by Brad Thor
“As if the torture were not bad enough, not being able to use my hands to feed myself or conduct other necessities was a demoralizing indignity.”
Harvath had heard some sadistic POW stories in his time and this one ranked right up there. “How long were you in captivity?”
“It was seven months before I was rescued.”
“That’s a long time.”
“At first, they weren’t even sure I was alive. But once they figured out I was, they worked day and night to get me back. Israel never once gave up on me.”
The Israelis were incredibly loyal to their warriors. It spoke to the character of their nation and was something Harvath had always admired. It was one of many reasons that explained the close kinship America and Israel enjoyed. As the only Democracy in the Middle East, Israel mirrored many of America’s values.
Now that Harvath understood the barbarity of Mordechai’s captivity and that it had been overseen by Al-Mabhouh, it was clear why the Israeli had been so angry with Nicholas.
Harvath was about to ask the little man what was taking so long with the memory card, when Nicholas looked up from his keyboard and said, “We may have a problem.”
CHAPTER 41
* * *
Wait a second,” Mordechai replied, leaning in to look at Nicholas’s screen. “She erased everything?”
“How much information can you extract from it?” Harvath asked.
“Not much,” the little man replied.
“How do I know I can believe you?” said Mordechai.
“You shouldn’t,” Nicholas said, removing the memory card and handing it to him. “Your IT people in Tel Aviv will tell you the same thing. She used a pretty sophisticated product to scrub the data, but they’ll back up what I’m telling you.”
“Why would she erase all of the earlier keystrokes she had captured and only give us the most recent?”
“You tell me. There’s a lot of memory space available on that card. She could have stored keystrokes for years. It’s not like she needed to continually free up space.”
Harvath looked at Mordechai. “You said her op was taking longer than it should have, and you were concerned that she had fallen for Damien and didn’t want to go through with it. That’s why you offered up the sex-trafficking leader. But what if Helena had another agenda? What if she didn’t want you to have all of the keystrokes she had captured?”
Mordechai was smart enough to know that you never really knew people, but he thought he knew Helena. The idea that she might be pursuing an alternate agenda had never entered into his mind. But it should have. Maybe she was that good of an actress. Maybe she had fooled everybody—even him.
It was a lot to process, but what mattered most at the moment, though, was transmitting the information from the memory card back to Israel.
“I’m going to need my laptop,” said Mordechai.
Nicholas removed it from the cubby he was sitting next to and handed it over.
“I hope you didn’t waste too much time going through it. There isn’t anything on it.”
“Didn’t even power it up,” the little man said, writing down the access code for the WiFi in his van and giving it to him.
Mordechai doubted that. “The laptop is a burner, as are the web sites and email addresses I am about to use.”
“Best practices. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
The man was a pro, and Nicholas had been telling the truth when he said he expected nothing less of him. While operatives like Mordechai can and did make mistakes, it was highly unlikely at his level. If there had been anything on his computer, it would have been highly suspicious, so much so that Nicholas would have considered it a trap, purposely meant to be uncovered.
What’s more, Mordechai and the Mossad were smart enough to know that the United States had grown beyond unreasonable with personal electronics searches at points of entry, even demanding that returning American citizens hand over passwords to their encrypted data or be thrown in prison. It was out of control and something President Porter had vowed to fix.
Mordechai jumped through the digital hoops of preparing the data from Helena’s memory card. It would be routed through a false front web site to a special cloud server that had been established by the Mossad’s “Technology Department” in conjunction with Unit 8200 —Israel’s Ministry of Defense signal intelligence division akin to the NSA.
Once the data was ready, he began the transmission. If Damien’s hard drive held what the Mossad hoped it held, then they would know the extent of his plans and be able to set the wheels in motion to stop him.
If it didn’t, he had no idea what they were going to do next. There was no doubt in his mind that Damien’s weaponized hemorrhagic fever was incredibly lethal. To meet his goal of slicing the world’s population from over seven billion to under five hundred million, it would have to be the worst plague mankind had ever known.
And what bothered him the most was that as forthright as he had been with them, his American counterparts appeared to be holding back on him.
As if he needed any further proof, Nicholas motioned for Harvath—and only Harvath—to look at something on his screen. Once Harvath had seen it, he summoned Palmer and Ashby over to the van.
“How much money do you have on you?” he asked Palmer.
“Couple hundred bucks,” he replied. “Why?”
“Any credit cards?”
Palmer nodded.
“I want you to max them out,” he said, pulling up a web site on his phone and texting the link to his colleague. “Get as many things on this list as possible.”
“SHTFPlan.com? The Top 100 Items That Disappear First in an Emergency? What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later,” Harvath replied. “Hit the home improvement store first and then go next door to Target. Make sure to top off your gas tank. Bring all of it to my place.”
