Hidden Order: A Thriller (6 page)

Harvath dismissed her with a wave. “Pay attention to the road.”

“What a fitting end that would be,” she replied, ignoring him. “Beaten to death at the feet of Albert Einstein for being a frickin’ moron.”

“Why don’t we find something else to talk about?” he offered.

“Like what?” she asked as they merged onto the road for D.C.

“I don’t care. Regale me,” Harvath replied, adding, “As long as it’s not about shopping, your girlfriends, or your love life.”

“If you wanted to ride in silence, why didn’t you just say so?”

She was pulling his leg. “Fine,” he said. “You pretend to be interesting and I’ll pretend to care. Sound good?”

Ashby smiled. “Aren’t we just like an old married couple? And by old married couple, I mean a couple where some young hot girl hooks up with some
really
old guy only because he’s filthy rich and she knows he’s going to die at any moment now.”

Harvath shook his head and leaned the seat way back like he was going to sleep. When she reached out and slapped him across the chest, he relented and told her to pick a topic.

She raised a few of the current problems their organization was having and how they might fix them, and despite their capacity for verbal jabs, the rest of the drive resulted in an excellent conversation.

A
fter conducting a circuitous surveillance detection route, also known as an SDR, Ashby pulled up in front of the Albert Einstein memorial and wished Harvath good luck.

“And by the way,” she said, as he got out of the car and was about to shut the door, “if the boss does decide to kill you, do you think it would be okay if I took your parking space back at the office?”

“Here’s a tip,” he said as he leaned back into the car. “The only nutcrackers men actually enjoy are the ones you see at Christmastime. Keep that in mind and you might find a husband someday.”

Ashby mimicked a massive overbite and replied, “Do you think I’ll get a purty man? I sure do hope so.”

Harvath shook his head and closed the door to the sound of the young woman laughing at her own joke.
Wiseass,
he smirked to himself. That sense of humor was going to get her into trouble. He wished he could save her some future heartache, but if she was anything like him, she was going to have to learn the hard way.

He spotted the Old Man sitting on one of the far benches and made
a loop around the memorial, taking everything and everyone in before deciding it was safe to approach his boss and sit down.

“You sure took your time,” Carlton snapped. “I’ve been sitting here like a moron for over forty-five minutes feeding the damn pigeons.”

“I’m fine,” Harvath replied. “Thank you for asking, sir.”

“Don’t be a smart aleck. What’s with that shirt? All of your white ones at the cleaners?”

Reed Carlton put the “old” in old school. He had always worn Brooks Brothers suits, white shirts, and very conservative ties, which was exactly how he was attired now. A tan overcoat sat folded on the bench next to him along with a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
, a cup of coffee and a bag from which he must have been feeding the pigeons pieces of a muffin.

“This is what Ashby brought from my house,” said Harvath.

“Women,”
the Old Man responded with a dismissive shake of his head. “I should have sent a man to pick up your clothes.”

Harvath knew Carlton liked Ashby and didn’t really mean the remark, but he was in a bad mood for some reason.

“We need to get going,” he said.

“Where to? Across the street to State?”

Carlton chuckled as he stood and gathered his things. “Those people could screw up a one-car funeral. After all the headaches they put us through back when I was at the CIA, there isn’t enough money in the world for me to take them as a client. Not even now.”

Harvath doubted that, but he knew better than to argue with him. “So if not State, who are we going to see?”

Carlton pointed up C Street with his chin and began walking. “What do you know about the Federal Reserve?”

“The Fed? Let me see. I know that they technically don’t print our money.”

“
Technically
, they also don’t make ice cream, but that’s not what I asked.”

Wow, the Old Man has a burr under his saddle.
Assuming that it was the Fed who had sent the plane to pick him up, he was tempted to say that
they had a very nice aircraft, but he bit his tongue and replied, “The Federal Reserve establishes our monetary policy.”

“That’s a better answer. What does it mean?”

“They set the interest rates at which banks borrow money.”

“Is that all?” asked Carlton. “That’s the extent of your knowledge of the Federal Reserve?”

“I think it’s actually beyond the extent of most people’s knowledge. Not many care about the Fed.”

“They
should
.”

Harvath couldn’t argue with that. Americans should care about a lot of things. He wasn’t quite sure, however, how high the Federal Reserve ought to be on that list.

“What did you study in school again? It wasn’t economics, was it?”

The Old Man knew perfectly well what he had studied. The economics remark was a jab.

“I studied political science and military history.”

“Did they give you any John Adams to read out there in Southern California?”

“Of course. The Revolutionary War and the history of the Republic was a key focus. We read all the Founders.”

“Good,” Carlton replied. “Then you can tell me what Adams identified to Jefferson as one of America’s greatest weaknesses?”

“
One of America’s greatest weaknesses
?” he repeated as he thought about it for a second. “Based on our context here, I’m going to assume it has something to do with banking.”

“It does. Adams saw people’s complete ignorance when it came to money, credit, and circulation as a serious deficiency.”

“That’s a new one by me. What does it have to do with why we’re having a meeting at the Federal Reserve, though?”

