Foreign Influence_A Thriller Read online

  “No,” he replied. “I mean yes. Well, not anymore.”

  “Which is it?”

  “I told you he was lying,” said the Troll.

  “I’m not. I just want to answer your questions so I can get a doctor.”

  “So which is it?” asked Harvath. “Either you did or didn’t have access to his university network.”

  “When I was his teaching assistant, I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “I did some things I shouldn’t have done.”

  “Finally, some truth,” snapped the Troll.

  “What kind of things?” asked Harvath.

  “I made a stupid mistake that got traced back.”

  “A mistake on a hack?”

  Lee nodded. “It cost me my job at the university. Lars made me promise never to do it again.”

  “But you kept on hacking, didn’t you?”

  “It was dishonest, but in my mind I was promising not to make the same stupid mistake again, not to stop hacking.”

  “So you lied to Jagland.”

  “Yes. Now, please can I see a doctor?”

  “I don’t believe that your access to Jagland’s network was cut off.”

  “It was. He started changing his password and didn’t even access the university system from home.”

  “So no one had access to it but Jagland?”

  “And his TA. The one he hired when I left.”

  “The woman with the glasses?” asked Harvath.

  “That’s her. Dripping with talent, but cold. Ice cold.”

  At that moment, Harvath realized that they had made a very big mistake. Rechecking Michael Lee’s wounds he said, “We’re going to get you to a doctor, but first I’m going to need you to do something for me.”

  CHAPTER 33

  MONDAY

  Adda Sterk awoke from a strange dream. In it, she had purchased a very expensive new car, but couldn’t remember where she had parked it. There was something about the car that wouldn’t allow her to go to the police or friends for help. As she continued to search her neighborhood, she became more and more distraught.

  When she opened her eyes, the nightmare should have been over, but it was just beginning.

  The man standing over her bed was rough and very strong. His face was covered by some sort of mask. He placed a piece of tape over her mouth and bound her hands painfully behind her back. She felt certain that he was going to rape her until he bound her feet and then placed a hood over her head. She struggled, but it made no difference to her situation.

  As he lifted her from the bed, he pulled off the top sheet and covered her with it. She wanted to believe that this was an act of decency on his part, an attempt to conceal her nakedness because of the goodness, the humanity in his soul, but she knew that wasn’t why he was doing it. He was doing it to conceal her altogether. And with that realization, she knew in her core that whatever was in store for her was going to be worse than rape.

  Adda Sterk fought to purge her mind of the fear and to focus. If she knew who was doing this to her perhaps she could negotiate her way out of it. After all, she had only been the messenger. One didn’t kill the messenger.

  The man carrying her paused near the glass doors to her balcony and her heart seized in her chest. He was going to drop her to the pavement!

  The man then bent down and picked something up with his other hand. They were close to her desk. Was it her laptop? Was that what this was about? Did he want information? Maybe she would be able to bargain with him after all.

  In the hallway, he moved quickly past the elevator and into the stairwell. He was very strong indeed to be able to carry her down so many flights of stairs. He was obviously being careful too. He hadn’t risked the elevator. The chance he could have bumped into a neighbor, even at this early-morning hour, would have been too great. In addition to being strong, he was intelligent, or at least experienced.

  If only she had been more attractive, she might have also been able to use her body to entice the man to spare her life, but she had been born with neither good looks nor an attractive physique. The only thing God seemed to have blessed the teaching assistant with was an incredible mind.

  That said, how had this man found her? As an average citizen, she had no value as a kidnap victim. He, or the people he was working for, somehow knew what she really did for a living and therefore understood her true value. And for that to have happened, somewhere along the line, despite all of her safeguards to prevent this very thing, she had made a mistake.

  In the parking structure, she was placed facedown inside a van with a sliding door. The man bent her legs upward and secured the restraints around her ankles to those around her wrists. The vehicle’s metal floor was cold and the thin sheet did little to insulate her body.

  There was a faint, lingering odor as well. Something she vaguely recognized. As her lungs constricted and she began having trouble breathing, she knew what it was—dog hair. Underneath the hood, her eyes wide with terror, Sterk’s greatest fear rushed to the front of her mind. She was going to suffocate to death.

  After leaving the garage, the van made so many turns she would have given up trying to follow its path had she been paying attention. Instead, she was trapped within a horrific nightmare. She felt a warm, wet sensation grow beneath her stomach and realized that she had wet herself.

  Outside the van’s thin metal sides, she could hear the din of morning traffic. She wanted to scream. She wanted to yell for someone to save her, but even without the hood and tape over her mouth she would have been unable. She was in the midst of a full-blown asthma attack.

  When the van pulled into the empty warehouse on the outskirts of the city, Sterk was only semi-conscious. The pungent scent of urine and sweat greeted Harvath as he opened the vehicle’s door. The fact that she wasn’t moving told him something wasn’t right.

  Hopping inside, he pulled back the sheet and snatched off her hood. He tried to hold her head up, but it just lolled to the side.

