by Brad Thor
As Bremmer stepped back, Middleton looked down at Harvath. “You actually had old Chuck for a little bit. In the end, though, he figured it was worth one more try at getting rid of you. I’d say that was a pretty good gamble. Wouldn’t you?”
Harvath spit a glob of blood onto the Persian carpet he was lying on and worked his jaw side to side.
“Since you had Vignon and Schroeder, we figured it was pointless to try to stop you from accessing the estate. In fact, it was Chuck’s idea to let you walk on. If security caught you, perfect. If not, we figured this would work and it did. Now, to tie up all the loose ends.”
Harvath watched as Middleton gestured for the rifle. Bremmer checked to make sure there was a round chambered and then handed it to him.
He hefted it up and down a couple of times and then seated the stock at his shoulder. Stepping away from Harvath, he raised the weapon and pointed it at several of the animal heads mounted on the wall. Bremmer gloated with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.
But the smile vanished when Middleton aimed the weapon at him and pressed the trigger.
A spray of pink mist hung in the air like some sort of obscene halo as the round took out half the man’s head.
“Very nice,” said Middleton as he walked over and picked up the Taser. “Very nice indeed. Now, about the rest of those loose ends. I’d like to know where you’re keeping Kurt Schroeder as well as my security chief, Mr. Vignon.”
Harvath looked up, smiled, and shook his head. He was already gritting his teeth, aware of what was coming next.
Squeezing the trigger on the Taser, Middleton gave Harvath another burst of electricity.
Harvath’s body went as stiff as a board and then began to bend as his spine arched and his tensioned shoulders pushed him up off the floor.
When the effects of the Taser passed, Middleton repeated his question.
“Go fish,” Harvath replied.
The Director of ATS was visibly upset with that answer and sent Harvath back into agony with the device.
He pulled the trigger two more times just to prove how far he was prepared to go.
When Harvath’s eyes, which had rolled back into his head, came down and refocused, Middleton leaned over and pressed him one last time. “Listen to me, motherfucker. One last chance. After this, I’m going to the rifle and I’ll start by putting holes in your fucking knees. Where are my people? More importantly, where the fuck are Banks and Carlton?”
“Right here, asshole,” said a voice from the doorway.
Middleton spun as Reed Carlton pantomimed a kiss and two shots sped from his custom 1911.
EPILOGUE
TUESDAY
Though Reed Carlton knew plenty of heavy hitters in Washington, it was Tommy Banks who was able to secretly get the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the DoD into one room on such short notice. Harvath had no desire to be at the meeting and had politely declined. Carlton understood why he wanted to remain in the background. He only asked that he and Nicholas, who had gone back to Texas to spend time with Nina, be accessible via secure communication in case there were any questions.
As it turned out, there were many questions, most of which were aimed at the Director of the NSA. All of the agency heads viewed ATS as a monster that the NSA had allowed to get out of control. They had long held suspicions about what the quasiprivate company had been up to, and now many of their worst fears were confirmed.
With no staff in the room, there was no one the NSA Director could divert to and ask questions of. Not that it would have mattered. If even half of what Carlton had said about ATS was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, they had a major clusterfuck on their hands—regardless of how much sway the NSA did or didn’t have over ATS. In a town like D.C., perception was reality, and that was all that mattered.
The other problem NSA was staring down the barrel of was how physically intertwined they were with ATS, particularly when it came to the Utah Data Center. They were going to have to shut it down, immediately, at least until a thorough investigation could be conducted. They needed to know how ATS had specifically planned to carry out its attack and make sure that safeguards were put in place so that such a thing could never happen in the future.
After the participants tired of putting the boot to the NSA Director, they turned their sights to what the next several steps should be. All present agreed that there were two that needed to be taken care of right away. First, a cleanup team needed to be sent to the ATS estate to relieve Casey and Rhodes.
Per Reed Carlton’s suggestion, the CIA would handle the cleanup, as well as develop a cover story that showed Chuck Bremmer had deep financial difficulties. In addition to a daughter leaving for an expensive Ivy League college next year, he was carrying on multiple extramarital affairs. He had decided to leave the Defense Department and transition into the private sector in order to make more money. To that end, he had lined up a job with ATS, but when it fell through, he went on a rampage, killing several ATS personnel at the company’s rural Virginia retreat, including the company’s managing director, Craig Middleton. The evidence at the scene would show that Middleton was able to get a shot off in the struggle before he died, killing Bremmer.
According to Casey and Rhodes, none of the board members had arrived at the estate yet. Having control of the scene worked to their advantage, but they would have to move fast.
The other step that needed to be taken was informing the President. The hardest part about setting up the meeting was limiting the amount of people in the room. The Director of Central Intelligence, though, was quite blunt and informed the President that the only people that would be allowed in the room were the Attorney General and the Treasury Secretary. The President’s chief of staff and the rest of the opinion shapers he was wont to surround himself with were not allowed. This was a national emergency, but the circle of people chiming in needed to be very tight.
