Full Black - Brad Thor [83]
CHAPTER 35
The growling of Nicholas’s two dogs, Argos and Draco, ceased as soon as they saw who it was. Both of them stood up from their beds and trotted over to see Harvath.
“Hello, boys,” he said, patting them on the head. “Hello, Nicholas.”
The little man was typing away at his keyboard. He quickly raised his left index finger, indicating he’d be with Harvath in a second, and then returned to typing.
In the eerie lighting of the SCIF, Harvath studied Nicholas’s face. He had been attacked over the summer with a razor. It had happened in a remote mountainous region of Spain. There wasn’t a hospital, or even a clinic, for over a hundred miles. One of the monks who found him had some medical experience and had sewn him up. All things considered, Nicholas was lucky to have received any stitches at all. In fact, he was just lucky to be alive.
He had since undergone two procedures to help improve his appearance and reduce scarring. From what Harvath could see, Nicholas was almost back to normal.
As soon as the little man was finished with what he was typing, he hit the Enter key, saying, “And a Dolly for Sue.”
Nicholas needed an extraordinary amount of computing power to do what the Carlton Group had brought him on board to do. When the NSA categorically denied him access to their massive data centers, he turned to the next best thing and hacked into Google’s.
Google had dozens of data centers around the world and more than a million servers, from right there in Reston, to places like São Paulo, Moscow, Milan, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Nicholas had given the ones he used most often nicknames—Spotted Elephant, Bird Fish, Charlie-in-the-Box, Ostrich Cowboy, Scooter for Jimmy, and a Dolly for Sue.
Harvath had chalked it up to eccentricity until someone in the Group had asked him if he knew the significance of Nicholas’s code name. The little man had chosen it for himself and it had been approved. Harvath figured it had some poetic meaning for him until he learned that Moonracer was the name of the winged lion that ruled the Island of Misfit Toys. He was responsible for flying around the world each night in search of unwanted toys. It was a fitting moniker.
When it became obvious that Nicholas was not going to grow any bigger, his godless Soviet Georgian parents had decided he was an embarrassment and would forever be like a stone around their necks. They no longer wanted their son and decided to get rid of him.
They made no attempt to find him a suitable, loving home. They didn’t even try to place him in an orphanage. Instead, they abandoned the boy, selling him to a brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There, Nicholas was starved, beaten, and made to participate in unutterable acts no child should ever be subjected to.
It was there that Nicholas learned the true value of information. Pillow talk from the alcohol-loosened lips of the brothel’s powerful clients proved to be a gold mine, once he knew what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.
The women who worked in the brothel were society’s castoffs, just like Nicholas, and they took pity on him. Those ladies of the night were the first to ever treat Nicholas with respect. They became the only family he had ever known, and he repaid their kindness one day by securing their freedom. He had the madam who ran the brothel, along with her husband, dispatched for the inhuman cruelty he had suffered at their hands.
Though he moved beyond the horrors of his youth, he never forgot them. He carried with him a tremendous burden of shame. He was no angel. He had done many bad things since leaving the brothel in Sochi. He had done many good things as well, particularly with the vast amount of money he had made and lost over the years. He wanted to cleanse himself. Whether that was possible, only time would tell. Agreeing to come to work with Harvath was a step in that direction.
Pushing his chair back from the desk, he reached his tiny arms into the air and arched his back. Lowering them, he