by Brad Thor
“If you ever to come back to Africa,” he said, “I’ll be expecting a phone call. And that steak dinner.”
“You got it,” replied Harvath.
Asher stepped onto the top stair, gave the doorframe two quick taps and shouted “See ya, Superman,” as he returned to the vehicles.
After retracting the airstairs and closing the aircraft door, Harvath checked to make sure Hendrik was secure and then informed the pilots that they were ready to take off.
As the plane began to taxi forward, Harvath took a seat, cinched his seat belt, and drew a deep breath. Goma International was known for its crashes—both on landing and on takeoff. He prayed Mr. Murphy had overlooked the airport today.
The plane had been given first position and had been cleared for takeoff. The engines whined as the pilot throttled up the power and turned onto the runway.
Harvath leaned back in his seat and looked out the window. Ash, Mick, and Jambo had already cleared the gate and were headed back to the hotel. They were good men. Harvath had meant it when he said that he appreciated them. They had his back and had proven that he could trust them. That was everything in his book.
He could only imagine the new assholes Decker was going to tear them once they cut her loose. But no matter how arrogant or nasty she was, they would take it like pros and make sure she got on her flight, even if they had to carry her onto the plane.
As the jet raced down the runway and lifted off into the air, he watched Congo fall away beneath him. This was the point where he usually felt relieved. Not this time.
Throughout the flight, he monitored Hendrik and kept him pumped up with sedatives. When the jet touched down in Malta, it taxied into a private hangar where he handed over the prisoner to the interrogation team. The lead operative was a man named Vella. Harvath had never met him before, but he knew him by reputation. He was very good at what he did. He worked out of a facility masquerading as a rural Maltese farmhouse. It had been irreverently nicknamed the “Solarium” because most of it was deep below ground with no windows. If Hendrik was holding anything back, Vella was going to get it.
Waiting in the hangar for Harvath was a new jet and crew. The Gulfstream G650ER had been arranged by Beaman to get him back to the States as quickly as possible. It came fully catered along with a flight attendant. But the best feature as far as Harvath was concerned was the private bedroom.
He had a drink just after takeoff and another with his meal. By the time he took off his clothes and hit the bed, he was more than ready to close his eyes and fall asleep.
He woke up a couple of times in flight—just long enough to open his eyes, check his watch, and drift back asleep.
It was a godsend—a chunk of over eight hours of uninterrupted time. When he couldn’t sleep any longer, he availed himself of the en suite bathroom and took a long, hot shower. He then shaved as he let the water pound against his body.
After drying off, he returned to the bedroom, where he found the bed made, his clothes hung up, the TV turned to a satellite news channel, and coffee waiting. Sitting on the bed was a menu offering a range of meals he could choose from before they landed.
This really was the way to fly. The only thing it was missing was someone to share it with. He had no doubt Lara would love it. Who wouldn’t?
Scanning the menu, he made his decision, and called up front to order. By the time he had dressed and walked out of the bedroom, the table had been set with new silver, new flowers, and a fresh linen tablecloth. A plate of fresh fruit was already waiting. Lara would like this a lot.
The flight attendant asked if he wanted a cocktail, and he politely declined. He knew he was going to have to hit the ground running when the plane landed.
After eating a double portion of bacon and eggs, he took a bottle of water back to the bedroom and closed the door. There wasn’t much time before they touched down, and he wanted to use it to get his thoughts together.
He didn’t know how secure the plane’s WiFi was, so he had refrained from using his laptop. He didn’t like going in to the office blind, but he didn’t have any choice. Security always came first.
They would be landing at Dulles and Harvath assumed the Old Man would send someone to pick him up. If no one was there, he would just hop in a cab. The Carlton Group was not that far away. The building’s proximity to Dulles had been one of the selling points for Carlton. Taking in the crawl along the bottom of the screen, Harvath tried to get up to speed on what had transpired while he had been away. He also needed to make the mental shift from Congo mode to back home, CONUS mode—military speak for Continental United States.
Once the plane had landed and come to a stop, the flight attendant lowered the airstairs and a U.S. immigration agent boarded the plane. Harvath handed the man his passport, as well as the still blank declaration form the flight attendant had given him.
The agent looked at it and smiled. Harvath was on a very special VIP list.
“Nothing to declare then?” he asked.
“Only that I’m glad to be home.”
“It’s good to have you back, sir.”
The man handed Harvath’s passport back to him, and Harvath picked up his bag and stepped off the plane. The crew met him at the bottom of the airstairs and thanked him for flying with them. They were extremely professional and he thanked them in return before heading across the tarmac.
Though most of his travel was done out of D.C.’s Reagan International, he knew the private aviation routine at Dulles very well and walked toward the Signature Flight Support building.
When he stepped inside, he saw that Reed Carlton had sent someone to meet him. Standing with a garment bag over her shoulder was one of his colleagues from the Carlton Group, Sloane Ashby.
“You better not have been in my house,” Harvath said as she held out the garment bag to him.
