Full Black - Brad Thor [61]
He also didn’t want to go anywhere until he knew what Mansoor’s prognosis was. If the guy was going to be ready for interrogation again soon, Chase wanted to be there for it. He knew the most about the network and he wanted to help guide some of the questions, if not do a portion of the interrogation himself. Riley was going to stick around and wait for the prognosis as well. Even though she’d be handing him over to a new doctor, she still felt responsible for him.
Harvath was the only one without a reason to stay in Iceland. The only thing he could think of was that if Karami or Sabah popped up somewhere in Europe, he’d be a lot closer and get to them a lot faster from Iceland than he would from D.C.
Something told him that Europe was where the puck had been. America was where he needed to skate to now. That’s where the puck was going to be. He couldn’t help but think that if Aazim Aleem had come to Chicago in advance of those attacks, and had planned on sending Chase to New York while he went to L.A. to oversee additional strikes, the Uppsala cell leader would have to do the same thing. He had nothing to back that up, though. It was just a gut feeling.
His gut also told him that despite what she had said in the barn back in Sweden, he shouldn’t give up on Riley Turner. It could take days for them to run the battery of tests on Mansoor. This could turn out to be the perfect window he’d been looking for to get to know her better and for her to get to know him.
Coming off the deaths of the assault team, though, the timing wasn’t right. Men had died on their operation. She hadn’t been at the scene, but she was part of the team. It was a loss for all of them.
It was also probably just as well. The Old Man was going to want Harvath to render a full debrief. There was also the issue of monitoring the Swedish investigation. Knowing the Old Man, he’d already reached out to the authorities in Sweden with a piece of intelligence that pointed the finger of responsibility for what had happened at a completely different foreign intelligence service. Whatever service he chose to implicate, he would do so in such a way as to not be airtight, but to be enough to convince the Swedes there was little doubt. It also probably served one of the many other ops the Old Man was running at the moment. He often likened running an intelligence service to dropping pebbles in a still pool. You had to know not only how far out every ripple would radiate, but which ones would intersect and with how much force. The man was truly a savant.
Was it the best way to treat an aligned nation like Sweden? No, but it was unfortunately the way the game had to be played. In the world of three-dimensional chess, checkers players found themselves swept from the board pretty fast. You were either steps ahead of everyone, even your allies, or they were steps ahead of you. The Carlton Group had been created to help catapult America back into the lead.
Considering the Old Man’s attention to detail, Harvath wasn’t surprised when moments after stepping off the jet his cell phone rang.
“Yes, sir,” he said, moving aside for the ambulance team that was transporting Mansoor and his stretcher down the stairs.
The Old Man’s voice was as clear as if he were standing right next to Harvath. “What’s the situation there?” he asked.
“They’re transferring Massachusetts to the ambulance now,” Harvath replied, referring to Mansoor Aleem by his operational code name.
“Any change in his condition?”
“Negative.”
“Are you sure he’s not faking it? That’s textbook for these guys, you know.”
Harvath was well aware that they were taught to feign illness, severe if possible, to avoid interrogation for as long as possible. They were also taught to inflict physical harm on themselves and to