Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 7

There was no sign of a struggle. No torture. Salah sat on the couch in a gold and purple robe with his head tipped back. A corona of blood was splattered on the wall behind him. On the table was a highball, half-filled with what was probably his favorite bourbon. The TV was on. Probably had been for days.

Harvath stepped inside and closed the door. The scent of tea and spices was overpowered by the odor of death. He needed to make this quick.

Standing in the vestibule, he took everything in. The hit looked professional. Salah had been shot once in the head.

As no one had called the police, the killer had probably used a suppressed weapon. That ruled out Aisha’s husband and an act of passion.

Making his way into the master bedroom, Harvath noticed an unmade bed, Salah’s clothes over the back of a chair, and a woman’s clothes draped across a chaise near the window. Faint light glowed from the bathroom. Harvath had a bad feeling about what he was going to find inside.

Moving over to the door, he nudged it open. Aisha lay naked and dead in the tub. Someone had shot her once in the head, just like Salah. The tiles behind her were bright red with her blood, the bathwater a deep rose.

Stepping out of the bathroom, Harvath walked back through the apartment.

It was definitely a professional hit. Nothing appeared to have been stolen. Salah still wore his gold Rolex Daytona, the two Chagalls still hung in the living room, and all the jewelry he had purchased for Aisha, which she could never bring home, sat in a red velvet box on her dressing table.

The killer was not only professional but disciplined. This ruled out most, if not all, of the underworld and jihadist figures Salah conducted business with.

If any of them had had a beef with the smuggler, Harvath would have heard about it. Salah frequently abused their relationship in order to settle his business disputes. He knew there were certain clients that the United States would gladly take out for him.

In fact, the CIA sometimes scrawled AGFSA on the missiles its drones used for such assignments—A Gift From Salah Abaaoud.

Salah’s success rate in identifying and locating terrorist targets was why the CIA had taken his recent ISIS intel so seriously.

But now look at him, Harvath thought as he examined the body. He had definitely been here a couple of days.

So if it wasn’t a jealous husband, or a disgruntled business associate, who killed him?

The professionalism of the hit made it look like a state sponsor, carried out by some country’s intelligence service.

Harvath immediately ruled out any services allied with the United States. He had flagged Salah across the board. If MI6, the Mossad, or anyone like that had wanted him, it should have been brought to his attention.

Could it have been a Middle Eastern nation like Morocco, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia? Possibly, but they were pretty bad at projecting force much beyond their own borders. And if it were one of them, why would they expend that kind of effort over Salah? It didn’t make sense.

There were a lot more questions coming to his mind than answers. One thing, though, was certain. Salah was proving just as much a pain in the ass dead as he had been alive.

Harvath continued to carefully move through the apartment as he looked for clues. The last thing he wanted was to leave anything that would tie him to the scene. He wanted Belgian authorities focused on catching the real killer.

And whoever that was, he had chosen to splash Salah here, rather than at his home or his clinic. Why?

Based on the evidence, it looked like he had caught Salah by surprise. Having just had sex, he was watching TV and enjoying a drink, while his mistress took a bath. The assassin appeared to have only one goal — to kill him right where he found him.

But if that was the case, why not then turn and leave? Why walk back to the bathroom and kill Aisha? Time.

If he had just turned and left, it wouldn’t have taken Aisha long to find Salah’s body. Would she, the unfaithful wife, have called police? Maybe. Would she have screamed and drawn the attention of neighbors? It was possible, and a professional would have taken it all into consideration.

This was particularly true of someone who needed to get out of the country. The more time he had before the police even knew he was there, the better his chances, especially if he was leaving by plane or rail.

Pulling out his phone, Harvath took pictures of everything. GeoTagging the location, he transmitted the images back to his team in the United States. He included a message with it for his IT expert, Nicholas.

Known to global intelligence services as “The Troll,” Nicholas suffered from a condition known as primordial dwarfism. Though he stood less than three feet high, Nicholas was a digital savant who had built a name through the purchase, sale, and theft of highly sensitive black-market information.

He had made powerful enemies in his career. And though he had gone “straight,” his two enormous white Caucasian Ovcharka dogs were always at his side, just in case.

Professional job, Harvath’s message read. Possible foreign intel service. Pull surrounding CCTV footage. See if you can track the hitter.

Returning to the bedroom, Harvath removed the keys from Salah’s trousers and exited the apartment.

