Page 119 of Edge of Honor

With reserves yet to be tapped, Scot and Sølvi had offered to stay another night, but their friends had insisted they return home and promised that they’d take them up on their babysitting offer again very soon.

They had lingered in the kitchen, waiting for Monday morning traffic to die down, and then had headed home.

That afternoon, as Harvath had been busy turning his interrogation room back into a storage room, cleaning and restowing his gear, Alan Gallo had shown up at the house, along with Russ Gaines, who was carrying a large, gift-wrapped box.

Inviting them inside, he showed them into the kitchen.

“Can I get you guys anything?” he asked.

“Do you have any soft drinks?” Gallo replied.

“Sure. Sam Adams or Heineken?”

Both men chuckled.

“I guess, since it’s Fourth of July week,” said Gaines, “I’ll take a Sam Adams.”

“Me too,” Gallo agreed.

Pulling three beers from the fridge, Harvath opened them and handed them to his guests, reserving the third one for himself.

After a long slug, he asked, “Who’s the present for?”

Gaines pushed it across the table. “Open it.”

Harvath set his beer down. “If there’s a human head in here, Sølvi’s going to be pissed. I’m supposed to do that kind of stuff in the garage.”

Once again, his guests chuckled.

Lifting the lid, Harvath looked inside and saw that Gaines had brought his guns back from the attack outside the Naval Observatory.

“Are you granting me full custody? Or is this just a supervised visit?”

“The investigation is closed,” said Gaines. “At least that part of it. I also have this for you.” Pulling out an envelope, he handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

“Two tickets to the White House Fourth of July celebration.”

“Thank you,” said Harvath as he handed the envelope back. “Unfortunately, we have other plans.”

“Are you sure?”

Harvath nodded and Gaines put the envelope back in his pocket.

Looking at Gallo, Harvath smiled and said, “Those were two pretty good gifts. How are you going to beat that?”

Gallo shook his head. “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try. How would you like an update on the investigation?”

For the next twenty minutes, Gallo laid out everything they had—much of which Harvath had already learned from his interrogation of Conroy.

Harvath knew, for instance, that the mole inside the FBI had been Kennedy and, shockingly enough, that the mole inside the Secret Service had turned out to be Gaines’s own unctuous assistant, Kyle Marshall. And of course, Conroy had been behind everything at the CIA.

The cabal of Washington insiders looking to unseat President Mitchell from power included the Vice President’s chief of staff, Missouri Senator Bill Blackwood, and even some podcaster whom Harvath had never paid any attention to named Coughlin.

The one thing all the men had in common was a deep sense of anger at Mitchell. They used this anger, cloaked in a warped, nationalistic patriotism, to recruit others to their cause.

Behind everything, however, Gallo still believed there lurked the unseen hand of the Russians and their new chaos group the SSD.