“Sure, but all of them were cut loose. You know that.”

“Do I? I’m not so sure anymore. The CIA didn’t cut you loose, did they?”

“That’s different,” Ryan argued.

He leaned back in his chair, unconvinced. “Really? Different how?”

“I was assigned to police that team. They were good, but they were also a bunch of cowboys. People don’t last long at Langley if you don’t follow the rules.”

“Interesting. I seem to remember you breaking a lot of the rules yourself.”

“No,” Ryan admonished him. “What you remember is an imbecile of a CIA station chief and an American ambassador with a Pollyannaish worldview. Everything we did, everything, there was clearance for, especially the things we kept quiet from those two. It’s hard enough doing the work you and I do without having to fight our own people in the process.”

Nasiri shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

She looked at him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, my dear Lydia, that even by your own admission your destabilization team was very skilled. Yet despite that skill, someone chose to shut it down and fire all of its members. All the members, that is, except for you. If I recall correctly, you got promoted. Case officer now, isn’t it?”

Glancing at her watch, Ryan said, “If there’s a point to all of this, Nafi, I suggest you get to it.”

“The point is that your entire CIA destabilization team, minus your ‘policing’ presence, was seen in Cyprus three days ago meeting with two men that my country is very nervous about.”

“These two?” she asked, pointing at one of the photographs. “Who are they?”

“Senior members of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood.”

Suddenly, it hit her. “Wait a second. You think that the United States is planning to topple Jordan?”

Nasiri raised his hands palms up and tilted his head to the side. “If you were in our position, with governments falling all around you, what would you think?”

“I think a country like Jordan should be confident enough to trust its allies. That’s what I think.”

The Jordanian leaned forward and repeated his original question. “Is Jordan going to be the next Middle Eastern country to be overthrown?”

“There could be any number of reasons for that meeting in Cyprus.”

“Really?” he stated, reaching down and removing two more folders from his briefcase. He held them out over the table and then let them drop. “Would any of those reasons be the same, or different, for why your team was seen in both Egypt and Libya before those governments collapsed?”

She would’ve stressed again that it wasn’t “her team,” but she was too stunned by his remarks to utter the words. The Americans in those photos had not only been let go from the CIA; they had been let go with prejudice along with big black marks in their records. What was this all about?

Lydia Ryan was good at reading people, so whatever intelligence Nafi Nasiri had, she could see he was one hundred percent confident in it. Which meant, by extension, so was his boss, and very likely, the King of Jordan himself. Otherwise, Nafi wouldn’t have been sent here to meet with her like this.

“I don’t know what to say,” she finally offered.

The Jordanian pushed the folders across the table to her. “Tell me you’ll read what’s in these files.”

“Of course, but—”

“And that you’ll get me some answers.”

“Nafi, I can’t make you any promises.”

Nasiri looked at her, his face implacable. Reaching down, he removed a final folder from his briefcase, but he didn’t open it. He didn’t push it across the table, either. He just sat there tapping his index finger on the cover.

“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he finally said.

“Sorry for what?”

“Understand that we take any threat to the survival of the Kingdom of Jordan very seriously.”

There was now another tone in his voice, and she didn’t like it. “What’s in the folder, Nafi?”

The Jordanian lifted the cover, but only high enough so that he could see inside. From where she was sitting, Ryan couldn’t make out a thing.

“Over the winter, we infiltrated a terror cell that has been moving bomb makers, bomb materials, and martyrs into Syria via Lebanon. While inside the cell, our asset learned of an advanced plot targeting the United States.”

Ryan’s eyes went wide. “You’ve known of an attack being mounted against the United States and this is the first you’re telling us? Give me that file. I want to see what’s in it.”

Nasiri shook his head. “We’ve been monitoring the situation.”

“Monitoring the situation, my ass,” said Ryan, her anger growing. “You know what, Nafi? Fuck you, and fuck your monitoring. You can’t sit on information like that.”

“We didn’t want to come to you until we were confident.”

“This is blackmail. The Kingdom of Jordan is blackmailing the United States. That’s what’s going on here. You’re not going to give me what I want, until you get what you want.”

The Jordanian slid the file back into his briefcase and stood.

Ryan’s blood was boiling. She knew her emotions were getting the better of her and that that was wrong, but she couldn’t control her anger. “You haven’t given me a shred of proof. What makes you think my superiors will even believe you?”

Nasiri frowned as he reached the conference room door. “I think a country like America should be confident enough to trust its allies. That’s what I think. Have a good flight home, Lydia.”

With that, the Jordanian was gone, and in his wake, the CIA had been dropped into a nightmare involving a terrorist plot that might or might not exist, and no way to even begin running it to ground.

CHAPTER 2

COAST OF SOMALIA

MONDAY

From the beginning, everyone had told Scot Harvath that his plan not only was flawed and would never work, but was absolutely insane. The three men who disagreed had been hired on the spot.

Parachuting onto the rear deck of the supertanker Sienna Star was considered a kamikaze mission, but they’d made it. One of the team members was injured on the landing, but they still managed to retake the ship and free its crew. What they hadn’t bargained for, though, was that the tanker’s captain had been smuggled to shore earlier as an insurance policy against any such rescue attempt. This had placed Harvath and his team in a very difficult position.

The assignment called for the successful recapture of the ship and the recovery of the entire crew. In order to beat out the other private contractors for the job, Harvath’s boss had proposed an exorbitant fee, but with the caveat that the ship’s owners owed them nothing unless the operation was one hundred percent successful.

As a former Navy SEAL with a storied career now working for a private intelligence agency, he lived for this kind of work. That said, it was an extremely risky operation and it wasn’t the first they had been forced to take. Recently, his employer and the company’s namesake, Reed Carlton, had been targeted for assassination. The killers had also targeted the Carlton Group’s top operations personnel. Harvath and Carlton had been lucky enough to survive, but they had lost so many key players that their organization was unable to function at its previous level and ended up losing its biggest and sole government contract with the Defense Department. Because of that loss, they had been forced to take any and all assignments—sometimes under ridiculous terms—in order to rebuild their organization.

The Old Man, as Harvath referred to Carlton, had put everything on the line for this assignment, advancing a small fortune that included funding a secondary team out in the Gulf of Aden to conduct drone reconnaissance on the Sienna Star for the last week and a half.