by Brad Thor
“This?” she asked, looking down through the opening at the top of the bag. “I think somebody mugged a pimp or maybe a TV weatherman.”
“Very funny,” he replied, extending his hand. “How’d you get into my house?”
Sloane lifted her right foot and executed a quick snap kick. “I used my size-six Manolo skeleton key.”
Sassy. Harvath liked sassy. In fact, he liked it almost as much as he did Scandinavian flight attendants with scarves tied around their necks. But only almost. Sloane Ashby was not only too young for him; she was also a colleague. What’s more, Reed Carlton — who had very likely given her the key and alarm code for his house — had made it quite clear that he expected Harvath to maintain a strictly professional relationship with her. Someday she was going to go on to do some incredible things for their agency, even more than she already had for the country. By that point, God willing, she would be reporting to Harvath. The Old Man didn’t want any messy entanglements between them screwing up their performance.
“If I get home,” Harvath said as he accepted the garment bag, “and find any of my Kool & the Gang records missing, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Ashby shook her head. “No one got near your phon-o-graph, grandpa,” she replied, drawing the words out slowly like she was speaking to someone hard of hearing. “No need to worry. E-v-e-r-y-thing is okay. Your Drool & the Gang will still be there when the bus brings you back to the home after bingo.”
Now it was Harvath’s turn to laugh. Sloane Ashby was a wiseass and could give as good as she got. She reminded him a lot of himself at that age — cocky, and way too sure of herself. Even so, he enjoyed mixing it up with her. Because the Old Man had been so adamant about not getting romantic with her, Harvath looked at her like a younger sister and treated her accordingly.
“Here,” he said, handing her the box with the SBJ model in it. “I really did get you something.”
Sloane opened the lid, looked inside, and rolled her eyes. “Wow. What a guy. You really know what women want. It’s a wonder some girl hasn’t snapped you up yet.”
“It isn’t for lacking of trying,” Harvath replied as he tucked the vanity kit under his arm, smiled, and then turned and walked inside the FBO to grab a quick shower and change into his fresh clothes.
CHAPTER 6
The staff of the FBO welcomed Harvath and after checking him in, offered him use of the facility’s shower, which he accepted.
The steam from the hot water quickly filled the bathroom. Next to a nice, thick cheeseburger, there was nothing he looked forward to more after an overseas trip than a long, hot American shower. It just felt different.
Stepping into the stall, he closed his eyes and let the water pound against his sore body. The work he did was both mentally and physically demanding. He took extremely good care of himself and it showed. He was in better shape than most men half his age. Nevertheless, he was getting older and he knew it. He could still carry out the ops just fine; it was the recovery time that was beginning to take longer. Someday, he was going to have to face the facts that this tended to be a younger man’s game and consider moving in a different direction. The Old Man had told him as much, and was grooming him to take over the business someday. As far as Harvath was concerned, though, that day was still a long way away.
He could have stood there in the shower forever, allowing his half-hypnotized mind to drift in the heat and the steam, but there was work to do. Taking a deep breath, he flipped the temperature selector all the way to cold and exhaled. As the icy water hit his skin, he forced himself to count to thirty.
Harvath was convinced that the amount of cold that SEALs were forced to endure over the course of their careers eventually made them unable to deal with it at all. His observations were anecdotal at best, but he knew way too many guys who had opted for warm-weather climates after getting out and who never set foot anywhere else even remotely cold for the rest of their lives.
He was determined to never let anything, much less cold, beat him and so he stood in the shower every morning and punched cold right in the face. Of course it punched him right back, but it was like getting a double espresso for free and it always left him feeling invigorated. Today was no different.
Climbing out of the shower, he dried off and tied the towel around his waist. On his right side was a bruise he hadn’t noticed or felt any pain from until now. It must have come during the taking of the tanker or rescuing the captain in Somalia. You bump into tons of things in close quarters battle and don’t notice until after the fact. He was afraid to look down and see what his legs looked like. The joke in close quarters battle, or CQB, was that the shinbone’s only purpose was to find furniture in a darkened room.
Harvath glanced in the mirror. His face was tanned from the training they had done down in the Gulf of Mexico before leaving for Somalia. His neck and forearms were, too. A few days of R&R to tan the rest of his body would be pleasant and for a moment, he allowed himself the delusion that maybe the Old Man’s new client had an easy job for them someplace nice. That caused him to smile. The Carlton Group wasn’t in the “easy job” business. And as far as “someplace nice” was concerned, as long as it was someplace “nicer” than the pit of human misery and suffering that was Somalia, he’d be thrilled.
Noticing that he’d missed a spot while shaving, he bypassed the cheap, plastic disposable razors sitting in a glass jar on the bathroom counter and unzipped the vanity kit from the private jet. He was glad he’d held on to it. Not only was their razor a lot nicer, but Natalie had slipped her phone number inside at some point as well.
