Harvath tried to repair his trench coat by tucking the torn fabric underneath the shoulder seam. It would have to do for now. He was extremely lucky that the blade had not sliced any deeper. He rubbed his jaw, and although it was sore, he quickly determined that it hadn’t been broken. He would live, but he had suffered yet another blunt trauma to his head. That was twice in less than eight hours.

Cutting south on Fourth Street, Scot arrived at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He needed a place where he could catch his breath and gather his thoughts. This seemed as good a place as any. Falling in with a group of older tourists who were scurrying up the stairs to get out of the rain, Harvath blended in with them perfectly as they entered the building. The group checked their wet things and were led into a recreated Tudor gallery with dark oak panels. Everyone oohed and ahhed at the library’s intricately carved Elizabethan doorways. As the group moved on, Scot found a bench and sat down, placing his trench coat next to him.

He withdrew the manila envelope from his suit coat and tore it open. Inside he found several strips of paper that he couldn’t at first make out. Suddenly, he realized what they were. Apparently, André had been using a handheld Xerox scanner and the strips were meant to be put together to show a complete page. Harvath didn’t have time for puzzles, so he quickly sifted through the stack. Most of it seemed to be journal entries, presumably from Senator Snyder’s personal appointment book. But as Harvath continued to sift, something else caught his attention.

Two strips of paper could be placed together to form what looked like a photo negative of a note. The paper was black and the handwriting was white. The handwriting matched the entries in the senator’s appointment book, but why would André have a negative of a note that the senator had written? Harvath pushed the thought aside and read:

Dear Aunt Jane,

All is well here. We are looking forward to your visit and hope that everything is ready on your end. We trust that the money we sent will cover your expenses. We expect your trip to be a roaring success. You know how to contact us if you have any questions.

Yours,

Edwin

Why would Snyder write a letter and sign it “Edwin”? Harvath kept flipping through the pieces of paper. He came across something in a totally different hand and assumed it was André Martin’s.

Aunt Jane? Edwin? Switzerland? Snyder claims he has no living relatives. What’s the connection?

Stapled to it was another piece of paper that listed an address for a post office box in Interlaken, Switzerland, written in the senator’s hand. Switzerland? Scot tumbled the pieces in his mind, trying to figure out how they all fit.

What was the connection? There had to be one. Snyder had had André killed because of what he thought he had discovered. Whatever it was, it must have been explosive if Snyder would kill to protect it. Now he wanted Scot dead. Well, Senator Snyder had a little surprise coming; Scot Harvath was not that easy to get rid of.

Back outside the Folger Library, Harvath turned and headed south. Along the way he tried another ATM and got the same message as before. If he was going to figure things out, he would need a little walking-around money. He flagged a cab and had it take him to the Washington Navy Yard. He gave the driver his remaining seven dollars and got out. Checking carefully behind him, he ducked into Navy Yard Metro station and took the train one stop to Waterfront. There, he emerged again and hailed a cab for his bank on Twelfth Street, just south of Logan Circle.

The bank officer was polite and after comparing Harvath’s signature to the one on his card and looking at his ID, he gestured for Scot to follow him downstairs to the vault that contained the safe deposit boxes. Scot produced his key, and in a synchronous fashion that Harvath felt sure was supposed to impress, the bank officer waited to turn his key at the same moment Scot did, as if they were about to unleash a nuclear weapon.

After the box had been withdrawn, Scot was shown to a small private room, where the door was shut behind him and he was left alone. He lifted the lid of the box and removed the normal things one would expect to find, stock certificates, bonds, legal papers…Once those were removed, he stared down at something he thought he would never need to use.

43

As he exited the bank, Harvath carefully surveyed the street before stepping out of the doorway. All of his senses were afire, filtering the stream of input they were receiving, searching for even the slightest hint of danger. Everything looked normal, but years of training had taught him that was when attacks often happened. Half a block to his left was a red-and-white van with Ziretta Carpet Cleaning written across the side. A long orange hose stretched from the van across the sidewalk and into a nearby building. The generator inside the van created a tremendous amount of noise, but that wasn’t unusual; carpet cleaning vans were normally loud.

As he turned to his right, he decided not to give the van a second thought. It wasn’t out of place, he was. This whole morning had been out of place. Life in D.C. was not magically changing because of his experiences; the real danger for him lay in seeing threats where there weren’t any. Paranoia was not going to do anything to improve his current situation.

The flip side of Scot’s reassuring self-talk was that paranoia might be annoying, but a healthy dose of it served to keep you alive. No one ever got killed by being too vigilant.

Quickly, Scot made his way down the street, using the reflective storefront windows he passed to see what was happening across the street and behind him. The noise of the carpet van began to slowly fade, but it was replaced by something that sounded like a heartbeat: boom, boom, boom. It was faint at first, but began to increase in volume. Harvath didn’t hear it so much as feel it in the middle of his chest: boom, boom, boom. He realized that the sound was growing louder because it was coming closer: boom, boom, boom.

It was the heavy bass from a pumped-up car stereo system. Without even turning to look at the vehicle, Harvath knew exactly what it would be. His colleagues at the Secret Service called them ghettomobiles. Cars with windows tinted in flagrant violation of city ordinances, the chassis lowered, and tires sticking out far beyond the wheel wells. The drivers of these cars didn’t care that bass matured over distance and got louder and deeper as the sound waves traveled outward. All they knew was that it sounded cool. Harvath hated ghettomobiles and the hey, look at me machismo attitude of their drivers and occupants.

The noise was almost on top of him now, and as he listened to it approach, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the car had slowed down. He glanced ahead, but there wasn’t any traffic that would have caused the car to reduce its speed. Probably not on their way to the bank, he thought. Drawing alongside another storefront, Harvath looked in the window just in time to see the reflection of tinted windows sliding down on the ghettomobile and a Tec 9 automatic being thrust through.

Reflexively, Harvath hit the sidewalk and rolled. Bullets tore up the concrete where he had stood. The window he’d used to covertly survey the vehicle shattered in a thousand pieces, spraying him with shards of razor-sharp glass. All the while, the stereo kept thumping its staccato beat: boom, boom, boom.

Harvath jammed his hand inside his trench coat and groped for his waistband. It settled on the rubberized grip of his silenced nine millimeter Glock pistol. He thought he heard one of the car doors opening, and the sudden increase in the music’s volume confirmed it. From where he lay next to a parked car, the curb was too high for him to see anything in the street. With the window of the store to his left shattered, he had no idea which way the person, or persons, who had exited the car were coming.