had been asleep for only ten minutes. It sounded like a church tower had been covered with a heavy blanket. The more he tried to ignore the bells, the closer together and more insistent they became.
As he slowly shook off the fog of his deep, dreamless black sleep, he realized it wasn’t church bells he had been hearing but rather the old-school telephone ringtone he had assigned to Reed Carlton. He began to reach for his nightstand and realized he had left his cell phone in the pocket of his shorts on the floor.
Leaning over the side of the bed, he found the phone and activated the call.
“Time to move,” said the Old Man. “Briefing at the White House in an hour. I’ll meet you at the West Wing entrance.”
With that, Carlton ended the call.
Harvath looked at his watch. What felt like only ten minutes of sleep had actually been several hours. Getting out of bed, he walked into his bathroom and turned on the shower.
He stood under the hot water just long enough to get soaped up and then threw the temperature selector all the way to cold. He forced himself to stand there for a full sixty seconds.
He had heard it referred to once as a “Scottish shower,” but regardless of its origins, it was the equivalent of three cups of coffee. Nothing woke him up or sharpened his mind faster.
He shaved, taking care not to cut himself by going too fast, threw on a dark suit and tie, then hopped into his Tahoe for the drive up to D.C.
• • •
When Harvath arrived at the White House, he was cleared at the West Gate and waved in. He parked his SUV near the West Wing entrance and met the Old Man, who, as promised, was waiting for him inside.
“The President doesn’t want either of us saying anything in this meeting. We watch. We assess. And we discuss afterward. Understood?”
Harvath nodded and followed Carlton down to the Situation Room, where they took the last two remaining seats. FBI Director Erickson was just beginning his briefing. The flat-screens in the room showed the face of a young Asian man in his twenties.
“The man you see here,” said Erickson, “is Thomas Ming Wong, better known as Tommy Wong. Wong is a member of a Chinese transnational criminal organization called 14K. Based out of Hong Kong, 14K is the third-largest triad in the world. They make their money from a variety of criminal enterprises including arms trafficking, the heroin and opium trades, money laundering, prostitution, child pornography, smuggling, and counterfeiting.
“Special Agent Heidi Roe of our Los Angeles field office was spearheading an investigation into Wong when new information about the six missing Muslim engineering students came to our attention. Agent Roe?”
Roe, who had been sitting near the middle of the Situation Room, stood and said, “Thank you, sir. 14K is one of many criminal enterprises that the FBI is focused on. Earlier this year, the LA field office targeted Tommy Wong as a likely candidate to be turned and used against 14K’s Southern California hierarchy and hopefully all the way back to China.
“As we have been made aware, each of the six engineering students was given a cell phone, told to turn that cell phone on when they arrived in the U.S., and to await further instructions. Thanks to the diligence of the National Security Agency, we think those cell phones have been successfully identified. All six phones received one phone call each, were turned off, and were never used again. Based on the metadata collected by the NSA, the point of purchase for each of the phones has been identified.
“All six were purchased within Los Angeles County. Upon being given this information, agents from the LA and San Diego field offices visited the six stores involved. Of these, four had some sort of security-cam system. Only three, though, had retained their footage going back to the date in question.”
Roe pressed her remote, the screens split in three, and the footage rolled. “As you can see, in two out of the three we get a very good view of who is buying the phones.”
“Tommy Wong,” said the Secretary of State.
“Correct.”
“So we believe Wong bought the phones and then shipped them to the recruiter over in Dubai?” asked CIA Director McGee.
“Yes,” Roe replied.
“Do we know who called the six engineering students?”
“It was also a phone used only once and was purchased from a store in Salt Lake City, Utah. Agents from the