The First Commandment (5 page)

“So the way we see it,” said Finney as Tom Morgan wrapped up his presentation and closed his laptop, “we’ve got this little runt’s nuts in a vise. The only question is how hard do you want to squeeze?”

Harvath was impressed. Finney and his Sargasso Intelligence Program had been able to do what the United States government wouldn’t or couldn’t do. They had located the Troll’s stock-in-trade, his highly classified data.

It wasn’t a tough decision for Harvath to make. The Troll had helped Al Qaeda carry out the attacks on New York City.

Then there was the whole matter of Tracy.

Looking at Finney, Harvath said, “I want you to squeeze so hard his eyes roll back into his fucking head.”

The Warlord nodded at Morgan, and the former NSA employee picked up his phone and dialed. The Troll’s field of play was about to be dramatically upended.

ANGRA DOS REIS, BRAZIL

Three hours southwest of Rio de Janeiro by car, or forty-five minutes by private helicopter, was the hottest getaway in Brazil, the bay of Angra dos Reis.

Known for its warm waters, white-sand beaches, and lush vegetation, Angra dos Reis, or simply Angra as it was called by those in the know, boasted 365 islands-one for every day of the year. Angra was a mystical place, its breezes laden with the scent of exotic tropical flowers that intoxicated its visitors.

Upon its discovery by Portuguese naval officers in 1502, one of the officers wrote home saying that they had discovered
paradise.

Angra was indeed a paradise. The kind of paradise one could easily get lost in. And lost was exactly what the Troll had wanted to be, though not without certain creature comforts.

The private island he’d leased was a half mile long and a quarter mile wide. It was known as Algodão. It boasted a helipad, speedboat, and accommodations rivaling the greatest luxury hotels in the world. Though it could easily sleep eighteen, at present there were only three souls ashore-the Troll and his two snow-white Caucasian Ovcharkas, Argos and Draco.

Weighing close to two hundred pounds each and standing over forty-one inches at the shoulder, these giant animals were the dogs of choice for the Russian military and former East German border patrol. They were exceedingly fast and absolutely vicious when it came to protecting their territory. They made the perfect guardians for a man who stood just under three feet tall and had very powerful enemies-many of whom were his clients.

The Troll lived by the motto that knowledge didn’t equal power; it was the precise
application
of knowledge that equaled power. He had also learned very quickly that it could also equal incredible wealth.

It was in following this motto that the Troll had made a substantial living for himself dealing in the purchase, sale, and trade of highly classified information. Each piece on its own had a certain value, but the skill-the art if you will-was in knowing how to join together just the right tidbits to create a true masterpiece. That was where the Troll excelled in his profession. It was quite amazing, especially for someone whose prospects in life had been seen as so dismal that even his parents had given up on him.

When it became obvious the Troll was not going to grow any further, his godless Georgian parents made no attempt to find a suitable loving home for their son, nor did they try to find even a half-decent orphanage. Instead, they abandoned the boy, selling him as if he were chattel to a brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There, the boy was starved, beaten, and made to perform unutterable sex acts that would have shamed even the Marquis de Sade himself.

It was in the brothel that the Troll learned the true value of information. The loose-lipped pillow talk of the powerful clients proved a goldmine once he had learned what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.

The whores, most of them life’s castoffs as well, felt a kinship with the dwarf and treated him well. In fact, they became the only family he ever knew, and he repaid that kindness by one day buying their freedom. He had the madam and her husband tortured and then killed for the inhuman cruelty he had spent years suffering at their hands.

From the ashes of his youth, the Troll rose a fiery phoenix armed with a cutthroat business acumen and a gluttonous appetite for the best of everything in life.

In his palm-thatched living room, he cradled a glass of Château Quercy St. Emilion Bordeaux between his two small hands as he stared through the villa’s glass floor at the colorful starfish and vibrant sea life playing in the illuminated water below. He had indeed come a long way since the brothel in Sochi. But was it far enough?

Draco looked up as his master slid off his chair and padded across the room in his handmade Stubbs amp; Wootton Sisal Pajas. Argos remained in a deep sleep, still recovering from the wound he had suffered in Gibraltar. It was good for all of them to get away from his estate in the rainy Scottish Highlands. The weather was much more agreeable in Brazil. It was also a safer place.

