As the truck exited the alley and disappeared from view, Harvath motioned to Casey and they stepped away from the Dumpster they’d been hiding behind.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Harvath looked up at the apartment. All of the lights had been turned out and the curtains were still drawn. “I think that they’ve got something very bad in those crates.”
“That’s what I’m thinking too. Whatever they’re planning, it’s big and they’ve got a lot of it.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
She put her hand on Harvath’s shoulder and said, “Wait a second. Shouldn’t we be sure there’s nobody else up there?”
“Trust me,” he replied. “There’s nobody else up there.”
“How do you know?”
Harvath started down the alley. “Because if they had more men, they would have gotten those crates up into the apartment a lot faster.”
Despite his confidence that the apartment was empty, Casey noticed that Harvath was still very careful about how he moved. He avoided motion lights and stayed close to large objects that could function as cover and concealment.
It had been hot and humid ever since they had landed in Chicago. There wasn’t any breeze and the alley was thick with the odor of overripe garbage. Casey was sweating. Her shirt clung to her back as she followed him.
Their target was a four-story brick building with a wooden set of fire stairs behind it. A section of chain-link fencing with a broken gate separated the property from the alley.
They walked down the narrow gangway and were about to mount the stairs when Cooper’s voice came over their earpieces. “Two new trucks just pulled up to the loading dock.”
“What are they doing?” Harvath whispered.
“Bunch of Middle Eastern guys have come out of the store and are now loading cardboard boxes.”
That place was like a clown car. Just when you thought it was empty, more of them crawled out, Harvath thought.
“Do you want us to follow them?” she asked.
“Only if you see someone matching Jarrah’s description. Other than that, hold your position and write down the license numbers, descriptions of the trucks, and anyone you see getting in.”
“Roger that,” said Cooper.
Looking at Casey, Harvath asked, “Ready?”
She adjusted the laptop bag she was carrying and flashed him the thumbs-up.
Harvath opened his messenger-style bag the rest of the way and wrapped his hand around the grip of his suppressed MP7 and led the way up the stairs.
Though the weapon was extremely compact, it was difficult to conceal beneath casual, summer clothing so they carried their MP7s in bags that wouldn’t look out of place in an urban environment. Beneath their shirts, each also carried a Glock 19 in a paddle holster.
All of the apartments they passed were dark. When they reached the third-floor landing, they could hear a television through an open window somewhere off in the distance, but nothing from inside the apartment itself.
They stepped carefully on the landing, just in case Harvath had been wrong about the unit being empty and a warped board gave them away. He moved to the door and pressed his ear against it while Casey covered him. He still heard nothing from inside.
He checked the door frame for any alarms or trip devices and when he didn’t find any, he tried the knob. The door was locked.
Harvath removed one of the lockpick guns that had been included with their gear and went to work. When the dead bolt slid back, he returned the device to his pocket, removed his MP7 completely from his messenger bag, and stood back so that Casey could grip the doorknob.
He took a deep breath, then nodded, and Casey quietly pulled the door open. Harvath swept into the kitchen searching for hostile targets. Despite the drapes on the window being drawn, a certain amount of ambient light from the buildings on the other side of the alley illuminated the room. It also smelled like someone had forgotten to take out the garbage.
With Casey behind him, he moved past a card table to the other side of the small kitchen. Across a narrow hallway, he could see through an open door into a bedroom. Next to that was a closed door, which he assumed led to the bathroom. To see any further, he needed to stick his head into the hallway, but suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
Harvath hated hallways. They had a bad habit of funneling the gunfire of even the worst shooter right at you. But that wasn’t it; not completely at least.
His sixth sense was trying to tell him something. Someone else was in the apartment. He could feel it now. He didn’t know if they were in the bedroom closet, behind the closed door to the bathroom, or at the end of the hallway where he couldn’t see. Wherever it was, there was danger in this apartment and his body was tensing up in anticipation of engaging it.
He signaled Casey that he would cover the hallway while she crossed to clear the bedroom. When he was ready, he nodded and swung out into the hallway, and that’s when he saw it.
