Target Omega

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The morning haze didn’t burn off until well past nine. The forecast promised temperatures in the mid- to upper nineties, with oppressive humidity. The sidewalks were nearly empty and the traffic sparse. It was a slow, lazy Sunday morning in July in Washington, D.C.

Olivia Perry was scouring the classified briefing materials from the National Counterproliferation Center regarding US WMD protocols. Before leaving Brandt the previous evening, she had asked him to call the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and request any information he could provide on US efforts to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction and any information available on an individual by the name of Michael Garin.

Olivia’s only concession to its being a Sunday morning was her casual attire and her decision to work from home. She wore a pair of white cotton running shorts and a tank top and sat on a cushioned deck chair on the small balcony of her apartment overlooking the Pentagon. A cup of espresso sat on a circular coffee table next to her laptop and a manila file folder.

The requested information had arrived by courier at Olivia’s apartment in Crystal City shortly after eight A.M. It consisted of a CD and a thin manila folder. The CD contained the material on WMDs. The folder contained information about Michael Garin.

Olivia hadn’t expected that the information the DNI sent over would be anything more than generic, open-source information. She wasn’t disappointed. Most, if not all, of the data could’ve been obtained through a diligent Internet search.

Still, the material saved Olivia a considerable amount of research time, and given Brandt’s desire to get as much information as quickly as possible, it was a useful starting point.

Olivia began by reviewing the WMD data on the CD. She was already familiar with much of it. SEAL Team Six — DEVGRU — based in Dam Neck, Virginia, was trained in WMD. As was Delta Force. No mention was made of any WMD task force assigned to destroy or otherwise compromise the WMD programs of rogue nations and terrorists. No mention was made of anyone named Michael Garin or Thomas Lofton. Olivia would have thought it a spectacular breach of security if there had been.

The only references to the destruction of WMD programs was a file on the CD that consisted of publicly known or suspected WMD programs that had been delayed or destroyed by deception or force. The majority of these, unsurprisingly, related to actions taken by Israel against some of its neighbors. A nation faced with existential threats didn’t have the luxury of engaging in detached deliberation about the pros and cons of destroying a murderous dictator’s nuclear weapons program. Among the actions were the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1982, the bombing of Syria’s al-Kibar nuclear reactor in 2006, and several acts of sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities in the last several years. It was widely rumored that the attacks on the Syrian and Iranian programs had been accomplished with American assistance, but there was no evidence confirming such rumors.

After Olivia completed a review of the data on the CD, she opened the file on Garin. The contents were so sparse as to be mildly amusing. Had Olivia not been informed by the president’s national security advisor that Garin led an elite team of operators tasked with destroying renegade WMD programs, the file would’ve caused her to think Garin was nothing more than an honorably discharged veteran with six years of service in the US Navy. In fact, it appeared from the file that Garin’s last military or government service ended nearly ten years ago.

According to his file, Garin had enlisted in the Navy at age twenty. He had been stationed at several bases, including Coronado, California, where he had gone through BUD/S and SEAL Qualification Training as a member of Class 226. He didn’t become a SEAL, having failed to complete the course. He was discharged sometime thereafter. That, and a three-by-five black-and-white file photo, constituted the complete official record of Michael A. Garin’s service to his country.

The file was practically useless. Sitting back in her chair, Olivia gazed at the Air Force Memorial in the distance and plotted her next move. She wasn’t a private investigator and Brandt hadn’t charged her with acting as one. She had suggested to Brandt that he simply requisition Garin’s entire file, but he dismissed the idea as unproductive. Even if he knew what agency Garin worked for, without presidential clearance all he was likely to get back would be a heavily redacted, compartmentalized file. And Brandt wasn’t inclined to go to the president’s bedside at Walter Reed and pester him for the file of some GS-14 who might be able to shed some light on the not-unexpected cooperation between Russia and Iran on a resolution condemning Israel. Afterward, Brandt, sensing that Olivia felt chastened by her naïveté, apologized and reassured her that he, too, was struggling with the ways of Washington bureaucracy.

Olivia decided to follow up on Garin’s tenure in BUD/S and SQT. Since that was the beginning of his special operations training, and since he evidently was still in some form of special operations, she thought it could be fruitful to explore any connections between Garin’s SEAL training and his current occupation. She planned to start with finding out who the instructors for Class 226 had been. Maybe one or more of them still had a relationship with Garin.

