State Of The Union

“There’s got to be some people you can trust.”

“There are-to greater or lesser degrees. I have a core contingent of operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency and if need be, I can pull from a handful of Diplomatic Security Service perso

“What are they?” replied Harvath.

“With the State of the Union address only a week away, we don’t have very much time to train a replacement team and get them in place. And, probably the biggest problem, though we know where the nukes were hidden, we have no idea how Gary’s guys pla

Harvath was dumfounded. “What do you mean you have no idea?”

“Operation Dark Night was established as an independent covert action team. Everything was highly compartmentalized. In fact, the word team is somewhat of a misnomer. Once activated, the operatives were to go their own separate ways and they only thing they would have in common was a shared point of contact-Gary Lawlor.

“The men had access to money, safe houses, and weapons caches secreted in both western and eastern Europe. We have general knowledge of how the men were going to go about achieving their objectives and what their targets in Russia were, but not the nuts and bolts of their plans. Gary encouraged all of them to be highly creative in their assignments.”

“So you have to coordinate with Gary.”

“And he’s disappeared,” responded the president.

Harvath wanted to hope for the best. “Just like he was supposed to do when you activated him, correct?”

“I wish it was that simple,” said the president. “A strict protocol was developed for the Dark Night operation that would allow us to maintain some semblance of control back here in Washington. Part of that protocol involved communication, and Gary has failed to check in since leaving the U.S.”

“Do you think they may have gotten to him?”

“Anything’s possible. No matter how you look at it, he’s gone far too long without contacting us. Until we get a better handle on things, we’re playing this very carefully. Especially until we figure out why would they take out everyone on the Dark Night team except for Lawlor and Leighton.”

There was only one answer that seemed to make any sense to Harvath and he offered it. “Obviously the two of them must be more useful to the Russians alive than dead. But why did you place an intercept team at Leighton’s house?”

“Gary was the lead member of the Dark Night team. He knows more than anybody, so we can understand why the Russians would want to take him alive, but ignoring Leighton doesn’t make any sense. We were toying with the idea that maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to him yet, and with the FBI sitting only a two man team on his house until they compiled enough evidence for a warrant, we decided to deploy some of our own, more sophisticated assets there as well on the off chance we might get lucky. That’s how they found you.”

“Great,” replied Harvath, as he rubbed his ribs and tried to change the subject. “If this was classified above top secret, how did the Russians get a hold of the names and whereabouts of the Dark Night operatives in the first place? In fact, considering that the entire operation had been deactivated, why did they even bother going to all that trouble to take those men out?”

“Our best guess is that they were covering their bases. The Russian assassins were given their targets, and they carried out the sanctions,” replied Hilliman.

“But how did they get the names?”

“We don’t know, and at this point we don’t have the resources to investigate. Our goal is to protect the American people from an impending attack and maintain the sovereignty of the United States.”

“As it should be,” replied Harvath. “So let’s try another tack. How were the Dark Night operatives to be activated?”

“The Army maintains a database of perso

“We scrubbed the records of all the Dark Night team members clean. There was not only no mention of Dark Night involvement in their files, but there was no valid current contact information in the Army’s general management system. Besides their participation in the Dark Night program, they had been involved in many other international interdictions, which made them a lot of enemies. Suffice it to say, that the United States Government thought it better to conceal their whereabouts than to allow them to become public through some freedom of information error.”

“So how could someone have found them?” asked Harvath.

“The president and I were made aware of the Dark Night team by our predecessors. We were told that no one else knew and that it was to remain that way.”

“Well, somebody obviously found out.”

“Right, which means either someone on the team talked-”

“Which is highly unlikely,” interjected Harvath.

“Or, there was some other sort of breach.”

“How were the men contacted?”

“To facilitate some of its more clandestine operations, the Defense Department maintains a front company out of a townhouse in Foggy Bottom called the Capstone Corporation. Capstone owns several safe houses and apartments throughout Europe, including Gary’s in Berlin, which different teams have used over the years. In the basement of the townhouse is a secure computer network.

“The computer was programmed so that upon being given the command by the president, it could simultaneously contact each of the twelve Dark Night operatives via telephone. They’d be prompted to enter an authentication code, and once their identities were verified they would be activated.

“Could anyone have eavesdropped on these calls?” asked Harvath.

“No. The computer was able to detect any taps, and even if someone had found a way around it, most of the process sounded like a personal computer conducting a handshake with a server,” replied Hilliman.

“Or a high pitched fax machine on full volume?”

“Yes, but how’d you know?”

“I’m guessing Gary Lawlor placed a call to your computer in Georgetown. When I hit the redial button on his phone, I received those same tones. But you said the computer would have called him, not vice versa.”

“No, our records show that Gary did call back into the system to check on the status of the other team members. As the team leader, that would have been his responsibility-to know who had been contacted and activated.”

“Now I understand why Leighton called Gary’s house,” said Harvath. “If I had been activated after all these years, I would probably call my old team leader too before flying halfway around the world to nuke an old enemy we all thought was dead. But what about the other operatives? Does Gary know they’re dead?”

“No. They were all killed before they were activated. We put out the call to activate the team, but only Leighton and Gary were alive to receive it. Based on when Gary called back into the system, all he would have known was that the rest of the team hadn’t been reached yet.”

“And yet whoever killed them missed Gary and Frank Leighton,” mused Harvath.

Hilliman nodded his head. “Taking out ten highly trained American operatives, all of whom were scattered around the country, is no small feat. I don’t care if those men were retired. They were not easy marks. Whoever did this spent a lot of time pla