OLD EBBITT GRILL

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Aydin Ozbek met Carolyn Leonard at a quiet table near the back bar. The head of Jack Rutledge’s Secret Service detail, she was in her late thirties, about five-foot-ten, and very fit. She wore her red hair down around her shoulders, and her understated Brooks Brothers suit concealed a.40 caliber Sig Sauer 229, two spare magazines, a BlackBerry, Guardian Protective Devices “pop-and-drop” OC grenades, and a few other tools necessary to her trade.

As a rule, Ozbek never dated women who were in the military, law enforcement, or the intelligence realm. For Carolyn Leonard, though, he’d long been willing to break that rule. She was easily one of the most attractive and eligible single women in D.C., a fact that most likely had made her rise to one of the most prominent positions in the Secret Service much more difficult than it should have been.

Despite his obvious attraction to her, Carolyn had never showed him any interest beyond friendship. It was probably for the best. Meeting up, hooking up, and breaking up would not have been conducive to the favor he needed now, even for a professional like Carolyn Leonard.

“I can’t talk to you about this,” she said as she pushed the small Sony Cybershot camera back across the table.

Uploading the stills and closed-circuit footage to a digital camera seemed a lot more discreet to the CIA operative than handing Leonard a big manila envelope with a couple of VHS tapes and a stack of 8 x 10 photographs inside.

“Come on, Carolyn,” he replied. “I’m not asking for state secrets here. I just need you to ID the guy and answer a couple of questions for me.”

The CIA operative slid the camera halfway back across the table.

She looked at him. “You’re asking me to violate my oath.”

“No, I’m not. I just need to know what’s going on.”

“Aydin,” said Leonard with a smile, “you work for the CIA. Are you telling me that things have gotten so bad over there that you need the Secret Service to do your investigations for you?”

Ozbek smiled. “We’re all on the same side and we all need help from time to time. Will you look at the videos again, please?”

Leonard was quiet for a moment. “I don’t need to see them again.”

Now it was Ozbek’s turn to be quiet. He’d learned a long time ago that most people were uncomfortable with silence and would fill the void if you kept your own mouth shut long enough.

“What do you know about Scot Harvath?” she asked.

The CIA operative had been able to piece some of the information together before meeting with Leonard. “He’s a Navy SEAL who was transferred to the Secret Service to help you with both antiterrorism and counterterrorism operations at the White House. He was instrumental in helping recover the president when he was kidnapped several years ago.

“He has been involved in a few off-the-books assignments and everyone who has ever worked with him considers him a top-notch operator. Other than that, nobody knows what he has been up to.”

Leonard didn’t say anything.

“My guess,” said Ozbek, “is that maybe he was drawn over to the dark side on a permanent basis. There was mention of him being attached to something called the Office of International Investigative Assistance at DHS helping international law enforcement and intelligence agencies head off terror attacks, but that’s about as far as I got. The guy doesn’t seem to stay in one job very long.”

“Well, you got one thing right,” she replied. “He is a top-notch operator.”

“So what’s he doing in Paris at the sites of a bombing and a shooting today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Carolyn, you saw how he humped and dumped that guy seconds before the explosion. He knew it was going to happen. He’s involved with that bombing somehow.”

Leonard took a sip of her drink. “You still haven’t explained what your interest is in all of this.”

Ozbek knew better than to hold out on her. “The man behind Harvath in the video from the shooting-we have reason to believe he’s one of ours who went off the reservation.”

“You think Harvath is working with him?” she said, the tone of disbelief evident in her voice.

“I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m talking to you. You know Harvath.”

“And I know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t be involved in a bombing or a shooting.”

“Really?” asked Ozbek. “Then give me a plausible explanation for why I have video of him at the scenes of both.”

“Jesus, Aydin. Are we really having this conversation? Harvath saved a person who otherwise would have been blown to bits in that bombing, and it’s obvious the guy at the shooting had a gun on him.”

“But why? Why Harvath? Why both scenes? That’s what I’m trying to get at.”

Leonard looked at Ozbek. “You, a CIA operative, have suspicions that Harvath is involved in black ops yet you’re asking me, a Secret Service agent, what he’s up to in Paris? Oz, let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“What kind of money do you guys get for chasing your tails like this?”

Ozbek ignored the sarcasm and changed his line of questioning. “The woman with Harvath, who is she?”

“She’s his girlfriend,” replied Leonard. “Tracy Hastings. Ex-Navy. She was an EOD tech before an IED she was defusing went off prematurely and took out her eye and part of her face.”

Though the video wasn’t the best quality in the world, Ozbek found it hard to believe the attractive woman he had seen had suffered such a horrific tragedy.

“You wouldn’t know it by looking at her,” added Leonard, somehow reading his mind. “If you’ve got her face on video, you should have been able to run it through all of your databases and get a match, at least for her passport photo.”

When Ozbek didn’t answer she said, “You didn’t have a match on her, did you? Why not?”

Ozbek replied truthfully. “The video footage from the bombing wasn’t good enough.”

Leonard leaned back in her chair. “Imagine that.”

“What about the man Harvath saved from the bomb?” asked the CIA operative.

“No idea,” she replied.

Her answer came a little too quickly for his liking. “Even though the video quality was bad,” he said as he picked up the digital camera and switched to the still pictures he had stored on it, “I ran his image through the database anyway.”

“Standard operating procedure, I would imagine,” said Leonard.

“We get paid for doing a little bit more than chasing our tails.”

Leonard remained silent.

“Anyway,” continued Ozbek, “we ran it and got hits all over the place. None of them were what we were looking for so we applied some filters to try to narrow it down. The one person I could tie him to was Harvath, so I started there. I ran the subject through the U.S. Navy database, the database at DHS, even the Secret Service.”

“You’ve been a naughty boy.”

Ozbek brushed off the remark. “Then on a real wild hair, I ran him through a different Secret Service database.”

Leonard raised her eyebrows. “Something tells me naughty may not exactly be enough to cover what you’ve been up to.”

“We got an eighty percent match on a repeat visitor to the White House, cleared and badged for all access except the situation room. Want to see his photo?” asked the CIA operative as he brought up the image on his camera.

“Not particularly.”

Ozbek turned the camera around for her to see anyway. “His name is Anthony Nichols. He’s a professor at UVA. He also holds an American passport and flew into Charles De Gaulle Airport from Reagan National two days ago.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” said Leonard.

“I might agree with you,” replied Ozbek, “if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t believe in coincidences.”