To his credit, the President respected the counsel of the DCI and did exactly as he asked. When Reed Carlton arrived at the White House along with the heads of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DoD, the President met them in the situation room with only the Treasury Secretary and Attorney General in tow.
Carlton spoke for fifteen minutes, followed by the Directors of the NSA, FBI, and CIA, as well as the Secretary of Defense. The Attorney General and the Treasury Secretary were floored by what they had heard. The President, though appalled, retained his composure.
After everyone had been given a chance to speak and ask questions, the President raised the issue of damage control. The story would be so corrosive to the American psyche and would so undermine the people’s trust in government, that he wanted it buried and cemented over. His intelligence chiefs cautioned there was a very fine line to be walked here. If they attempted a cover-up, it would suggest that ATS had been acting with the knowledge and support of the United States government, which wasn’t true. If that caught hold in the American consciousness, it would be a nosedive from which there’d be absolutely no recovery.
The intelligence chiefs asked the President to order a thorough investigation first and have them report back what they felt were the best options. The President agreed.
In the meantime, the President wanted a stake driven through the heart of ATS. He wanted it completely broken up and all of its dirty deals unwound. If they had immediate access to all of the financial records at ATS, the Treasury Secretary said, they would make it their number one priority. The Attorney General said the Justice Department would back Treasury with whatever it needed. The question was, could the government, and the countless agencies and departments ATS provided technical solutions to, survive if the company was collapsed?
The NSA Director and the Secretary of Defense conferred for a moment off to the side. As they did, the President wrote on a notepad, outlining three legislative issues he wanted his staff to get moving in Congress right away:
1. A state of national emergency could last for only one year. Any period be
yond that would need approval by a two-thirds vote of Congress.
2. All warrantless surveillance of American citizens was to be terminated immediately. Going forward, it would be a capital offense to surveil American citizens without proper judicial review and written authorization.
3. In order to curb insider trading, all members of Congress, as well as all federal employees who work in the defense, technology, and intelligence sectors of government, were to be prohibited from investing in the stock market.
The President was developing a fourth point about bringing better oversight to classified programs so that the nation’s leaders couldn’t be kept in the dark, when the NSA Director and the Secretary of Defense adjourned their sidebar and replied to the President’s question.
It was their opinion that ATS could in fact be broken up and sold to a myriad of contracting firms who would be able to maintain the existing service agreements.
The conversation then turned to Craig Middleton and his coconspirators. The only two people currently in custody were Kurt Schroeder and Martin Vignon, neither of whom appeared to have had any knowledge of the proposed attack or the overall big picture plot. But both were guilty of a string of other violations, as were a significant portion of the rank-and-file at ATS. When they began discussing legal strategy, all eyes turned to the Attorney General.
He had already been playing various scenarios in his mind and didn’t need time to collect his thoughts. All of the charges against ATS employees could be handled in federal court. That didn’t worry him. His concern was the company’s fifteen-member board of directors. Because of their prominence, openly trying them in public could be the equivalent of a public relations loose nuke. If it detonated, the fallout would be devastating. The knowledge that so many well-known and trusted figures had been conspiring against their own country might actually do more long-term damage than anyone could predict. Though it would demonstrate that the United States eventually discovered and stopped the plot, and might act as a deterrent, he didn’t think the nation’s psyche would survive it.
Citing the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, the AG stated that an argument could be made for indefinite detention of any and all board members and possibly even military tribunals. There was another option available, but it would be up to the President. The Black List.
Upon mention of the list, the Treasury Secretary was asked to leave the situation room and wait outside. Discussion of the Black List was outside his purview.
It might have been argued that the only people who should have been allowed to stay in the room at all were the CIA Director and the Secretary of Defense, but the President asked Carlton, as well as the FBI and NSA directors, to remain. Going around the conference table, he asked the men one by one to weigh in on utilizing the Black List.
The FBI Director was adamantly opposed to it. He did not like the idea of the United States government being able to target and kill American citizens without due process. Immediately, the Attorney General jumped in to argue that there was a process, it just didn’t take place in a courtroom.
The FBI Director finished his argument by saying that if you couldn’t face your accusers and personally answer the charges against you, it was not due process, and it was not what the Founders intended.
Not only did the CIA Director disagree with his FBI colleague, so too did the NSA Director and the Secretary of Defense. They argued that ATS had intended to overthrow the United States. After failing to achieve their goal, the board members couldn’t then come back and lobby for the full rights and protections that they had been actively working to subvert.
As the debate wore on, the FBI Director continued to remain steadfast in his position. No argument could change his mind. Eventually, the President thanked him and excused him from the room.
The final person the President queried about using the Black List was Reed Carlton. Very carefully, he laid out his argument.
