So are we going to the reception, or not?” asked Harvath as the crowd outside the church began to break up.
“We thought we’d do our own private send-off for Bob,” replied Cates.
“What? You mean just the three of you?”
“No. The four of us,” said Morgan. “After all, we’re a team, right?”
Harvath smiled. As he did, Tracy Hastings removed a bottle of Louis XIII from her bag and said, “Bob mentioned he owed you a drink. We all chipped in and bought this in his honor.”
Harvath smiled even wider.
As they had all paid their respects to the family at the wake last night and had stayed well into the early morning hours drinking, nobody could fault them for missing the reception. In fact, few would probably even notice their absence. Besides, swapping stories while they consumed a $1300 bottle of cognac was the kind of send-off Bob would have approved of.
They decided they’d take the Fulton Landing Ferry back over to Manhattan and find a quiet place in Battery Park where they could look out over the Hudson and maybe forget, at least for a while, about everything that had happened.
A block from the church a black limousine pulled up next to them, and when the tinted window rolled down, Harvath thought he recognized the voice of the man calling his name. As he turned to look, he saw Robert Hilliman, the U.S. secretary of defense, waving.
“Quite a moving ceremony,” he said, beckoning Harvath over to the vehicle. “I need a couple minutes of your time. Would you mind?”
Harvath told the others he’d meet them at the ferry and then climbed inside the limousine.
“How’ve you been, Scot?” said Hilliman once the door was shut.
“Fine, sir,” he replied, not exactly happy to be sitting in a limo in the middle of Brooklyn Heights talking to the secretary of defense.
“Fit for duty? The shoulder’s okay? The ankle?”
“The shoulder’s about eighty percent, but the ankle’s okay now.”
“Good, glad to hear it.”
“Sir, what are you doing here?” asked Harvath.
Hilliman smiled. “I knew Robert Herrington. Not well, but I knew him. He was a good man. He was part of my protective detail the first time I visited Afghanistan. There was a situation. It never made the news, but suffice it to say that if it wasn’t for Bob’s efforts in particular, I might not be here right now.
“I paid my respects to his parents earlier this morning and kept a low profile in the back of the church during the service.”
“And the Black Hawk? Was that your doing?”
“His team had asked for it and were getting some static. With everything that’s happened in Manhattan, there were certain people that felt a funeral flyover was an inappropriate diversion of resources. I disagreed. Bob Herrington was a hell of a guy and one of the finest warriors this country has ever seen.”
Hilliman removed a folder from his briefcase and handed it to him. “I read the debriefing they did on you while you were getting patched up at the VA. I thought you deserved to have some of the blanks filled in.”
As Harvath looked through the file, the secretary of defense continued, “Scot, you’ve been in this game long enough to know why certain operations must remain classified. Sometimes it’s of vital national security that the right hand not know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes, though, we begin with the absolute best of intentions and clarity of purpose, but the walls we build to protect our operations can actually prevent us from sharing strategic information of paramount importance. It’s clear now that’s what happened last week and we lost a lot of good people because of it.
“Though I have some incredible resources at my disposal, I can’t change the past. I can, though, have a significant impact on the future.”
Harvath wasn’t listening anymore. When he looked up from the folder the anger was chiseled across his face. “I can’t believe what I’m reading. You were actually getting ready to let him walk? After everything we know about Mohammed bin Mohammed? After the incredible amount of manpower and money that went into tracking him down? What about the people who were killed trying to apprehend him? What about what he is planning to unleash on this country?”
“You don’t know the full story.”
“You know what, Mr. Secretary? I don’t see how that could possibly make a difference.”
“Listen to me and I’ll tell you.”
Harvath tossed the file onto the seat next to him and prayed the man had a good answer. If not, he was going to rip his throat out right in the back of that limousine.
Hilliman took a deep breath and replied, “Nobody can withstand torture indefinitely, not even a man like Mohammed bin Mohammed. The problem lies in knowing when you’ve truly broken them. To know that, you have to verify the intel a subject gives you, and that can take time. Time was not something we had on our side in Mohammed’s case. Making matters even more difficult were his extensive dialysis treatments.
“Therefore, it had been agreed that if we couldn’t make measurable progress within a certain window, we were going to transport him to another nation that collaborates with us in interrogations, a nation we knew his associates might be likely to subvert to help facilitate his escape.”
“I still don’t understand why you’d do that.”
“So we could track him.”
“But it took you guys years to find him in the first place. What makes you so sure you wouldn’t lose him?” demanded Harvath.
“That’s the thing. We were over ninety percent certain we wouldn’t lose him-and in our business, that’s a percentage we were willing to bet the house on.”
“How were you going to track him?”
“Through a radioisotope we’d been administering as part of his dialysis treatments. It creates a very specific signature which can be tracked via satellite.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The secretary held up both hands and said, “So help me. It’s a very new technology, but it works. We’d seen the data, but we went a step further and did a slew of comprehensive tests ourselves. The bottom line is that it works.”
“Ninety percent of the time,” clarified Harvath.
“Correct.”
“So, do you know where Mohammed bin Mohammed is now?”
Hilliman looked at him. “Yes, we do.”
“So what are you waiting for? Why don’t you grab him?”
“Because we need to know who al-Qaeda is about to get their nuclear material from.”
“And once you do? What then?”
Hilliman pulled two more files from his briefcase, handed them across to Harvath, and said, “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”