When he was done touching up his shave, he unzipped the garment bag. He had guessed by the weight that there was a pair of shoes inside and sure enough there was. Ashby had thought of everything, right down to a shirt and tie combination he probably wouldn’t have made on his own, but which actually looked pretty nice.
Exiting the building and walking over to her car, he received an approving whistle. “Don’t you look handsome.”
“There were plenty of white shirts in my closet, you know.”
“And they were all boring. You look great,” she said, straightening the knot in his tie. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Harvath tossed his garment bag with his other clothes into her trunk and then got in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”
“Mr. Carlton is waiting for you downtown,” she said, starting the car and pulling out of the parking lot.
“Where exactly?”
“C Street between 22nd and 21st.”
Harvath pulled up the location in his mind’s eye. “The State Department?”
“No,” said Ashby. “Across the street. The Einstein Memorial.”
“Any idea why?”
“I don’t know. Have you done anything so stupid recently that he’d want to beat you to death in front of a statue of Albert Einstein as a lesson to the rest of us?”
Harvath laughed. It was true. The Old Man didn’t suffer fools lightly and he was taken to making examples of smart people who made dumb decisions or did stupid things.
Sloane took her eyes off the road to look at him. “You’re actually running through your mind what you’ve done lately, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“The hell you aren’t. I was pulling your leg and you actually think it’s a possibility.”
Harvath dismissed her with a wave. “Pay attention to the road.”
“What a fitting end that would be,” she replied, ignoring him. “Beaten to death at the feet of Albert Einstein for being a frickin’ moron.”
“Why don’t we find something else to talk about?” he offered.
“Like what?” she asked as they merged onto the road for D.C.
“I don’t care. Regale me,” Harvath replied, adding, “As long as it’s not about shopping, your girlfriends, or your love life.”
“If you wanted to ride in silence, why didn’t you just s
ay so?”
She was pulling his leg. “Fine,” he said. “You pretend to be interesting and I’ll pretend to care. Sound good?”
Ashby smiled. “Aren’t we just like an old married couple? And by old married couple, I mean a couple where some young hot girl hooks up with some really old guy only because he’s filthy rich and she knows he’s going to die at any moment now.”
Harvath shook his head and leaned the seat way back like he was going to sleep. When she reached out and slapped him across the chest, he relented and told her to pick a topic.
She raised a few of the current problems their organization was having and how they might fix them, and despite their capacity for verbal jabs, the rest of the drive resulted in an excellent conversation.
CHAPTER 7
After conducting a circuitous surveillance detection route, also known as an SDR, Ashby pulled up in front of the Albert Einstein memorial and wished Harvath good luck.
“And by the way,” she said, as he got out of the car and was about to shut the door, “if the boss does decide to kill you, do you think it would be okay if I took your parking space back at the office?”
“Here’s a tip,” he said as he leaned back into the car. “The only nutcrackers men actually enjoy are the ones you see at Christmastime. Keep that in mind and you might find a husband someday.”
Ashby mimicked a massive overbite and replied, “Do you think I’ll get a purty man? I sure do hope so.”
Harvath shook his head and closed the door to the sound of the young woman laughing at her own joke. Wiseass, he smirked to himself. That sense of humor was going to get her into trouble. He wished he could save her some future heartache, but if she was anything like him, she was going to have to learn the hard way.
He spotted the Old Man sitting on one of the far benches and made a loop around the memorial, taking everything and everyone in before deciding it was safe to approach his boss and sit down.
“You sure took your time,” Carlton snapped. “I’ve been sitting here like a moron for over forty-five minutes feeding the damn pigeons.”
“I’m fine,” Harvath replied. “Thank you for asking, sir.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck. What’s with that shirt? All of your white ones at the cleaners?”
Reed Carlton put the “old” in old school. He had always worn Brooks Brothers suits, white shirts, and very conservative ties, which was exactly how he was attired now. A tan overcoat sat folded on the bench next to him along with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a cup of coffee and a bag from which he must have been feeding the pigeons pieces of a muffin.
“This is what Ashby brought from my house,” said Harvath.
“Women,” the Old Man responded with a dismissive shake of his head. “I should have sent a man to pick up your clothes.”
Harvath knew Carlton liked Ashby and didn’t really mean the remark, but he was in a bad mood for some reason.
“We need to get going,” he said.
“Where to? Across the street to State?”
Carlton chuckled as he stood and gathered his things. “Those people could screw up a one-car funeral. After all the headaches they put us through back when I was at the CIA, there isn’t enough money in the world for me to take them as a client. Not even now.”
Harvath doubted that, but he knew better than to argue with him. “So if not State, who are we going to see?”
Carlton pointed up C Street with his chin and began walking. “What do you know about the Federal Reserve?”
“The Fed? Let me see. I know that they technically don’t print our money.”
“Technically, they also don’t make ice cream, but that’s not what I asked.”
Wow, the Old Man has a burr under his saddle. Assuming that it was the Fed who had sent the plane to pick him up, he was tempted to say that they had a very nice aircraft, but he bit his tongue and replied, “The Federal Reserve establishes our monetary policy.”
