Page 83 of Edge of Honor

“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 Sølvi 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 menSølvi 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.”

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