Black List sh-11

by Brad Thor

  The Colonel swallowed. “Paris. Spain. Texas.”

  “In Paris, was I the only target?”

  Bremmer shrugged. “You were the primary target.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We knew the woman would be with you and that our best chance would be to take you at the apartment.”

  “So you ordered her killed as well.”

  “She was a threat. Yes.”

  “You also targeted other people I work with,” Harvath stated.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Bremmer replied, “you were on the list.”

  Harvath detected a slight change in the pitch of the man’s voice. It was paired with a microexpression that lasted less than the duration of a camera flash, but there was no mistaking it. The Colonel was either lying or holding something back. “What list are you talking about?”

  “It’s called the Black List. I don’t compile it. I just handle the names once they’ve been added.”

  Harvath conducted his interrogations much like a shark, swimming in wide concentric circles around his subject as he gathered information. The more information he gathered, the closer to the truth he came and the tighter the circles began to get.

  There was blood in the water, though, and it was Bremmer’s. His last answer had been a lie; the tell had reappeared once more. When a subject began to bleed lies, Harvath had to restrain his desire to strike. Sometimes, seeing a fin slice through the waterline was even more psychologically terrifying than having a bite taken out of you.

  “Who’s responsible for the list? Who compiles it?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Bremmer replied. “It’s classified.”

  Harvath smiled. “You and I are way beyond classified, Colonel. What’s more, I think you’re trying to dance with me now, and I already explained what would happen if you did that.” Taking the walkie-talkie back out, he lifted it to his lips and said, “He’s not playing ball. Take out both targets.”

  Bremmer stepped forward. “No, no, no. I’ll tell you.”

  Harvath raised his pistol and pointed it at the man’s head. When Bremmer stepped back, Harvath lifted the radio again and said, “Cease fire. Do not engage targets. Stand by.”

  “It’s a panel of national security people who are close to the President, and it also includes the Attorney General.”

  “Who put my name on it?”

  “You were accused of treason.”

  “That’s not what I asked you,” Harvath said, noting the man’s tell yet again. “Who put my name on the list?”

  “I don’t know. The meetings are way above my pay grade. They’re beyond top secret. I don’t attend. I just handle the list. I’m telling you the truth. You have to believe me.”

  “You’re lying to me and I told you what would happen if you did. Never forget that you could have stopped this,” replied Harvath. He raised the radio once more and said, “You are cleared hot. Fire when ready.”

  “Jesus, no. Please dear God. No,” Bremmer begged.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling on God to help spare your family. You could have saved them, but you chose not to. For as long as you live, don’t you ever forget that because you lied, they died.”

  Tears began to roll down Bremmer’s cheeks as he blurted out “I did it. I added your name to the kill list. Tell your sniper to stand down.”

  “Why?”

  The Colonel’s eyes were wide with fear. “Call off your sniper, for God’s sake, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Tell me now.”

  Bremmer couldn’t believe his ears. He darted his eyes from Harvath to the field hockey match and back again. “Craig Middleton,” he implored. “He’s the person who wanted your name added to the list.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Please. You have to radio your sniper. Tell him not to engage. I’m begging you. He runs a company called Adaptive Technology Solutions. He’s the one behind all of this. I had no choice. Please don’t hurt my daughter. None of this is her fault. Please.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Adaptive Technology Solutions had been the magic phrase. Based on everything Nicholas had shown him on Caroline Romero’s flash drive, by naming the company, Harvath knew that Colonel Chuck Bremmer was telling the truth.

  He spent the next forty-five minutes questioning him in the Suburban. Rhodes had been left in place just in case Bremmer needed a reminder not to stray from his newfound commitment to cooperation. As it turned out, no such reminder had been necessary. It was like opening a faucet wide and letting it run.

  Though the man was loath to do it, he admitted how Middleton had co-opted him and revealed the extent to which he had organized wet work assignments on Middleton’s behalf. He detailed to Harvath how the kill teams had been made up of convicted military personnel, selected because of their extremely aggressive personalities. The list of things they had been convicted of was disgusting. Many were former and even current gang members. That explained some of the tattoos Harvath had seen on the attacker in Spain, as well as tattoos he had seen when prepping two of the corpses in Texas.

  It had made Harvath sick to his stomach to think that he had killed American military personnel, but that was all changed now that he knew the backgrounds of the men who had been sent to kill him.

  As Harvath continued questioning, Bremmer offered up one particularly good piece of news. He explained that the initial attack on Reed Carlton had failed and that as far as he knew, the man had gone to ground and disappeared.

