It was a blustery night with heavy snow predicted in the forecast. Though Harvath didn’t relish having to cover footprints made in freshly fallen snow, he welcomed the cloud cover as it helped to block out the moonlight.
On his initial drive down Lawlor’s street, he had missed the surveillance. It wasn’t until an hour later that he dared to make another pass and noticed them cleverly hidden in a house across the street.
A white Lincoln Navigator sat cleanly off to one side of the driveway up against one of the garage doors, but why not tuck it away in the oversized three-car garage and protect it from the impending storm? When Harvath drove by for the second time, he got his answer.
As one of the garage doors opened, a casually dressed man whom Harvath assumed was the owner the house, stepped outside to take his recyclables to the curb. Sitting inside alongside a silver Mercedes coupe and a red Volvo station wagon, was a car that screamed FBI-a slightly worse for wear dark blue Dodge four-door. Either these people were concerned about the ability of their maid’s vehicle to weather the approaching storm, or they were trying to help keep the Ford out of sight from people who would recognize it exactly for what it was. Harvath was willing to bet it was the latter.
The most commanding view would have been from one of the upper floor windows facing the street, and a quick glance up was all Scot needed to confirm that he had located one of the surveillance teams. The only question remaining was who was covering the back?
Meg’s words were still ringing in Scot’s ears as he pulled his black Chevy TrailBlazer onto a deserted side road about a mile-and-a-half behind Gary Lawlor’s home. Though he didn’t want to, he had been thinking about what she had said. Unzipping the duffle bag in the cargo area, he tried to put it out of his mind and concentrate on what lay in front of him.
After suiting up and placing the rest of his gear into a small, camouflaged backpack, Harvath set off.
He moved quietly, using a small GPS device to lead him through the forest to the rear of Gary ’s property. When he reached the edge of the tree line, he found a spot with a good view of the back of the two-story Colonial-style house and removed a set of night vision goggles. The wind was blowing in fierce gusts, and a light snow had begun to fall.
Harvath took his time scanning the perimeter and didn’t see anything-no intrusion detection measures and no FBI agents. Either the Bureau wasn’t holding out much hope that Lawlor would return to his house or, more likely than not, they had already been inside and the team across the street had been left in place to ‘sit’ on the residence while they applied, ipso facto, for a full blown FISA warrant to search the premises and catalogue anything they had previously found as evidence. Either scenario was fine by Harvath. The absence of a surveillance team in back wouldn’t make his job a complete walk in the park, but it would make things easier.
He took off the night vision goggles and reached into his backpack for his modified Beretta Neos. With its modular design, it looked like a weapon straight out of aStar Wars movie. Its magazine held ten rounds of.22 LR-caliber ammunition and the full length of the weapon, before the modified stock and silencer were attached, was only twelve inches, making it very easy to conceal. It was also an extremely accurate weapon, especially when coupled with the advanced, next generation Starlight scope Harvath had brought along for the job.
Having attended many barbecues in Gary Lawlor’s back yard, Scot was familiar with the motion-activated security floodlights installed around the outside of the house. This was probably another part of the reason the FBI had felt the need to only post one team to watch his residence.
As Scot pulled the trigger for the first shot, he said a silent prayer of thanks that the neighbors’ houses were set far enough apart not to be able to hear thecrack of the silenced rounds as they slammed into and disabled the floodlight sensors.
He disassembled the Neos, put it back in his backpack and put his night vision goggles back on. After slowly scanning the perimeter for any signs that someone might be watching, he made a run for the rear of the house. Fifteen feet before the back door, he already had his lock pick gun in his hand. A few moments’ work on the deadbolt and he was inside.
He hoped Gary hadn’t changed his alarm code. He found the panel in the mudroom, next to the door leading in from the garage and entered the four-digit code Lawlor had given to him the last time he was out of town. It worked. Like most people, Gary was a creature of habit.
Five or six coats, including the Holland and Holland hunting jacket he had received as a gift from the president, hung from an orderly row of pegs above a wooden storage bench where Harvath stowed his backpack and night vision goggles. He attached a red filter to his compact M3 Millennium SureFire flashlight, making the beam virtually invisible to anyone outside the house, and continued on.
The kitchen was neat and orderly, just like Gary himself. There wasn’t a dish in the sink, or a spot of grease on the stovetop. Harvath hadn’t thought about it before, but the degree to which Lawlor kept his house in order was almost sad. Who did he do it for? He lived alone and besides the occasional summer barbecue, no one ever saw the house except for him. It didn’t seem healthy.
Placed above the cabinets were mementos Gary had collected during his travels throughout Europe. There were German beer steins, a drinking bowl from Sweden, a ram’s horn cup from Hungary, a hand-painted Irish jar-the assortment covered almost every country and every type of drinking vessel. Each one, Gary had once explained, had its own special story and special meaning. At the far end of the cabinets was the collector’s edition bottle of Maker’s Mark Harvath had given Lawlor as a Christmas present. It made Scot glad to see that his gift occupied such a place of prominence in his home.
There were fresh vegetables in the fridge along with a new carton of milk. Whatever had caused Gary ’s disappearance, it certainly hadn’t been something he had seen coming.
Harvath decided to focus on where he knew Lawlor spent most of his time. He sat at the desk in Gary ’s study going through his bills and personal papers trying to find some sort of clue as to what had happened. Numerous commendations and meritorious service awards lined the walls, along with pictures of Gary and Harvath’s father in Vietnam and later with his mother as the three of them enjoyed parties at the house in Coronado and took fishing trips to Mexico. The centerpiece of the room was an enormous oil painting of General George S. Patton and his bull terrier, Willie, short for “William the Conqueror.”
