Hidden Order: A Thriller (5 page)

Unlike his mother, as well as many of the women he had dated, Harvath wasn’t a “travel size” guy. He didn’t keep hotel soaps or shampoos, nor did he keep the complimentary vanity kits when traveling first class. That said, he didn’t want to hurt Natalie’s feelings and so accepted the kit with a smile and a thank-you. He could toss it once he was off the plane.

After he’d cleared customs and passport control, a courtesy vehicle picked him up for the short drive over to Signature Flight Support. It was a “Fixed Base Operator” facility where he’d have a chance to clean up before one of his Carlton Group colleagues drove him into D.C. for his meeting with the Old Man.

As he arrived at the FBO, he saw that it was one of Carlton’s protégés, Sloane Ashby, who had been sent there to pick him up.

Leaning against her car, with her high cheekbones, smoky gray eyes, and hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like the country club wife of some handsome young banker. It would be a mistake, though, to judge this book by its cover.

Sloane was not only brilliant, having graduated at the top of her class from Northwestern University with a dual major in math and chemistry; she was also highly skilled as a winter athlete, having competed in both figure skating and snowboarding. She was also one hell of an operator.

As a former member of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team, Harvath told his colleagues that what he liked most about her was her prowess in winter sports, but none of them believed him. They all assumed that what he “liked”
about her was that she was hot. In other words, even people trained to know better still fell prey to the mistake of judging her solely by what they saw on the surface.

Carlton, on the other hand, had very different reasons for liking her. In addition to admiring her academic and athletic abilities, he respected her because, despite her family’s ability to cover all of her college expenses, she had insisted on paying her own way and had rocketed through the ROTC program. She had signed up insisting that she be promised combat duty. She went on to complete two tours in Afghanistan, killing more enemy combatants than all the women in the theater combined (not to mention many of the men). But when some glossy magazine ran an unauthorized cover story on her, it placed a huge bull’s-eye on her back and brought her combat career to a screeching halt.

The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were both offering big rewards for her head on a pike and the Department of Defense had no other choice but to deny her request for a third tour. Without missing a beat, and as bold as brass, she requested to be sent immediately to Iraq before all the action ended there. She was turned down, though, once again.

She ended up being detailed to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, where she worked with the all-female Delta detachment known as the Athena Project. Despite her young age, she was an excellent instructor. Everyone knew, though, that her heart and her talent lay in being an operator. She was quite vocal about the fact that if it weren’t for the Islamic bounty on her head and the subsequent PR nightmare her capture or killing would cause, she’d still be out whacking and stacking Muslim terrorists like cordwood. Neither political correctness, nor empathy for the risk aversion of her commanders, was part of her DNA.

Because of that, the United States Army had a love/hate relationship with Sloane Ashby. They loved the fact that they could push a super-attractive, athletic, young American woman as an Army success story, but they hated that she repeatedly suggested, in public, that the Army had no balls and was caving to the terrorists by not letting her return to the fight.

She was definitely a headache for the Department of Defense, but
there were many other people in D.C. who absolutely loved her. To the chagrin of her superiors, Ashby was invited to lots of powerful, insider cocktail parties where she freely spoke her mind. It was at one such party where she had met Reed Carlton.

They chatted for over an hour about world events, politics, and the military. The next day they then met for a three-hour lunch. By the end of the month, the Old Man had worked his magic. Ashby was honorably discharged from the military and forty-eight hours later she had been hired on at the Carlton Group.

Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been relegated to doing airport pickups, but these weren’t normal circumstances for the organization and everyone was chipping in. While she did have a hard-charging style, she was still a team player.

“Hey, old man,” she said as Harvath stepped out of the courtesy vehicle.

Old man?
He might have been in his forties, but he was nowhere near “old,” especially when all of them worked for a literal “old” man like Reed Carlton. That said, she never missed a chance to needle him. He didn’t see himself as old at all and it grated on him when she called him that.

“I brought you something from Africa,” he said without missing a beat.

Suddenly, Ashby softened. “Really?” she asked with an almost childlike naïveté. “What is it?”

“This,” Harvath replied, holding up his middle finger.

Ashby laughed. There wasn’t even a hint of anger. She could admire a good joke, even one at her own expense and she never let it dent her ego. She was good at rolling with the punches.

She was also good at sizing up people and situations. It was scary both in how bright she was and how rapidly she could analyze something and figure out what was going on. Harvath hated to admit it, but she was probably much smarter and quicker than he had ever been.

“At least you have something to hang this on,” Sloane said, reaching through the window of her car and pulling out a garment bag.

Harvath walked over to her. “Where’d that come from?”

“This?” she asked, looking down through the opening at the top of the bag. “I think somebody mugged a pimp or maybe a TV weatherman.”

“Very funny,” he replied, extending his hand. “How’d you get into my house?”

Sloane lifted her right foot and executed a quick snap kick. “I used my size-six Manolo skeleton key.”

Sassy
. Harvath liked sassy. In fact, he liked it almost as much as he did Scandinavian flight attendants with scarves tied around their necks. But only
almost
. Sloane Ashby was not only too young for him; she was also a colleague. What’s more, Reed Carlton—who had very likely given her the key and alarm code for his house—had made it quite clear that he expected Harvath to maintain a strictly professional relationship with her. Someday she was going to go on to do some incredible things for their agency, even more than she already had for the country. By that point, God willing, she would be reporting to Harvath. The Old Man didn’t want any messy entanglements between them screwing up their performance.

