TWELVE

GREENBELTPARK

LATER THAT AFTERNOON

Do you want to explain to me why we had to meet all the way out here?” demanded Harvath, whose temper had only gotten worse since his meeting with the chief of staff.

“Because right now,” replied Gary Lawlor, as he walked past his thirty-five-year-old protégé and headed for one of the park’s paved jogging trails, “you have the unfortunate distinction of being politically toxic.”

“Politically toxic,” mused Harvath as he fell in step with the man who was not only his boss, but also a long-standing friend of his family and someone who had become like a second father to him. “This isn’t exactly how I had imagined my career coming to an end, “He continued. “It’s not only a bit undistinguished, but the timing’s off by about a good twenty years. Jesus Christ, Gary, how the hell did I become the bad guy in all of this? If Carmichael goes public with my identity, that’s it. I’ve screwed the pooch. It’s all over. What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“For starters, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” suggested Lawlor.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for my country. You know I wasn’t exactly in this for the paycheck. I was in it because I believed in defending what America stands for.”

“And what? You’ve stopped believing? You don’t want to defend those things anymore?”

“Were you not listening when I told you Charles Anderson had me sign a letter of resignation?” asked Harvath.

Lawlor stopped and turned to face him. “What did you expect? He’s the president’s chief of staff. His job is to protect Jack Rutledge, not Scot Harvath.”

“In pursuit of which it’s okay to throw me to the wolves on the Hill?”

“If necessary, you bet,” replied Lawlor.

“But why me? Why make me the sacrificial lamb?”

“Why not you?”

“Because I do a very dangerous job for my country and I’ve never asked for anything in return.”

“Now you’ve hit upon the right word,” said Lawlor. “Dangerous. Your job is extremely dangerous. Not only for you, but for this administration as well.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Harvath asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t care if that guy in Baghdad was some jackass fruit vendor. He got paid to be a decoy. He knew he was doing something he shouldn’t, and as a result, he got the beating I was intending on handing Khalid Alomari. Maybe he’ll stick to selling fruit from now on.”

“I think you’ve guaranteed that the man’s decoy days are well behind him, but that’s not what we’re talking about.”

“Really?” inquired Harvath. “Then what is?”

“Senator Carmichael. She isn’t after you for what you got caught doing by al-Jazeera.”

“The hell she isn’t.”

“Scot, I know you’re angry, but shut up a second and listen to me. The whole al-Jazeera thing is only a pretense. Does it make us look bad in the Muslim world? Yes, it does. Can we repair that damage? Of course we can. It might take some time and a lot of PR, but we can definitely do it.

“You need to remember that Senator Carmichael didn’t get to be where she is by being stupid. She’s a savvy woman and an extremely adept politician. Would I have liked it if you had never popped up on her radar screen? Of course, but now that you’re there, she’s using lots of little crumbs of information to bake a very big cake-one which she hopes to cover with candles and use to celebrate the Democrats taking back the White House.”

“But how do we know she can even prove anything?”

“She doesn’t have to prove anything. This is Washington. All she has to do is have enough to suggest that the president may have been sanctioning off-the-books black ops, and it’ll hurt him in the election. It doesn’t matter that Jack Rutledge has been proactive as hell and has had the balls to do whatever necessary to keep this country safe, there’s a good percentage of the voting public out there who don’t like the idea of their president operating outside the scope of his power and not having to answer to anyone.”

“But that’s not how he works, and you know it,” replied Harvath.

“Of course I know, but what I say isn’t going to make a bit of difference. Carmichael is going to make him look like an egomaniacal despot waging his own war via his own private assassin. It’ll decimate the public’s trust in him.”

Harvath was silent. How could he argue? Lawlor was right.

“I don’t need to tell you what a battlefield DC is,” said the older and often wiser man, “and I also don’t need to tell you that on the battlefield, you never underestimate your opponent. The president and his chief of staff are certainly not underestimating Helen Carmichael right now.”

“You can say that again,” replied Harvath. “According to Anderson, they expect her to have a subpoena ready for me by three o’clock this afternoon.”

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted us to meet here. Carmichael means to drag you out in front of the media, and the sooner the better, as far as she’s concerned. But if she can’t find you, she can’t serve you. And if she can’t serve you, then she can’t expect you to appear before her committee and the media.”

Harvath was quiet for a moment while he tried to divine his boss’s meaning. “Are you telling me you want me to duck a congressional subpoena?”

“Right now? Yes. I want you to duck it as hard as you can.”

“You know what that means,” replied Scot. “It means not going to the office, not going home-not going anywhere I normally go. What do you suggest I do?”

“Disappear.”

“For how long?” he asked

“For as long as it takes for us to fix this thing,” said Lawlor. “The last thing the president wants is for you to appear before Senator Carmichael’s committee.”

“But why did he have me sign a letter of resignation then?”

“He didn’t have you sign it, Anderson did, and it’s just a fail-safe. The president has no intention of accepting it, “He replied as he handed Harvath an envelope. “In fact, he has something else in mind for you.”

THIRTEEN

BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 216

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

LATER THAT EVENING

As Harvath’s flight sped across the Atlantic, his mind was reeling. He doubted if anything could have prepared him for the contents of the envelope Gary Lawlor had handed him only hours earlier. The photos and description of what had happened in the village of Asalaam were horrific. In addition to the non-Muslim population, the illness had claimed five U.S. soldiers, all members of Stryker Brigade Combat Team sent to look for missing American aid workers.

Harvath ran through the images again in his mind’s eye, reliving every horrible stage of infection as it unfolded. A crack containment team from USAMRIID had been dispatched to Iraq as soon as it was discovered that the SBCT soldiers had become infected. It was no use. Hours after the body strapped to the ceiling of the Provincial Ministry of Police had covered them in a fine bloody mist, they began to show symptoms of contamination. Immediately, the soldiers were placed in quarantine, which helped to prevent the illness from spreading, but despite being pumped full of antibiotics, there was nothing that could be done to save them.

The illness worked faster than anything anyone had ever seen. The only thing the USAMRIID team was able to learn was that the black sludge that exited the nasal passages right before death was actually the remains of the victim’s liquefied brain matter.

Despite their express desire to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction to use against the West, no one could understand how al-Qaeda had been able to come up with something this sophisticated. The idea that they could have bioengineered a substance to attack all but the followers of Islam was beyond comprehension. Harvath was beating himself up for not having apprehended Khalid Alomari sooner. Somehow he was involved in all of this, and Harvath couldn’t help but feel that if al-Qaeda succeeded in carrying out whatever they had planned, he would be largely at fault.