Hidden Order: A Thriller (43 page)

Cordero spotted the look on his face instantly. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

Harvath leaned over the bed and grabbed the object off the shelf. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s just an airplane. Why?”

“Lara, where did this come from?” he demanded, as his other hand began to reach for his gun.

“It was a gift from Sal. What’s this all about?”

Placing the detailed display model of the Aerion Supersonic Business Jet back on the shelf, Harvath said. “I’ll explain in the car, but we need to move.
Now
.”

T
hey had argued the entire above-the-speed-limit drive to Sal Sabatini’s home. No matter how strenuously she defended him, though, Harvath knew she was entertaining the possibility. Over their years together, she had seen something, perhaps even several things that either she had chosen to ignore or that hadn’t made sense until this evening. The bottom line was that she was cooperating and that was the most important thing at this point. Coming to grips with it was something he could help her with later.

As he stood in the backyard and peered through the kitchen window, he could hear the phone ringing inside. After dialing the number a second time and letting it ring, Harvath signaled for Cordero to put her phone away. Sal was home and waiting for this to happen, in which case Harvath regretted showing up without the SWAT team, or he’d already offed himself, or maybe was someplace else entirely, preparing to kill the remaining hostage. Having looked in the garage and finding it empty, he figured Sal was dead or someplace else.

That said, he had fooled a lot of people for a long time and had been exceptionally well trained. For all Harvath knew, he could have parked
his car around the corner to give anyone considering entry a false sense of security. Harvath’s mind was doing flips trying to sort out all the possibilities. There was only one way to approach this—prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

With his weapon out and ready, he said to Cordero, “Good to go?”

She nodded, and removed her picks from the lock. He hadn’t seen any signs that the house had an alarm system. That was the funny thing about cops. Some were extremely security conscious, while there were others who were incredibly lax. Sal Sabatini, though, was also nuts, so who knew what his deal was.

Harvath counted in a whisper, backward. “Three, two, one.”

On one, she turned the handle and quietly pushed the door open so Harvath could slip inside. The kitchen was thirty years out of date, but clean and smelled faintly of spices. There was a door to the basement and Harvath made a quick command decision. They’d save that for last.

Grabbing one of the vinyl-backed, lime-green kitchen chairs, he tucked it under the knob and made sure the door was securely closed. If Sal or anyone else was hiding down there and tried to come back up, they were going to make quite a ruckus trying to get out.

With Cordero covering his six o’clock, Harvath swept in and cleared the dining room, living room, and the front hall closet. Next were the bedrooms, which he hated almost as much as basements. The tiny bungalow-style dwelling only had two bedrooms, which were clear. There was no one in the closets or under the beds. The bathrooms were also clear, as was a tiny attic space above that they accessed from a set of pull-down stairs. That just left the basement. Lord how he hated basements.

Weighing the odds that there might be a teachable, I-told-you-so-moment in the kitchen, he opened the freezer, but it was devoid of severed heads or any other body parts. Time to face the real music.

Cordero put her hand on his arm this time. “I’ll do it,” she said.

Harvath shook his head.

“He might not shoot me, but if this is all true, he’ll
definitely
shoot you. I’m doing this, so get out of my way.”

Removing the chair from underneath the doorknob, she flicked on
the lights and waited.
Nothing
. She then did something Harvath hadn’t thought of. Noticing there were no risers, she lay down on her stomach and peered between the first and second stair. After that, she used her flashlight to illuminate the far corners.

Satisfied, she stood up and went down to clear the basement. Two minutes later she was back in the kitchen.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Everything must have taken place via that warehouse.”

“I’ll bet he’s the one that tipped them to clear out before we hit it.”

Cordero didn’t comment. She was still having trouble wrapping her mind around everything. She felt guilty and disloyal, doubly so by agreeing to accompany Harvath and break into her partner’s home.

“Why don’t we see what else is here,” he said, heading back toward the living room, a small corner of which had been set up with a desk and appeared to function as the man’s home office.

Sal was meticulous. There were records and receipts for everything, just nothing attaching him to anything illegal. While Harvath had hoped against hope that there would be something here, he wasn’t surprised. A detective would hopefully be much too smart to leave anything directly tying himself to a crime.

Harvath powered on the computer and waited for it to boot up. Once it did, he was greeted with a password screen.

“Try
REDSOXFAN7
,” Cordero said from behind him. “All caps. All one word. That’s what he uses at the office.”

Harvath entered the password and was granted access.

“It worked,” he said.

“I’m sure after all these years he knows mine, too.”

“What is it?”

“None of your business,” she replied.

“All caps? All one word?” he said as he tried to pull up Sal Sabatini’s recent Web browsing history. There was nothing there. It had all been scrubbed. There was nothing in his email history, either, though he doubted that was how Sal conducted clandestine communications. He would have received better training than that.

Harvath looked at his Word documents as well as his iTunes folders.
It was all very pedestrian and boring, right down to the wallpaper on his desktop. It looked like Sal had chosen the factory default, which was a little odd, as Harvath didn’t know anyone who didn’t monkey around with their desktop at least a little bit to try to make it more personal.

