The First Commandment

CHAPTER 52

When Al-Tal’s wife and twenty-year-old son returned from the mosque, Harvath was waiting for them. Wearing a thin, black ski mask, he slipped out of the stairwell into the dimly lit corridor and placed his silenced, 45 caliber Taurus 24/7 OSS pistol against the back of the son’s head.

When the mother opened her mouth to cry out, Harvath grabbed her by the throat. “If you make any sound,” he told her in Arabic, “I will kill you both.”

With the mother and son Flexicuffed and pieces of duct tape across their mouths, he relieved them of their house keys and let himself into the apartment. Before entering the building, Harvath had gone through the dossier, committing pertinent facts about Al-Tal’s residence and its occupants to memory.

He’d read enough about Al-Tal’s bodyguard to know that he was extremely dangerous. A former interrogator for the Syrian Secret Police, the man had routinely brutalized subjects by submitting them to horrific beatings and making them watch as he raped and sodomized their wives and children.

When Harvath crept into the apartment, he found the hulking bodyguard wearing a leather shoulder holster over a sweat-stained T-shirt. He was focused on a pan of greasy lamb’s meat he was heating over the stove in the kitchen. He looked up just as Harvath’s pistol spat two rounds into his forehead.

The hot pan clattered to the floor and Harvath made it into a short hallway just as Al-Tal’s nurse appeared. Undoubtedly, Al-Tal had chosen him because of his size. If push came to shove, the cagey intelligence operative had probably figured he could use the nurse as extra muscle.

Harvath struck him full in the face with the butt of his weapon, and the man folded like a cheap wallet.

Stepping over the nurse, Harvath swung into the rear bedroom. He found Al-Tal propped up in bed and affixed to an IV with a PCA, or patient-controlled anesthesia. It allowed him to regulate the flow of morphine for his cancer pain via a small device in his clawlike hand.

“Who are you?” the man demanded in Arabic as Harvath entered the room.

Before Harvath could answer, he noticed the gray-haired man’s right hand slip beneath his blanket. Harvath put three rounds into the bed, and Al-Tal immediately drew back his hand.

Harvath walked over to the bed and pulled back the blankets. He found both a pistol and a modified AK-47.

“Who are you?” Al-Tal spat again as Harvath removed the weapons. His eyes were narrow and dark, his voice arrogant.

“You’ll discover who I am soon enough,” said Harvath, knowing the man spoke flawless English.

Binding his hands and feet to the bed, Harvath gagged him and left the room.