Code of Conduct

by Brad Thor

  “Now what?” he asked, excusing himself for having to remove a handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose. “Anyone have any ideas?”

  Harvath cleared his throat and looked at Colonel White. “How much of my debrief from Congo did you read?”

  “The whole thing.”

  He looked over at General McCollum, who nodded and said, “I did as well.”

  He knew Lydia Ryan and Bob McGee, as well as the President, had read theirs, so that meant everyone in the room was up to speed. He also knew that they had been made aware of the patients who had bled out in Chicago, Houston, and Detroit. It had been one of the reasons Colonel White had moved to push up the Ngoa operation.

  Harvath filled them in on what they had learned about the patients and their travel histories. He then laid out his theory about the Hajj and how the virus might have been introduced.

  “What kind of protocol do we even have for something like this?” President Porter asked, fishing his handkerchief back out.

  “It’s Federal, not military,” McCollum responded.

  “CDC, NIH, FEMA,” White added, “all coordinated from DHS.”

  Out of an abundance of caution, White had not been told that right now, all of those organizations were suspect, and were being purposefully cut out of the loop by the White House.

  “Let’s say something happened,” CIA Director McGee replied, fixing his eyes on White, “and DHS was unable to get spun up in time, how would you want to see things unfold?”

  “Why wouldn’t DHS, or more importantly FEMA or CDC or NIH be able to respond in a timely manner?” she asked.

  “Just answer my question.”

  “Is this a drill?”

  “No,” the President replied. “This isn’t a drill. Please answer.”

  “We’d want to know as much about this strain of African Hemorrhagic Fever as possible. We’d need samples. We’d need them from any newly diagnosed patients here, but if this thing did start in Congo, I’d like to get samples from there too.

  “Ideally, I’d want the samples taken at the Matumaini Clinic from patient zero. I’d want anything you could get from that sick rebel commander, as well as samples from that Matumaini Clinic worker and his son who transported patient zero’s samples and was there when the rebel commander was exposed. That’s just for starters.”

  President Porter looked at Harvath. “On the Congo end of things, how doable is that list?”

  “Provided the rebels are where we left them, I could give the STAR team coordinates and they could go in to get samples from the commander’s corpse. We left him in the jungle, though, so his bones might be picked clean by now.”

  “We’ll take that chance,” said Colonel White.

  “And the rest of it?” Porter asked.

  “When we left Bunia with Dr. Decker, Leonce and Pepsy said they intended to stay there. There was nothing left for them in their village.”

  “Could we find them?”

  “I have someone who could track them down,” said Harvath, thinking of Jambo.

  “Which just leaves us with recovering the patient zero samples from the WHO offices in Kinshasa,” stated White. “Do you have somebody who could do that?”

  Jessica Decker was back in Kinshasa, but he didn’t believe for a minute that she would cooperate, much less that she could pull it off on her own.

  Needless to say, he did know someone, and he nodded.

  “We have an experienced team in-country we can use,” Harvath replied.

  “Extremis?” Carlton asked, referring to Ash and the three other SAS men.

  He nodded once more.

  “But do they know how to handle samples?” White inquired. “How to package them for transport? Will they even know how to locate them in the Kinshasa office?”

  All good questions, the answers to which were no. Ash and his men, as far he knew, didn’t have applicable experience in handling highly lethal pathogens. He shook his head.

  “Colonel,” Porter said. “How soon can you get someone from the STAR team to Kinshasa to supervise?”

  “I can task one of them immediately, but it’ll all come down to transport.”

  “And Extremis?” the President asked, looking at Harvath.

  “Same answer.”

  “What about samples from the U.S. patients?” said Lydia Ryan.

  “Normally, I’d say that wouldn’t be a problem,” White replied. “We have a good working relationship with the CDC. With something like this, they’d want as much help as they can get. But we began this discussion with Director McGee asking me what USAMRIID would do if the CDC couldn’t respond.”

  McGee looked at the President, then at her. “Ask the CDC for the samples, just as you normally would in a situation like this. If you get any pushback, let us know and we’ll take care of it.”

  “If this is some kind of terrorist attack,” she stated, “why are we not telling them?”

  “There are additional National Security issues involved,” McCollum replied as he closed his briefing book. He had been read in on the full scope of the situation before White had arrived and that was all he said.

  White was a highly skilled scientist, but she was also a soldier and a professional who respected the chain of command. “Understood,” she responded.

  After thanking General McCollum and Colonel White for their attendance, the President excused them from the Situation Room. He then turned to the remaining attendees and asked for a domestic update.

  Carlton and McGee gave the President a quick rundown, hitting the high points and answering the handful of questions that were raised. The longer they sat in the Situation Room, the worse the Commander in Chief looked.

  “Are you feeling okay, Mr. President?” Carlton finally asked.

  “I’m fine,” Porter replied, coughing briefly to clear his chest. “What about those letters MC that Damien wrote in relation to their plan for the United States? Have we figured that out yet?”

