Brad Thor - State Of The Union

That night, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team suffered more fatalities than during any other assignment in the two plus decades they had been in existence. Eleven men were dead.

While Gold Team wrapped a wrist here and pulled glass out of a laceration there, they each found time to privately thank Alexandra for saving their lives. Harvath, though, stood off to the side alone and wondered if there was any limit to what Helmut Draegar would do to complete his assignment. It was an exercise in futility. He knew that there was not only no limit to what Draegar would do to succeed in his mission, but that the man also approached his personal animosities with the same, if not a greater passion.

The fire had torched a good portion of the house, a testament to Draegar’s knowledge of explosives and the amount of accelerant he had sloshed around the interior of the structure.

Harvath knew that Gary would be heartbroken. He and Heide had built this home together, and it was one of the precious few tangible reminders he still had of their life together.

As multiple fire engine companies arrived to help extinguish the blaze, Harvath became fixated upon the body that the Blue Team operative had seen upstairs, as well as the car, which had been parked in the driveway, and was now nothing more than a flaming hulk.

The wondering was killing him and he stuck to the Fairfax County Arson Investigator like glue as the man, along with hastily summoned ATF agents, probed further into the wreckage of Gary Lawlor’s home and the firefighters got the blaze under control.

One of the firefighters eventually brought out a badly charred wallet and using a pair of forceps provided by one of the Fairfax EMTs, Harvath pulled out several damaged pieces of identification. Laying them side by side it was easy to see who they had originally belonged to-David Patrick, aide to the Deputy Secretary of the National Security Council.

The firefighters continued to battle the blaze as Harvath regrouped with the rest of his team. “So what the hell do we do now?” asked Avigliano as he flexed his hand and tested the bandage that had been wrapped around his left wrist. “I’ll be fucked if I’m going to stand here and roast marshmallows,” he said and then quickly added for Harvath’s benefit, “No offense.”

Harvath understood his sentiment completely. When men you know die, not only are the stakes considerably raised, but so is your desire to finish what you and those men had started together. Draegar had made this assignment even more personal for them.

With the house in flames, Harvath turned his attention to the car smoldering in Gary Lawlor’s driveway. He assumed that it belonged to David Patrick, but at the same time, something inside told him that when it came to anything having to do with Helmut Draegar, nothing should be accepted prima facie.

He instructed a team of firefighters to get as much water on the car as possible. If the license plates couldn’t be salvaged, he wanted the VIN number, and he wanted it within the next five minutes.

The firefighters had the VIN number for him in three. They were glad that’s all he wanted. Everything else was burned beyond recognition.

Harvath asked the Fairfax police chief to run it. In the meantime, SIOC called Harvath with the latest update on the sleeper arrests. The evidence techs had been instructed to make lists of everything, no matter how insignificant, and to run those lists against what the other field agents were finding.

They had come up with two commonalities, neither of which made very much sense. The first, was that each of the sleepers was carrying two portable hydraulic jacks with jack stands in the trunks of their cars and the second, was that in the last twenty-four hours, each sleeper had purchased flowers. Harvath put the controllers at SIOC on hold while he explained the latest development to Alexandra, only to find she was just as confused as he was. The jacks might have something to do with how heavy the devices were, but why would you need two of them, and what the hell could flowers possibly have to do with what they were up to?

Harvath told SIOC they would get back to them and ended the call. He and Alexandra were still wondering aloud what the flower connection might be when the Fairfax police chief returned with a positive ID on the car sitting smoking in the driveway. He thanked the chief and then turned toward the backyard and yelled for DeWolfe.

The communications expert came limping up on his damaged ankle and asked, “What’s up?”

“We’ve got a positive ID on the car in the driveway. It’s a Dollar Rent-A-Car out of Dulles from two days ago.”

“You want to know who rented it?”

“No,” said Harvath. “I’ve got a pretty good idea who rented it. I want to know where it’s been.”

DeWolfe was wiped out. He looked from Alexandra to Scot and in all sincerity said, “How the fuck am I supposed to do that?”

Harvath could read not only the pain from his injury, but also the stress that was written across the man’s face and replied, “When I was training with the Secret Service before I moved to the White House, I worked a counterfeiting case where some Colombian was bringing bogus fifties and hundreds into the country. The bills were almost perfect. He’d even run them through his clothes dryer at home along with a couple of hundred poker chips to give them just the right look. We were going crazy trying to nail him. He wasn’t considered a very big fish by the higher-ups, and therefore the amount of resources allocated to the case were less than what we would have liked to have seen.”

“But you found a way to pop him anyway, didn’t you?” said DeWolfe.

Harvath smiled and replied, “There’s something about flying into Miami International that automatically makes people forget about everything else. I don’t know if it’s the sea breeze, the palm trees, the beautiful women, or what, but this guy cleared passport control, then customs, and went outside and boarded one of the Thrifty buses to go get his big fancy four-door rental car.”

“So? What does any of that have to do with this car here?”

Harvath was still smiling as he responded, “Thrifty and Dollar both use the same company for fleet management.”

“What the hell is fleet management?”

“Something so innocuous sounding that they’ve been able to post it on top of their rental agreements for the last several years without anybody asking any questions.”

“I still have no idea what it is.”

“A Canadian company called Air IQ has contracts with rental car companies to install transmitters, like LoJacks, which allows all the movements of all the cars in their fleets to be tracked via satellite.”

Suddenly, DeWolfe was with the program. “Are you telling me that Dollar knows where this car has been?”

“Not Dollar,” responded Harvath, “but Air IQ. I need you to get a hold of them, give them the VIN number and find out everything you can about where this car has been in the last two days.”

A graveyard?” said Harvath.

DeWolfe scanned through the printout that had been faxed to one of Fairfax patrol cars. “That’s what it says here. Two visits to Congressional Cemetery over the past two nights.”

“How’d he get a car in there at night? Don’t they close the gates?”

“I asked one of the SIOC guys about that and he told me that the place is open around the clock.”

“What about security?”

“Nonexistent.”

“And dead men tell no tales,” said Harvath as the pieces began to come together. Congressional Cemetery was only about three miles from the White House and half that distance from the Capitol. In fact, every major city the Russians had put sleepers in probably had some sort of cemetery close to its most populated area. Suddenly, the sleepers buying flowers didn’t seem so strange anymore. “I want the exact coordinates of where that car was parked. Have the NEST team ready to move and get SIOC to pull some real time thermal imaging of the cemetery from the National Reconnaissance Office.”