Mordechai looked at him. “What’s happening?”
“The virus is spreading,” he said. Turning to Ashby, he pointed at the PetSmart, “Nicholas will text you what he needs for the dogs. Get it, get gas, and then get Mr. Mordechai to my place and wait for me there.”
“Your place? Are you sure about that?”
“Positive. Now get moving.”
The Israeli held up his laptop. “I haven’t heard anything back yet.”
“We’ll get you set up on my network when we get there,” Harvath replied. “Now, let’s go.”
Exiting the van, they slid the door shut as Nicholas tapped out a quick list for Ashby and then climbed into the driver’s seat and fired it up.
“How reliable are the numbers you just got?” Harvath asked as he slid into the passenger seat next to him.
“They’re straight out of the CDC’s Epi-X. It’s the most current and up-to-date.”
“Damn it.”
The virus had now appeared in eleven more cities.
“There’s something else,” Nicholas said, as he put the vehicle in gear and navigated out to the road. “Those initials, MC—the ones Damien had scrawled on his Outcome Conference document—I know what they stand for.”
“You do? How?”
“It was part of the keystroke data that Helena captured. While Linda Landon was in the room with Damien she accessed something. MC refers to a FEMA database called ‘Main Core.’ ”
“I’ve never heard of it,” replied Harvath. “Do you know what it is?”
“I’ve only heard rumors about it. It was supposedly developed in the 1980s as part of the United States Continuity of Government plan. It is a list classified above top secret with over ten million American names. These Americans have been classified as potential threats to national security. In the event of a national emergency, each person has been pre-ranked for surveillance, questioning, or even detention.”
; “What lands them on the list to begin with?”
“Usually, disagreeing with the government.”
“Like being antiwar?” Harvath asked.
“Or you can be anti-universal health care. It is a completely nonpartisan list. It doesn’t care how you vote. All that matters is that you are perceived as a threat to the government in some form or another.”
“So just by attending a Code Pink or a Tea Party rally, you wind up on the list?”
“From what I have read, you have to do more than just attend the rally, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they keep lists like that too. To land on Main Core, you’d have to have a more active role in a movement. The concept, as I understand it, is that the government would want to know where to find you in a time of national unrest in order to make sure that you weren’t contributing to that unrest.”
“And if I was?” Harvath asked indignantly.
“Then you’d be silenced.”
“How?”
Nicholas shrugged. “I didn’t write the plan, but I think you get the idea. Certain people are going to need more pressure applied than others. If you have a bad enough event take place, if something like martial law is imposed, then habeas corpus can be tossed out the window, and your rights don’t mean anything. You get thrown in a cell and that’s that.”
“Except we wouldn’t call it martial law. We’d use the term state of national emergency,” Harvath replied.
“Correct. And under a state of national emergency, Congress can be bypassed and an incredible array of extraordinary powers get swept into the Oval Office. Just for starters, property and commodities could be seized, private sector businesses could be told what to do and how to do it, all means of transportation and communication could be taken over, the list goes on and on. It’s quite remarkable how quickly a democratic republic could cease being democratic.”
“But sometimes in an emergency, if it’s bad enough, certain things are necessary. Kind of like the way blood in the body races to protect the internal organs.”
“I’m not arguing,” said Nicholas. “I’m just laying out the facts. That’s a lot of power to concentrate in one location. And based upon what we know of Damien and who we saw leaving his estate, I think we’ve got more than a little reason for concern.”
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Harvath deadpanned, quoting a former White House Chief of Staff.
“Exactly. By all accounts, Main Core is nothing more than an enemies list. It incorporates people from across the ideological spectrum who are united by one thing, opposition to the Federal Government. The list exists only to identify and quash dissent. The First Amendment notwithstanding, what if that dissent is warranted? What if some of those voices are valuable, particularly at a time of national crisis?”
Harvath had heard the Federal Government likened to the Star Wars character Jabba the Hutt. It sat in Washington, D.C., gorging itself and increasing in size. If you suggested it go on a diet, or you threatened it in any way, it would send bounty hunters like Boba Fett after you in the form of multitudinous Federal agencies which no longer served the citizens, but were part and parcel of Jabba and only concerned about protecting themselves.
Nicholas’s question about the value of certain dissenting voices concerned him. In the 1970s, a Senator named Frank Church had begun to ring the alarm bell about the incredible surveillance capabilities the United States was building. When focused outward on the rest of the world, America’s giant listening ears were unbelievably valuable. But the Senator warned of a day that might come when those ears would be turned inward on the American people. That was exactly what had happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Church’s biggest concern was that under the banner of “protecting” the American people, the Federal Government would pursue more and more invasive means of gathering, sifting, sorting, and storing personal information and private communications. He referred to it as crossing the Rubicon and warned that if—even generations hence—the U.S. Government ever began tilting toward tyranny, it would be impossible to mount any form of resistance whatsoever. Such was the government’s ability to read everything, listen to everything, and know everything before it even happened.