In the eerie half-light of the living room was the outline of a hooded figure sitting in a chair. Harvath lit up the scene with a flash from his weapon light and saw that it wasn’t just one figure, but three.
He held his position as Casey quickly exited the bedroom and cleared the bathroom, which was jammed with the shipping crates they had seen being carried upstairs.
Together they moved into the living room and secured it, making sure no one was lurking beyond the apartment’s front door. Then and only then did they tend to the hostages.
Their chairs had been duct-taped in a sort of circle and the men to them. Harvath removed their hoods and the hostages wildly gestured with their chins at their chests.
He opened the shirt of the man nearest him and instantly understood. He didn’t need to see vests on the other two to know that they had them as well.
“Everyone relax. We’re going to get you out of here.”
Instead of calming down, the man who Harvath was standing in front of became even more agitated. He was gesturing even more urgently, but not at the vest anymore. He seemed to be nodding toward the corner of the room. Harvath turned and looked behind, but couldn’t understand what the man was trying to tell him.
When Harvath couldn’t figure it out, the man became even more impatient. His eyes were wide and he was yelling from behind the layers of duct tape that had been wrapped around his head and over his mouth.
“Don’t move,” Harvath said as he pulled out his knife. The man didn’t listen and Harvath had to sling his weapon and grab the man’s face as he carefully made an incision along the left side of the tape.
Peeling enough of it away to get a good grip, he then pulled back-hard.
“The camera!” John Vaughan shouted as the tape came free. “There’s a camera between the books! The vests are triggered to remote detonate!”
It took Harvath a second but he found the camera and spun it so it faced the wall.
When he turned back around, Casey had opened the shirts of the other men, revealing their explosive vests.
“Get out of here, before they detonate!” said Vaughan.
“Easy,” replied Harvath. “The men who brought you here drove off in their truck. That’s a wireless camera with a limited range. If somebody was watching us, they would have already detonated.”
“I’m Sergeant John Vaughan with the Chicago Police. There’s going to be a terrorist attack.”
“We know,” said Casey as she examined the man’s vest with her flashlight, “but I need you to be still for a minute. Don’t talk, okay?”
Vaughan fell silent as she examined his vest and then looked under and behind his chair.
“Are you looking for the trigger?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“There’s something in the small of my back. I think it’s a cell phone.”
Casey put her flashlight between her teeth, bent down, and very carefully slid one of her hands behind the police officer. “I feel it.”
“Can you disarm it?” Harvath asked.
“I won’t know till we get him out of the chair and I see it.” Straightening back up, she looked at Vaughan and said, “There’s something called a mercury switch. The way it works is-”
“I’m a Marine. I was in Iraq,” interrupted the policeman. “I know what a mercury switch is.”
“I’m trying to figure out if moving you will trigger this vest.”
“We got the crap jostled out of us in those crates. Trust me, there’s no mercury switch.”
“So all they did was tape you to the chairs?”
“Yes,” said Vaughan.
Casey took out her knife. “Let’s cut him loose.”
Once Vaughan was free, Harvath helped him stand, while Casey studied his vest. “It’s similar to the mechanism they used in London; probably how the vests in Amsterdam were set up.”
“Who are you?” asked Vaughan.
“That’s not important,” said Harvath.
“Don’t worry,” added Casey. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Thank God, because-”
“Done,” she replied, having disconnected the cell phone trigger.
“What?”
Casey raised her finger to her lips for him to be quiet as she studied the buckles on the vest. She then put the flashlight back in her mouth and carefully unfastened them.
“Now very slowly,” she ordered, nodding at Harvath to grab the opposite side of the vest, “we’re going to lift up and I want you to slide out of it. If you feel even the slightest tug, a snag, even if you think you’re imagining it, I want you to freeze. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Vaughan.
“Good. Now on three and remember, slowly. Here we go. One. Two. Three.”
The policeman slowly slid out of the vest and backed away from it. Harvath then took it from Casey and held it up for her to examine.
Her eyes narrowed as she moved in to look at something. “What the heck is this?”
“What did you find?” asked Harvath.
“I’ll tell you after we look at the other two vests. Let’s hurry up.”