“Have you even picked up a paper since you’ve been gone?” the Old Man asked.

“Didn’t exactly have a lot of newsstands where we were.”

Carlton’s visage softened. “I’m sorry. I owe you an ‘attaboy’ for that job.”

He had never been comfortable with praise, fulsome or otherwise. “No, you don’t, sir.”

“Yes, I do. That was a hard operation and you did remarkably well. You got handed a bushel basket of lemons with that captain having been smuggled into port and you still made lemonade. You and your team did, though, leave a lot of dead Somalis.”

“No, sir. We left a lot of dead
pirates
.”

“I understand,” the Old Man said with a nod. “And better them than a single one of you, but my problem right now is that some French human rights organization caught wind of it and they’re trying to put the pieces together and make some international incident out of it. Had everything been contained to the ship, that would have been one thing, but going into Somalia and that village has created a whole different set of headaches.”

“We had no choice. They’d killed the navigator and we had every reason to believe they’d do the same thing to the captain,” Harvath insisted.

“Of course, but I want you to listen to me. You did the
right
thing. That captain would have been murdered had you left him there. We all know that. Nevertheless, the owners of the
Sienna Star
are nervous. They never okayed the shore raid and now they’re worried that this whole thing is going to blow up in their faces. They’ve boxed us into a corner by refusing to release any payment until this whole thing goes away.”

He now understood why the Old Man was in such a bad mood. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything.”

“I feel responsible, though, about the payment being held up.”

Carlton lifted his hand, his face tensing up again. “I gave the green light for you to launch. I will handle this. In the meantime, let’s focus on what’s in front of us.”

Harvath nodded. “You asked if I’d seen a paper since I’ve been gone. I haven’t. What’s up?”

The Old Man handed him his copy of the
Wall Street Journal
. It had been folded over to an article inside. “You can read it if you want, but there’s not a lot of detail. A week ago, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had a heart attack and died.”

Harvath looked at the man’s picture. He had seen him on TV and in a few news articles over the last couple of years. “I’m sorry for his family.”

“So am I, but that’s not why we’ve been asked to this meeting.”

“What’s the reason, then?”

“The President of the United States in this situation is given a very closely guarded, some even say secret list, and from that list he picks who the next Federal Reserve chairman will be. Last night, all of the people on that list disappeared.”

Harvath was astounded. “All of them?
Just gone?
”

Carlton nodded. “The body of one, a woman named Claire Marcourt, was found this morning.”

“Where? What happened to her?”

The Old Man stopped walking. They were now parallel with the enormous white marble Federal Reserve Building, which took up an entire D.C. block. Pointing to a discreet side entrance, he said, “That’s what we’re here to discuss.”

CIA H
EADQUARTERS

L
ANGLEY

V
IRGINIA

P
hil Durkin leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples as he tried to think. “For all we know, Nafi didn’t have a single thing in that folder. Or maybe he had his wife’s grocery list or the lease for his mistress’s apartment in Amman.”

“He wasn’t bluffing, Phil,” Lydia Ryan said to her former supervisor. “If you’d been sitting across from him like I was, you would’ve seen he was dead serious.”

“Think he might give you the information if you slept with him?”

“Go fuck yourself, Phil,” Ryan responded in disgust. “Better yet, why don’t you go fuck Nafi Nasiri and see if he’ll pillow-talk the plot over to
you
.”

“I’m not seriously suggesting you sleep with Nasiri to get the intel, Lydia.”

“Oh, really? Because that’s
exactly
what it just sounded like to me. In fact I ought to take this up to the seventh floor right now and have them run your ass up a flagpole. You’re beyond sick.”

Durkin laughed as he leaned forward and focused on Ryan. “You have no idea what sick is.”

“I’m looking at you, so I’ve got a pretty good picture in my head.”

“Yeah, I’m the first guy in all of history to have too much to drink at an office Christmas party and make a pass at a coworker. I’m the devil.”

“First of all, we weren’t coworkers, you were my
supervisor
. And secondly, what you did wasn’t some booze-fueled pass,” she said, remembering how he had pulled her into an empty office, forced his hand under her dress, and tried to pull her panties off. “It bordered on charges being filed and you know it.”

“It’s not healthy to live in the past, Lydia. You’ve got to let it go.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you. In fact, I bet you’d like it if I left the Agency altogether.”

“What I’d like, is if you didn’t run your mouth so much. It’s not like I skated. I got suspended without pay
and
my wife left me.”

“Brenda left you because you’re an asshole and drinking only made you worse. The Agency should have cut you loose, but you manipulated the crap out of them and blamed all of your bad behavior on being an alcoholic so they sent you to rehab instead. Speaking of which, do you even bother going to AA meetings anymore?”

“That’s none of your damn business.”

“Fair enough,” Ryan replied with a shrug. “I can only imagine how much they get in the way of drinking.”

“Can we get to the point? I’ve got a lot of other work to do.”

“
Get to the point?
What do I have to do? Draw you a picture? The Jordanians aren’t going to share until we give them something.”