down. When it arrived and the doors opened, Harvath stepped inside.
The building was twenty-five stories tall and the Carlton Group’s offices were on the top floor. The main elevators that served the building proper and all its tenants had buttons from L to 25, but no 13, which meant those elevators technically only went to the twenty-fourth floor. As a precaution, the Group also controlled the entire twenty-fourth floor, which supposedly included a collection of unoccupied offices. Should anyone ever manage to get a peek at the twenty-fourth floor, it wouldn’t appear unusual at all.
The special service elevator Harvath was in went only to the twenty-fifth floor. When the doors opened, he stepped out into a carpeted foyer area. Sitting behind a desk were two large men dressed in suits and ties. They nodded to Harvath and buzzed him in.
Passing through a heavy blast door hidden behind panels of mahogany, he entered the headquarters of the Carlton Group.
The entire space had been built to the strictest TEMPEST specifications. Though the Carlton Group was a private organization, they were contracted to the DoD and handled classified information. Every step was taken to safeguard against what was referred to in intel-speak as “compromising emanations,” or CE. CE was any electrical, mechanical, or acoustical signal from equipment that was transmitting, receiving, processing, analyzing, encrypting, or decrypting classified information that could be intentionally or accidentally intercepted. It was a sophisticated science that looked at everything from magnetic field radiation and line conduction all the way to how window blinds can vibrate and give away conversations held in offices and what is being typed on a keyboard feet away from a window.
The antieavesdropping measures aside, the Carlton Group’s offices resembled a large, successful law firm. There were private offices, conference rooms, and multiple cubicle areas that had been collectively nicknamed Kubistan by staff.
As in the CIA’s counterterrorism center, employees were grouped according to the regions and areas in which they possessed expertise. Taking a page out of Silicon Valley’s handbook, they were encouraged to move when assignments dictated via mobile workstations that looked as if they came straight out of an IKEA catalog. The Group’s director of operations referred to it as “clustering” and had found that often the personnel themselves formed more effective and productive teams than when management assigned specific people to specific projects.
One of the nation’s longest-serving and most revered spymasters, the Old Man was not a management guru. He believed in simply hiring the best people possible and then trusting them to do their jobs. He’d watched how too much management and bureaucracy had choked the life out of the CIA, and he had sworn he’d never let it happen at his organization.
That said, he’d drawn a few lines in the sand with his management team. Employees were expected to dress like business professionals. There were no casual-dress Fridays. He expected people to comport themselves with dignity. They were the best and he expected them to look like it.
He was particular about facial hair. Unless you were going into the field and it was a part of your cover, male employees were expected to be clean-shaven. He didn’t want to see any piercings other than earrings, and then only two, on female employees only-one in each ear. If you had a tattoo, it had better not be visible. There were also strict rules about physical conditioning, grooming, and hygiene.
There were only two exceptions to “Reed’s Rules of Order,” as they were known. The first had to do with smoking. As a relapsed smoker himself, he allowed people to smoke, but they couldn’t go outside to do it. Smokers had a habit of getting too chummy and chatty with strangers and other tenants in a building. They milled around outside and lingered over cigarettes, wasting productive time. They also made themselves vulnerable to surveillance and approach.
To cater to the smokers, he’d built what became known as “the coffin”-a small glass booth, barely big enough for two people, at the far end of the office. It had an intense air-purification system that roared so loudly you could barely hear yourself think.
It wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. There wasn’t even a place to sit down inside. You went in, got your fix, and got out. Strangely enough, no one ever saw the Old Man using the coffin, and it was widely suspected he had had an equally efficient, though much quieter, system placed in his office allowing him to smoke whenever he wanted to.
The other exception to Reed’s Rules of Order had to do with his newest employee, Moonracer. He was an eccentric little man who was also particularly cunning. The Old Man didn’t trust him a single bit.
When it came to bringing Nicholas on board, Carlton had been one hundred percent against it, but Harvath had made a very compelling case and he’d eventually relented once the man had been able to secure his presidential pardon. That didn’t mean that he had changed any of his ways. The Old Man had created a secure area within which Nicholas operated, and within which he could constantly be monitored.
Nicholas had refused to shave his beard and had also insisted that the two enormous white Russian Ovcharkas, or Caucasian Sheepdogs, he owned, which were never away from his side, be allowed to come to work with him. Though Reed Carlton loved dogs, he had refused the request. The little man then claimed they were service animals and hinted at bringing a suit against him for violating the Americans with Disabilities act. The Old Man didn’t know if Nicholas was pulling his leg or if he was actually serious.
Once again, Harvath had stepped in and had lobbied for the dogs, explaining that the Group wouldn’t secure Nicholas’s cooperation unless the dogs were part of the deal. Carlton relented once more. It was obvious that Harvath had appointed himself the little man’s guardian. That point was driven home shortly after Nicholas’s first day on the job.
Because of the man’s physical limitations, a special Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, SCIF for short, had been built for him. A SCIF was an enclosed area within a building used for processing sensitive information. Nicholas’s SCIF was built to his specifications on a raised floor and stuffed full of all the computer equipment and data links he had asked for. As with the other sections of the Carlton Group, Nicholas’s SCIF had been assigned a title based on its function. A white sheet of paper with the words Digital Ops had been printed out and taped to the door.
The next day it had been taken down and replaced with another sign: The Lollipop Guild. When Harvath heard about it, he had hit the roof.
It took him less than fifteen minutes to track down who had done it. And cornering him in the men’s room, it took every ounce of restraint he had for Harvath not to punch the man’s lights out. To his credit, the man didn’t deny that he had posted the sign. In fact, he owned right up to it and launched into what a mistake he felt it was having brought a criminal like Nicholas into their operation.
Harvath didn’t care what the man thought. He told him that if he didn’t stay away from Nicholas, he would put a bullet in his head and dump his body where his family would never find it. Five minutes later, the man was in his supervisor’s office registering a complaint against Harvath. To the supervisor’s credit, he had backed up Harvath and told the man that if he didn’t close his mouth and get back to work, Harvath wouldn’t have a chance to shoot him because he was going to do the job himself. That seemed to put an end to things. Word quickly got around that anybody who screwed with Moonracer was going to get a visit from his big brother, Norseman, and that Harvath had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted and management would turn a blind eye.
Arriving at the SCIF, Harvath punched in his code, waited for the green light to come on, and listened for the locks to slide back and the hiss of air as the door was released.
CHAPTER 35
The growling of Nicholas’s two dogs, Argos and Draco, ceased as soon as they saw who it was. Both of them stood up from their beds and trotted over to see Harvath.
“Hello, boys,” he said, patting them on the head. “Hello, Nicholas.”
The little man was typing away at his keyboard. He quickly raised his left index finger, indicating he’d be with Harvath in a second, and then returned to typing.
In the eerie lighting of the SCIF, Harvath studied Nicholas’s face. He had been attacked over the summer with a razor. It had happened in a remote mountainous region of Spain. There wasn’t a hospital, or even a clinic, for over
