The First Commandment

CHAPTER 72

On Twelfth Street, just south of Logan Circle, Harvath doubled back once more to make sure he wasn’t being followed and then crossed the street and entered the bank.

The bank officer was professional and polite. After checking Harvath’s ID and signature, she gestured for him to follow her to the vault that contained the safe-deposit boxes.

Harvath produced his key and in a synchronous fashion that he felt certain was designed to impress, the bank officer followed his lead, inserted her key, and turned it at exactly the same moment as if they were about to unleash a nuclear weapon.

Once the box was withdrawn, he was shown to a small, private room where the door was shut behind him and he was left alone.

Harvath lifted the lid off the box and removed the normal things one would expect to find — stock certificates, bonds, and legal papers. Beneath them was what Harvath had really come for.

As he stared at the items, he felt a strange sense of reluctant contentment for having had the foresight to be prepared for such an event. Actually, who was he kidding? It wasn’t foresight. He was just practical. His own government had turned on him repeatedly. What prompted him to keep the stash of items was a keen instinct for survival, plain and simple.

There had been the president’s kidnapping years ago, the more recent setup in Iraq with Al Jazeera, and now this. Each time the people he served had left him on the outside looking in. They had branded him a criminal and now, a traitor.

He had always known he was expendable. It was part of the territory, but to lump his family and friends in that category was unacceptable.

Every time he’d been forced to the outside, Harvath had had to muscle his way back in. He’d had to make the powers that be see that he was right and that they were wrong. This time, though, he didn’t know if things were that black-and-white. He wasn’t going to just sit back while someone stalked the people in his life. And for the first time ever, Harvath thought he might actually burn for what he was doing.

He’d always been about doing the right thing. He had pursued the correct course of action repeatedly throughout his career, often at his own peril, but with the knowledge that as long as he did what he felt was right, he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror and that was all that mattered.

Now, he was confronting something new — two versions of what was right: the president’s version and his own. The decision Harvath had to make, though, went much deeper than simply what was right. It was about protecting the people he cared about who had been put in harm’s way for no reason other than their love or friendship with him.

In Scot Harvath’s mind, there could be no bigger betrayal, no larger disloyalty than to allow these innocents to be harmed. Whatever the cost to himself, he had to stop that from happening.