Blowback

Whitcomb was right. As far as any scientific progress that might be made, the best Harvath could do was to facilitate Vanessa and Alan’s transfer to Fort Detrick. And to do that, he was going to have to figure out a way to disregard his orders and communicate directly with one of his best-established intelligence community contacts, without getting caught.

Listening to Jillian say her good-byes, Harvath began to form a plan in his mind.

FIFTY-THREE

RIYADH, S AUDI ARABIA

Ex-CIA operative Chip Reynolds hauled his bulky, fifty-eight-year-old, six-foot-two frame into the shower and let the hot water pound against his head and shoulders. Though he would have preferred to stay under it all day, that wasn’t what the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco for short, was paying him for.

After toweling off, Reynolds opened the door of his villa and found his breakfast and newspapers waiting. He carried the tray inside to his desk and poured a cup of coffee while he waited for his laptop to boot up. Knowing what a tight grip the Saudi monarchy kept on the media, he only glanced at the local papers. The valuable information came from his network of contacts scattered throughout the country. Though the deputy minister for state intelligence, Faruq al-Hafez, copied him on the daily threat assessment (the creation of which had been Reynolds’s idea in the first place), Chip knew that what he was getting was nothing more than a watered down version. Faruq had never liked him, and Chip knew why.

While still in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, Reynolds had uncovered a plot by a Lithuanian mobster to bump off one of the lesser princes of the Saudi Royal Family. The spoiled, drugcrazed brat had run afoul of the Mafioso while vacationing in the Baltic, where his sadistic antics had resulted in the death of two young girls-one of whom was a relative of the aforementioned organized crime figure. The assassination plot was actually quite ingenious, but flawed in that it relied on local talent within the Saudi Kingdom to pull it off.

Reynolds’s superiors at Langley had instructed him to coordinate with Saudi intelligence, in particular its deputy minister. Despite Reynolds’s extensive background and expertise in the Middle East, including his fluency in Arabic, Faruq refused to work with him, insisting his people could handle the situation. The man had been wrong, almost dead wrong, and had it not been for Reynolds’s refusal to be sidelined, the prince surely would have been killed.

When Reynolds’s wife died seven years ago of cancer, he decided it was time to retire from the agency. He had given his country a good chunk of his life and wanted what was left of it back. He had watched for years while former colleagues jumped ship for the private sector and cashed in, and he wanted a piece of that action for himself. Saving the young prince’s life, no matter how much Reynolds privately believed that he and most of his debauched ilk within the Royal Family ought to take a dirt nap, had secured him a special preferred status within the house of Saud. The fact that he was ex-CIA, could speak their language, and knew his way around the block better than anybody they had seen in a long time didn’t hurt his standing either.

But while the al-Sauds might have liked what Reynolds brought to their side of the table, their deputy minister for state intelligence had been shown up by the American and never intended to let it happen again. Ergo, no real substantial intel ever flowed in Reynolds’s direction.

Reynolds had diplomatically discussed Faruq’s lack of cooperation with the Saudi Royal Family, and things had gotten better for a while, but they always seemed to recede to their current, frosty state of affairs. That said, Reynolds hadn’t become one of the CIA’s top operatives and wasn’t being paid such a big consulting fee for being lazy or stupid, and so he used his skills to bore as far as he could into all of his host country’s intelligence agencies. Within forty-five minutes every morning, he had a better handle on what was going on both inside and outside of their borders than they did. Truth be told, his picture was probably more accurate than if the Saudi intelligence agencies had been one hundred percent cooperative with him. Reynolds had always joked that he liked his intelligence like he liked his oysters-raw, with nothing added to enhance the flavor. The last thing he wanted was other people clouding his view of the landscape by trying to impress him with their take on things.