the perfect little boy’s room. And asleep in his race car bed, complete with rails that made sure he didn’t fall out, was the perfect little boy.

Marco had sandy blond hair and was tan like his mother. He had cheeks that probably got pinched, a lot. He looked so peaceful, so unaware of what had happened in the world tonight. It was the way it should be. Harvath was immediately taken by the little guy. He was even cuter than the photo Cordero had shown him.

As she walked in to kiss her son, Harvath’s eyes scanned the shelves above the little boy’s bed. There were lots of great children’s books, a bunch of stuffed animals, several Fisher Price vehicles, and something that stopped Harvath’s heart cold.