Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 46

Harvath used the Solarium’s SCIF, a small secured room for transmitting top-secret information, to provide a full report to Washington. He had been in there for hours.

No one wanted to believe it. Harvath didn’t want to believe it. But once the shock of Sergun’s revelations began to wear off, they started discussing what their response should be.

There were many serious decisions to be made. Not the least of which was whether the United States should declare war on Russia.

The President wanted to confer privately with his advisers. It was decided that everyone would reconvene in an hour.

Stepping out of the SCIF, Harvath saw Vella and flagged him over.

“How’d it go?” the interrogator asked.

Harvath needed a case of water and a fistful of aspirin. Pinching the bridge of his nose to relieve his headache, he replied, “Not well.”

Vella had extracted a stunning confession from Sergun. Russia not only had a mole deep inside American intelligence, but had also orchestrated the attack on the SAD team in Anbar, the assassination of the Secretary of Defense, and the suicide bombing at the White House.

All of the attacks had been designed to draw America into an all-out ground war with ISIS. Russia had been playing a media relations game — pretending not to be fully engaged in Syria, when the truth was they absolutely were. They needed ISIS defeated, but they couldn’t do it on their own.

There were two major factors at stake for Russia. One foreign. One domestic.

Russia’s only deep, warm-water port was located in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus. From this Mediterranean facility, Russia could project its naval power anywhere in the world.

All of its other main ports were either ice-locked for large portions of the year, or landlocked, which required Russian naval vessels to pass through straits controlled by other countries.

If ISIS took over Syria, there was no telling what would happen to the treaty allowing the Russian naval facility at Tartus and their air base north of there. It was in Russia’s best interest that the status quo be maintained.

But to do that, Russia had to focus most of its energy on defeating the CIA-backed rebels trying to topple the current government. It couldn’t afford to open up a second front against ISIS. The United States, though, could.

All America needed was a strong enough push. If it were repeatedly and dramatically humiliated, it would have no other choice but to act.

Even America’s war-weary citizens would eventually call for something to be done. Russia was certain of it.

The attack on the White House was the icing on the cake. It would make for a dramatic ISIS propaganda video, but its real mission was to be an affront to America’s patriotic sense of honor — a provocation that could absolutely not be ignored.

Russia’s other reason for wanting ISIS destroyed was domestic. The greatest population of non-Arabs traveling to Iraq and Syria to fight for ISIS were Russian speakers.

They came in the thousands from Russian satellites like Chechnya and Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Abkhazia.

Fighting with ISIS, they gained extensive, hard-core combat experience. They learned how to build IEDs, as well as nuclear, biological, and chemical bombs.

Eventually, many would return home to their unstable regions. They would train others, foment unrest, and launch revolutions. And as soon as one revolution started, others would follow. Russia would be overwhelmed, unable to respond. It was a nightmare scenario. One for which they could see only a single exit — getting the United States involved.

It was stupid, outrageous, dangerous, deadly, and unquestionably a direct act of war. Nobody during Harvath’s secure teleconference inside the SCIF had debated that. What they had debated was the appropriate response.

As far as Harvath was concerned, the only appropriate response was to hit the Russians so hard that they never attempted anything like it ever again. But that’s what America thought it had done a decade ago, when small, man-portable nukes had been discovered secreted across the United States. The message, though, didn’t appear to have gotten through. America was going to have to come up with something bigger.

The problem at the moment was figuring out how far up the chain the plot went. Was it limited to just the GRU? Or had it been sanctioned at the very top, from inside the Kremlin?

There was only one way Harvath could see for them to figure that out. And he wanted to be the one to do it. But before he did, he wanted to know how Vella had been able to break Sergun so quickly and so thoroughly.

“Your sense of smell is able to go straight to the part of the brain that stores memories,” Vella explained. “It can also impact your mood and performance and does so without asking your conscious mind for permission.

“Essentially what we’ve created is a chemical Trojan horse. It gets us into the brain, specifically to the amygdala, where fear memories are stored and potential threats are determined.

“It short-circuits the ‘fight’ portion of the fight-or-flight mechanism. All the patient cares about is surviving. They become highly cooperative, malleable.”

“Why were you talking about Dante?” Harvath asked.

“When I interrogated Malevsky, he mentioned that Sergun liked to brag about how smart he was — the kinds of books he read. He spoke a lot about Dante, so I used that.”

“Used it how?”

Vella knew Harvath was highly intelligent. He also knew that science could be boring and so used the simplest analogy he could think of. “Fear is like an icepick,” he said. “The deeper I can get it, the more acute the sensation. If I can work with images that are already in the subject’s mind, it helps speed things up. That’s why I try to gather as much background as possible.”

“Would it work on a stranger?”

“I suppose,” Vella said. “But it’s probably going to take longer.”

Harvath thanked him and headed for the stairwell. He wanted to get some fresh air before he had to return to the SCIF.

A plan was beginning to take shape in his mind and he hoped taking a short walk around the property might help the rest of the pieces fall into place.