“Me neither. I had to work my ass off to track down their bid package. Apparently, they ticked all three boxes. Blue Pine is owned by two women, both IT whizzes. One of them is of Asian descent. The other is an Army veteran.”
“And?”
“The Army veteran worked in Army Intelligence. Then she went to work for the NSA.”
It just so happened that the CIA contracted a certain amount of off-the-books surveillance to a group run by a woman who had worked both in Army Intelligence and at the NSA. Ryan didn’t believe in coincidences.
“What’s her name?” she asked.
“Susan Viscovich.”
• • •
Doing jobs for the branch of the CIA responsible for clandestine intelligence collection meant taking meetings at interesting times in interesting places. A lockhouse in the C&O National Historical Park on a Friday night definitely ranked toward the top of Susan Viscovich’s “most interesting” list.
Upon arrival, she saw a lone Lexus sedan parked outside. It seemed a little bit odd, but then again, what had she expected? A column of blacked-out Suburbans? That probably wasn’t how the Director of the Clandestine Service rolled — especially not when he was meeting to discuss such a sensitive surveillance case.
She figured the meeting had to do with her surveillance of Lydia Ryan and Reed Carlton. Was she going to get her ass chewed for the fact that the cameras, microphones, and vehicle trackers had been discovered? Maybe.
She had reached out to Andy Jordan to get a heads-up on what was going on, but her calls went right to voicemail. He hadn’t responded to any of her texts either. Whatever.
Sometimes surveillance assignments got blown. It happened. She had, though, delivered on the emails, and maybe that was what she was being asked in to discuss.
Nevertheless, it was weird for her to be having a Director-level meeting. Perhaps they had discovered something highly sensitive and they wanted to dot all their i’s and cross their t’s before confronting Lydia Ryan. There was only one way to find out.
Parking her Volvo next to the Lexus, she got out, walked up the short flight of steps, and knocked on the blue door.
A moment later, it opened. But instead of seeing the Director of the Clandestine Service, she saw the Director of Central Intelligence.
“Thank you for coming,” said Bob McGee.
Shocked, she looked deeper into the room and saw the Deputy Director, Lydia Ryan, sitting at a table near the fireplace.
Opening the door the rest of the way, the Director motioned for her to come inside.
What the hell was going on? For a moment, Viscovich thought about turning around and leaving. In fact, a voice in the back of her mind told her not only to leave, but to leave as fast as she could.
The rational part of her, though, maintained control. She wanted to know what this was all about. Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside.
• • •
Two hours later, realizing she had been lied to by Andrew Jordan, and that he had even forged the finding from the Director authorizing her to surveil Lydia Ryan and Reed Carlton, Viscovich exited the lockhouse, climbed back into her Volvo, and headed home.
The Director of Central Intelligence had given her a new directive. Until she heard from him personally, she was to do nothing and to speak with no one, including Andrew Jordan.
Before she had even exited the park, McGee and Ryan were formalizing what their next step would be.
The only question was whether it should be run through the CIA or whether they should use the anonymity of the Carlton Group to carry it out.
CHAPTER 83
Argento had a private jet waiting for them at the Reggio Calabria airport. The flight to Rome took less than an hour. A pair of helicopters was on the tarmac when they arrived, rotors hot, ready to take them the rest of the way.
From a public safety standpoint, the ROS wanted to hit the warehouse in the port at Civitavecchia as quickly as possible. From a media standpoint, Harvath wanted to hit it while it was dark and everyone was still asleep. The last thing they needed was a TV news crew showing up, or someone with a camera phone posting video to the Internet. The less the bad guys knew about what they knew, the better.
Patching Nicholas directly into Vottari’s phone via satellite, they had been able to retrace where the RFID tags had been.
La Formícula’s men had handed over the weapons near Cerveteri — a town northwest of Rome. From there, the ISIS men had driven to a warehouse in Civitavecchia, where there had been no movement since the tags were placed upon the cargo ship Grande Senegal shortly before it headed out to sea.
Harvath had no doubt that the target was somewhere in Rome. If ISIS had been planning on using the weapons someplace else in Europe, they would have had them, and Mustapha Marzouk, delivered much farther north — possibly Turin or Milan. What good is an illicit underground railroad if you don’t follow it as far as it will take you?
The helicopters landed well north of the target, where an additional ROS team met them.
As the team leader spoke to Argento, Lovett translated for Harvath.
“The warehouse has been under surveillance for the last hour and a half. There have been no signs of any activity. The lease is only a couple of months old and, according to the landlord, is held by a trading company out of Panama. Probably a shell corporation.
“The ROS Hazmat unit out of Rome is two blocks away from the target. They have been watching the surveillance feeds and are ready to make entry as soon as Argento gives the order.”
There was some back and forth between the men that got somewhat heated. Lovett waited until it was resolved before explaining it.
“Apparently, there’s some disagreement about whether the neighborhood should be evacuated. It’s largely an industrial area, but some of the businesses run overnight shifts.”
“Argento won the argument?” Harvath asked.
“For now.”
Once Argento and his colleague had finished going over the plan, everyone climbed into waiting vehicles and they took off for the target.
The command post had been established three blocks upwind of the warehouse. If sarin or any other hazardous chemicals were present, they wanted to be outside the immediate zone.
In addition to the ROS team outfitted with respirators and CBRN suits and prepared to make entry, hazardous incident response units from the Italian Department of Civil Protection had also been activated and were staging nearby.
Argento had taken great pains to keep the operational footprint as small as possible. Unfortunately, with so much at stake, this was as small as the situation would allow.
Pulling up at the staging area, Harvath and Lovett hopped out and followed Argento into the mobile incident command post, which was housed inside a climate-controlled tractor-trailer.
Staff in military green flight suits sat in front of computer screens, while large monitors bolted to the walls fed back a series of images, including footage from two drones that were observing the warehouse from overhead.
After a quick discussion, Argento gave the order to send the ROS team into the building.
Moments later, two black vans appeared on two different monitors. One approached the warehouse from the front, another from the rear. Each came to a stop only long enough to drop off its occupants before moving on.
Even wearing the bulky chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear protection suits and respirators, the armed men moved with speed and dexterity. At both entry points, the lead operatives used fiber-optic cameras to make sure the doors weren’t booby-trapped before calling up their breachers.