Only Reed Carlton had keys to Harvath’s home, but on more than one occasion he had given them to Ashby for one reason or another.
Harvath didn’t like it. Not only because he didn’t want her looking around his house when he wasn’t there but also because it was demeaning to an operator of Ashby’s status to relegate her to errand-girl status.
That was the Old Man’s style, though. No matter who you were or where you came from, you had to earn your way up in his organization.
The problem with sending Ashby to select clothes for Harvath was that every time she was sent to do it, she always pushed the envelope—picking combinations Harvath would never assemble for himself.
“I didn’t pick these,” she said, handing over the garment bag. “I wasn’t in your house. I only drove up and popped the trunk.”
Harvath unzipped the bag and looked inside. It wasn’t the staid dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie he would have expected from the Old Man, but it wasn’t the envelope-pushing ensemble he would have expected from Ashby. In fact, it fell tastefully right in the middle.
“Who gave this to you?” he asked.
“Lara.”
“Lara?”
“Did you develop a hearing problem in Congo?” she joked. “Yeah, Lara.”
“Why was she at my house?”
“You can ask the Old Man when you see him. Right now, you need to get changed into your party clothes, or he’s going to chew my ass for being late. Let’s go, pretty boy.”
Harvath had a real soft spot for Ashby. She was a smartass, and he liked that. She could dish it out as well as she could take it. In fact, she probably dished it out too well, which was part of the reason the Army had agreed to let Carlton have her.
Ashby had killed so many of the enemy in Afghanistan that when a magazine back home did an unauthorized profile of her, a price was put on her head. She had taken out more bad guys than any other woman in combat, and more than even most male soldiers. The Army, though, couldn’t risk the negative PR of a ce
lebrity soldier, much less one who was killed or captured, so they pulled her from active duty.
To add insult to injury, they refused her request to be sent to Iraq. Instead, she was detailed to Fort Bragg where she helped train the top-secret, all female Delta Force detachment known as The Athena Project.
She couldn’t believe her government had sidelined her for being good at what she had been trained to do—killing bad guys. While she may have been a good instructor, she was too talented and too young to be mothballed. When Carlton offered to arrange for her to be released to his organization, she had jumped at the chance.
Everyone knew that Harvath was the Old Man’s golden boy, but like any smart manager, he was always looking to add depth to his bench. At about the same time he hired Ashby, he had hired Chase Palmer. When Harvath stepped out of the Signature Flight Support building in his tailored Argentine blue suit, Palmer and Ashby were leaning against Palmer’s car waiting for him.
“Did you go to Congo or a Day Spa?” Palmer asked when he saw him.
Being a smartass seemed to be part of the Old Man’s corporate culture.
“It wasn’t Congo,” Harvath replied. “Your mom and I went to Turks and Caicos.”
Palmer flipped him his middle finger as Harvath chucked his bag in the trunk and told his two colleagues to get in the car.
Their conversation grew more serious as they neared the office. Ashby and Palmer were both privy to his operation, and he gave them a full recap of what had happened. It was good practice for what he would have to recount to the Old Man.
At the office building, they cleared security and pulled into the underground garage. Harvath retrieved his bag from the trunk and Ashby used her keycard to summon the elevator to take them upstairs.
Even though the Carlton Group was a private organization, they handled classified information, and so all of their systems were built to the strictest NSA specifications.
Every step had been taken to safeguard against “compromising emanations” or CE as they were known. CE was any electrical, mechanical, or acoustical signal from equipment that was transmitting, receiving, processing, analyzing, encrypting, or decrypting classified information. From preventing magnetic field radiation and line conduction, to actively vibrating the windows so that conversations and keyboard strokes couldn’t be intercepted, nothing had been overlooked.
All of these measures, though, were largely invisible. To the untrained eye, the Carlton Group’s offices resembled a successful, high-tech law firm.
Though Carlton believed in hiring the top people and staying out of their way so they could do their jobs, he ran a tight ship.
There were no casual dress Fridays. The Group’s employees were the best. They were expected to dress and act like it. There were also strict rules about physical conditioning, grooming, and hygiene. The Old Man was old school.
As a smoker himself, Carlton allowed people to smoke, but they couldn’t go outside to do it. Smokers had a habit of getting too chummy and chatty with strangers and other tenants in a building. That was dangerous in the intelligence business. They milled around outside and lingered over cigarettes, wasting productive time. They also made themselves vulnerable to surveillance and approach.
To cater to the smokers, he’d built what became known as “the coffin,” a small glass booth barely big enough for two people at the far end of the office. It had an intense air purification system that roared so loudly you could barely hear yourself think.
It wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. There wasn’t even a place to sit down inside. You went in, got your fix, and got out.
Strangely enough, no one ever saw the Old Man using the coffin, and it was widely suspected he had an equally efficient though much quieter system placed in his office that allowed him to smoke whenever he wanted to.
When Harvath stepped off the elevator and entered the offices, he half expected to find the Old Man waiting for him up front in the main conference room. Instead, there was a medical team. Harvath recognized the doctor. It was the same one he had been on the phone with from Congo. The man waved him into the conference room.