  “No, sir,” McGee said. “We’re still working on that.”

  “Well, work faster. I want another update in two hours. And by update, I mean progress. Is that understood?”

  Around the conference table, everyone nodded and replied, “Yes, Mr. President.”

  As the President stood, the rest of the room stood, and Harvath pressed his luck. “Mr. President, one last thing, if I may, sir?”

  Porter didn’t look happy, but he nodded.

  “Sir,” Harvath continued. “I know when it was originally presented, you tabled any talk of taking Damien into custody.”

  “You mean rendering him,” the President clarified.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know why I tabled it?”

  “I think I have an idea, sir.”

  “Well allow me to clarify it for you,” Porter retorted. “Pierre Damien is an American citizen currently on U.S. soil. He is also a citizen of Canada, which is an important American ally. Damien is also a diplomat, an Under-Secretary-General with the United Nations no less. He’s a wealthy and powerful man with a lot of wealthy and powerful friends.”

  “I understand, sir, it’s just—”

  The President cut him off. “Don’t interrupt me.”

  Never before had Harvath been chastised by Porter. He regretted interrupting him immediately.

  “Any corners you may have to cut from time to time downrange, or things you may have do in the name of expediency, become considerably more complicated when the recipient of those measures is an American citizen. Place that citizen on U.S. soil, and the complication factor skyrockets so high that God himself couldn’t even reach it.”

  Porter took a moment to catch his breath and look around the table before returning to Harvath. “Making a case is like laying bricks, and you don’t have enough of them. You have th
e slaughter of workers at a medical clinic and a village in a part of Africa most Americans know nothing about. It’s horrific, I’ll give you that, but the only thing you have tying it to Pierre Damien is the word of some mercenary whom you subjected to waterboarding and then rendered to Malta without any authorization whatsoever.

  “That’s it. That’s all you have. And that means that’s all I have. That’s all my Attorney General would have. It doesn’t matter who was seen coming out of his house. He, like every other American, has a right to free association.

  “Do I enjoy his anti-American rhetoric? No, but he also has a right to freedom of speech, along with a long list of other rights guaranteed to him in the Constitution, a document that I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend.

  “So when you ask me if you can render an American citizen, from American soil, for a crime he allegedly orchestrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, based upon a statement coerced from a non-U.S. citizen under unauthorized, harsh interrogation, my answer is not only no, it’s hell no.

  “Does that clarify my position for you?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Paul Porter looked around the table one last time. Everyone else nodded, and with that, he exited the Situation Room.

  Harvath, Carlton, Ryan, and McGee sat for a moment in stunned silence until McGee said, “That went well.”

  Carlton shook his head. “You never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

  Harvath didn’t want to be disrespectful to the Old Man, but he couldn’t hold his tongue. “It needed to be asked.”

  “No it didn’t, at least not directly. You know better. He’s the President of the United States. He doesn’t mind a little coloring outside the lines, but there are certain things that you have to be very delicate about raising. And there are most definitely things that cannot be put to him point-blank.”

  Harvath glanced at Ryan. There were times where she seemed to understand him better than either of their bosses. “It all comes down to bricks, right?”

  “What?”

  “The President told you. You don’t have enough bricks. He wants you to build the thickest, highest wall you can. Something Damien will never be able to scale. I didn’t hear POTUS say stop. I just heard him say that for the time being, you can’t choke any of your bricks out of Pierre Damien directly.”

  Was that it? Was that what the President was telegraphing? He hadn’t shut them down. He had simply established a bright line. One that for now, they would all have to abide by.

  Switching to strategy, they remained for a few more minutes to discuss roles and who was going to do what next.

  After discussing the Israelis and Ben Mordechai, they agreed to talk again in an hour, and exited the Situation Room en masse.

  Halfway up the stairs, Harvath’s phone began to blow up, chiming with a string of texts—all of them from Nicholas, telling him to call in.

  As he hit the exit for the West Wing, his phone sprang to life once more, this time with a call. “Atomic Dog” by George Clinton.

  The Old Man looked at him.

  “Nicholas,” Harvath responded.

  “Answer it.”

  CHAPTER 38

  * * *

  It was a torrent of bad news. “Six more cases have been reported,” said Nicholas.

  “Where?” Harvath replied.

  “San Francisco, Cedar Rapids, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C.”

  Washington? Harvath shouldn’t have been surprised. D.C. and Northern Virginia had large Muslim populations. He just hadn’t expected this thing to spread so quickly, much less wind up on his own doorstep overnight. But it was there, and they were going to have to deal with it.

  “Has the media gotten ahold of this yet?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Nicholas. “And in the last two hours, health ministries from eleven other countries have reached out to the CDC. They’re trying to control the information flow in order to prevent a panic.”

