Porter took a moment to catch his breath and look around the table before returning to Harvath. “Making a case is like laying bricks, and you don’t have enough of them. You have the slaughter of workers at a medical clinic and a village in a part of Africa most Americans know nothing about. It’s horrific, I’ll give you that, but the only thing you have tying it to Pierre Damien is the word of some mercenary whom you subjected to waterboarding and then rendered to Malta without any authorization whatsoever.
“That’s it. That’s all you have. And that means that’s all I have. That’s all my Attorney General would have. It doesn’t matter who was seen coming out of his house. He, like every other American, has a right to free association.
“Do I enjoy his anti-American rhetoric? No, but he also has a right to freedom of speech, along with a long list of other rights guaranteed to him in the Constitution, a document that I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend.
“So when you ask me if you can render an American citizen, from American soil, for a crime he allegedly orchestrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, based upon a statement coerced from a non-U.S. citizen under unauthorized, harsh interrogation, my answer is not only no, it’s hell no.
“Does that clarify my position for you?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Paul Porter looked around the table one last time. Everyone else nodded, and with that, he exited the Situation Room.
Harvath, Carlton, Ryan, and McGee sat for a moment in stunned silence until McGee said, “That went well.”
Carlton shook his head. “You never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.”
Harvath didn’t want to be disrespectful to the Old Man, but he couldn’t hold his tongue. “It needed to be asked.”
“No it didn’t, at least not directly. You know better. He’s the President of the United States. He doesn’t mind a little coloring outside the lines, but there are certain things that you have to be very delicate about raising. And there are most definitely things that cannot be put to him point-blank.”
Harvath glanced at Ryan. There were times where she seemed to understand him better than either of their bosses. “It all comes down to bricks, right?”
“What?”
“The President told you. You don’t have enough bricks. He wants you to build the thickest, highest wall you can. Something Damien will never be able to scale. I didn’t hear POTUS say stop. I just heard him say that for the time being, you can’t choke any of your bricks out of Pierre Damien directly.”
Was that it? Was that what the President was telegraphing? He hadn’t shut them down. He had simply established a bright line. One that for now, they would all have to abide by.
Switching to strategy, they remained for a few more minutes to discuss roles and who was going to do what next.
After discussing the Israelis and Ben Mordechai, they agreed to talk again in an hour, and exited the Situation Room en masse.
Halfway up the stairs, Harvath’s phone began to blow up, chiming with a string of texts — all of them from Nicholas, telling him to call in.
As he hit the exit for the West Wing, his phone sprang to life once more, this time with a call. “Atomic Dog” by George Clinton.
The Old Man looked at him.
“Nicholas,” Harvath responded.
“Answer it.”
CHAPTER 38
It was a torrent of bad news. “Six more cases have been reported,” said Nicholas.
“Where?” Harvath replied.
“San Francisco, Cedar Rapids, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C.”
Washington? Harvath shouldn’t have been surprised. D.C. and Northern Virginia had large Muslim populations. He just hadn’t expected this thing to spread so quickly, much less wind up on his own doorstep overnight. But it was there, and they were going to have to deal with it.
“Has the media gotten ahold of this yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Nicholas. “And in the last two hours, health ministries from eleven other countries have reached out to the CDC. They’re trying to control the information flow in order to prevent a panic.”
Good luck with that, Harvath thought. In his experience, life was predominantly made up of three distinct groups: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. And if there was one thing he had learned from a lifetime of hunting wolves and protecting sheep, it was that sheep had two speeds — graze and stampede. Now that word was out that the virus was loose, all bets were off. Very soon, chaos was going to ensue.
“What else do you have?” he asked, bracing himself for more bad news.
“The pharmaceutical companies Damien’s involved with appear pretty benign. One focuses on dementia medication and the other on birth control drugs.”
Go figure.
“I think you were right about the Congolese Muslims, though,” Nicholas continued. “There was a group of thirty. They arrived and departed Saudi Arabia via the same privately chartered aircraft.”
Finally, some good news. “Any passport photos or CCTV footage?” he asked.
“All of it has been transmitted to the Solarium. Vella is personally going to go through it with Hendrik.”
While it wouldn’t move the ball down the field, at least it would confirm his theory. “Anything else?”
“Mordechai’s asset made contact.”
“The woman with Damien?”
“Yes,” Nicholas replied. “She thinks she captured his password.”
“That’s even better news.”
“And it keeps getting better. The keystroke logger captured activity from multiple devices in the room, one of which we were able to ID.”
“Which was?”
“A laptop belonging to Linda Landon from the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Have you reviewed all of the keystrokes they caught?”
“No one has seen them. Not even Mordechai. Without access to secure comms, his asset isn’t transmitting the data. She and Damien are having lunch today at some place called La Niçoise in Winchester. She’s going to pass the actual memory card to Mordechai there.”
With all the tech the Israelis had, he was a little surprised they couldn’t have equipped her with some way to encrypt and transmit the data. But by the same token, this was an incredibly important operation. They were risking a ton just sending her in with the keystroke logger. There was no telling what Damien or his people might have done if they had discovered any of it.
He also needed to keep in mind that Mordechai’s operation had revolved around the City of Geneva, where it wouldn’t have been a big deal to pass off the memory card on her way to work, or to a store, or something like that. Now that she was at Damien’s rural Virginia estate, she was much more isolated.
There was no telling how secure his WiFi was and what possible digital eavesdropping measures he had in place. He was known to entertain wealthy and extremely powerful people. Did he eavesdrop on any of their communications?
The restaurant was a good play. The handoff would be low-tech, old-school Espionage 101. What he didn’t like, though, was that they’d be burning hours in a battle where every second counted.
“Where’s Mordechai now?” Harvath asked.
“Still at the canal house. The team that’s on him is about to rotate off.”
“Who’s up next?”
“Sloane Ashby and Chase Palmer are back on.”
Harvath put the phone on mute, spoke to the Old Man for a couple of seconds, and then returned to Nicholas. “How would you like to get out of the SCIF for a little bit?”
“That depends,” the little man said. “What do you have in mind?”