Chapter 45
As soon as Morrell had connected with Davi, they put their own wheels in motion. Ashby and Palmer were sent back to the safe house, where they were told to brief Haney and Staelin, gear up, and be ready to move on a moment’s notice.
Harvath and Morrell walked back to Morrell’s Land Cruiser and drove to his apartment.
The drive took longer than it should have.
Police checkpoints had sprung up on major roads and had begun to bleed into the side streets.
Sirens rose and fell in every direction.
In storefronts and open-air restaurants, televisions all carried the same images—fire, smoke, shattered glass, and the kind of chaos and confusion that only made people more afraid.
Neither man said much. Morrell kept both hands on the wheel, his eyes moving between the traffic and his mirrors.
Harvath couldn’t imagine what he was feeling.
KitKat and Mo hadn’t just been part of the operation.
They had worked with Morrell at the embassy.
He had known them. Trusted them. And now they were dead.
Morrell pulled into the garage beneath his building and parked.
Having taken the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, they walked into his apartment, a corner unit at the end of the hall.
It was quite luxurious with marble floors, polished nickel fixtures, and modern furniture.
On any other day, Harvath might have made a remark about Morrell being on the take, but not after what had just happened.
Locking the door behind them, Morrell told Harvath to make himself at home while he went to call his station chief. News about KitKat and Mo would eventually make it to the embassy, and the ambassador shouldn’t hear any of it for the first time from Thai authorities.
Harvath walked across the living room and took in the view of the Bangkok skyline. It was gleaming skyscrapers and green treetops for as far as the eye could see, but over it all hung a pall of smoke from the RBSC bombing.
When Morrell came back out of his bedroom, he looked haggard. Motioning Harvath over to the open kitchen, he said, “My chief’s handling the embassy side. Ambassador, DSS, whoever needs to be read in. He’s leaving us alone, for now.”
“That’s good,” Harvath replied.
Morrell reached for the coffee machine, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. “That should be Davi.”
He crossed the room, checked the peephole, and opened the door.
Davi stepped inside carrying the bombing scene with her. There was soot on one of her sleeves, a faint streak of grime near her collar, and a look on her face that suggested whatever reserve she had started the day with had long since been burned away.
“How bad was Khlong Toei?” she asked.
“Bad,” Morrell replied. “We lost two good operatives. And Koebler now knows who was watching him.”
Removing her shoes, Davi pushed past him and headed for the fridge. “You’re positive it was Koebler?” she asked, as she removed a bottle of water, took off the top, and sat down at the island.
“Positive enough,” Harvath replied. “Male. Roughly six feet. Baseball cap. Surgical mask. Black backpack. According to a witness, he came up behind the van and fired through the rear doors. Then he climbed inside, fired a couple more rounds, and then spent time looking through the cargo area before leaving.”
Davi drank from the bottle and set it down. “My people are already pulling any footage they can get from Khlong Toei. And from the area around the club. If there’s a connection, we’ll find it.”
“It was him,” said Harvath, echoing Morrell’s words from earlier. “Both places. I guarantee it.”
“There’s something else,” she added. “Overnight, there was an explosion and a fire at a small storage facility. Two unidentified men are dead.”
“Any idea what caused it?” Harvath asked.
Davi shook her head. “No, but a Toyota Fortuner, the same make and model we believe may have been used in the RBSC bombing, was seen exiting the property.”
“It’s Koebler,” Harvath asserted.
“It very much looks that way,” she agreed. “Originally, it didn’t match his attack pattern, so we kept it quiet in order to not create a panic. Now, however, we assume it’s connected.”
“It’s all connected,” said Morrell. “Which means the clock just sped up.”
Davi looked at him. “Because of your two colleagues in the van?”
He nodded. “Before Thai police connect them to my embassy, I briefed my station chief. He’s getting the ambassador on board and handling the fallout on that side.”
“Good,” she replied. “Because once they’re identified, the press will move fast.”
“The bigger problem,” Harvath interjected, “is Koebler. He just lost his bolt-hole. He knows the police will be pushing his image everywhere. He’s not going to wait around to see how tight the city gets.”
“You think he’ll attempt to leave.”
“I know he will.”
“The entire country has been locked down since Friday. Airports, train stations, ferry terminals, border crossings, ports, highways—everything. Now, every province, right down to their beat cops, will have his photo—on top of their orders to stop anyone and anything that looks wrong.”
“Koebler will have planned for that. He’ll have a contingency.”
“And how do we figure out what that contingency is?” she asked.
Harvath thought about it for a moment. “The best way would be to look at what he’s done before when a job went bad.”
“You want to see what happens when his pattern is under pressure,” replied Morrell, as he turned back to his coffee machine and hit the switch.
