by Brad Thor
“Well, work faster,” said Standing. “Your ass is on the line.”
Ashford was about to reply, when Standing disconnected the call and the line went dead. Arsehole, he thought to himself. His dislike for the man was growing by the hour.
Nevertheless, Standing had every right to be angry over what had happened in Los Angeles. The fact that Ashford couldn’t reach his contact only made him look more unprofessional. He was going to locate him soon, or else come up with some sort of Plan B. As soon as silver and gold were unleashed, the United States was going to be locked up tighter than a drum.
CHAPTER 34
RESTON, VIRGINIA
The Carlton Group’s offices were located in a nondescript glass office building ten minutes from Washington Dulles International Airport.
Pat Murphy, the surviving assaulter from the Uppsala operation, and Andy Bachmann, the former CIA man, had hitched a ride home on the jet with Harvath. Murphy kept to himself in the back of the plane. He’d lost his entire team, and Harvath knew there was nothing he could do to help assuage what the man was feeling. Harvath had simply thanked him again for pulling him out of the building, handed him the bottle of Maker’s Mark, and left him alone.
After the post-landing formalities at Dulles, a team met Murphy to accompany him home. It was standard operating procedure. The man had been through too much to just be sent off on his own. Bachmann offered to go along, too.
Harvath extended the assaulter his condolences once more and told him that he’d be in touch. Before climbing into one of the black Suburbans the Old Man had sent to the airport for them, he thanked Bachmann and asked him to make sure Murphy had anything he needed.
When the vehicle pulled out onto the Dulles Toll Road, it was just after midnight. It took them eight minutes to get to the office.
They pulled into the underground parking structure and Harvath was let out near a service door. He punched a code into a pad at the wall, the lock released, and Harvath entered a short maintenance corridor. At the end was a service elevator. He looked up at the surveillance camera in the corner and then waited for the elevator to be sent down. When it arrived and the doors opened, Harvath stepped inside.
The building was twenty-five stories tall and the Carlton Group’s offices were on the top floor. The main elevators that served the building proper and all its tenants had buttons from L to 25, but no 13, which meant those elevators technically only went to the twenty-fourth floor. As a precaution, the Group also controlled the entire twenty-fourth floor, which supposedly included a collection of unoccupied offices. Should anyone ever manage to get a peek at the twenty-fourth floor, it wouldn’t appear unusual at all.
The special service elevator Harvath was in went only to the twenty-fifth floor. When the doors opened, he stepped out into a carpeted foyer area. Sitting behind a desk were two large men dressed in suits and ties. They nodded to Harvath and buzzed him in.
Passing through a heavy blast door hidden behind panels of mahogany, he entered the headquarters of the Carlton Group.
The entire space had been built to the strictest TEMPEST specifications. Though the Carlton Group was a private organization, they were contracted to the DoD and handled classified information. Every step was taken to safeguard against what was referred to in intel-speak as “compromising emanations,” or CE. CE was any electrical, mechanical, or acoustical signal from equipment that was transmitting, receiving, processing, analyzing, encrypting, or decrypting classified information that could be intentionally or accidentally intercepted. It was a sophisticated science that looked at everything from magnetic field radiation and line conduction all the way to how window blinds can vibrate and give away conversations held in offices and what is being typed on a keyboard feet away from a window.
The antieavesdropping measures aside, the Carlton Group’s offices resembled a large, successful law firm. There were private offices, conference rooms, and multiple cubicle areas that had been collectively nicknamed Kubistan by staff.
As in the CIA’s counterterrorism center, employees were grouped according to the regions and areas in which they possessed expertise. Taking a page out of Silicon Valley’s handbook, they were encouraged to move when assignments dictated via mobile workstations that looked as if they came straight out of an IKEA catalog. The Group’s director of operations referred to it as “clustering” and had found that often the personnel themselves formed more effective and productive teams than when management assigned specific people to specific projects.