“So how does Main Core help Damien?” Harvath asked.
“To understand that,” Nicholas replied, “we’re going to need to get a look at who’s on the list.”
CHAPTER 42
* * *
Harvath had called ahead to alert Lara that people were going to begin showing up at the house. By the time he and Nicholas arrived, the Old Man’s vehicle was already parked in the drive.
Harvath’s home, as well as the surrounding acreage, had been deeded to him as a thank-you by a prior U.S. President. In exchange for his one-dollar-per-annum rent, Harvath was expected to maintain the historical property in a manner befitting and contributing to its stature.
Overlooking the Potomac and just south of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate sat Bishop’s Gate—a stubby, yet elegant stone church and rectory. During the Revolutionary War, it had been home to an outspoken Anglican priest and dedicated loyalist who had given aid and comfort to British spies. As a result, the church was attacked by the colonial army and left in ruins.
Bishop’s Gate remained that way until the late 1800s when it was taken over by the United States Navy, renovated, and repurposed as a covert training center for the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Eventually, the ONI outgrew the facility, and after a short stint storing dead files, it was relegated to “mothball” status.
Although not as upscale as some of the other properties in the Navy’s portfolio, its location was exceptional, as was its access to the water. The history of the estate, though, was what had won Harvath over.
On his very first exploration of the rectory attic, he had discovered a beautiful, hand-carved sign. Upon it, had been written the motto of the Anglican missionaries: TRANSIENS ADIUVANOS. I GO OVERSEAS TO GIVE HELP. It was as if it had been carved expressly for him. The moment Harvath had seen it, he had known that he was home.
It had taken some doing, but he had gotten the place into great shape. He was good with his hands and knew his way around a toolbox. Fixing things was becoming a lost art. When Lara visited with her son, Marco, Harvath liked to find projects for the two of them to do together. He had even gotten him his own little boy–sized tool set. It gave him no end of joy to see the sense of pride and accomplishment in Marco when he successfully completed one of their tasks together. He was a good boy.
Entering the house, Harvath and Nicholas passed the Anglican missionary sign in the entry hall and walked toward the sound of voices in the kitchen. Argos and Draco trotted ahead. Nicholas spent a lot of time at Bishop’s Gate, and the dogs knew their way around. It had become like a second home to them.
Carlton was seated at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him. Lara was leaning against the kitchen counter smiling, a cup of coffee in her hand and something simmering on the stove behind her.
“That smells good,” he said, kissing her.
“Arroz Carreteiro. Your favorite.”
Both of Lara’s parents were amazing cooks and they had passed on their love of cooking to her. Arroz Carreteiro, which roughly translated into Rice Wagoner or Cart Riders, was a popular dish from southern Brazil. Meat, rice, tomato, onions, and spices—it was perfect for this time of year.
Grabbing a coffee cup, he looked at Nicholas, who nodded. After pouring coffee for each of them, he suggested to Carlton that they walk back to his study.
It was one of his favorite rooms in the house. Here he stored his vast library in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There was an old desk, a large fireplace, a leather sofa, and two comfortable side chairs. He motioned for his guests to find a place to sit while he looked for his remote and powered on the television.
“Have you heard about the new cases?” Harvath asked.
Carlton nodded. “But that’s not the worst part of it.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“The dead ones, the ones who bled out, all of them travelled to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. The bad news is that hospital emergency rooms, minute clinics, and family doctors across numerous cities are now reporting a surge in patients who haven’t travelled outside the United States, but who are presenting with high fevers and other symptoms believed to be consistent with the initial stages of African Hemorrhagic Fever.”
“Damn it,” Harvath replied.
His instincts to send Palmer to stock up on supplies had been well founded. Though he always kept his pantry stocked and would be able to take care of a certain number of visitors for an extended period during an emergency, nobody in their right mind would pass up getting one last crack at the stores before they were overrun and stripped bare. All you had to do was ask anyone in a hurricane zone whether it was better to be two minutes early to the grocery store in advance of a storm, or two minutes late.
“There’s something else,” the Old Man added. “And it doesn’t get repeated outside this room, but President Porter has developed a fever. Out of an abundance of caution, he has been transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital for observation.”
“He said it was just a cold,” Harvath replied. “Has he had contact with anyone who recently travelled to Mecca?”
“He’s the President. He has contact with a lot of people.”
“Including us.”
The Old Man knew what he was suggesting—not that they had potentially infected Porter, but that he may have infected them.
“All the more reason we need to get moving,” said Carlton. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s start by you giving me an update on what happened in Winchester.”