Page 50 of Spymaster

Fully backstopped covers were very time consuming and expensive to create. They didn’t grow on trees. Among the major advantages of working with the man in the hat were the top cover he could provide and the preservation of the team’s anonymity. ID wouldn’t have been required for anything. That was a good thing, especially in a covert operation.

In fact, it was Tradecraft 101—something the Old Man had repeatedly pounded into him. As an example of whatnotto do, Carlton loved to cite a horribly botched operation Langley had run in Italy about a decade earlier.

Two dozen CIA operatives had participated in an assignment to snatch a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan and render him for interrogation. Inexplicably, the operatives not only traveled under their own names, but also used their personal hotel rewards programs to rack up points, and ran all around Italy with their personal cell phones, leaving a trail of electronic bread crumbs.

The Italian government tried all of them in absentia for kidnapping, false imprisonment, and torture, resulting in unanimous guilty verdicts. The trial was followed by sentencing, in which massive fines and jail time were levied. None of them would ever again be able to travel to Europe without fear of arrest and imprisonment.

To call it amateur hour would be an insult to amateurs. The Old Man had been adamant that Harvath and everyone else at The Carlton Group hold themselves to a higher standard.

But even in the presence of best intentions, an immutable law of covert operations remained—if something could go wrong, it would.

Harvath had already witnessed Murphy’s Law on full display in Norway. He didn’t intend to let Murphy pop his ugly head up here. Though, if it did, no matter what got thrown at them, they would adapt and overcome. Failure was not an option.

With Harvath’s and Chase’s aliases each tied to a rental car, they used Sloane’s alias to book their accommodations. The less anyone could connect the team’s dots, the better.

That same mindset applied to where they’d be sleeping. The fewer people who saw them coming and going, the better.

As Gotland was a popular vacation destination, Staelin had looked beyond hotels, searching for off-season houses and apartments that might be for rent. Within five minutes online, he had found the perfect spot.

Once paperwork had been completed and their vehicles—a blue Kia Sedona minivan and a gray Toyota Camry sedan—had been brought around, they transferred over the gear from the plane and headed out of the airport toward the rental house.

The old country house sat on fifteen allegedly “quiet” acres twenty minutes outside town. They stopped along the way at a gas station minimart to load up on provisions. Harvath stayed outside to keep an eye on the vehicles.

While he waited, he banged out a text on his encrypted sat phone. He wanted to give Ryan a fuller picture of what was going on and how they were dealing with it. With his message sent, he shut down the phone and turned his attention to the cars.

Since leaving the airport, he had kept a close eye on their six o’clock. It hadn’t seemed as if they were being followed. But in the age of GPS, a person didn’t need to physically tail you in order to monitor where you were going.

“Fleet management” was a fancy term for GPS tracking and was standard operating procedure for all major car rental companies. He disabled the fleet management system in the minivan first and then the sedan. After, he did a full inspection of each vehicle to make sure no secondary devices had been added. He didn’t find anything.

Ten minutes later, the team exited the minimart, each carrying multiple grocery bags. Barton, the SEAL, was carrying several cases of bottled water, with a case of sugar-free Red Bull stacked on top.

“Somebody also bought coffee, right?” asked Harvath.

“Two kinds,” replied Chase, who was right behind him. “They even had a grinder inside. I got to do the beans myself.”

“At a gas station?”

“Welcome to Sweden,” he said with a grin.

Harvath was glad to see him so upbeat. The last time they had run an operation in Sweden, it hadn’t gone well. Multiple operatives had died, and Chase, who had penetrated deep inside a sophisticated terror cell, had been lucky to make it out alive.

Like Sloane Ashby, Chase Palmer had the right mix of what it took. He was young, sharp, and highly successful in the field. He was also fearless and, like Sloane, fully understood the threats that were massing around the world. They had had access to weapons and training the likes of which he had never seen at their age. Harvath envied them both.

They also had plenty of time left on the clock. They could go kinetic for years, if not decades, to come. Harvath, though, was already pushing his limit.

He was closer to exiting his forties than entering. He had been masking the pain that came from a lifetime of beating the hell out of his body with anti-inflammatories and the occasional Vicodin. In between, his preferred method was taking the healing waters of Buffalo Trace, Knob Creek, or Hudson Bay.

But despite everything that had been thrown at him, he worked hard to stay fit.

His training regimen had been crafted by one of the top sports medicine physicians in the country. In addition to massive weight and cardio workouts, he did what every successful operative did—he cheated.

The SEALs referred to it as the “cocktail,” while Delta called it “Hulk sauce.” It was a combination of performance-enhancing compounds developed by a group in Florida that worked on training and rehabilitating professional athletes.

Harvath had been the first at The Carlton Group to try it, even though Lara had cautioned him against it. The results turned out to be undeniable.

He had packed on ten additional pounds of muscle and had cut fourteen seconds off his mile. Even so, he was smart enough to know that there might be a price to pay. In time, the injections could be found to cause this or that illness. Right now, though, whatever allowed him to remain in the field was all that mattered.

Smiling back at Chase, he said, “So besides coffee, did we get anything else healthy, or is it all junk food?”

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