“Exactly,” said Harvath. “Not his normal pattern. His worst-day pattern.”
“Do you think Nicholas could pull that out of the data he’s compiled?”
Harvath removed his phone from his pocket and dialed. “If it’s doable, he’s the guy.”
When Nicholas answered, he got straight to it.
“Koebler knows we’re onto him. We think he’s going to try to leave the country.
His name and photograph will be everywhere.
That means official ports of entry are off the table for him.
In everything you pulled up on him, has he ever had a job go wrong and suddenly his exit gets ugly?
We’re trying to get a sense of what he does when forced to pivot. ”
“Give me a minute,” Nicholas replied, already typing. “I’ve got his bombing and travel overlays. I just need to strip out the clean departures and isolate the outliers.”
While Nicholas worked, Morrell poured coffee into two mugs and slid one toward Harvath. Davi, who he knew well enough to know wasn’t a coffee person, took another drink of her water.
Finally, Nicholas came back on the line. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got one.”
Harvath put him on speaker. “What do you have?”
“His standard rhythm is what we already knew. He stages locally, executes, and gets out fast. When the environment stays permissive, he prefers commercial air travel under the same identity he used to enter. With so much being computerized and countries keeping a closer eye on lengths of stays, that makes the most sense.”
“But?” Morrell asked.
“But there appears to have been one operation where the heat came down too quickly for that.”
“What happened?”
Nicholas paused, keys clicking in the background. “He vanished.”
Harvath’s brow furled. “Meaning?”
“Meaning no outbound flight. No documented land crossing. No recorded departure at all. Then, less than three weeks later, facial recognition picks him up in another country under a different alias.”
“So, he didn’t get out through normal channels,” Morrell said.
“That’s my read,” Nicholas responded. “He used some sort of route that bypassed official scrutiny.”
“Such as?”
“That’s the part I am still trying to nail down.”
Harvath took a sip of his coffee and said, “Whatever it was, I’m guessing he didn’t improvise it from scratch after the attack.”
“Probably not,” Nicholas replied. “When the clean exits disappear, you don’t suddenly invent a whole new pipeline, not under duress. You fall back on something preexisting. A route. A facilitator. A set of contacts. Maybe all three.”
Davi said nothing, but Harvath could see her processing it.
“Then what’s the common denominator?” Morrell asked.
“I’m still trying to unravel it,” Nicholas answered. “But if I had to guess, it’s not passenger movement. It’s freight. Cargo. Something with enough volume that Koebler could hide in.”
Harvath nodded. That tracked. “Can you narrow it any further than that?”
“Not yet. I can tell you this, though—if it worked before, there’s a good chance Koebler will try it again. You don’t forget a solid exit, especially one that came through in a pinch.”
Nicholas kept typing. “One more thing.”
“What is it?”
“In the outlier case, what forced the pivot was a fuel truck driving by at the last moment. It turned the attack into something bigger than he expected. It jammed up law enforcement systems and pushed every visible exit to maximum scrutiny.”
“Just like what Thailand is experiencing now.”
“Exactly,” said Nicholas. “If he’s forced to flee, he doesn’t necessarily need to know the exact route yet. He just has to know what kind he needs.”
“The kind that survives a countrywide lockdown,” Harvath replied. “Freight. Food. Fuel. Coastal traffic. Any commercial transport no government wants to shut down unless they absolutely have to.”
“Bingo.”
“Keep on it. I want every single piece of data you can find.”
“Working it now,” Nicholas stated.
Ending the call, Harvath slid the phone back into his pocket.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Davi set down her water bottle. “Thailand is already checking highways, borders, ports, ferries, rail. The question is where we can focus faster than everyone else.”
“The criminal pipelines hiding inside legitimate traffic,” Harvath said.
Both of them looked at him.
“When Nicholas and I were talking earlier about how the bomb components might have made their way into Thailand, he pointed out that contraband is sometimes concealed beneath seafood in refrigerated trucks. If this operation is tied to an existing smuggling network, Koebler may not need the quickest route out. He just needs one that already knows how to slip through the cracks.”
“That’s where we focus then,” Davi said, as her phone buzzed. Pulling it out, she glanced at the screen and answered in Thai. Her expression hardened almost immediately. She listened, asked two rapid-fire questions, then ended the call and looked up.
“What is it?” Morrell asked.
“That was my tech team at RBSC,” she said. “The FBI evidence recovery people have started sorting debris.”
Harvath looked at her. “What did they find?”
“Unlike the devices from Friday, the white phosphorus component either didn’t ignite properly or didn’t burn all the way through,” she said. “They’ve recovered a partial SIM card and identified a component signature. Both of which point back to Cambodia.”