One of the nation’s longest-serving and most revered spymasters, the Old Man was not a management guru. He believed in simply hiring the best people possible and then trusting them to do their jobs. He’d watched how too much management and bureaucracy had choked the life out of the CIA, and he had sworn he’d never let it happen at his organization.
That said, he’d drawn a few lines in the sand with his management team. Employees were expected to dress like business professionals. There were no casual-dress Fridays. He expected people to comport themselves with dignity. They were the best and he expected them to look like it.
He was particular about facial hair. Unless you were going into the field and it was a part of your cover, male employees were expected to be clean-shaven. He didn’t want to see any piercings other than earrings, and then only two, on female employees only-one in each ear. If you had a tattoo, it had better not be visible. There were also strict rules about physical conditioning, grooming, and hygiene.
There were only two exceptions to “Reed’s Rules of Order,” as they were known. The first had to do with smoking. As a relapsed smoker himself, he 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. 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 had an equally efficient, though much quieter, system placed in his office allowing him to smoke whenever he wanted to.
The other exception to Reed’s Rules of Order had to do with his newest employee, Moonracer. He was an eccentric little man who was also particularly cunning. The Old Man didn’t trust him a single bit.
When it came to bringing Nicholas on board, Carlton had been one hundred percent against it, but Harvath had made a very compelling case and he’d eventually relented once the man had been able to secure his presidential pardon. That didn’t mean that he had changed any of his ways. The Old Man had created a secure area within which Nicholas operated, and within which he could constantly be monitored.
Nicholas had refused to shave his beard and had also insisted that the two enormous white Russian Ovcharkas, or Caucasian Sheepdogs, he owned, which were never away from his side, be allowed to come to work with him. Though Reed Carlton loved dogs, he had refused the request. The little man then claimed they were service animals and hinted at bringing a suit against him for violating the Americans with Disabilities act. The Old Man didn’t know if Nicholas was pulling his leg or if he was actually serious.
Once again, Harvath had stepped in and had lobbied for the dogs, explaining that the Group wouldn’t secure Nicholas’s cooperation unless the dogs were part of the deal. Carlton relented once more. It was obvious that Harvath had appointed himself the little man’s guardian. That point was driven home shortly after Nicholas’s first day on the job.
Because of the man’s physical limitations, a special Sensitive Compartmented Information Faci
lity, SCIF for short, had been built for him. A SCIF was an enclosed area within a building used for processing sensitive information. Nicholas’s SCIF was built to his specifications on a raised floor and stuffed full of all the computer equipment and data links he had asked for. As with the other sections of the Carlton Group, Nicholas’s SCIF had been assigned a title based on its function. A white sheet of paper with the words Digital Ops had been printed out and taped to the door.
The next day it had been taken down and replaced with another sign: The Lollipop Guild. When Harvath heard about it, he had hit the roof.
It took him less than fifteen minutes to track down who had done it. And cornering him in the men’s room, it took every ounce of restraint he had for Harvath not to punch the man’s lights out. To his credit, the man didn’t deny that he had posted the sign. In fact, he owned right up to it and launched into what a mistake he felt it was having brought a criminal like Nicholas into their operation.
Harvath didn’t care what the man thought. He told him that if he didn’t stay away from Nicholas, he would put a bullet in his head and dump his body where his family would never find it. Five minutes later, the man was in his supervisor’s office registering a complaint against Harvath. To the supervisor’s credit, he had backed up Harvath and told the man that if he didn’t close his mouth and get back to work, Harvath wouldn’t have a chance to shoot him because he was going to do the job himself. That seemed to put an end to things. Word quickly got around that anybody who screwed with Moonracer was going to get a visit from his big brother, Norseman, and that Harvath had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and management would turn a blind eye.
Arriving at the SCIF, Harvath punched in his code, waited for the green light to come on, and listened for the locks to slide back and the hiss of air as the door was released.
