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O ne thing is for damn sure,” said McGee, taking a sip of his coffee. “Those weren’t fucking Iranians at Rogers’s house.”

Harvath nodded in agreement. “Which begs the question, who were they and why were they after the Ambassador?”

“And why so many of them?” added Haney. “Not to mention, who brings a ladder to something like that?”

“Someone with inside information,” McGee replied.

“And now we’re at the heart of this thing,” stated Harvath. “The guy at the top of the ladder had a circular saw and other breaching tools in his pack. There’s no question in my mind that they were going to cut through the roof and down into the ceiling of Rogers’s safe room.”

“Then what?” asked Haney. “Make it look like he slipped in his tub? While there’s a gaping hole above his master bedroom closet?”

“Mike’s right,” said McGee. “If the deaths of the SecDef and the SecState are connected; if the Ambassador really is next on some sort of kill list, then style-wise, this a pretty major departure.”

“And,” Haney continued, “why assume Rogers is going to beat you to the safe room at all? You’re hitting his house at three in the morning. Wouldn’t you expect him to be asleep?”

“Probably,” said Harvath.

“And if you’re skilled enough to shut down his cameras and turn off his alarm, shouldn’t you be able to open a door or a window without waking him up?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why go the roof route?”

It was a fair question and Harvath had only one answer: “Because Bob’s right, these guys had insider information. It’s exactly the op we would have run. If we knew our target had a safe room, we would have come equipped to rip through it and pull the guy out.”

“But they didn’t come to pull him out. They came to kill him. Would it have made any difference where they caught him?”

“Probably not.”

“Then, if Rogers is right about the demise of his colleagues, how would the killers have made this death track?”

“High-end home invasion gone bad,” said Harvath.

“It’s the only thing I can come up with that makes sense.

Disabling cameras, disabling the alarm, knowing about the safe room—that kind of attention to detail is all par for that course.

Burglars at that level normally have an inside source and my guess is that some sort of evidence would have ended up being planted to frame the housekeeper.

An untraceable payment to an account in her name would have surfaced, or they would have found a bunch of unexplained cash hidden somewhere in her house. ”

“And the cops would have believed that?”

“You saw his house. Rogers was a very successful attorney before going to work for the government. He stepped away from a highly respected law firm, but he didn’t stop being a partner and having equity.

I think it’s totally believable that he’d be a target for that kind of home invasion.

Whether or not it would spook the other high-ranking officials involved with the Soleimani hit is another question.

Personally, I think they might discount it and continue to whistle past the graveyard. ”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t,” McGee interjected.

“Except for Bob,” Harvath clarified, picking up his coffee and taking a sip.

“But based on that stack of bodies back at the Ambo’s house,” said Haney, “the hitters aren’t Iranians. So doesn’t that torpedo the idea that this is retribution for Soleimani?”

McGee agreed. “The attack we saw would mark a huge evolution for Tehran. Way too sophisticated. The ability to recruit well-trained, ostensibly American operators is simply beyond their capabilities. They could throw all the money in the world at something like this and still not pull it off.”

“Then what are we looking at?” Harvath asked, legitimately exasperated. “I’ve now been in two serious gunfights, in two days, with what looks like American citizens. What the hell is going on?”

Looking into his coffee as if he might find the answer, the former CIA director shook his head. “I don’t know. I think, maybe, it’s ideological.”

“ Ideological? The protesters outside the VP’s residence were members of his own party. Ambassador Rogers is from the opposite party and no longer in government. How could any of this be ideological?”

“In my experience,” said McGee, “when something bad goes down, you look at two groups—those who benefit from what happened, and those who were pissed-off leading up to what happened.”

“Okay,” Harvath replied, humoring him. “Someone very publicly kills a group of Mitchell supporters, along with a bunch of cops, and then goes after Rogers, but not before they ice the SecDef and SecState? Assuming, of course, that the Ambassador’s correct about their deaths.

So then, looking at all of that, cui bono? ”

“I don’t know who benefits,” he replied, exasperated himself. “But if you can nail that down, you’ve got your hands on the key to this whole thing.”

“So let’s look at the second group,” said Haney, trying to keep things moving. “In the run-up to the attack at the VP’s Residence, who was pissed-off?”