  Good luck with that, Harvath thought. In his experience, life was predominantly made up of three distinct groups: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. And if there was one thing he had learned from a lifetime of hunting wolves and protecting sheep, it was that sheep had two speeds—graze and stampede. Now that word was out that the virus was loose, all bets were off. Very soon, chaos was going to ensue.

  “What else do you have?” he asked, bracing himself for more bad news.

  “The pharmaceutical companies Damien’s involved with appear pretty benign. One focuses on dementia medication and the other on birth control drugs.”

  Go figure.

  “I think you were right about the Congolese Muslims, though,” Nicholas continued. “There was a group of thirty. They arrived and departed Saudi Arabia via the same privately chartered aircraft.”

  Finally, some good news. “Any passport photos or CCTV footage?” he asked.

  “All of it has been transmitted to the Solarium. Vella is personally going to go through it with Hendrik.”

  While it wouldn’t move the ball down the field, at least it would confirm his theory. “Anything else?”

  “Mordechai’s asset made contact.”

  “The woman with Damien?”

  “Yes,” Nicholas replied. “She thinks she captured his password.”

  “That’s even better news.”

  “And it keeps getting better. The keystroke logger captured activity from multiple devices in the room, one of which we were able to ID.”

  “Which was?”

  “A laptop belonging to Linda Landon from the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Have you reviewed all of the keystrokes they caught?”

  “No one has seen them. Not even Mordechai. Without access to secure comms, his asset isn’t transmitting the data. She and Damien are having lunch today at some place called La Niçoise in Winchester. She’s going to pass the actual memory card to Mordechai there.”

  With all the tech the Israelis had, he was a little surprised they couldn’t have equipped her with some way to encrypt and transmit the data. But by the same token, this was an incredibly important operation. They were risking a ton just sending her in with the keystroke logger. There was no telling what Damien or his people might have done if they had discovered any of it.

  He also needed to keep in mind that Mordechai’s operation had revolved around the City of Geneva, where it wouldn’t have been a big deal to pass off the memory card on her way to work, or to a store, or something like that. Now that she was at Damien’s rural Virginia estate, she was much more isolated.

  There was no telling how secure his WiFi was and what possible digital eavesdropping measures he had in place. He was known to entertain wealthy and extremely powerful people. Did he eavesdrop on any of their communications?

  The restaurant was a good play. The handoff would be low-tech, old-school Espionage 101. What he didn’t like, though, was that they’d be burning hours in a battle where every second counted.

  “Where’s Mordechai now?” Harvath asked.

  “Still at the canal house. The team that’s on him is about to rotate off.”

  “Who’s up next?”

  “Sloane Ashby and Chase Palmer are back on.”

  Harvath put the phone on mute, spoke to the Old Man for a couple of seconds, and then returned to Nicholas. “How would you like to get out of the SCIF for a little bit?”

  “That depends,” the little man said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Lunch. I’ll buy.”

  •••

  Nicholas’s gray Sprinter cargo van was a rolling TOC. It had satellite communications equipment hidden in the roof and was packed with racks of electronics inside. Special hand-controls had been added that allowed him to drive the van himself.

>   They arrived in downtown Winchester well before the lunch rush and found parking half a block down from La Niçoise on the other side of the street. Its awning promised Mediterranean and French cuisine—two of Nicholas’s favorites. Harvath exited the van and came back fifteen minutes later with Thai.

  “What the hell is this?” the little man complained.

  “Pad See Ew.”

  “I’m not eating this.”

  Harvath took the container back and set it on the dashboard.

  “That’s it?” Nicholas asked. “No Champignons Sauvages? No Pâté de Campagne? No Escargots Bourguignons?”

  Harvath looked in his bag from Thai Winchester. “I guess they forgot.”

  He shook his head. “Less than fifty yards from a French restaurant and you stumble around until you find Thai food.”

  “Who doesn’t like Thai?”

  “Don’t play stupid with me,” Nicholas replied. “You’re so much better at it.”

  Harvath laughed and reached inside the bag. “That’s what I love about you. You never look down on anyone.”

  The little man fixed him with a stare. “Is that a short joke?”

  “Maybe,” he replied, handing him a styrofoam container. “Gourmet bison burger, rare, with caramelized onions and blue cheese.”

  Nicholas’s stare softened into a smile.

  “We good?” Harvath asked.

  “It’s not Gigot D’Agneau,” he said, lifting the lid and admiring the sandwich, “but I’ll take it. Did you bring back anything for the boys?”

  Harvath looked into the back of the van at Argos and Draco, their noses in the air, taking in the smell of all the hot food. “Sorry, they only took cash and I came up a little—”

  “Don’t say it,” Nicholas smiled.

  Harvath smiled. “You’re lucky I found someplace to get you a burger.”

  “Thanks.”

  In between bites of his food, Harvath said, “A TV was on in the Thai place. They broke from national news for a local report about another patient who had bled out at Georgetown University Hospital.”

  “They’ll never contain this.”

  “The illness or the story?”