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 Sao 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 turned to face his friend. “I’m sorry about Uppsala,” he said.
“Me, too,” replied Harvath, nodding toward the minifridge on the opposite wall.
Nicholas nodded. “Help yourself.”
Crossing over to it, he opened the door and peered inside. “Does the Old Man know you’ve got a bottle of wine in here?”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with the hours I’ve been putting in, I deserve a drink now and again.”
“Do you have any beer?” asked Harvath.
“Do I look like I’ve suddenly turned into a beer drinker?”
Though a man of diminutive stature, Nicholas had perhaps the best taste of anyone Harvath had ever met. From clothes to wine and food, Nicholas was a connoisseur of all the good things life had to offer-and that included beer. Harvath had sat and drunk with him before. “Seriously, you don’t have any beer?” Harvath asked.
“It was hard enough getting the wine in here without Carlton knowing. Five percent per volume versus twelve. You do the math.”
Wine packed a stronger punch than beer. Harvath got it. He settled on a Red Bull instead and closed the fridge door.
“I thought you didn’t drink that stuff anymore,” said Nicholas.
“Only in emergencies,” he said, popping the lid and rolling a chair over. “Like when there’s no beer.”
Nicholas smiled and made room for him. “How’s Chase? I heard he got shot in the shoulder.”
“Bicep,” Harvath corrected, pointing at his own. “I think it hit the bone. He’ll be riding the bench for a while. So,” he continued, changing the subject, “the Old Man says you’ve made some progress?”
“I have,” replied Nicholas, as he pulled up an instant message screen and typed a note to the Old Man that Harvath had arrived.
“Is he still in the office?”
“Yeah. He wanted me to let him know when you got here so we could go over everything together.”
“While we’re waiting for him, why don’t you give me the thirty-thousand-foot view of the situation?”
Nicholas nodded and turned back to his computers. Moving his little fingers across the keyboard, he brought up a series of images on the screens around the SCIF. “In the early 1990s, the Chinese watched in utter fascination at how rap
idly the United States defeated Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
“They realized that there was absolutely no way they could ever meet the technologically advanced American military on the conventional battlefield and win. They also realized something else. As they studied how the United States had waged its wars, they saw that leaps in technological innovation drove innovation in American military tactics. Not the other way around.
“The Chinese considered this quite a profound discovery and began to embrace the idea that in a China-versus-America conflict, the inferior China could beat the superior United States. In fact, China’s defense minister, General Chi Haotian, even stated that war with the U.S. was inevitable and that China would not be able to avoid it. He posited that the key issue for the Chinese armed forces was going to be controlling the initiative, or how the war would be fought. It would all come down to how each side approached waging war. China knew exactly what their plan would be. Their blueprint became known as unrestricted warfare.
“The first and most important rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules. Nothing is forbidden. The plan calls for merciless, unconventional out-of-the-box thinking. The key is asymmetrical attacks on every sphere of American life-political, economic, and social.
“Using the ancient martial doctrines of leaders like Sun Tzu, they focused on the time-proven methods of surprise and deception, particularly by weaponizing civilian technologies and employing them without morality, mercy, or limit in order to crush American society.”
“What do you mean by weaponizing civilian technologies?” asked Harvath.
“What is one of the most important technologies that touches every single home and business in America?” said Nicholas.
Harvath thought about it for a moment and replied, “The Internet.”
“You are correct, but the Internet is the second most important. The first is electricity. If electricity were weaponized, meaning an opponent had found a way to use it against the United States, America would be devastated. Without electricity, fuel doesn’t get pumped, trucks don’t move, food and drugs don’t get delivered, the economy comes to a grinding halt. As the economy grinds to a halt, society starts to break apart. Fires don’t get extinguished, looting and crime doesn’t get stopped, you pick up the phone to dial 911 and there is no dial tone. Soon there are no police, there are no firemen. All there is, is chaos.