“That’s a better answer. What does it mean?”
“They set the interest rates at which banks borrow money.”
“Is that all?” asked Carlton. “That’s the extent of your knowledge of the Federal Reserve?”
“I think it’s actually beyond the extent of most people’s knowledge. Not many care about the Fed.”
“They should.”
Harvath couldn’t argue with that. Americans should care about a lot of things. He wasn’t quite sure, however, how high the Federal Reserve ought to be on that list.
“What did you study in school again? It wasn’t economics, was it?”
The Old Man knew perfectly well what he had studied. The economics remark was a jab.
“I studied political science and military history.”
“Did they give you any John Adams to read out there in Southern California?”
“Of course. The Revolutionary War and the history of the Republic was a key focus. We read all the Founders.”
“Good,” Carlton replied. “Then you can tell me what Adams identified to Jefferson as one of America’s greatest weaknesses?”
“One of America’s greatest weaknesses?” he repeated as he thought about it for a second. “Based on our context here, I’m going to assume it has something to do with banking.”
“It does. Adams saw people’s complete ignorance when it came to money, credit, and circulation as a serious deficiency.”
“That’s a new one by me. What does it have to do with why we’re having a meeting at the Federal Reserve, though?”
“Have you even picked up a paper since you’ve been gone?” the Old Man asked.
“Didn’t exactly have a lot of newsstands where we were.”
Carlton’s visage softened. “I’m sorry. I owe you an ‘attaboy’ for that job.”
He had never been comfortable with praise, fulsome or otherwise. “No, you don’t, sir.”
“Yes, I do. That was a hard operation and you did remarkably well. You got handed a bushel basket of lemons with that captain having been smuggled into port and you still made lemonade. You and your team did, though, leave a lot of dead Somalis.”
“No, sir. We left a lot of dead pirates.”
“I understand,” the Old Man said with a nod. “And better them than a single one of you, but my problem right now is that some French human rights organization caught wind of it and they’re trying to put the pieces together and make some international incident out of it. Had everything been contained to the ship, that would have been one thing, but going into Somalia and that village has created a whole different set of headaches.”
“We had no choice. They’d killed the navigator and we had every reason to believe they’d do the same thing to the captain,” Harvath insisted.
“Of course, but I want you to listen to me. You did the right thing. That captain would have been murdered had you left him there. We all know that. Nevertheless, the owners of the Sienna Star are nervous. They never okayed the shore raid and now they’re worried that this whole thing is going to blow up in their faces. They’ve boxed us into a corner by refusing to release any payment until this whole thing goes away.”
He now understood why the Old Man was in such a bad mood. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“I feel responsible, though, about the payment being held up.”
Carlton lifted his hand, his face tensing up again. “I gave the green light for you to launch. I will handle this. In the meantime, let’s focus on what’s in front of us.”
Harvath nodded. “You asked if I’d seen a paper since I’ve been gone. I haven’t. What’s up?”
The Old Man handed him his copy of the Wall Street Journal. It had been folded over to an article inside. “You can read it if you want, but there’s not a lot of detail. A week ago, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had a heart attack and died.”
Harvath looked at the man’s picture. He had seen him on TV and in a few news articles over the
last couple of years. “I’m sorry for his family.”
“So am I, but that’s not why we’ve been asked to this meeting.”
“What’s the reason, then?”
“The President of the United States in this situation is given a very closely guarded, some even say secret list, and from that list he picks who the next Federal Reserve chairman will be. Last night, all of the people on that list disappeared.”
Harvath was astounded. “All of them? Just gone?”
Carlton nodded. “The body of one, a woman named Claire Marcourt, was found this morning.”
“Where? What happened to her?”
The Old Man stopped walking. They were now parallel with the enormous white marble Federal Reserve Building, which took up an entire D.C. block. Pointing to a discreet side entrance, he said, “That’s what we’re here to discuss.”
CHAPTER 8
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY
VIRGINIA
Phil Durkin leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples as he tried to think. “For all we know, Nafi didn’t have a single thing in that folder. Or maybe he had his wife’s grocery list or the lease for his mistress’s apartment in Amman.”
“He wasn’t bluffing, Phil,” Lydia Ryan said to her former supervisor. “If you’d been sitting across from him like I was, you would’ve seen he was dead serious.”
“Think he might give you the information if you slept with him?”
“Go fuck yourself, Phil,” Ryan responded in disgust. “Better yet, why don’t you go fuck Nafi Nasiri and see if he’ll pillow-talk the plot over to you.”
“I’m not seriously suggesting you sleep with Nasiri to get the intel, Lydia.”
“Oh, really? Because that’s exactly what it just sounded like to me. In fact I ought to take this up to the seventh floor right now and have them run your ass up a flagpole. You’re beyond sick.”
Durkin laughed as he leaned forward and focused on Ryan. “You have no idea what sick is.”