  “And you told me I went too far with Lee,” admonished Nicholas from just outside the van.

  Harvath tore the tape from her mouth and checked her breathing and vital signs. She was on the verge of death.

  “Her purse is on the front seat,” said Harvath. “Get it.”

  Nicholas climbed up into the van, retrieved the purse, and brought it back. Harvath unzipped the bag and dumped its contents on the floor. He found her inhaler, shook it, opened her airway, and injected the inhalant. Because he was administering it to her without her being able to actively breathe in the medication, he repeated the process two more times before pulling her from the van, cutting the restraint that bound her hands to her feet, and laying her on the cement floor.

  When her breathing began to normalize, he picked her up and moved her to the center of the facility where he secured her to a column and waited for her to fully regain consciousness.

  The first person she saw was Michael Lee. He lay with his legs akimbo and his arms bound behind another support column. His trousers were tattered and he was covered in blood. To his left stood two enormous dogs, their faces also covered in blood. Sterk knew who the beasts belonged to. Had she any question, it was all but settled when the little man waddled into her field of vision and spoke.

  “You are much more intelligent than I ever gave you credit for,” said the Troll as he came closer. “Here I thought Tsui was some little hacker operating out of his parents’ basement somewhere. I was obviously very wrong. I shouldn’t have let my prejudice get the better of me.”

  Sterk turned her eyes away.

  “Why so shy, my dear? Don’t you want to see what you have accomplished? Granted, as friends remind me, I wasn’t very pretty to begin with, but I’m downright hideous now, wouldn’t you agree?”

  The woman who had built a burgeoning intelligence dynasty as Tony Tsui remained silent.

  “Own it!” the Troll screamed. “Look at me and own what you have done!”

/>   Sterk looked up at him and as she did a tear rolled down her left cheek.

  “Oh that’s good,” said Nicholas. “That’s very, very good.”

  With a calm and perfectly placid expression, he drew back his small arm and struck her across the side of the head with the wrench he had removed from the van’s emergency toolkit. Harvath, who was standing behind Sterk, looked at Nicholas and drew a hash mark on the dusty support column she was tethered to.

  “My, what a horrible gash,” said Nicholas as he studied the wound he had inflicted upon her.

  Sterk had never had any of the bones in her face broken, but she was fairly certain that her cheekbone had just been shattered. “You like to hit women. You’re pathetic.”

  The Troll wound up and hit her again, this time on the other side. Sterk cried out from the intensity of the pain.

  Harvath ticked off another hash mark on the column.

  “You’ve been a very, very bad girl, Adda,” said Nicholas as he hit her again.

  Harvath put yet another hash mark on the board and was fairly certain the little man was going to start popping stitches.

  Blood was rolling freely down both sides of her face. “I hope the woman I sent was a good lay, because she was obviously a terrible assassin.”

  Nicholas was about to hit Sterk again, but he stopped. Michael Lee had been right about her; about both her asthma and her pride.

  He dropped the wrench, and without a hint of irony, smiled and said, “Now we can speak freely.”

  “If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “get it over with.”

  Nicholas got a considerably good laugh out of that. “Kill you? You’re worth much more to me alive than dead.”

  Sterk looked at him.

  “I have big plans for you. First I’m going to cut out your tongue and seal your rather bland face inside an iron mask. Then I’m going to sell you to an unusually perverse Saudi prince who will chain you outside his tent in the middle of the desert, naked. Between the Arabs and the camels, you’re going to be the belle of the Bedouin ball.”

  “And the award for S&M fiction goes to the man with the world’s smallest penis,” said Sterk.

  Nicholas lunged for his wrench and struck the woman again. This time he tore open a wound along her forehead.

  Harvath tallied his fourth hash mark. Nicholas would be allowed only one more swipe at her before he stepped in.

  The Troll set the wrench down, quietly this time. “Do you know that man across from you?”

  The woman didn’t reply.

  “Of course you do. That’s Michael Lee,” Nicholas continued. “He’s the man you set up to take the fall as Tony Tsui if the heat ever got too close to you.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Do I need to pick the wrench back up, Adda? Or perhaps you would like to meet my dogs?” Nicholas snapped his fingers and the dogs began growling. “In fact, I’m going to even go so far as to suggest that the untimely demise of Lars Jagland wasn’t an accident, but that he somehow stumbled on to what you were up to and you killed him.”

  To frighten the woman, Lee had been bound to the other column facing her. And in order to make him look like a real hostage, which in part he was, and also to make sure he didn’t say anything he shouldn’t, Harvath had placed a piece of duct tape across his mouth. The man now struggled against it. His eyes bulged as he cursed her and yelled from behind the tape.

  “I agree with you. I think Lars was probably murdered, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said the Troll. “I think he discovered what you were up to and you killed him. Didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I have to hand it to you. The Tsui persona was exceptional. You not only had me fooled, but you covered your tracks quite well. And the icing on the cake was positioning Michael Lee to take the fall if things ever got bad. Brava.”

  “I didn’t kill Lars,” Sterk insisted.

