There would only be one chance to take him down. If he failed, Carlton would come after him with everything he had. Page, though, didn’t intend to fail.
And he didn’t care whom he burned in the process. He wasn’t going to let anyone—not Bob McGee, not Lydia Ryan, not even whoever this Scot Harvath was, stand in his way.
“So the CIA knew about a potential terrorist attack and didn’t inform the FBI?” he asked.
“Not just the CIA,” replied Jordan. “The Carlton Group too. Harvath’s the linchpin in all of this. Imagine the lawsuits from the victims and their families if this was made public.”
Page already was imagining it. It would be devastating for both organizations. “This has all got to be irrefutable. Are you going to be able to get me the rest of what I need?
“I’m already working on it,” said Jordan. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it.”
Raising his glass, Page saluted his colleague. “In that case, to revenge.”
CHAPTER 17
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* * *
LIBYA
The safe house was better than Harvath had expected. The property sat along the coastal road, en route to the Tunisian border. It had a motor court with a high wall, no neighbors, and an unobstructed, 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain.
It was sparsely furnished. There was electricity and running water. A rooftop deck, surrounded by a lattice parapet made of concrete, provided decent concealment for use as a sniper or observation post.
While Barton and Gage cleaned up and then secured the shopkeeper to a chair in one of the ground-floor bedrooms, Mike Haney drew up a roster for guard duty. Staelin and Morrison pulled first shift.
Morrison grabbed his rifle and a bottle of water and headed to the roof. Staelin took his rifle and his Meltzer book and headed to the motor court. Harvath collected his backpack and the phones he had gathered up at the electronics shop and walked upstairs to the second floor.
The home’s master bedroom faced the ocean and had a wraparound balcony. Stepping outside, he saw a small table and chairs. He dragged them over to where he could get the best signal and then removed a laptop and satellite phone from his pack.
Once a connection was established, he attached his laptop to the SAT phone, removed the SIM cards from the cell phones, and uploaded their information back to the CIA. In particular, he wanted to know with whom the third militia member was talking when he walked into the shop and if any sort of alarm had been raised. With the help of the NSA, it wouldn’t take long.
All of the phones had been locked. The lock on the shopkeeper’s phone was controlled via fingerprint. All Harvath had to do to open it was place the man’s finger on the sensor.
The address book was full of contacts, but there was nothing, at least not by name, for the man they had come looking for—Umar Ali Halim.
The smuggler could have been listed under an alias, or it was possible that the shopkeeper dealt with an intermediary. While it might have looked like a bust, Harvath’s search of the phone did turn up something—something he anticipated would be very useful.
With a plan beginning to form in his mind, he fired off a quick email to the CIA. In it, he included pictures of the Glocks that he had stripped from the dead militia members, serial-number side up.
Then, repositioning his chair, he put his feet up and tilted his head back. He had been at this game long enough to know to grab rest whenever he could find it.
The late afternoon sun was warm on his face. Below, waves from the southern Mediterranean Sea rolled onto the beach. Harvath tried not to think about the dead bodies, from sunken smuggler vessels, washed ashore here, or the dozens of Christians ISIS had beheaded up and down the coast. For the moment, all that mattered was that he could close his eyes without fear of someone putting a knife to his throat or taking a shot at him.
As he listened to the waves, he breathed in the scent of the ocean—a mix of salt and seaweed and fish. He had spent most of his life around the water. No matter where he traveled, or how dangerous the assignment, he always found the smell familiar. It was a constant the world over.
There weren’t many things that had been constant in his life. As a SEAL himself, his father had been gone more than he had been home.
And until Lara, his track record in the relationship department had been anything but stellar. The relationships had been fun, but few had been serious, and fewer still had shown any promise of surviving long term.
What he had with Lara and her little boy was the closest he’d ever come to creating a family of his own. Outside of his career, it was the thing he wanted most in his life. It was why he had rented a house and had moved almost everything he owned from Virginia to Boston.
He had encouraged Lara to come to him, but then she’d been offered the promotion of a lifetime. She couldn’t replicate her position in Alexandria or D.C. He had encouraged her to take it. That left him with only one option if he wanted things to work—him going to her.
With the Old Man’s blessing, that’s what he had done. He picked and chose which CIA assignments he wanted, went away and did them, and then came home. Langley cut a check to the Carlton Group and money appeared in one of his multiple bank accounts.
He would have been happy to continue the arrangement in perpetuity, but based on what Lydia Ryan had told him, the Old Man had other plans.
It pissed Harvath off and made him smile at the same time. Reed Carlton was inscrutable. No matter how sure you were that you had him figured out, he was always running multiple different angles you had never even considered. He was the spy master’s spy master. He had seen America through the Cold War and beyond.
As technology boomed, life became easier. As life became easier, Americans grew softer. As Americans grew softer, the threats arrayed against the United States grew more deadly. Weakness encouraged aggression.
And when the aggression arrived, America had turned to hard men like Reed Carlton to strap on their armor, climb into the arena, and run a sword through it. But now, Reed Carlton could no longer strap on his armor.
That was a hard fact for Harvath to come to terms with. The Old Man had been one of those few constants in his life. He was also the epitome of the warrior. Warriors died in the arena, in battle, on their feet.
Once again, Harvath was reminded of how cruel it was for a man as brilliant as Reed Carlton to lose his life to a disease known for robbing victims of their minds. Of everything he had given to his country—his courage, his patriotism, and his loyalty—it was his genius that had served America without equal.
Now, his mind was being stolen from him. But it wasn’t gone yet. His wife was in a nursing home, and before he joined her, he intended to not only set the chess board, but stack the bench of American chess players as deep as he could as well.
To do it right, though, he needed Harvath onboard. That was why he had asked Lydia Ryan to intercede. It wasn’t hard to see.