  He confirmed that the attack on the Three Peaks Ranch in Texas had come about after the ranch manager had conducted a Google search that led them to believe the Troll was hiding there. Via their surveillance of Maggie Rose, they had discovered Harvath’s arrival, and that had cemented the decision to launch their attack.

  Bremmer knew that his team had been killed and that Harvath had done the killing. Surprisingly, he made no inquiry as to the location of their bodies. They weren’t people to him, they were pieces on a game board like Monopoly hotels. If you lost a few, you could always buy more. He was a heartless son of a bitch, and it hadn’t slipped Harvath’s notice that the man had been much more vociferous in pleading for his daughter than his wife.

  The Colonel admitted that he had padded the kill list based on orders from Middleton. When pressed for an accounting of all the assignments he had carried out for the ATS Director, five times Bremmer tried to horse-trade for immunity from prosecution. It got so bad that Harvath had to reach back out to Megan Rhodes and threaten not only to shoot Bremmer’s wife and daughter but to take out several of Molly’s teammates as well.

  He was astounded by how quickly the Colonel could go from concern for his daughter to thinking only of himself and of saving his own skin. Had the daughter not been an exploitable, psychological pressure point, they would have had to physically torture him to get him to cooperate. He was that terrified of Middleton and what he had the power to do.

  To that end, Bremmer demanded to know how Harvath was going to insulate him from Middleton’s wrath. Just because Harvath had promised no harm would come to his family didn’t mean that Middleton wouldn’t come after them. When he asked Harvath if he was going to kill Middleton, Harvath changed the subject. It was none of the man’s business. He was lucky to be breathing.

  Once Harvath knew who was behind the kill orders, he wanted to know why.

  “According to Middleton,” Bremmer replied, “your group had been turned. He said you were conspiring with a foreign entity that was planning an imminent terrorist attack on the United States.”

  “And he brought this to you, rather than to the FBI?”

  “He said your people had every agency penetrated; that it had to be handled this way.”

  “And you believed him?” asked Harvath, though he could tell from the look on the man’s face that he didn’t.

  “I didn’t have much choice.” />
  Harvath wanted to rip the man’s throat out. “You are the worst excuse I have ever seen for a human being. You have no code at all. There are barrels of innocent blood on your hands. You know that? There is nothing I want more at this moment than to snap your flabby neck with my bare hands.

  “The people you are responsible for having killed were patriots who repeatedly went into the darkest corners of the globe to battle the most hideous evil you have ever seen. Middleton lied to you, and you knew he was lying, yet rather than do the right thing, you went along with him to save your own fat ass. You’re disgusting.”

  Bremmer tried to hang his head, but Harvath wouldn’t let him. “Don’t you dare, you son of a bitch. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  When the man looked back up, Harvath railed for several more moments before resuming his interrogation. The more questions he asked, the more useless Bremmer proved himself. He had no idea what Middleton was attempting to frame the Carlton Group for, and he was completely unfamiliar with the term “digital Pearl Harbor” or what it might entail.

  The only other thing he could offer was an interesting suggestion about how to get to Middleton. For a paper pusher, it was rather ingenious. Harvath asked a couple of follow-up questions but beyond that, showed no interest in pursuing the man’s suggestion.

  Before letting him go, he gave the corpulent colonel a final warning. “You sent the best you had after me and none of them returned alive. There is nothing you can do to me. I am beyond anyone’s grasp. I also have a lot of friends, several of whom will be keeping an eye on you and your family. If you vary your routine even the slightest bit or try to take a sudden vacation, they have explicit instructions on what to do to you.

  “If you tell anybody about our little talk, if you attempt to contact Craig Middleton, I will do worse than kill your wife and cripple your daughter. I know a very sadistic Bedouin who would love to add a young girl like Molly to his harem, and I’ll make sure you get complete video documentation of it.”

  “No. I promise. I won’t say anything,” Bremmer pleaded.

  “And if I even think one of your kill teams is on my trail, every single bet will be off and I’ll personally come for you and your family. Is that clear?”

  The Colonel nodded. Harvath cut him loose and motioned for him to get out of the truck. Casey watched from the front seat as Bremmer walked back to his car.

  “Do you think we can trust him?” she asked.

  Harvath, who was also watching, shook his head. “No. But we really don’t have any choice.”

  “Listening to him speak, I wanted to put a bullet in him. I still do, for what he did to Riley.”

  “I probably couldn’t have stopped you. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “Because you told me this was the right way to handle this and I trust you.”

  It was a frank and honest admission, one that he respected her for.

  “When this is all over, though,” she added, “I’m not the one who promised to let him live.”

  “I understand.”

