State Of The Union

Harvath could read not only the pain from his injury, but also the stress that was written across the man’s face and replied, “When I was training with the Secret Service before I moved to the White House, I worked a counterfeiting case where some Colombian was bringing bogus fifties and hundreds into the country. The bills were almost perfect. He’d even run them through his clothes dryer at home along with a couple of hundred poker chips to give them just the right look. We were going crazy trying to nail him. He wasn’t considered a very big fish by the higher-ups, and therefore the amount of resources allocated to the case were less than what we would have liked to have seen.”

“But you found a way to pop him anyway, didn’t you?” said DeWolfe.

Harvath smiled and replied, “There’s something about flying into Miami International that automatically makes people forget about everything else. I don’t know if it’s the sea breeze, the palm trees, the beautiful women, or what, but this guy cleared passport control, then customs, and went outside and boarded one of the Thrifty buses to go get his big fancy four-door rental car.”

“So? What does any of that have to do with this car here?”

Harvath was still smiling as he responded, “Thrifty and Dollar both use the same company for fleet management.”

“What the hell is fleet management?”

“Something so innocuous sounding that they’ve been able to post it on top of their rental agreements for the last several years without anybody asking any questions.”

“I still have no idea what it is.”

“A Canadian company called Air IQ has contracts with rental car companies to install transmitters, like LoJacks, which allows all the movements of all the cars in their fleets to be tracked via satellite.”

Suddenly, DeWolfe was with the program. “Are you telling me that Dollar knows where this car has been?”

“Not Dollar,” responded Harvath, “but Air IQ. I need you to get a hold of them, give them the VIN number and find out everything you can about where this car has been in the last two days.”

Chapter 55

A graveyard?” said Harvath.

DeWolfe scanned through the printout that had been faxed to one of Fairfax patrol cars. “That’s what it says here. Two visits to Congressional Cemetery over the past two nights.”

“How’d he get a car in there at night? Don’t they close the gates?”

“I asked one of the SIOC guys about that and he told me that the place is open around the clock.”

“What about security?”

“Nonexistent.”

“And dead men tell no tales,” said Harvath as the pieces began to come together. Congressional Cemetery was only about three miles from the White House and half that distance from the Capitol. In fact, every major city the Russians had put sleepers in probably had some sort of cemetery close to its most populated area. Suddenly, the sleepers buying flowers didn’t seem so strange anymore. “I want the exact coordinates of where that car was parked. Have the NEST team ready to move and get SIOC to pull some real time thermal imaging of the cemetery from the National Reconnaissance Office.”

“TheNRO? Why not use the HRT bird?” asked DeWolfe. “It has second generation FLIR and can be over the target area in less than fifteen minutes.”

“No. No helicopters. Tell SIOC it has to be satellite. If Draegar’s there, I don’t want him to have any clue that we’re coming. He’s switched cars now, which means he’s being even more careful. Find out the make, model, color-everything about the car Patrick drove-and put out an APB. If anyone sees it, they call it into SIOC, but under no circumstances are they to try to stop it. Got it?”

“Got it. What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got a score to settle for an old friend.”

As the MH-6 Little Bird helicopter raced them due east for the Anacostia Naval Station, Harvath explained that Congressional Cemetery got its name not because one necessarily had to be a member of Congress to be buried there, but rather because of its proximity to the Capitol and the government’s frequent use of it over the last two hundred years.

Alexandra was not completely unfamiliar with the Congressional Cemetery and made mention of the fact that the gravesite of former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover had been a favorite clandestine meeting spot for KGB operatives throughout the seventies and eighties. As interesting as that fact was, Harvath had a feeling they weren’t going to find Draegar just leaning against Hoover’s tombstone.

Landing at Anacostia, Harvath received word that the NRO satellite had failed to locate any human heat signatures in the cemetery. They did, though, pick up a warm car engine not too far from where Air IQ had placed Draegar’s rental over the last two nights.