Page 81 of Edge of Honor

“Precisely. Somebody very skilled would have had to help them do that.”

She looked at him. “Do you have any idea how difficult that would be? Breaking into government databases would require next-level hacking ability. I don’t think the Russians could even do it.”

“Put a pin in the ‘who’ for a moment,” said Carolan. “Let’s talk about the ‘what.’ What would you get by erasing these people?”

“Easy question. Anonymity. If we don’t know who any of them are, we can’t map their networks and link them together. We wouldn’tknow who their associates are, nor how many of them there may be out there.”

Carolan smiled. “Bingo. They’d have an invisible army.”

“An army that’s piling up a lot of casualties,” Fields responded. “Six bodies from the attack outside the VP’s Residence, eight at Rogers’s house, and it sounds like at least three more at the motorcade attack.”

“True, they’re taking serious losses, but let’s get back to the databases. What if the ‘who’ wasn’t some hacker on the outside? What if it was somebody on the inside doing the erasing?”

Her eyes widened. “A mole?”

“Think about it. Someone with the right access, someone who knew what they were doing… Why not? It wouldn’t be the first time the government had a bad actor on its payroll. Snowden, Manning, Winner, Teixeira—we’ve been particularly awash in these antigovernment types over the last decade.”

“Where would you even start looking?”

“That’s the problem,” Carolan admitted. “A needle in a haystack is one thing, but a needle somewhere in a sea of haystacks is something you and I aren’t equipped to go after. Which brought me back to the National Gang Intelligence Center.

“Even though it acts as a national clearinghouse for gang-related information, its intel comes through FBI field offices via their local and state law enforcement partners. So, if anything got erased from the NGIC federal database, like data about our sword-and-tree tattoo, maybe there’s copy of it on a computer, in a file drawer, or an iPhone of some local cop or state trooper somewhere.

“All I had to do was send an email, with the picture of the tattoo, to all the FBI field offices and ask them to reach out to their contacts. Then hope they’d kick back someone like Weber, who had a pressure point we could leverage, and we’d be off to the races.”

“And did we get anything?” Fields asked.

“So far, just one,” Carolan replied, pulling up the man’s information on his computer. “Richard ‘Ricky’ Thomas Russell.”

“And does this Ricky Russell have something we can leverage?”

Her boss nodded. “Big-time.”

“Well done. You did it.”

Carolan, however, didn’t share her enthusiasm. Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t think Gallo is going to okay my plan.”

“Why not?”

“Because the leverage is Russell’s six-year-old child.”

CHAPTER 41

Harvath 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’sparamilitary 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.

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