Despite Harvath feeling perfectly fine, Carlton had ordered a full workup. They took his temperature and vitals, as well as several blood samples.
After the team was finished, the doc handed Harvath a digital thermometer. He told him to take his temperature twice daily and to text him the results.
Harvath tucked the device in his pocket, put his jacket on, and thanked the doctor. He then walked back toward the Old Man’s office.
He and Jessica Decker had been wearing full protective gear when they explored the Matumaini Clinic, but only a respirator at the pit, and nothing at all in the village, nor in their encounter with the sick FRPI rebel commander.
From what he had gleaned from Hendrik, whatever the illness was that had been cooked up in Ngoa, it moved fast. The incubation period was days, not weeks. Oddly enough, Leonce and his son had been standing right there when the rebel commander had damaged one of the vials, but nothing had happened to them. They had been perfectly fine. If, and when, he started running a fever or had any other symptoms, then he’d raise his concern level. Right now, he tried not to think about it.
Reaching the Old Man’s office, Harvath stuck his head inside, but it was empty.
As he had sent Ashby with a suit to pick him up at the airport, someone important had to be in the building, or on their way. Harvath figured it was Beaman. The Old Man probably wanted to give him an update. But as he was a civilian, there was a lot that had happened in Congo that couldn’t be shared with him. They would have to figure out what their story was and just how far they would read Beaman in.
Walking down the hall, Harvath breezed past the coffin, but still no sign of Carlton. Unless he had left the building, there was only one other place he could be.
CHAPTER 29
* * *
A Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, commonly referred to in intelligence parlance as a “SCIF,” was an enclosed space, fortified against all forms of eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, and used for processing sensitive information. The sign on the outside of the door read, DIGITAL OPS.
Harvath punched his code into the pad and stood still as biometric reader scanned his face. There was a hiss of air as the locks released, the light changed from red to green, and he was able to open the door.
Inside were three of the greatest players in the world of intelligence, and two enormous white dogs that looked like wolves on steroids.
The dogs belonged to Nicholas, the Carlton Group’s digital guru. He was an amazingly talented little man who suffered from primordial dwarfism and stood less than three feet tall. Argos and Draco, as the dogs were named, were Russian Ovcharkas—the breed favored by the Russian Military and the former East German border patrol. They were highly intelligent, incredibly fast, and fiercely loyal. The dogs made excellent companions and even better protectors. That last part was especially important for a man who had spent his previous career buying, selling, and hacking black market intelligence used to blackmail some of the most powerful figures in the world.
In global intelligence circles, Nicholas was known only as “The Troll.” Not much was known about his upbringing. Even less was known about where he was now, and whom he was working for. The fact that the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was sitting in a chair next to him, petting one of his dogs, said a lot about how far Nicholas had come. It also said a lot about how far Carlton and his relationship with the CIA had come.
The Old Man had worked at the Central Intelligence Agency for three decades. One of his proudest accomplishments during that time had been establishing its Counterterrorism Center.
But over the years, he had watched as the CIA had become more bloated and bureaucratic. Middle managers more concerned with protecting their own careers
rather than the country they had sworn to serve fueled a risk-averse culture that was more focused on avoiding failure than securing success.
There were great men and women at the CIA, tons of them, but desk jockeys better suited to IBM than the world of international espionage were hamstringing them. When the Agency began paying foreign intelligence agencies to run ops for them, Carlton had had enough.
Tendering his resignation, he left and created his own company. Based on the CIA’s precursor—the OSS, the Carlton Group hired the best intelligence and special operations people it could find. They broke all the rules with only one goal in mind—to keep America and her citizens safe, no matter what the cost.
Thanks to the frustration with the CIA’s broken culture and the Agency’s inability to conduct effective espionage, government contracts rolled in, especially from the Department of Defense.
But when a new President entered the White House, things at the CIA began to change. He named two highly respected operatives to take the number one and number two slots. Along with the Oval Office, they had begun to repair that broken culture and turn things around.
It was an amazing snapshot to see Nicholas, Reed Carlton, and Lydia Ryan all sitting there in the SCIF together.
Harvath liked Ryan. The product of an Irish father and a Greek mother, she was a tall, beautiful woman in her early thirties with dark hair and intense green eyes, but that wasn’t why Harvath liked her. He liked her because she was smart; off-the-charts smart and a hell of a field operative.
The fact that she was good-looking didn’t hurt, but Harvath had always found intelligence incredibly attractive. It was what drew him to Lara, and was part of what had created a spark with Decker. He could never be with a stupid woman. As a rule, though, he worked hard to keep his business and personal lives separate.
Stepping into the SCIF, the dogs leapt up to greet Harvath first, and he scratched both of them behind the ears. He had not only fought to get Nicholas his job, but he had also fought to get Carlton to allow him to bring the dogs to work. It was obvious from the start that Harvath had appointed himself the little man’s guardian.
