Hidden Order

CHAPTER 62

The first person Harvath saw as he came to was Cordero’s partner. The man’s lips were moving but no sound was coming out. Harvath could hear what he thought was the rustle of the detective’s Boston PD nylon windbreaker. He soon realized that it was the rush of blood pounding in and out of his ears.

As the detective’s voice became discernible, it was accompanied by a loud ringing.

“Are you okay?” Sal yelled.

The man might as well have been yelling across the Charles River. Harvath could barely make out what he was saying, but he got the gist of it. He nodded and waved him off as he sat up and looked for Cordero.

It smelled like gasoline and burnt flesh. There were fires burning everywhere. The ground was littered with bodies and broken glass.

Sal was about to leave him and Harvath reached out and grabbed his arm. “Is she okay?” he asked. “Where’s Lara?”

A triage area had been set up near a row of ambulances. EMTs were working their way through the dead and wounded, assessing who needed immediate care, who needed immediate transport, and who was beyond being helped. Through his blurred vision, he could just make out Cordero, who was being examined.

The male detective waved over one of the other EMTs, who gave Harvath a quick assessment and then helped him to his feet and walked him over to where Cordero was sitting.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he was helped into a sitting position next to her.

“Sir,” the EMT said to Harvath, “I need to ask you some questions.”

“I’m fine. Go take care of everyone else.”

“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.”