Gary had modeled himself in many ways after the hard-charging general and was a compendium of Patton information. He was always citing one or another of the general’s famous quotes:Do not fear failure. Do more than is required of you. Make your plans fit the circumstances. There is only one type of discipline -perfect discipline.
Harvath felt guilty for being here alone and going through Gary ’s bank and retirement account statements, but he knew he had to do it. It was only after he had computed Lawlor’s healthy, yet not by any means legally unachievable net worth, that he realized how ridiculous the exercise was. If Gary had been selling out his country, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to hide his ill-gotten gains in plain sight. Then what was it? Harvath had come to believe that everyone, no matter how careful they were, always left behind some sort of clue, but there didn’t seem to be anything here at all.
Frustrated, and wondering if the FBI had already bagged any promising items, he left Lawlor’s study and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The guest bedrooms and baths were clean-both literally and figuratively. He approached the master bedroom with a sense of déjà vu. Prowling around Gary ’s empty house like this reminded him of what it felt like to return to his parents’ house after his father’s burial ten years ago. His mother had been too distraught to do anything. Closing out his father’s affairs had been left to Scot and Gary. Going through his personal effects, his papers, his clothes-it all felt just like this. It was as if Gary had died. He hoped to God he was wrong.
As he entered the master bedroom, the first thing he noticed was the neatly made bed. The sheets and blankets looked so perfectly tight that Harvath knew he could bounce a quarter off of them military style, just like his father had always done to him.
He ran his finger along the top of the dresser where there was only the slightest trace of dust. Socks, underwear, and handkerchiefs had been neatly pressed and folded and placed in separate drawers. A small brown leather box contained two watches, several pairs of cuff links, several tie clips, and a discarded wedding band.
In the closet, stacks of crisply starched shirts sat in a perfect row along the shelf, while a line of suits hung in gradation of color above a phalanx of perfectly polished wingtip shoes. As Scot marveled at the man’s penchant for organization, he noticed that something was slightly out of place.
All of the suits were enshrouded in clear plastic dry cleaner’s bags. One in particular, though, seemed to have been hastily hung. The bag was not covering the entire suit and it was bunched up where it had been slid between its two neighbors. Harvath noted that the suit was black and wondered if maybe Gary had thought about packing that one for the memorial service and at the last minute had changed his mind and shoved it back in his closet. Possible, but not likely. Not unless Gary was running behind and had been in a tremendous hurry. For all he knew, some careless FBI agent had pulled it out and shoved it back in place, but somehow he doubted it. They would have left things exactly as they had found them so on their return they could videotape everything the way Gary had left it.
Scot searched the bathroom. There was no deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush or razor evident, which made sense as Gary had been about to take a trip when this entire thing, whatever it was, went down. The toilet and sink were spotless, but the chrome wastebasket was filled with discarded tissues. Harvath pulled several of them out, only to discover that none had been used.That was strange. He kept digging only to find that the entire garbage can was filled with unused tissues.What was Gary hiding?
After emptying the can of tissues, Harvath could clearly make out the remnants of a small fire. There was a trace amount of ash and some melted plastic around the seam in the bottom of the can. A quick check of the shower confirmed Harvath’s suspicions. The ceiling above had been slightly browned as if by smoke. Some ash was still visible around the drain. Apparently, Gary had burned something in the shower and had tried to rinse the can out afterwards. When he couldn’t get ride of all of the evidence, he decided to fill the can with tissues. But why? What did he need to hide so badly that he had to burn it? For the first time, Scot’s confidence in the man was shaken.
As Harvath continued to search the bathroom, he flipped open the lid of the laundry hamper and was stunned by what he discovered. Inside were three days’ worth of clean, warm weather clothes-most still perfectly folded. The forecast in Southern California had called for temperatures in the mid-eighties. It was as if Gary had just dumped the clothes right out of his suitcase instead of taking the time to put them away back in the bedroom. A poorly hung suit was something Harvath could chalk up to a thoughtless Bureau investigator or packing in a hurry, but now signs were starting to point more toward a hurriedunpacking.
Even though Gary hadn’t bothered to call him, he might have phoned someone else. That someone might know what had happened to him. At the same time, Harvath knew that even while the Bureau waited for a FISA warrant, they would have already established a trap and trace on Gary ’s phone and would have been going through all of his incoming and outgoing phone logs.
Harvath also knew that if the Bureau had been in the house, which was almost a slam dunk considering the well being of its former deputy director was currently in question, that they would have most likely relied solely on the phone company to provide them with Gary ’s phone activity. That meant that the phones themselves might at least catch Harvath up on the most recent activity.
Leaving the master bedroom, Scot walked downstairs to the study where he picked up the phone and hit theredial button. There was a long pause and clicking noises before a series of ear splitting tones, which sounded like a fax machine at full volume, blasted on the other end.Must have been a wrong number, thought Harvath as he hung up. But why wouldn’t Gary have found the right number and tried again? None of this was making any sense.
Harvath hit* 69 to see who Lawlor’s last call had been from. The automated voice gave a Maryland area code followed by a seven-digit number, which Scot wrote with a pen onto the palm of his hand. At least it was something. Whether that something would actually be worthwhile was another question entirely, but he didn’t have any time to toss that possibility around now. If there was a trap and trace, the FBI would now know that someone was in the house and that the phone had been used. He had to get out.
As Harvath took one last look at the pictures on the walls of Gary ’s study, he whispered into the darkness, “Where the hell are you?”