Chapter 41
H arvath drove to the public parking garage he had used near Secret Service headquarters and swapped the Malibu for Haney’s Bronco. Even running multiple SDRs on the way out of D.C., he still made it back to his place with forty-five minutes to spare before McGee got there.
After a shower and a change of clothes, Harvath turned on the TV in his office and got caught up on the news.
With few to no facts, speculation was rampant.
The United States was under attack from a foreign power.
Domestic terrorists were running wild. The attack outside the Vice President’s Residence was a “false flag” meant to weaken President Mitchell, while the attack on the Dulles Access Road was meant to drive a wedge between America and its NATO allies, weakening the transatlantic organization.
Harvath didn’t know much, but at this point he knew enough to know that any and all of those options were possible. He hoped that whatever McGee had uncovered, it would help make sense out of some of this.
When the former CIA director arrived, he set up his laptop at Harvath’s kitchen table and walked him through what he had learned from his contact back at the Agency.
He began with the photo of the attacker he had recognized at Ambassador Rogers’s house. “Alex Cobb,” he said. “He was ex–Ground Branch.”
First, some sort of Secret Service leak and now CIA assassins? Harvath wondered what agency would be uncovered next.
Ground Branch was particularly hard-core.
It was the CIA’s paramilitary detachment and was operated under the auspices of the Special Activities Center.
It recruited from some of the military’s most elite units.
Harvath had known a lot of Ground Branch members, including Mike Haney, who had crossed over when he left the Marine Corps.
“He was ‘ex’ Ground Branch?” Harvath asked, seeking clarification.
“Correct. He was fired six months ago when the new director took over.”
“Fired for what?”
“For not having been there longer,” McGee explained.
“He was a ‘probationary’ employee. Hadn’t hit the two-year mark.
They’re easier to fire because they don’t have all the civil service protections yet.
President Mitchell wanted deep cuts at CIA.
You know how he feels about the intelligence community. ”
“He’s not a fan,” Harvath replied. “I know that much.”
“The president believes the IC was behind the whole October Surprise thing exposing his college romance when he studied abroad in Russia.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t know where it came from, but it wasn’t CIA.”
“You’re sure?” Harvath asked.
McGee nodded before continuing, “Anyway, Mitchell campaigned on paring the size of government way back. And that went double, if not triple for the CIA. The new director began swinging the ax the moment he rolled into the parking lot. It was an absolute bloodbath. The probationary people like Cobb took it right in the neck.”
“So, Cobb gets cut loose and then what? Hangs a murder-for-hire shingle across the street at Immanuel Presbyterian?”
“I’m not sure what he did, but by the following month, his home was listed on the MLS. The month after that, he was in default on his mortgage, and behind on both his car payment and his wife’s.”
“Sounds like the wolf was at the door.”
“Then everything changes the next month,” said McGee. “The for-sale sign comes down, the house is taken off the market, and Cobb magically writes a series of checks, which all clear, catching him up on his mortgage and car payments.”
“Apparently someone suddenly came into some money.”
“Exactly.”
“But did a rich old aunt step in to save him?” asked Harvath. “Or could he have quietly put himself out there and actually been hired by the Iranians?”
“I was wondering the same thing, but according to my source, after he got his finances back in order, the money trail goes cold.”
“What about the other shooters?”
McGee pulled up their photos and stated, “All probationary employees. All Ground Branch. All fired.”
Harvath studied the pictures. They looked like photographs taken of hard copy, paper files. “Who’s your source at Langley? The archivist?”
“Everything inside the Special Activities Center, especially personnel files, is locked down tighter than tight. If you access any of the computerized databases, you leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs a mile long. Sometimes the old ways still are the best ways. Believe me.”
Harvath had seen that proven enough times to know that it was true. “What about the financial information? Where’s that coming from?”
“Someone I trust at Treasury.”
“And do we know anything about the rest of the attackers’ finances?”
“More or less, they all drop off the banking grid about the same time.”
“Interesting,” said Harvath. “So unless they had the same benevolent old aunt, it would suggest a more unsavory source of income.”
The former CIA chief nodded. “It looks like somebody may have bought themselves their own wet-work team.”
“Do we have any idea who?”
“That’s what I wanted to figure out. I recognized Cobb because he was featured in a mission briefing I signed off on about a year and a half ago. However, I hadn’t interacted with any of the others, so I pushed my source to find a link. And it looks like we hit the jackpot.
“Every one of the attackers at Ambassador Rogers’s house was recruited to Ground Branch by the same CIA officer—a former Green Beret by the name of Dennis Hale.
Him, I remember. He was an exceptional strategist and played an important role in a lot of the more difficult missions that Ground Branch was asked to undertake. ”
“Is this guy Hale still at CIA?” Harvath asked.
