checked in. The team leader provided them with his cell number and told them to reach out if they needed anything else. Harvath thanked everyone and said good night.
Sølvi had been assigned the room next to Harvath’s. They agreed to try to get a few hours of sleep and then find breakfast.
After chugging a bottle of water and downing a couple of small packages of almonds, Harvath lay down on the couch in his room. He thought about brushing his teeth, but found he didn’t even have the energy to get back up. All he cared about was getting some sleep.
Kicking off his boots, he adjusted the cushion under his head and closed his eyes. His thoughts, though, wouldn’t let him rest.
He had heard it referred to as “monkey mind”—the way everything kept jumping around.
Normally when he closed his eyes, he saw Lara. That happened this time too, but then his mind switched to Marco and what the little boy had been through. Not only had his father died just before he was born, but he had also lost his mom and had been caught up in some sort of failed, violent attempted kidnapping, accompanied by plenty of gunfire.
Harvath couldn’t even to begin to imagine what all the long-term impacts would be. How do you even begin to have a “normal” childhood, much less grow into a healthy, fully functioning adult with that kind of stuff in your past?
What worried Harvath even more was what was to come. Lara’s parents were wonderful people, but they were much older. What would happen if one or, God forbid, both of them passed before Marco was old enough to be on his own? How much pain could a child take? Just thinking about it threatened to shatter his heart into a thousand more pieces.
He needed to put his thoughts about Marco and Lara in that iron box, weld it shut again, and shove it as far back into his mental attic as it would go. The pain only served to drain his energy and exhaust him further.
An unhealthy part of him suggested a nightcap would be worth getting up for and would quiet his mind. He knew, though, that it wouldn’t end well. He shoved that thought down too.
Looking for anything else he could lose himself in, he allowed his mind to drift. It landed on the woman next door.
As he thought about Sølvi, their lunch on the boat, and how her smile had dazzled him, everything else slipped away and he slowly began to unwind.
Not long after, he drifted off, sleep having locked him firmly in its grasp.
It was dark and dreamless, like tumbling off a cliff into a bottomless, midnight pit. He slept hard and deep.
At some point, the brain needed to power down—if only for a little while. Shock, trauma, and constant threats created an environment where the central nervous system—without periods of rest—could begin to deteriorate. Sleep was the key to remaining sharp. And his ability to remain sharp—to function at his absolute optimal limit—was what gave him his edge.
Unlike in the Jeep, this time he was able to get several hours of shut-eye. But when he awoke, he thought he had overslept. It sounded like Sølvi was knocking on his door.
After a few moments, he realized that the sound he was hearing wasn’t someone knocking at his door, but rather his cell phone vibrating atop the wooden coffee table next to him.
Reaching over, he picked it up and squinted at the caller ID. It was Nicholas. He couldn’t imagine what time it was back in the States.
Activating the call, he said, “You must have something.”
“I absolutely do,” the little man replied.
“What is it?”
“I think I know who the assassin is.”
Harvath sat up on the couch. “Talk to me.”
“In order to catch Carl’s killer, I thought maybe we should set loose the most terrifying organization the United States has ever created.”
“Which is?” he replied, eyeing the coffee machine.
“The Internal Revenue Service.”
He smiled. They certainly were disliked by a lot of people in the United States. That said, Harvath would have guessed that Nicholas would have taken a shot like that at his old nemesis, the National Security Agency.
Nevertheless, maybe the IRS did make sense. After all, the most relevant data in the Contessa’s file had to do with financial transactions.
“So, lay it out for me. What’s the connection?”
“Remember OAKSTAR?” Nicholas asked.
“The NSA’s internet surveillance program that Snowden revealed?”
“Precisely. While everyone was freaking out about their Facebook posts, emails, and