But first, Olivia decided to try something easy. She Googled him. It took her ten minutes of scrolling through hundreds of dead ends before she linked to a fifteen-year-old article in The Cornell Daily Sun. It was a sports-section report on the Cornell football team’s 21–17 victory over Yale. A free safety by the name of Mike Garin had returned two interceptions for touchdowns, including the game winner. She scrolled to the bottom of the piece, where there were a series of game-related photos including one of a Cornell player standing next to a stocky, tough-looking man who appeared to be in his mid- to late sixties. The caption read “Big Red Star Congratulated by Biggest Fan.”

Because the player in the photo was wearing a helmet, Olivia couldn’t be sure if Mike Garin, Cornell football player, was Mike Garin, special operator. She hit the link under the player’s name and a few seconds later a page of statistics and honors appeared. This Garin was six foot two inches, 210 pounds, and had been honorable-mention all-American, as well as all-Ivy. Olivia knew enough about football to recognize that it was uncommon for an Ivy Leaguer to be named an all-American — even an honorable mention. She thought it even more uncommon, however, for an Ivy Leaguer to be a lethal commando.

At the bottom of the page it showed that Cornell’s Garin was from Cleveland, Ohio.

She hit the link under Cleveland and more honors appeared — this time from high school. By his senior year, Garin had been a second-team high school all-American in football and small school division state four-hundred-meter champion in track.

Her father having played at Alabama, Olivia knew full well that high school all-Americans generally got scholarship offers from major powers such as Alabama, Ohio State, and USC. It was unusual for someone like that to end up at an Ivy League school with its rigorous academic requirements and lack of athletic scholarships. This Garin, whether or not he’d gone on to become the special operator Garin, was a peculiar specimen.

Olivia went to the bottom of the page, where there was a grainy photo of a taciturn high school football player standing beneath goal-posts on a football field. Olivia took out the photo from Garin’s file and placed it next to the photo on the computer screen. Both subjects had black hair, although the adult Garin’s was short and the high schooler’s was long and curly. Both had angular features and pugilistic jaws. But it was the intense, purposeful look in their eyes that convinced Olivia that the two Garins were almost certainly the same. It was a look uncommon for the Ivy League elite. It was, thought Olivia, the rather chilling look of a man capable of taking another man’s life.

Olivia spent another half an hour looking for more information on Garin before returning to the Cornell Daily Sun article. She reread the article carefully for anything she might have missed. She then went to the link for Garin’s college stats and to his high school stats. Olivia noticed that she had missed the link underscoring the term “all-American.”

She clicked on the link and was directed to an article from The Plain Dealer describing the recruitment of area high school stars by various college programs. She read the paragraph that mentioned Garin:

After receiving offers from a number of programs, including Ohio State University, Michigan, and Notre Dame, the Blue Devils’ Mike Garin narrowed his choice to the Naval Academy and Cornell, before ultimately choosing the latter. “We were really disappointed,” said the Academy’s Dan Dwyer, who had recruited Garin heavily, “but we wish Mike the best of luck. He’s going to be a fine college player.”

There was nothing more about Garin in the story. Olivia got out of the chair and stretched. Standing with her hands on her hips, she looked down at the computer screen and contemplated taking a short break before running down the instructors for Garin’s BUD/S and SEAL Qualification Training classes. That would take a lot of time, she thought, and even then she might not get anything more useful than what she had just learned on the Internet.

She decided that she should call Brandt and give him a heads-up that progress on the assignment was slow and she was skeptical of finding any substantive information on Garin. The Cornell Daily Sun article was fifteen years old, the Plain Dealer article even older. And any information gleaned from Garin’s BUD/S instructors would probably be more than a decade old. Olivia opened the sliding glass door and stepped from the sweltering July heat into the air-conditioned kitchen. She poured herself another cup of espresso and searched for her cell phone, which, miraculously, was in the first place she looked. She punched the speed dial for Brandt. It rang twice before she abruptly disconnected and placed the phone down on the kitchen counter next to a stack of the last week’s editions of The Washington Post.

Olivia stared at the newspaper as if trying to remember where she had put her keys. A few moments later she walked back onto the balcony and looked at the laptop screen, which still displayed the Plain Dealer article. “‘We were really disappointed,’ said the Academy’s Dan Dwyer…”

Olivia hurried back inside and rifled through the stack of newspapers until she came to Thursday’s edition. She opened the first section and leafed through the pages before stopping at page five. There, at the top of the page, was a story titled “President of DGT to testify Monday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.” Olivia traced her index finger down the column until it rested on the phrase “DGT president Dan Dwyer, a former Navy SEAL, maintains that the company’s contracts with the Defense Department—” Olivia’s cell phone interrupted. The caller identification indicated it was Brandt.

“Olivia, I understand that you called.”

“Professor, let me call you back in an hour. I’ve got to talk to a man about a SEAL.”