“Only about half the country,” Harvath responded, standing up to get some fresh coffee.

“You’ve got everyone who didn’t vote for Mitchell, plus anyone who’s lost faith in him since he took office.

But none of that explains why the attack happened or who’s behind the hit on Rogers, much less any connection between the two. ”

“If I may,” said McGee. “Let’s pull the lens back and think like I did at CIA. If you were a foreign nation hostile to the United States, how might attacking angry Mitchell supporters, as well as officials from the previous administration, serve your ends?”

It was an unusual question, and one that Harvath definitely hadn’t considered. If a hostile foreign intelligence service was trying to stir unrest in the United States, the last thing they’d want to do was make the plot easy to piece together.

In fact, the more complicated and disjointed they could make it, the more successful they’d likely be at avoiding detection.

But at the same time, he reasoned, there would have to be a through line, some sort of unified objective to it all.

Chaos simply for chaos’s sake hardly seemed like much of a plan.

What’s more, while gunning down protesters and blowing up cops had the potential to grab people’s attention and possibly spur them to some sort of action, you wouldn’t get a single person in the streets because a bunch of government employees from a previous administration had been killed.

Right or wrong, not enough people would care about them.

That was where the whole foreign intelligence service plot fell apart for Harvath. Killing Rogers and his former colleagues produced a juice that just didn’t seem worth the squeeze. No matter how many angles he came at it from, he couldn’t come up with an answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

“Okay,” McGee offered. “Instead of zooming out, let’s change our lens altogether. If you wanted to hobble the new administration, how would you do it? Think big.”

After topping off Haney, Harvath filled his own mug and said, “I’d want to make Mitchell as unpopular as possible; absolutely crater his polling numbers. I’d want to put him in a hole so deep that no matter what he did or said, even his dog wouldn’t support him.”

The ex–CIA director smiled. “And to guarantee that, to make him a full-on dead man walking, politically speaking, what would you do?”

“That’s easy,” Harvath stated as he leaned against the counter. “I’d make people afraid. I’d use murder and mayhem to make them feel that their world was spinning out of control, that they weren’t safe, and that it was all because of Mitchell.”

McGee raised his mug to him. “Now you’re thinking like a CIA director.”

“What I can’t figure out, though, is how it ties in with Rogers and the deaths of his colleagues.”

“That’s even easier to explain. In fact, Mitchell may have handed the idea to our enemies on a silver platter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The President hasn’t been shy about cutting the size of government—including Secret Service details.”

“And?”

“And if it comes to pass that any officials, especially those involved with national security, were murdered because Mitchell didn’t protect them, can you imagine the chilling effect that would have?

Who would want to work for Mitchell, or any future administration, if you knew that one day you could be hung out to dry?

How hard would you push America’s enemies if at some point in the future, when you needed your country the most, the United States might not have your back?

We’d never get top-tier talent into national security positions ever again.

It would be an enormous win for the enemies of the United States. ”

It was an excellent point. And while President Mitchell was within his rights to deny ex-officials like Rogers protection, which could run upwards of $2 million a month, the potential consequences of doing nothing seemed incalculable to Harvath.

In his opinion, if there was a bona fide, active threat against any government official—past or present—and that threat was a result of their official duties on behalf of the United States, America should protect them. It was the morally just thing to do.

One would think it was also smart politics, regardless of party affiliation, but politicians were an odd breed as far as Harvath was concerned. There were very few he had met over his career that he had liked and fewer still that he had respected.

What troubled him was that as the character of America’s politicians declined, so too did the character of its people. They were inexorably linked.

“We still haven’t answered one of Mike’s first questions,” he said, getting back on topic. “Whoever is behind this, they originally sent two people after Rogers. Then, all of a sudden, last night they sent eight? Why?”

“You said it yourself,” McGee replied. “They had insider information. Someone either knew, or had reason to suspect, that the Ambassador was now being protected.”

“A leak? At the Carlton Group?” Harvath found that impossible to believe. Only Nicholas knew what they were up to.

“Did you speak with anyone else?”

Just one. And as soon as the revelation hit him, his blood went cold. He had to get to S?lvi.