“Cash,” Haggerty clarified. “None of that Bitcoin crap.”
Harvath laughed and they shook hands. Turning, he climbed the three slate steps to the lockhouse and knocked.
“Come in,” a voice replied. “It’s open.”
Harvath entered to find the CIA Director, Bob McGee, and the Deputy Director, Lydia Ryan, at a weathered wooden table in the living room.
McGee was in his early sixties. He had dark wavy hair, which was rapidly going all gray. His most distinctive feature, though, was his thick mustache. You didn’t see a lot of those in Washington, and even fewer in government.
Ryan was a gorgeous woman. She was the five-foot-ten product of an Irish father and a Greek mother. She had long black hair and deep green eyes.
Both McGee and Ryan had come from the clandestine service side of the CIA. They were smart, seasoned, no-bullshit people. The President had chosen them specifically to clean out the dead wood at Langley and bring the Agency back to its former glory.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Ryan said as Harvath stepped inside.
Walking back to the kitchen, he grabbed an enamel mug from one of the cupboards and poured himself a cup.
Returning to the living room, he joined McGee and Ryan at the table. It was covered with files.
They had been meeting like this a lot—outside CIA headquarters, on nights and weekends. The less people knew about what they were up to, the better.
Like a ruptured appendix, terrorism had exploded, gushing its poison in all directions. Attacks were on the rise everywhere, especially in Europe, and now in the United States as well.
Losing territory and suffering defeat after defeat, ISIS had become like a cornered, wounded animal. In desperation, it had lashed out, calling for attacks on Americans whenever and wherever they could be found. They were sending a very clear message—nowhere was safe.
In return, the American President had sent a very clear message of his own—there wasn’t a rock big enough for ISIS to crawl under or a hole deep enough to slither down. Wherever its members tried to hide, the United States would find them. All of them. America would hunt its enemies to the very ends of the earth. And it would be relentless in doing so.
The problem, though, was that not everyone in the U.S. agreed with the President. Some saw his approach as too antagonistic. They worried that he was giving the terrorists exactly what they wanted, that he was playing right into their hands. They wanted less cowboy and more samurai—wise, patient, striking only when absolutely necessary and then slipping back into the night.
Then there were those who didn’t want any strikes at all. They claimed that hitting back only perpetuated a cycle of violence. They cautioned that if we didn’t stop, neither would ISIS. The already bad situation would only grow worse.
Many felt that the President didn’t appreciate their opinions and hadn’t even bothered to take them into consideration. But those who knew him—that small circle with whom he kept counsel—knew that wasn’t the case at all.
The President didn’t like waging this battle, but it was a just war. The use of force was not something he took lightly. His greatest desire was peace. He wanted nothing more than the security of the American people. He saw the safety of Americans at home and abroad as his number-one responsibility as commander in chief. It was the duty he placed above all others.
He also was privy to something his fellow citizens were not. Every morning, he received an intelligence briefing, which laid out how truly dangerous organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda were.
They were fanatics who believed that they had been chosen to rule the earth. For that to happen, they had to subjugate America and her allies through jihad. Anything less than total commitment to this goal was an act of defiance against God himself.
The fundamentalism that drove them was a cancer. It infected almost everyone it touched. And yet the people best positioned to remove the cancer lacked the courage and the desire to do so. No matter how many atrocities were committed in the name of their religion and their God, the Muslim world was wholly incapable of combating the problem.
With so little cooperation, the President had been left with few choices. And those choices only narrowed as many of America’s allies were overwhelmed with resource shortages and tidal waves of radicals on their own soil.
While the President respected those American voices that disagreed with his position, he could already see over the horizon. He could see what was coming if the United States didn’t act.
Like Israelis, Americans would find themselves in a state of constant siege. Beaches, restaurants, trains, buses, night clubs, grocery stores, schools, playgrounds, dog parks, movie theaters, sporting events, parades, shopping malls, even the places where they worshipped, nothing would be off-limits.
And as the attacks mounted, a frightened population would demand that something be done. There would be armed guards and security checkpoints everywhere—and even that would not be enough to deter America’s enemies. The terrorists would strike as Americans dropped their children off at school or stood in line waiting to step through a body scanner at the latest Broadway show. It simply wasn’t possible to keep all of America safe all of the time.
The calls to do more, though, would only grow. Finally, the bureaucrats and politicians would step in and attempt to regulate terrorism away. At that point, America would take a very dangerous turn. As Ben Franklin was alleged to have said, those who would trade a little liberty for a little security deserve neither and will lose both.
That, in a nutshell, was the President’s greatest fear. So he decided to act.
Despite using much of his political capital to push through a dramatic increase to the FBI’s budget, the Bureau was drowning. It had active investigations in all fifty states, but still nowhere near the resources it needed to see each investigation through to its end. The terrorists were coming at them too quickly—from everywhere and every walk of life. There simply were too many cases, too many leads, and not nearly enough agents.
The President had been left with only one course of action. A course that, if made known, would very likely lead to his impeachment.
Looking at Harvath, McGee said, “Let’s talk about what happened at Burning Man.”
CHAPTER 8
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Harvath was operating on a black contract. Technically, none of what he was doing should ever see the light of day. But in the age of hackers and leaked documents, he went to extraordinary lengths to make sure he put little, if anything, in writing.