By the time he arrived back in Molenbeek, it was already dark and residents were at evening prayers. He decided to check Salah’s clinic first.

Unlocking the front door, he stepped over the pieces of mail and slipped inside. Salah’s personal office was in the back.

Harvath didn’t know what he was looking for. A professional hitter coming after Salah was one thing. A professional hitter coming after Salah, right on the heels of the attack in Anbar, was something entirely different.

Until he had reason to suspect otherwise, Harvath was going to consider the two events connected. You didn’t live very long in this line of work by believing in coincidences.

He made a quick pass of Salah’s office, but everything seemed to be in place. It didn’t look like anyone had been here at all.

Turning on the clinic computers, Harvath inserted a portable flash drive with a program that would allow Nicholas access. Once the program was uploaded, he removed the drive and headed for Salah’s house.

It was a bland, three-story brick structure. The ground floor, where Salah held meetings and received people from the neighborhood, was modestly decorated. The second and third stories were much more lavish.

The color scheme for these levels was similar to the robe Salah had been shot in — lots of purple and gold. Overstuffed couches sat on thick Persian carpets, accented by ornate chairs and heavy draperies. Paintings of plump, naked women and bowls of fruit adorned the walls. The musty air was laden with the sickly-sweet, overly perfumed smell of incense.

Harvath used his elbow to open a set of French windows and let in some air. Moving from room to room, he took note of what he saw.

Dirty breakfast dishes sat in the sink. A coffee cup rested on the windowsill in the bathroom. A three-day-old newspaper lay open on the dining room table. It didn’t look like anyone but Salah had been here since then.

Either the murder was revenge for something very far in Salah’s past, or he had been killed in order to keep him quiet.

Harvath was betting on quiet. But quiet about what?

There had to be something in the house that would tell him. Returning to the study, he opened Salah’s desk drawers and began going through his personal papers. Most of them were written in Arabic.

It was a language Harvath had some proficiency in speaking, but reading was all but out of the question. He was going to have to bag everything and get it to an Agency translator.

He was coming back from the bedroom with a pillowcase when he got a text on his phone.

Recognize this guy? the message from Nicholas asked. A photograph followed.

It showed a thin, almost feminine-looking young man with pale skin and blond hair that was nearly white. He wore a short sleeve dress shirt and a narrow black tie.

No. Who is he? Harvath typed back.

Within seconds, his phone vibrated. It was a call from Nicholas.

“His name is Sacha Baseyev,” the little man said from more than three thousand miles away, back in northern Virginia. “Two years ago, the FBI debriefed a Russian intelligence officer seeking political asylum. He came ready to play. Baseyev was on a list of names he gave up.”

“Why are we talking about him?”

“I’m getting there,” Nicholas replied. “You remember the Beslan School siege and the Moscow theater massacre?”

Harvath knew them well. They were huge mass-casualty events.

Beslan was a horrific three-day attack in which 1,100 people were taken hostage. Three hundred eighty-five were murdered, 186 of them children.

The attack on the Moscow theater resulted in 900 hostages, 170 of whom were killed.

They were textbook cases studied by America’s premier counter-terrorism and hostage rescue personnel.

“I remember,” said Harvath. “It was carried out by Islamic terrorists. Chechens. Is there some other nexus?”

“A Deputy Director of the GRU, Russia’s largest foreign intelligence service, lost his wife and daughter at the theater that night. After a long leave of absence, some believe to hunt terrorists in the Caucasus, he returned to the GRU and received permission to establish a new unit.”

“What kind of unit?”

“An assassinations unit.”

“Were they part of the response at Beslan?” Harvath asked.

“No, they came after.”

“To hunt down the rest of the terrorists?”

There was a pause. “To recruit,” Nicholas replied.

“From among the survivors? The children?”

“Who better to send after the devil, than someone who had already been through hell? At least that was their thinking.”

Harvath had once recruited a hijacking survivor to help ID a terrorist, but that was different. What the Russians were attempting was insanity. “I’d be stunned if any of those kids were capable of being a functional adult — much less an operative who could follow orders in high-stress environments.”

Nicholas agreed. “All of the recruits washed out. They either buckled under the pressure, or were so aggressive that it bordered on psychotic.”

“Except for one, I’m guessing.”

“Correct. Sacha Baseyev. No matter what they threw at him, he excelled.”

“So, now we’re back to my previous question,” said Harvath. “Why are we talking about him?”

“Because I think he’s your assassin.”