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Harvath played the entire scene across the panorama of his mind’s eye for the millionth time. It was all there—all so vivid—the boom of the rocket-propelled grenade leaving its launcher; the whoosh as it blistered through the air en route to its target, and finally the deafening explosion as the RPG connected with the trunk and gas tank of his car and the vehicle went up in a billowing fireball.
    In a blinding flash, his Yemen operation had gone from a resounding success to a spectacular failure. Aazim, who’d been in the trunk, would have purchased Harvath’s group some much-needed goodwill with the CIA, but it was too late for that now.
    Staring out the window, he caught a glimpse of his reflection. Although he had crossed the threshold into his forties, he still looked as if he was in his early thirties. His sand-colored hair showed no traces of gray; his handsome, green-eyed face bore few if any lines, and his five-foot-ten body was in better physical shape than those of men half his age. To see the toll the years had taken, one would have to look elsewhere.
    By most measures, Harvath was a success. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, he had made his vocation his vacation. He was a man of particular talents who was deeply committed to his country. Those talents and that commitment had propelled him to the pinnacle of his career. The cost to his personal life was something he didn’t like to think about.
    Nevertheless, ever since Yemen his relationships had been very much at the forefront of his mind. But it wasn’t romantic relationships that he had been thinking about. Someone had professionally betrayed him, someone with intimate knowledge of his organization, someone close.
    It was precisely because of this apparent leak that Harvath had requested permission to run this assignment himself. Somewhere there was a leak, and until that leak was plugged, there was a very short list of people Harvath could trust.
    At the top of that list was a thirty-year CIA veteran named Reed Carlton. Carlton had watched as bureaucracy and inertia devoured what had once been the best intelligence agency in the world. As management became more concerned with promotions and covering its tail, and as the Agency’s leadership atrophied, Carlton could see the writing on the wall. By the 1990s, when the CIA stopped conducting unilateral espionage operations altogether, he was disappointed, but not at all surprised.
    While there were countless patriotic men and women still left at Langley, the institutionalized bureaucracy made it all but impossible for them to effectively do their jobs. The bureaucracy had become risk-averse. Even more troubling was the fact that the CIA now subcontracted its actual spy work to other countries’ intelligence services. They happily handed over huge sums of cash in the hopes that other countries would do the dangerous heavy lifting and would share whatever they developed.
    It was the biggest open secret in the intelligence world and it was both humiliating and beneath America’s dignity.
    Once the secret was out that the CIA was no longer truly in the spy business, Carlton knew he had to do something. It was then that he began recruiting former Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations personnel and stood up his own venture—the Carlton Group. It was modeled upon the World War II intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. It was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only—to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.
    Frustrated with the CIA’s reluctance to do its job, the Department of Defense eventually turned to Carlton to provide private intelligence services in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group’s operatives had performed dramatically, developing extensive human networks across both countries. They penetrated multiple terrorist cells and delivered exceptional, A1 intelligence that resulted in huge successes for American forces, not to