“Pardon me, but who’s the soldier and who’s the doctor?” she asked.
“Fair enough,” said Teplov. “But you’re part of the Wagner family. It’s our duty to look out for you. The American could be anywhere.”
There was no point in arguing with them. She would accept an escort, but she wasn’t going to get in a car with them. “I’m okay to drive. You can follow me to the clinic if you wish. Are your men ready to go?”
Teplov called out to his men. Moments later, they materialized and gave him the thumbs-up. They hadn’t uncovered any sign of the American. The house was clean.
Locking the door behind them, Christina hopped into her 4x4 and headed back to her clinic.
She drove fast, but not too fast. She was well aware that if Teplov was the top man, and he had come out to her house, then she was his top lead. That meant that every moment she kept him and his men tied up was another moment that helped Harvath get farther away.
She just hoped that she had understood Harvath’s directions correctly.
CHAPTER 41
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HOSTAGE RECOVERY FUSION CELL
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Hit!” Nicholas exclaimed from the desk he had been given in the center of the room. “Hit! Hit! Hit!”
His dogs, which the FBI Director had allowed in the building as “service animals,” leaped to attention. Growling, they scanned for threats until Nicholas commanded them to lie down.
“What do you have?” the SPEHA asked as he rushed over. “Is it Harvath?” After his meeting with the Russian Ambassador, he could use some good news.
Nicholas had a smile on his face that stretched from ear to ear. “It’s his rescue protocol. And the code is one hundred percent his,” he said, pointing to his screen.
On it was an Instagram account with only a few thousand followers, all of them fakes. It had been set up as a digital dead drop.
The Carlton Group paid a trusted source in Iceland to update it with posts about makeup, fashion tips, and celebrity gossip. When Harvath, or someone operating under his authority, popped up and commented on the most recent entry, Nicholas was overjoyed. Rogers, on the other hand, was pragmatic.
“I know you’re excited,” he said. “Slow it down for me, though. What are we looking at?”
Nicholas was all too happy to explain. “Like the CIA, The Carlton Group has developed situation-dependent communication protocols. They run the gamut from transmitting SITREPs while under surveillance in friendly nations, to an operative transmitting a distress signal from inside a hostile country. We just received the latter from Harvath.”
“You’re positive it’s him?”
Nicholas nodded. “No question. It’s his authentication code and everything.”
The SPEHA stared at the Instagram comment. “You can be absolutely sure, just from this?”
Nicholas nodded again, emphatically. “Harvath set all of this up himself. Using Instagram was his idea, as were all the code words. He also built in a way for us to immediately know if the message was being sent under duress.”
“Under duress?”
“That someone was forcing him to write it,” Nicholas explained. “That doesn’t appear to be the case here.”
“He posted from Russia. Specifically Nivsky, a town in the Murmansk Oblast. But he’s on the move.”
“On the move where?”
“West,” stated Nicholas. “He’s trying to get to the border with Finland.”
“That’s fantastic,” said the SPEHA. “How do we get in touch with him?”
Nicholas looked up from the screen. “He doesn’t have access to a means of secure communication.”
“Then how do we pinpoint his location?”
“We can’t. All we have is his last known location. I can only imagine what it took to get this message out to us.”
“Agreed,” stated Rogers. “Okay, listen up, people,” he called out to the Fusion Cell. “According to what we just learned, we may have found our man. He does appear to be in Russia. He’s on the run. Our starting point is a town called Nivsky, in the Murmansk Oblast, heading west. All hands on deck. I want to fix his precise location. Start pulling SIGINT, geospatial, all of it. I’ll be damned if the Russians are going to beat us. Let’s move!”
CHAPTER 42
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MURMANSK OBLAST
Seven kilometers in, all Harvath wanted to do was puke his guts out. Part of it was the cheeseburgers, but another part was how fast he was moving. He wanted to get as far away from the mercenaries as fast as possible.