Though few knew of Eilenaigas House, he would not feel safe there for some time. After what his clients had done in New York City, he knew the Americans were quite literally out for blood. He’d seen it for himself firsthand in Gibraltar. If he lived to be a thousand, he would never forget the horrifically macabre death the American operative Scot Harvath had visited upon Mohammed bin Mohammed. It was something no sane man could have ever devised. Yet it was perfect. Mohammed had deserved it a million times over, especially for the sadistic acts he had visited upon the Troll as a young boy in that brothel near the Black Sea.

Harvath had been incredibly cruel in meting out the punishment to Mohammed, but in almost the same breath he had shown himself to be incredibly compassionate. Argos would have surely died if Harvath had not given him medical attention himself and found him an able veterinarian. Harvath had even gone so far as to pay the doctor out of his own pocket for the animal’s surgery. Though the Troll had never been very fond of Americans, this was a man he respected. He was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer, who also possessed a marked degree of humanity.

Turning his mind to dinner, the Troll removed several large Kobe steaks from the refrigerator, part of a special shipment he’d had flown in from Japan.

The Japanese were famous for the beer-and-sake-laced diet they fed their premium cattle-and of course for the massages the cows received. Nothing was too good for Kobe cattle, and the painstaking efforts showered upon the animals yielded an incredible meat. It was finely marbled with fat that was less saturated than the fat in other beef, was significantly lower in cholesterol, and was without rival in flavor and tenderness.

As he set the steaks up on the counter, both of the dogs appeared by his side, their nostrils flaring at the scent of the beef. They both asked so little from him and yet gave so much in return. They were his ever-present companions, truer and more loyal than almost any human being he had ever known.

The Troll plated a steak for each of the dogs and set them down on the floor. Immediately, they fell upon them and the beef disappeared.

When his food was prepared, the Troll set it upon the dining table, uncorked another bottle of Château Quercy, and climbed into his chair to eat.

His steak was perfect. Cutting into it was like slicing into a piece of soft, ripened Brie.

He savored every bite of his meal, and when his plate was clean and his wine glass empty, he removed his dinnerware to the kitchen.

Pouring himself a snifter of Germain-Robin XO, he took a long sip and closed his eyes. For all of his accomplishments, the Troll’s life was a lonely place.

The living-room windows were on sliding tracks and had been pulled back to open the room onto the sea. A light breeze carried the smell of the ocean mixed with the tiny island’s exotic flowers.
Only the Brazilians could create a night so perfect,
mused the Troll as he climbed up to the table he used as a desk and opened his rugged General Dynamics XR-1 GoBook laptop. Via a small, inflatable satellite dish positioned outside, he was soon connected with his rack of dedicated servers secretly housed in a bunker deep within the eastern Pyrenees Mountains.

A British entrepreneur had rolled the dice on an idea that the Swiss approach to banking could be replicated in the digital realm.

The Brit’s facility in the European principality of Andorra boasted redundant power supplies, redundant network feeds, FM200 fire suppression, redundant air-conditioning, and multistage security identification processes. His servers were connected to generous bandwidth allocations, fully burstable, with multiple aggregated providers, ensuring 100 percent availability for maximum uptime.

It had all been music to the Troll’s ears. Relying on the servers at his estate was out of the question. Eilenaigas House was beyond dangerous, at least for now. If he kept a low enough profile, the U. S. intelligence services would give up on him eventually, but until they did, he’d have to stay far away from his home in Scotland.

When it was all said and done, there were much worse places to pass one’s time than a private island in Brazil. And he would know. He’d been to them.

Listening to the music of the waves as they gently washed against the rocks outside, the Troll logged on to his primary server and began the authentication process to gain access to his data. He still had not sifted through the windfall of intelligence he had gleaned from raiding the NSA’s top-secret files in New York during the Al Qaeda attack. The amount of data he’d stolen from the Americans had been beyond his wildest dreams.

The NSA program had been named Athena, after the Greek goddess of wisdom. Apparently the Greeks didn’t have a goddess of blackmail.

It had been a
deep black
data-mining operation. Using both the Echelon and Carnivore systems, the NSA had been gathering intelligence that could be used as leverage against various foreign concerns-governments, heads of state, and influential foreign business people.

