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A fter lunch, Harvath rode back into D.C.

with S?lvi and caught the Metro Yellow Line out to Alexandria, Virginia.

She had offered to drive him all the way back to the house, but traffic was building and he didn’t want her to be late for her meeting.

It was easy enough for him to grab an Uber to Mount Vernon for the final leg and then hoof it through the woods from there.

Luckily, Nicholas was handling his transport going forward. All he would have to focus on once he got home was pulling his gear together.

When he arrived at the house, he headed straight for his study and powered up his computer. Nicholas had promised to have satellite imagery waiting for him.

Opening the encrypted email, Harvath studied the photos. None of them contained good news. If anything, his plan was going to be even more difficult to pull off.

He sent the imagery to his phone, logged out of his account, and shut down his computer. Now the real hard work was going to start. Changing clothes, he headed outside.

At the property’s small stone church, he produced a set of keys, opened one of the heavy front doors, and stepped inside.

With its thick walls and heavy slate roof, all the sounds from outside—the birds, a leaf blower on some neighbor’s property, the boats out on the Potomac—disappeared and he was instantly enveloped by the quiet and the calm.

Beneath the baptismal font was a narrow stone staircase, which led to a large security door.

Taking his keys back out, he unlocked the door and flipped on the lights, illuminating a modest crypt.

The small stone chamber had once been used by the Office of Naval Intelligence to store documents.

When they moved to a new facility, they had left behind rows of shelving and a large, center worktable.

By upgrading its temperature and humidity systems, Harvath had turned the space into a pretty decent gun room.

As a SEAL, it had been drilled into him to take pristine care of his equipment.

No matter how tired or how many things he had to do upon returning from an assignment, he always properly cleaned and oiled his gear before putting it away.

Other than the cosmetic wear and tear things normally got in the field, every item was in as good a shape as the day he got them.

Looking around the room, his first question was, how was he going to transport everything for tonight? Could he get it all into a backpack? Or would he need a duffle bag? He decided to lay all of it out on the table and go from there.

The number one piece of gear he reached for was his night-vision goggles. Removing them from their case, he checked them for cracks, scratches, or any other sort of damage before inserting fresh batteries.

Killing the lights, he powered them up and made sure they were functioning properly. They were in great shape.

Next up, he needed to select his primary weapon. It had to be something maneuverable that he could use at close range with a suppressor. Most of all, it needed to pack a punch.

Before he had even powered his night-vision goggles down and had turned the lights back on, he knew the weapon he was going to reach for.

The SIG Rattler, chambered for the 300 Blackout round, was a fantastic, ultracompact, short-barreled rifle.

Not only that, but it had terrific stopping power and could go neck and neck with, if not beat, the 5.

56 round out to about 150 to 200 yards. Harvath, however, doubted he was going to have to engage anything at that range.

What’s more, he was going to be using a quieter, subsonic version of the round.

It was smaller and lighter than the H&K MP5A3 he’d used both in and out of the SEALs. He had outfitted his Rattler with a night-vision-compatible Aimpoint Micro T-2 optic and a CGS Hyperion K suppressor made from grade-5 titanium.

As with his night-vision goggles, he thoroughly checked his weapon and its optic, making sure everything was in tip-top shape.

A big believer in “you can never bring too much ammo,” he next loaded six thirty-round Magpul magazines, popped them in the front pouches of his plate carrier, and then selected a sidearm.

The 9mm G19X was Glock’s first “Crossover” pistol. It comprised a full-sized G17 frame and a compact G19 slide. He would be running five nineteen-round magazines—one in his gun, plus a round in the chamber, and four more mags on his belt.

In addition to a double-edged Benchmade SOCP dagger, he grabbed a handful of plastic restraints, a Streamlight PROTAC flashlight, a trauma kit, a short roll of duct tape, an additional tourniquet, and a multitool.

Once everything was laid out on the table, he added a tactical helmet, along with a few more items, and then stood back.

Looking over his gear, he tried to envision how things might go sideways and, if they did, what he would want to have in that case. Unfortunately, frag grenades and a Spooky gunship overhead were not options. He was limited to what he had in his personal armory.

Judging by what he had selected, he was confident he could handle pretty much anything that popped up. Beyond that, he would adapt and overcome. That was how he had been trained.

Taking out his phone, he opened his flight-tracker app and checked the status of the inbound aircraft he and Nicholas had decided to use as their Trojan horse. So far, it was right on time.

With his backpack being too small and the duffle bag looking like a sure way to scratch, dent, and bang up all his equipment, he opted for an old sticker-covered Yeti cooler and foam inserts from a couple of his long gun cases, which he trimmed with a box cutter.

It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it would do the job.

Packing everything as tight as he could, he locked up the gun room and carried the cooler back to the house.

By the time he had pulled together the rest of his gear and had tossed a few things into an overnight bag, Nicholas’s people had arrived to drop off a car for him.

The idea was to give him something that wasn’t too flashy—an older vehicle that would blend in and not cause him to stand out.

Stepping outside, he saw a piece of junk—a dark blue 2010 Chevy Malibu with dented rims and a scratch down the right rear quarter panel.

Adding insult to injury, it wasn’t even a V-6. It was a four-banger.