Going into the settings area, he opened the folder that held sample photos for the desktop. They were typical stock landscape shots. He then clicked over to the screen saver folder, and that’s when he saw it.

Cordero was looking through some of Sal’s books on the other side of the living room.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Harvath said. “Recognize this young lady?”

There were a series of shots of a Goth-type woman posing around headstones at the Granary Burying Ground. “That’s Brittany Doyle. The one you paid four hundred dollars to for her bracelet cuff.”

“From which we got a full and a partial print.”

“But if those were Sal’s prints, why didn’t we get a hit on them?”

“Because whatever prints the Boston PD has on file for Detective Sal Sabatini, they don’t belong to Sal Sabatini.”

She was about to ask who was capable of making prints disappear from the Boston PD database when her cell phone vibrated in her back pocket. Looking at the caller ID, she froze.

“Who is it?” Harvath asked.

Cordero held the phone up so Harvath could see. “It’s him. Sal.”

C
ordero activated the call and waited. She didn’t know what to say. How do you greet the man you’ve just learned is a cold-blooded killer? As it turned out, she didn’t have to say anything. He started the conversation himself.

“I’m sorry to have to do this over the phone,” he said.

“What are you talking about, Sal? Where are you?” she asked. In the background, she could hear what sounded like noises from the harbor.

“I wanted to say goodbye to you and Marco in person.”

“Goodbye? Why? Where are you going, Sal?”

“Lara, I know you’re in my house. That means you must know everything.”

Cordero covered the phone’s mic and quickly whispered to Harvath, “He knows we’re here.”

“We need to get out. There could be a bomb. Keep him talking.”

“Tell me why you did it, Sal,” she said as they moved out of the living room and through the dining room. “Why did you kill all those people?”

“You weren’t supposed to be hurt,” the man replied. “I love you and
Marco very much and I’m very angry about what happened tonight. You could have been killed.”

“You act like you didn’t know it was going to happen, Sal.”

“I didn’t. Betsy Mitchell was not my responsibility.”

“Whose responsibility was she, then, Sal?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

“Sal,” Cordero said firmly. “What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? What are you taking care of?”

The man was silent on the other end of the phone as Harvath and Cordero rushed out the kitchen door and into the backyard.

“Sal,” she demanded, “where’s the last hostage? Tell me. You can still make this right. Where’s Jonathan Renner?”

Finally, Cordero removed the phone from her ear.

“Where’s Renner?” Harvath asked. “Did he tell you?”

“No. He just hung up.”

“Damn it.”

“He said he was angry about what happened tonight, that I could have been hurt. He wanted me to know that Betsy Mitchell had not been his responsibility.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think somebody else was responsible for killing her,” she replied.

“Maybe suicide vests are someone else’s job. He didn’t deny killing the other victims, though, did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“We’ve got to find him. Where would he go for safety? Where do you think he’d try to hide?”

“I could hear ambient noise behind him,” she said. “I think he was at the harbor.”

“Is he running? Was he catching the ferry for Logan Airport?”

“He said he was going to ‘take care’ of the danger I was put in tonight. It sounded to me like he was going to take care of the person who put me in danger.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“I don’t know,” Cordero replied. “After that, he hung up.”

“He must have had some sort of monitoring system on his house or
his computer that alerted his phone when we came in. He’s blown and he knows it. We need to get to the harbor as fast as possible.”

“He could be anywhere.”

“I don’t think so,” Harvath stated as he led her down the driveway and back toward where they had parked her car. “I think they’re out of time and they’re pulling out all the stops. They’re going to kill Renner tonight, too.”

“But where?”

“What’s the last significant historical event that also happens to take place at the harbor?”

Cordero stopped as she realized what it was. “The Boston Tea Party.”

 • • • 

The pieces were all coming together for her and made so much sense now. How the killer had been able to avoid being picked up on any CCTV cameras, how he’d not left any clues behind at the crime scenes, even the crazy contraption at the Liberty Tree site, as Sal had studied engineering in school before switching to criminology and had remained fascinated by it.

But for every piece that fell into place, it came attached to a thousand questions. Harvath had explained what Swim Club was and even how they may have recruited Sal, but Cordero still didn’t understand why they would be kidnapping and killing people. It didn’t make any sense. And as much as she wanted it to, she knew she had to focus her energies elsewhere. Sal and the people he was working with needed to be stopped.

When she got in her car and the Bluetooth synched with her phone, she pulled into the street and activated the speaker. There was no way they could risk using the police radio or their mobile data terminals. Sal had access to those and she and Harvath didn’t want to tip their hand.

She called her commander and filled him in on everything as she raced toward the harbor. She then told him what they needed and reminded him again to keep everything off the police network. They absolutely had to assume that Sal was listening.

Harvath listened to the conversation, and no sooner had she disconnected
the call than his phone rang. It was Bill Wise. He was calling on his cell phone, rather than his blocked landline from D.C.