In short, the Athena Program had been created to collect and sort extremely dirty laundry. Once they had their teeth into something particularly juicy, such as the Princess Diana crash, TWA 800, or the true cause of Yassir Arafat’s death, they assigned teams of operatives to flesh out the big picture and uncover as much supporting data as possible. That way, when it came time to use it, they had the victim pinned against the wall so tightly, there was absolutely no room for him or her to wiggle free.

And when they uncovered a conspiracy involving several powerful foreign figures, it was like hitting the jackpot.

The Troll had to smile. It was devious, deceitful, and utterly unAmerican. And now, all of the NSA’s data belonged to him.
The gift that will keep on giving.
There was enough in there to keep him busy for three lifetimes. The biggest risk was jumping the gun and selling off the pieces of information too quickly. He would have to study all of it and understand how it interrelated before he began assigning values. Fortunately, the Athena analysts had already done a lot of his work for him.

The Troll clicked on the subgroup folder he’d been working in and waited for its contents sheet to appear. It didn’t.

He clicked on the icon again and waited, but still nothing happened. He checked his uplink status. Everything appeared to be okay. So why then wasn’t his data coming up?

He tried another file and then another. They were all the same-
empty.
The Troll’s heart caught in his throat. This couldn’t be happening. This
wasn’t
happening.

He quaffed the balance of the brandy in his snifter, wiped his bearded lips with the sleeve of his linen shirt, and went through every single file on every single server.

All empty.

As he neared the end, he saw an animated icon that didn’t belong there. It was a little bearded man with a horned helmet, a sword in one hand, and a shield in the other. The figure hopped from one foot to the other and on every fourth hop banged his sword against his shield.

It looked like a little Viking, but the Troll knew better. This was no Viking. It was a Norseman-the codename of American counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath.

Enraged, the Troll clicked on the icon and opened the folder. It took a maddeningly long time for the file to load. For a moment, he thought it might be a trick-a way to purposely keep him online so that American intelligence could pinpoint his location.

Finally, the file loaded. It was a series of screen captures for all of his bank accounts. Every single balance reflected the same amount-
zero.

A scream welled up from deep inside his tiny body as he hurled his brandy snifter against the wall. The dogs leaped up and began barking.

His entire life’s work was gone.
Everything.
The only thing that was still his was the estate in the Scottish Highlands, but if the Americans had been this thorough, the Troll had little reason to doubt that they had found a way to tie that up and keep him from doing anything with it as well. British antiterrorism laws were quite severe. It wouldn’t take much for the Americans to convince the U. K. authorities to play ball.

The dogs were still barking. The Troll grabbed a pewter dish filled with pistachios and was about to launch it when he thought better of it. “Silence,” he ordered, and the barking dogs fell quiet.

He needed to think. There had to be some way out of this.

He spent the next two hours going through his servers, remotely connecting to his various bank accounts scattered around the globe. Then began a series of angry phone calls, during which he suffered through excuse after excuse from each of his bankers. They plied him with empty promises to get to the bottom of what had happened, but the Troll knew it was no use. The Americans had done it. They had gotten everything. He was ruined.

While the Troll had no idea what he was going to do next, he knew one thing for certain. Scot Harvath was responsible, and he was going to make him pay.

He went back to the lone computer file that had been left behind. The dancing Norseman mocked him as it hopped from one foot to the other. Slowly, the Troll scrolled through the data. On his third pass he found it.

Now the Troll understood why the file had taken so long to load. Embedded within that annoying, hopping Norseman icon was a message.

It was an invitation to a private chat room from none other than Scot Harvath. The Troll shut down his computer.

This was going to take some brainpower. He resisted the urge to pour another brandy. Instead, he brewed a small copper pot of potent Turkish coffee and returned to the living room.

As he watched the brightly colored fish below the glass floor, he considered his options. This would be a fight for his very survival, and though he guessed himself to be far beyond Harvath in the brains department, there was no telling what kind of resources the American had at his disposal. The gravest error he could make here would be to underestimate the man.

Since there was no clock ticking on the offer to enter the chat room, the Troll decided to take his time and research his adversary first.