“If I get home,” Harvath said as he accepted the garment bag, “and find any of my Kool & the Gang records missing, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Ashby shook her head. “No one got near your
phon-o-graph,
grandpa,” she replied, drawing the words out slowly like she was speaking to someone hard of hearing. “No need to worry. E-v-e-r-y-thing is okay. Your Drool & the Gang will still be there when the bus brings you back to the home after bingo.”

Now it was Harvath’s turn to laugh. Sloane Ashby was a wiseass and could give as good as she got. She reminded him a lot of himself at that age—cocky, and way too sure of herself. Even so, he enjoyed mixing it up with her. Because the Old Man had been so adamant about not getting romantic with her, Harvath looked at her like a younger sister and treated her accordingly.

“Here,” he said, handing her the box with the SBJ model in it. “I really did get you something.”

Sloane opened the lid, looked inside, and rolled her eyes. “Wow. What a guy. You really know what women want. It’s a wonder some girl hasn’t snapped you up yet.”

“It isn’t for lacking of trying,” Harvath replied as he tucked the vanity kit under his arm, smiled, and then turned and walked inside the FBO to grab a quick shower and change into his fresh clothes.

T
he staff of the FBO welcomed Harvath and after checking him in, offered him use of the facility’s shower, which he accepted.

The steam from the hot water quickly filled the bathroom. Next to a nice, thick cheeseburger, there was nothing he looked forward to more after an overseas trip than a long, hot American shower. It just felt different.

Stepping into the stall, he closed his eyes and let the water pound against his sore body. The work he did was both mentally and physically demanding. He took extremely good care of himself and it showed. He was in better shape than most men half his age. Nevertheless, he was getting older and he knew it. He could still carry out the ops just fine; it was the recovery time that was beginning to take longer. Someday, he was going to have to face the facts that this tended to be a younger man’s game and consider moving in a different direction. The Old Man had told him as much, and was grooming him to take over the business someday. As far as Harvath was concerned, though, that day was still a long way away.

He could have stood there in the shower forever, allowing his half-hypnotized
mind to drift in the heat and the steam, but there was work to do. Taking a deep breath, he flipped the temperature selector all the way to cold and exhaled. As the icy water hit his skin, he forced himself to count to thirty.

Harvath was convinced that the amount of cold that SEALs were forced to endure over the course of their careers eventually made them unable to deal with it at all. His observations were anecdotal at best, but he knew way too many guys who had opted for warm-weather climates after getting out and who never set foot anywhere else even remotely cold for the rest of their lives.

He was determined to never let anything, much less cold, beat him and so he stood in the shower every morning and punched cold right in the face. Of course it punched him right back, but it was like getting a double espresso for free and it always left him feeling invigorated. Today was no different.

Climbing out of the shower, he dried off and tied the towel around his waist. On his right side was a bruise he hadn’t noticed or felt any pain from until now. It must have come during the taking of the tanker or rescuing the captain in Somalia. You bump into tons of things in close quarters battle and don’t notice until after the fact. He was afraid to look down and see what his legs looked like. The joke in close quarters battle, or CQB, was that the shinbone’s only purpose was to find furniture in a darkened room.

Harvath glanced in the mirror. His face was tanned from the training they had done down in the Gulf of Mexico before leaving for Somalia. His neck and forearms were, too. A few days of R&R to tan the rest of his body would be pleasant and for a moment, he allowed himself the delusion that maybe the Old Man’s new client had an easy job for them someplace nice. That caused him to smile. The Carlton Group wasn’t in the “easy job” business. And as far as “someplace nice” was concerned, as long as it was someplace “nicer” than the pit of human misery and suffering that was Somalia, he’d be thrilled.

Noticing that he’d missed a spot while shaving, he bypassed the cheap, plastic disposable razors sitting in a glass jar on the bathroom counter and unzipped the vanity kit from the private jet. He was glad he’d held on to
it. Not only was their razor a lot nicer, but Natalie had slipped her phone number inside at some point as well.

When he was done touching up his shave, he unzipped the garment bag. He had guessed by the weight that there was a pair of shoes inside and sure enough there was. Ashby had thought of everything, right down to a shirt and tie combination he probably wouldn’t have made on his own, but which actually looked pretty nice.

Exiting the building and walking over to her car, he received an approving whistle. “Don’t you look handsome.”

“There were plenty of white shirts in my closet, you know.”

“And they were all boring. You look great,” she said, straightening the knot in his tie. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

Harvath tossed his garment bag with his other clothes into her trunk and then got in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”

“Mr. Carlton is waiting for you downtown,” she said, starting the car and pulling out of the parking lot.

“Where exactly?”

“C Street between 22nd and 21st.”

Harvath pulled up the location in his mind’s eye. “The State Department?”

“No,” said Ashby. “Across the street. The Einstein Memorial.”

“Any idea why?”

“I don’t know. Have you done anything so stupid recently that he’d want to beat you to death in front of a statue of Albert Einstein as a lesson to the rest of us?”

Harvath laughed. It was true. The Old Man didn’t suffer fools lightly and he was taken to making examples of smart people who made dumb decisions or did stupid things.

Sloane took her eyes off the road to look at him. “You’re actually running through your mind what you’ve done lately, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“The hell you aren’t. I was pulling your leg and you actually think it’s a possibility.”