As he saw it, the President had no choice. He agreed with the Attorney General that the spectacle of a public trial was out of the question. Indefinitely detaining the board members or trying them via a military tribunal would also be a huge spectacle. When word got out—and it would—that so many once-respected national political figures had been involved in a plot to subvert the nation, the effect would be irreversible. The Black List had to be used. Around the table, every head nodded in agreement.
The only weak point that the NSA Director could see was that even if the kills were handled covertly, someone at some point was going to connect the dots. You could only have so many “accidents” before suspicions were raised.
The CIA Director looked at Carlton, who then looked at the President and said, “There’s actually a way to handle that.”
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER
The Gulfstream G550 business jet registered to Advance Technology Solutions reached its cruising altitude and leveled off over the ocean.
Each of the aircraft’s fifteen passengers had received a phone call from Martin Vignon, a man they had all known for many years and trusted. Citing security concerns, he had kept the conversations brief.
With Reed Carlton listening in on each call, Vignon relayed two pieces of information. The first was that Middleton had been able to short-circuit the attack. As they’d all heard that it was imminent, yet it failed to materialize, Vignon’s claim made sense. It also made the second piece of information even more believable.
According to Vignon, Middleton had established a contingency that required the board’s immediate attention. Because the Virginia estate was an active crime scene and the ATS corporate headquarters were crawling with investigators, Vignon had arranged transportation for the board to the company’s Grand Cayman property.
After the flight attendant had gone through and conducted the second cocktail service, the pilot summoned her to the cockpit. Stepping inside, Gretchen Casey closed and locked the door behind her.
As the CIA pilot began reducing the oxygen in the main cabin, Scot Harvath, uniformed to look like the copilot, handed Casey her equipment. One by one, they took turns getting suited up in the tight cockpit. When the pilot flashed them the signal, they donned their helmets and began the flow of oxygen into their face masks. Ten minutes later, they opened the cockpit door.
It was obvious from where they stood that hypoxia had kicked in. Quickly, Harvath and Casey moved through, certifying that each of the ATS board members was in fact dead.
Once complete, Harvath returned to the cockpit and flashed the pilot the thumbs-up. As the CIA operative finished tweaking the autopilot settings, Harvath and Casey gave each other’s HAHO equipment a final inspection, then did the same for the pilot once he stepped into the main cabin and joined them.
Harvath looked at his wrist-top computer and gave the two-minute sign to the others. He then stepped forward and made ready to open the main cabin door.
At the one-minute mark, he signaled his team and opened the forward cabin door.
As alarms blared from the cockpit and the roar of the slipstream filled their ears, Harvath counted down the remaining seconds and then gave the team the signal to jump. The CIA pilot leapt first, followed by Casey and then, after one last look back into the cabin, Harvath.
The jet continued its flight out over the ocean toward its rendezvous with a deep, watery grave. Papers would carry the story about how the ATS board of directors, already reeling from the tragic loss of their managing director, had also discovered that he had embezzled significant funds from the company. They had been on their way to an emergency meeting with their bankers in Grand Cayman when their plane crashed. None of the bodies would ever be recovered.
Harvath navigated Casey and the CIA pilot to the drop zone out over the open ocean where a U.S. Navy vessel was waiting.
A flotilla of rubber Zodiacs rushed out to meet them, fish them out of the water, and return them to the ship.
From there, a Sikorsky SH-60F Seahawk helicopter ferried t
he team to Naval Air Station Key West, where the CIA pilot caught a flight back to D.C. Harvath and Casey, though, had other plans.
Cash, a change of clothes, and a vehicle from the motor pool were waiting for them when they arrived. Climbing in their car, they headed north on US-1 toward Little Torch Key. With the windows rolled down, the car was filled with the scent of the ocean. Though they were both quietly concerned about being late, they smiled when a Jimmy Buffett song came on the radio. Somehow, it felt like Riley Turner was sending them a message.
Undergoing the same training the Delta Force men did, the women of the Athena Project attended the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Combat Diver Qualification Course in Key West. But unlike for the guys in Delta and SF, who enjoyed spending their R&R in a handful of bars in Key West, Little Torch Key had become the destination of the Athena women when they had downtime.
It was Riley Turner who had discovered the Little Palm Island Resort and Spa on Little Torch Key, and she had dubbed it her favorite destination in the entire world. It seemed a fitting place for Harvath and Casey to say good-bye.
They checked in and were shown to their waterfront bungalows with a few minutes to spare. Poking her head into Harvath’s, Casey asked, “What do you think? Margaritas?”
Harvath shook his head, walked over to his coffee table, and grabbed the ice bucket, bottle of champagne, and two glasses he had ordered in advance. “We need to say good-bye in style.”
Casey smiled. He still had a little bit to learn in the leadership department vis-à-vis second-guessing the people under him, but he did think of everything. That had pissed her off about him more than once. She also knew that she had unfairly held him responsible for what had happened in Paris. She had blamed him for allowing Riley to die, even though she knew he would go back and trade places with her in a second. She was ready to forgive him.