Free Apostle by Brad Thor

sight.”
    “What a scam,” replied Harvath.
    “TIA,” said Hoyt as he motioned for Harvath to hand him his bag.
    Removing his laptop, Harvath handed Hoyt the pack. “I’m going to need a receipt for that,” he joked.
    “You can talk to our accountant when she gets back from mahjong. Anything else?”
    “You wouldn’t happen to have a holster for the 19 I’m carrying, would you?”
    Hoyt riffled through a few items stacked on one of the shelves in the safe and came up with a Blackhawk Check Six concealable leather holster. He tossed it to Harvath, closed the door, and put the wardrobe back together.
    Harvath pulled the Glock from his waistband and set it on the bed. After he had slid the holster onto his belt he replaced his weapon and looked in the bathroom mirror to see if he was printing. Confident no one could see the weapon beneath his untucked shirt, he turned back to Hoyt. “I also need a secure link for email.”
    “I’ve got one and Greg’s got one. If that jarhead’s not watching war porn, you can probably get online in his room.”
    “Thanks,” said Harvath.
    Hoyt waved at him with his cigarette as he went back to whatever it was he’d been doing on his computer.
    Gallagher’s room was two doors down and the door was ajar. Harvath knocked, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open, he stepped inside.
    Scanning a room when he entered was second nature for Harvath. Years of training had wired him to take a quick and detailed mental picture of what he saw.
    For all intents and purposes, Gallagher’s room looked like it belonged to a very neat, very well-organized person. The bed was perfectly made. Papers were stacked neatly on his desk next to his computer. The items on his shelves were in perfect order and precisely spaced. Harvath guessed that a drill instructor could have bounced a quarter off Gallagher’s bed, taken a ruler to the spacing of the items on his shelves, and run a white glove over the door frame and come away with nothing to fault.
    The room reflected a picture-perfect Marine—a man who had his act entirely together. That’s what made the last thing Harvath noticed that much more unsettling. In Gallagher’s wastebasket were eleven empty beer bottles. Unless Baba G had been hosting a party last night, it looked like he might have been hitting the booze pretty good. Harvath hoped the man wasn’t being haunted by any demons from his past.
    With Khan having been moved, this assignment had already taken one bad turn. It would probably take several more before it was over. That was just the nature of this business. But the last thing Harvath needed to worry about was if Greg Gallagher was going to be able to perform at 100 percent.
    He was going to have to keep an eye on him. One screw-up, and good people could be killed.

CHAPTER 11
    A LEXANDRIA , V IRGINIA

    “I really appreciate your seeing me so late,” Elise Campbell said as she stepped inside the small Pitt Street town house. “We’ve been on the road a couple of days and I had some paperwork to catch up on after my shift ended tonight.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” replied Carolyn Leonard as she took Campbell’s coat and hung it on a peg near the door. “I remember the hours. How about some coffee?”
    “Do you have anything stronger?”
    “I do,” said Leonard with a smile. “Come on in.”
    Carolyn Leonard was a fit and attractive woman, ten years older than Elise Campbell. She had red hair and a quiet, yet powerful presence. Leonard was one of those people you might not notice the moment you walked into a room, but once you did, you couldn’t help but be impressed by the confidence she exuded. It was a trait that, in her personal life, seemed to intimidate most of the men she met. The only ones able to get beyond who she was and what she had done for a living were other law enforcement officers. The fact that she had been the head U.S. Secret Service agent for the previous president of the United