Yet it was happening. A little more each day. Ryan had to remind herself that life wasn’t fair.
Carlton had even told her to get over it. He was still in the fight and would be until the very end. In the meantime, he didn’t want her around if she was going to be morose. They had a tough slog in front of them. If she couldn’t be positive and optimistic, he told her, she could stay at the CIA and ride that sick pony into the ground.
He had a good sense of humor and she had grown to love and respect him dearly. She wished they had more time, but the clock was working against them.
As he was sharper and more focused first thing in the morning, she had adjusted her schedule to match.
Setting her alarm for 4:30, she was able to work out and get to his house by 7:00.
Always, the two dark SUVs of his security team were parked in the driveway. This morning, though, there was a third vehicle—a pearl-gray Mercedes van.
She rang the doorbell and was greeted by Carlton. He was always showered, shaved, and dressed before she got there. This morning he was wearing khakis, a green oxford shirt, and leather driving moccasins.
“Whose van is that outside?” she asked as they said their good mornings and he let her in.
Gesturing toward his study, he replied, “Nicholas is here.”
Nicholas was the Carlton Group’s IT wizard. He was a Soviet Georgian born with primordial dwarfism. As a result, he stood just under three feet tall.
He had been abandoned by his parents and raised in a brothel near the Black Sea. The things that had been done to him there were unspeakable.
Despite his small stature, his intelligence was off the charts. He had eventually turned snippets of pillow talk and the loose lips of brothel customers into a blackmail empire.
He had become known throughout the intelligence world as “The Troll.” He dealt exclusively in the black market purchase, sale, and theft of highly sensitive, often classified, information.
Entering the study, the first thing Ryan noticed were Nicholas’s giant dogs. Named Argos and Draco, the highly trained, fiercely loyal white Caucasian Ovcharkas were always at his side.
Upon seeing her, the dogs stood up and came over for some attention. She scratched them both behind their ears and ran her hands over their powerful shoulders.
“Me next,” said Nicholas with a smile, as he gave the command for the dogs to lie down.
“Good morning,” she replied with a laugh.
“Coffee?” Carlton asked her. Nicholas already had a cup.
“Yes, please.”
It was Harvath who had brought Nicholas into the organization—something that wasn’t an easy feat.
They had started out as bitter foes, and many in the Carlton Group, including Carlton himself, were highly suspicious of Nicholas. But over time, the little man had more than proven his loyalty and his worth.
He and Harvath had developed a deep friendship.
Though he had been happy for Harvath about his decision to pursue a life and family of his own in Boston, he had been profoundly saddened by his friend’s departure. He had been the one person at the Carlton Group whom Nicholas felt he could fully trust.
“I didn’t expect to see you this morning,” Ryan said to Nicholas.
“Something’s come up.”
Carlton handed her a cup of coffee, and after thanking him, she asked, “What’s going on?”
“Late last night,” he continued, “a job order was opened on the dark web.”
The dark web was a series of encrypted sites accessible only through networks using special software like the Tor Hidden Service Protocol. They allowed users to remain anonymous and beyond the reach of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
From the most abhorrent pornography to the hiring of hit men, if it was illegal, and especially if it was morally repugnant, it was on the dark web.
“What kind of order was it?”
“A hack,” said Nicholas.
“Okay,” replied Ryan. “Of who?”
“You.”
She laughed. As Deputy Director of the CIA, she was under constant threat of being hacked. In fact, she had stopped paying attention to the reports a while ago. The attacks and scams came daily. That’s why the CIA had such a robust IT team, and she trusted them to do their jobs.
“So someone offered a bounty to hack me. What’s new?”
“What’s new,” replied Nicholas, “is that it was a twofer. The contract was to hack you and Mr. Carlton.”
That was new. It also told her that someone suspected they were working together. That had not been announced publicly yet.
“What are they looking for?”
“Everything,” replied Nicholas. “Not only all of your previous correspondence, but they wanted code planted that would allow them to monitor everything going forward, undetected.”
“Do we know who’s behind it?”
“No,” said Carlton, “and that’s the problem. While state actors usually have their own hacking teams in-house, they also have been known to hire criminal hackers.”
“Whoever this is,” said Nicholas, “offered up a lot of money for the job.”
“How’d you find out about it?” she asked.
“A broker I used to know reached out to one of my old aliases.”
Ryan looked at Carlton. “Okay, so someone wants to hack us. It happens to companies every single day. It’s probably even going to increase once it gets announced that I’ve left the Agency to come to work for you.”
“True, but this one bothers me. I don’t like the timing. I also don’t like the amount of resources someone is willing to throw at this. The hack may only be a jumping-off point. I think we need to take this seriously.”
She didn’t disagree. “Okay. What do you suggest?”
“I think Nicholas should take the job.”
She didn’t disagree with that either, but the way he let the words hang in the air made her feel that there was another shoe still left to drop. Then it did.
“And I think we should let him actually carry out the hack.”
CHAPTER 41
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* * *
OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN
TUESDAY EVENING
The ramp at the rear of the massive Air Force C-17 Globemaster cracked open and the last of the setting sun could be seen on the horizon.
When a small parachute attached to the rigging on the first High Speed Assault Craft was released, it began to pull the sleek HSAC down a set of rails running the length of the cargo hold.
As the long, gray boat was sucked out the back, the SEALs and their boat teams cheered. It never got old throwing huge pieces of equipment out of an airplane thousands of feet in the air.
They had lined up single file on either side of the ramp, flippers strapped to their thighs. After the second HSAC was launched, they began leaping out.
The air at seven thousand feet was much cooler than it had been on the ground at U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella on the island of Sicily.
The SEALs and their boat teams were excited to get some action. From what they had heard, the Americans they were going into Libya to exfiltrate had seen some serious fighting.