The idea had been to render the mercury in the tilt switch useless with a product used for flash-freezing biological specimens known as Quick-Freeze. After the tilt switch was immobilized, it would create a window of several seconds during which he could pick up the laptop and place it in the cooler. It then could be transported back across the border where a team was waiting to defuse it. At the time, the plan made sense. What nobody had counted on was Jamal coming home early. Because of it, Harvath’s attention had been diverted and now he didn’t have enough Quick-Freeze left to attempt refreezing the tilt switch.

He had to think of something else. Returning empty-handed, or worse, no-handed were not options he was willing to consider.

Though Harvath was just two careers removed from his days as a United States Navy SEAL, the lessons he had learned with the Secret Service at the White House and now as a covert counterterrorism operative for the Department of Homeland Security only served to reinforce his Special Operations training-there was an answer to every problem, you just had to look hard enough to find it.

Glancing at the special Suunto X9Mi watch he’d been issued for the trip into Canada, Harvath saw that he was very close to falling behind schedule. He had a rendezvous to keep and if he missed it, it was going to be hell getting out of the country and back across the U.S. border.

As he cycled through various options in his mind, something suddenly bubbled to the surface. Sayed Jamal was a bombmaker and unfortunately a pretty good one. From the intelligence reports Harvath had read, he knew that the man was meticulous. And if he was meticulous, he was probably also very safety conscious. The question was would he have what Harvath was looking for and if so where did he keep it?

Dragging Jamal up by the hair, Harvath put his gun under the man’s chin and said, “You’ve got a lot of soldering equipment in here, Sayed. If a fire broke out it could be pretty expensive-not to mention the undesirable attention it would draw. That was Ramzi Yousef’s mistake with that little chemical fire in the Philippines. If I recall correctly, his pal got busted going back later for their laptop, didn’t he? But you’re smarter than that. I can tell. So tell me, where’s your fire extinguisher?”

Jamal spit in Harvath’s face and cursed him in Arabic.

“Ebn el Metanaka!” Harvath responded as he jammed the silenced barrel of his weapon into the painfully soft tissue beneath Jamal’s chin. “We can do this in Arabic or English. I don’t really care. I just want to know where it is.”

The bombmaker tried to spit at him again, but Harvath cut him short with a knee to the groin. He’d had a feeling he wasn’t going to get much help, but it was always polite to ask-and Scot Harvath was nothing if not polite.

He dragged the terrorist to the kitchen, where he found what he was looking for under the sink. “Good choice, Sayed,” he remarked as he pulled it out. “Powder extinguishers leave such a nasty residue. CO₂ is much cleaner and a lot colder.”

Looking around, Harvath then asked, “Now then, where do you keep your falafel mitts, asshole?”

Forty-five minutes later, Harvath pulled his car over to the side of the road, yanked Jamal out of the trunk, and shoved half a tampon up each of his nostrils to stem his nosebleed. After putting a Windbreaker over the terrorist’s shoulders and zipping it up the front to hide his stained shirt, Harvath slid him into the front passenger seat, fastened his seat belt, and warned him what would happen if he tried to make any more trouble.

Once again, Jamal tried to spit, but Harvath was ready for him. He nailed him with a blow to his solar plexus, doubling him over and knocking the wind out of him.

Reaching back into the bag of goodies he had bought at the convenience store just outside Montreal, Harvath withdrew a PowerBar and a bottle of spring water. At thirty-six, his carefree days of unlimited cheeseburgers and beers were now behind him. At five feet ten and a muscular 175 pounds, Harvath was in better shape than most men half his age, but he found it took more and more work just to maintain his level of physical fitness. If an assignment in a Muslim country required that he grow a beard, after a couple of days he soon saw traces of gray mingled with the light brown that matched the hair on his head. His father, a Navy SEAL instructor who had died in a training accident when Harvath was in his early twenties, had gone completely gray by forty.

Despite the small lines starting to form at the corners of his bright blue eyes, it wasn’t anything Harvath couldn’t live with. Everybody had to get older sooner or later. What the signs of aging did make him wonder about was how much longer he wanted to put up with the stress of working for the government. The fact that he couldn’t get any good information that might have helped him on this assignment about the high-ranking al-Qaeda terrorist the United States had recently bagged was just another in a ongoing string of frustrations he was grudgingly putting up with.

While he respected his president and loved his country, the mounting bureaucratic bullshit was really beginning to piss him off. Having been both a SEAL and a Secret Service agent at the White House, Harvath understood the value of rules, regs, and a proper chain of command. But when the president had created a special international branch of Homeland Security dubbed the Office of International Investigative Assistance and had offered Harvath one of its plum assignments, Scot had thought things were going to be different.

Known as the Apex Project, Harvath’s covert unit was supposed to represent the collective intelligence capability and full muscle of the United States government to help neutralize and prevent terrorist actions against America and American interests on a global level.

Though it “technically” didn’t exist and Harvath was nothing more than a benignly titled “special agent,” just last year a self-aggrandizing senator with her sights set on the White House had been able to discover enough about him and his involvement with the Apex Project to force his resignation. Though it was only temporary, not knowing what his next move would be or what his life might be like with his cover blown was not a very pleasant experience.

He knew that his was a quiet, thankless profession that could only be lived in the shadows, but he was growing very tired of being at the mercy of partisan hacks and career politicians who sought advancement by stomping on the backs of true patriots guilty of nothing more than a deep love for their country.

He was so fed up with all the crap that he’d recently presented his boss, Gary Lawlor, with a.50-caliber bullet wrapped in red tape. The bullet was designed to take out targets at extremely long distances and Lawlor understood that it represented Harvath, who was constantly being sent on missions overseas to take out terrorists. The red tape was self-explanatory.

The job might have been a bit more palatable if it afforded him time to pursue any semblance of a personal life. Most of his buddies, even his former teammates from the SEALs, were pretty much married off and starting families. Though he didn’t necessarily want to start one of his own tomorrow, it would be nice to see a point in his not-too-distant future where his career would allow him to. Of course, that presupposed finding a woman who would want to start one with him as well. Most, he found, were unable to put up with the demands of his job, which regularly sounded the death knell in his burgeoning relationships. There’d only been one woman he’d ever been able to see himself actually making a full go of it with. She was even prepared to uproot her life and move to DC to be with him, but in the end, the demands of his job had made it impossible.