McGee shook his head. “When President Mitchell’s people offered buyouts for anyone looking to take early retirement, he jumped at the chance. Scored a job as head of security for a very wealthy Virginia family.”
“So he leaves, goes into the private sector, and when a bunch of people he recruited to CIA get let go, he launches a small, private military corporation as a side hustle?”
“Maybe. Or perhaps he hires people for legit security positions and they do a bunch of other things using their day jobs as cover.”
It was intriguing, Harvath had to give McGee that, but it was still thin. “Your guy at Treasury couldn’t find a way to connect all of them?”
“He was already doing me a favor giving me what he did. You either need a warrant, or someone who doesn’t mind stepping outside the bounds of the law.”
There was an arch to McGee’s left eyebrow as he finished his sentence and Harvath knew exactly who he was referring to. Nicholas .
“I can ask him. Did your archivist provide you with the attackers’ dates of birth and Social Security numbers?”
“Yes. It’s all in their files.”
“That should be enough to get our mutual friend started. In the meantime, you said I was going to want to act on this tonight. Why?”
McGee took a breath before responding. “One of the reasons Dennis Hale took the early retirement package was because he was being investigated inside the Agency.”
“For what?”
“Special Activities Center, as you know, has multiple branches.”
“Ground, Maritime, and Air,” said Harvath, very familiar with all of them.
“There’s another branch most people outside the Agency don’t know much about—the Armor and Special Programs Branch.
They provide anything the other branches need to conduct high-risk operations in sensitive or hostile environments.
And I mean anything—any kind of vehicle you can imagine, right down to any type of weapon.
Their specialty is plausible deniability, meaning none of their gear can be tied back to the United States. ”
“So where does it come from?”
“Some of it is bought from foreign arms dealers via third-party cutouts, but a lot of it they steal, often from dead bad guys. Hale was spearheading a program with that express purpose down in Mexico. One of the cartels had gotten its hands on a batch of shoulder-fired weapons. Hale’s job was to track down their stockpile and if possible liberate it. If not, he was to blow it in place.
“His op, allegedly, went sideways and he was forced to blow up the warehouse with everything in it.
Shit happens. You move on. Nobody thought anything more about it.
But a couple of months later, a source claimed that the warehouse had been emptied out before Hale blew it up.
The source stated that Hale had made a deal with the cartel and in return he was given a portion of the weapons—weapons that were never handed over to Armor and Special Programs, nor anyone else at CIA.
“An investigation was launched, but before it could get fully up and running, Hale took the early-retirement package and the investigation was put to bed. I had heard the rumors, but they were just that. There were no witnesses to contradict Hale. His teammates all told the same story. They came under heavy fire and blew the building before their exfiltration. There was a big explosion, consistent with what they all believed to have been inside. It was Hale’s word against the source’s down in Mexico.
The new director wanted no part of it and so they just closed the book. ”
“Jesus,” said Harvath, starting to understand the picture McGee was painting. “What kind of shoulder-fired weapons did they think the cartel had?”
“Stinger surface-to-air missiles, AT-4 antitank weapons, and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades.”
And there it is. Harvath now had the picture in full. “RPGs. The same weapon S?lvi and the Secret Service say was used against their motorcade today.”
“Which is why I thought you’d be very interested in confronting Hale tonight. That and the fact that the family he works for is leaving tomorrow for their ranch in Wyoming and he’s expected to travel with them.”
Taking out his phone, Harvath pulled up the photos of the three men S?lvi and Bente had killed in the woods off the Dulles Access Road and showed them to McGee.
“Recognize any of them?” he asked.
The ex–CIA chief studied them for several seconds before admitting, “No, I don’t.”
“How quickly can you get these to your source at Langley?”
“As soon as we get them from your phone to my laptop.”
Transferring them over, Harvath said, “If it turns out that they also worked at CIA, we’ll need everything in their files.”
“Understood,” McGee replied as he began preparing everything for his contact back at Langley.
“So,” Harvath mused aloud, trying to connect the dots, “if Hale’s behind the attack on the motorcade and the attack on Rogers, what’s the connection?”
“I keep trying to make it make sense, but I think that’s something you’re going to have to ask him yourself.”
“Where can I find him?”
“The family he works for has a pretty substantial estate. He lives on the property most of the time. There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Before hiring Hale, the family did a top-to-bottom security review and enacted a bunch of enhancements. Allegedly, it’s all cutting-edge, top-of-the-line stuff. Spared no expense. Even put in buoys along the shorefront to detect people coming in by boat.”
Harvath looked at him. “What’s this family’s name?”
“Willis. The husband made his fortune in—”
“Chemicals.”
McGee was surprised. “You know him?”
“The Carlton Group did the security review. I was the team leader.”