  “But you’re not denying you set up Michael, are you?”

  Sterk said nothing.

  “I have no reason to believe anything you say. You tried to have me killed. What’s one more?”

  Sterk remained silent.

  “You always have a fallback, don’t you?” said Nicholas. “When the assassin you sent after me failed, you implicated me in the bombings in Rome. What about Paris? Are my fingerprints going to surface there too?”

  At that moment, something in the woman’s face shifted.

  Nicholas motioned his dogs over. “You really have been a very, very bad girl.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Sterk demanded.

  “That depends on how you answer my questions.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Is there another assassin looking for me?” asked Nicholas.

  Sterk didn’t respond, and Nicholas bent down and picked up the wrench again.

  “No,” she responded.

  “None at all?”

  “I’m sure you have plenty of enemies, but when Leveque’s woman in Spain failed to return, I assumed you had killed her and had gone deeper to ground.”

  “So you moved to plan B: implicating me.”

  The woman shook her head. “Alive or dead, you were always going to be implicated.”

  “Why? Why implicate me?”

  “My employers wanted a diversion.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Someone I fear much more than you.”

  Nicholas tapped the head of the wrench in his tiny palm. “I’ll give you one more chance.”

  Sterk shook her head.

  Nicholas brought back his tiny arm and swung.

  The wrench met its target and blood began to pour from a tear behind the woman’s ear.

  Harvath tallied his fifth and final hash mark on the column and stepped out from behind her. It was time for him to take over. Producing a roll of duct tape, he tore off a piece and placed it across her mouth. He then put the bag back over her head as Nicholas said to Sterk, “Oh my. Things are about to get very bad for you indeed.”

  Harvath cut the rope binding her wrists to the support column, stripped the sheet from her naked body, and carried her back to the van. He had no idea what had triggered the asthma attack the first time. He suspected it was stress, though it could have been something else. Either way, he was determined to re-create the circumstances as closely as possible to bring about another one.

  He tied her back down in the vehicle exactly as he had before and closed the door. From the front seat, he grabbed two water bottles and then searched the warehouse until he found a suitable length of hose.

  The good thing about gasoline was that it was so pungent Harvath wouldn’t need much for what he had planned.

  He made a big deal of banging around the rear of the van. He opened one of the water bottles and poured out some of the water. He then carefully siphoned a small amount of gasoline out of the van and into the bottle.

  With Nicholas in tow, he stepped back around to the other side and opened the sliding door. He studied Sterk. Her breathing was rapid, as it should be for anyone in her situation. She was frightened. She wasn’t yet, though, suffering from another attack.

  “You can’t do this,” said the Troll as Harvath stepped into the van. “What if you don’t just burn her, but you end up killing her?”

  There was a long list of harsh interrogation techniques he could have tried on Sterk—sleep deprivation, stress postures, sensory bombardment, or even extreme cold—but he didn’t have the time. Frankly, after the beating the woman had taken from Nicholas, he was surprised she hadn’t already broken. She was a much tougher character than he had expected. He had no idea if she had undergone training to resist hostile interrogation or if she was just one tough woman. It didn’t matter. Everyone broke eventually, the key lay in discovering exactly how to break them and if time was of the essence, as it was here, how to do it as quickly as possible. Whether Adda
Sterk was left physically or psychologically wounded by the ordeal was of no concern to Harvath. She held all the cards and could end the experience at any point she wanted.

  The more one knew about one’s subject, the better equipped one was to carry out a successful interrogation. Considering the fact that up until several hours ago they had believed Adda Sterk was a young male hacker of Asian descent by the name of Tony Tsui, it was plain they didn’t have much to go on. But they did have one thing.

  On the scale of harsh interrogation methods, one of the stronger tactics that can be employed is the exploitation of a prisoner’s phobias. The fact that Sterk was asthmatic left no question in Harvath’s mind that she harbored a fear that most asthmatics shared, asphyxia.

  Opening the bottle filled with the gas-water mixture, he poured the contents over the woman’s hood. Panic quickly overtook her as she began writhing and struggling against her restraints.

  He followed by pouring the second bottle of water over the rest of her body. Her nostrils were so filled with the scent of gasoline, she would assume that she was now covered with it from head to toe. The gas seeping into her hood had probably found its way into the open wounds around her face and head.

  Harvath didn’t have to wait long. Whether there was some trigger like dog hair on the floor of the van, or if it was the stress of believing she was about to be set ablaze, Sterk was soon consumed by another intense asthma attack.

  Lifting her from the van, he carried her several feet away and set her on the warehouse floor. He pulled the hood from her head and tore the tape from her mouth. He pulled out her inhaler and showed it to her. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

  Gasping for air, Sterk nodded feverishly.

  Harvath shook the inhaler, placed it in her mouth, and administered the medication.

  He waited until her breathing became less labored and then dragged her back to the support column. Now it was time to see if she would cooperate or not. He studied her face as he asked his first question. “When I met you in Jagland’s office, why did you give up Michael Lee?”