Page 62 of Edge of Honor

“But based on that stack of bodies back at the Ambo’s house,” said Haney, “the hitters aren’t Iranians. So doesn’t that torpedo the idea that this is retribution for Soleimani?”

McGee agreed. “The attack we saw would mark a huge evolution for Tehran. Way too sophisticated. The ability to recruit well-trained,ostensibly American operators is simply beyond their capabilities. They could throw all the money in the world at something like this and still not pull it off.”

“Then what are we looking at?” Harvath asked, legitimately exasperated. “I’ve now been in two serious gunfights, in two days, with what looks like American citizens. What the hell is going on?”

Looking into his coffee as if he might find the answer, the former CIA director shook his head. “I don’t know. I think, maybe, it’s ideological.”

“Ideological?The protesters outside the VP’s residence were members of his own party. Ambassador Rogers is from the opposite party and no longer in government. How could any of this be ideological?”

“In my experience,” said McGee, “when something bad goes down, you look at two groups—those who benefit from what happened, and those who were pissed-off leading up to what happened.”

“Okay,” Harvath replied, humoring him. “Someone very publicly kills a group of Mitchell supporters, along with a bunch of cops, and then goes after Rogers, but not before they ice the SecDef and SecState? Assuming, of course, that the Ambassador’s correct about their deaths. So then, looking at all of that, cui bono?”

“I don’t know who benefits,” he replied, exasperated himself. “But if you can nail that down, you’ve got your hands on the key to this whole thing.”

“So let’s look at the second group,” said Haney, trying to keep things moving. “In the run-up to the attack at the VP’s Residence, who was pissed-off?”

“Only about half the country,” Harvath responded, standing up to get some fresh coffee. “You’ve got everyone who didn’t vote for Mitchell, plus anyone who’s lost faith in him since he took office. But none of that explains why the attack happened or who’s behind the hit on Rogers, much less any connection between the two.”

“If I may,” said McGee. “Let’s pull the lens back and think like I did at CIA. If you were a foreign nation hostile to the United States, how might attacking angry Mitchell supporters, as well as officials from the previous administration, serve your ends?”

It was an unusual question, and one that Harvath definitely hadn’tconsidered. If a hostile foreign intelligence service was trying to stir unrest in the United States, the last thing they’d want to do was make the plot easy to piece together.

In fact, the more complicated and disjointed they could make it, the more successful they’d likely be at avoiding detection. But at the same time, he reasoned, there would have to be a through line, some sort of unified objective to it all. Chaos simply for chaos’s sake hardly seemed like much of a plan.

What’s more, while gunning down protesters and blowing up cops had the potential to grab people’s attention and possibly spur them to some sort of action, you wouldn’t get a single person in the streets because a bunch of government employees from a previous administration had been killed. Right or wrong, not enough people would care about them.

That was where the whole foreign intelligence service plot fell apart for Harvath. Killing Rogers and his former colleagues produced a juice that just didn’t seem worth the squeeze. No matter how many angles he came at it from, he couldn’t come up with an answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

“Okay,” McGee offered. “Instead of zooming out, let’s change our lens altogether. If you wanted to hobble the new administration, how would you do it? Think big.”

After topping off Haney, Harvath filled his own mug and said, “I’d want to make Mitchell as unpopular as possible; absolutely crater his polling numbers. I’d want to put him in a hole so deep that no matter what he did or said, even his dog wouldn’t support him.”

The ex–CIA director smiled. “And to guarantee that, to make him a full-on dead man walking, politically speaking, what would you do?”

“That’s easy,” Harvath stated as he leaned against the counter. “I’d make people afraid. I’d use murder and mayhem to make them feel that their world was spinning out of control, that they weren’t safe, and that it was all because of Mitchell.”

McGee raised his mug to him. “Now you’re thinking like a CIA director.”

“What I can’t figure out, though, is how it ties in with Rogers and the deaths of his colleagues.”

“That’s even easier to explain. In fact, Mitchell may have handed the idea to our enemies on a silver platter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The President hasn’t been shy about cutting the size of government—including Secret Service details.”

“And?”

“And if it comes to pass that any officials, especially those involved with national security, were murdered because Mitchell didn’t protect them, can you imagine the chilling effect that would have? Who would want to work for Mitchell, or any future administration, if you knew that one day you could be hung out to dry? How hard would you push America’s enemies if at some point in the future, when you needed your country the most, the United States might not have your back? We’d never get top-tier talent into national security positions ever again. It would be an enormous win for the enemies of the United States.”

It was an excellent point. And while President Mitchell was within his rights to deny ex-officials like Rogers protection, which could run upwards of $2 million a month, the potential consequences of doing nothing seemed incalculable to Harvath.

In his opinion, if there was a bona fide, active threat against any government official—past or present—and that threat was a result of their official duties on behalf of the United States, America should protect them. It was the morally just thing to do.

One would think it was also smart politics, regardless of party affiliation, but politicians were an odd breed as far as Harvath was concerned. There were very few he had met over his career that he had liked and fewer still that he had respected.

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