  “Does that also mean you’ll understand if Megan and I decide to do something about it?”

  Harvath held her gaze for a moment. “I can’t tell you what to do, one way or the other. Do I think the guy deserves to be croaked? Absolutely. But he also has a wife and daughter.”

  “How about the operators from your group who were killed?” Casey asked. “How many of them had spouses and children?”

  “Most of them.”

  “So?”

  “So, I think Bremmer should be made to pay, without killing him.”

  “Are you moralizing now?”

  “Maybe,” Harvath replied. “In fact, yeah. I am. At some point, there has to be a process. Putting a gun against his head and pulling the trigger is no better than what he had done to Riley and the others.”

  “At least justice would be served.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Casey looked away. “I’m done talking about this.”

  It was a convenient way to dump out of the argument, but Harvath let it go. She was going to do whatever she wanted to in the end.

  What mattered now was getting to Craig Middleton and preventing whatever he had planned. Though it was fraught with more than a few pitfalls, Bremmer had given them a halfway decent suggestion as to the first part. Harvath just had to figure out how to make sure they weren’t walking straight into a trap.

  CHAPTER 56

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The trick for Reed Carlton wasn’t finding the men he needed, it was keeping them sober, or relatively sober, long enough to do their job. The operation was an exact duplicate of one he and Tommy Banks had run more than thirty years ago.

  “Look for the Barbour jackets” was a piece of advice given to many Western intelligence operatives, especially in the early 1980s. The famous green, British all-weather jackets had many pockets to hide equipment, were stylish without being too flashy and quite popular with people in the intel game. If you ever found yourself in trouble, recruits were taught, look for the Barbour jackets. Chances were, you’d find a friendly.

  The Soviets, it was rumored, had heard of this advice, and all their agents, from Bangkok to Berlin, had been taught to keep their eyes peeled for the low-key yet distinct outerwear. Whether this was true or simply Cold War–era paranoia, Banks wasn’t certain, but he had decided to play it up. It could only help his plan, and certainly couldn’t hurt.

  He and Carlton had been working on a very sensitive operation behind the Iron Curtain. They had a highly placed Hungarian intelligence agent who wanted to defect and had been dispatched to Budapest to make contact with him. Their job was to ascertain if he was the real deal and, if so, to gauge his value and then mount an operation to get him out of Hungary and into Austria, where he’d be fully debriefed in Vienna before being flown back to the United States.

  The two CIA operatives arrived in Budapest separately, and each was set upon by teams of Hungarian secret service surveillance teams augmented by Russian KGB. It was almost as if they knew they were coming. Both of the Americans sensed a trap, but they had little choice except to move forward.

  They tried a series of different gambits to shake the surveillance teams, none of which worked. Someone, somewhere, was very invested in their not succeeding in their assignment. It was Banks who finally came up with the ruse that allowed them to give their pursuers the slip. Decades later, it was the same ruse that Carlton planned to employ, though not to give their pursuers the slip but rather to draw them into the open.

  Washington, D.C.’s Union Station was a busy commuter hub. It was crowded during both the morning and evening rush hours, but the evening’s rush was different. Instead of people pouring out of the station, anxious to get to their jobs, people were pouring into it, and their end-of-the-day, exhausted-from-work pace was less intense. While some moved with energy and purpose, many moved slowly and en masse, as if on some sort of collective autopilot.

  Assuming his former mentor had been surrounded with digital tripwires, Carlton had chosen to e-mail Banks. He’d been careful, though. He wanted to pique the other side’s interest, but he had to do so without appearing obvious. He was, after all, setting a trap of his own. The last thing he wanted to do was to scare them off. He needed them to believe that they had the upper hand and were outsmarting him.

  He also needed to make sure that Banks understood the message. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. Banks remembered the Budapest operation like it was yesterday.

  Carlton found the two men near a homeless shelter in Baltimore. Both men were interested in making a couple hundred bucks, especially such easy money. After getting them cleaned up, Carlton bought them a meal, a new set of clothes, and drove them into D.C. to run them through what they were expected to do.

  He then used them to load a dead drop for Banks with final instructions. After that, Carlton took them for coffee, controlling the amount of “flavoring”
each would be allowed from a bottle of whiskey they had picked up on the way in from Baltimore. He wanted them to eat once more before the operation, but neither man was interested. Carlton figured he was lucky enough to have made it this far and worked on keeping the men sober enough to function.

  At the appointed hour, wearing a false beard, a hat, glasses, and clothing that made him appear much heavier than he was, Reed Carlton entered Union Station, took up his perch, and waited.

  The two homeless men proved to be more reliable than he had hoped and followed shortly after. No doubt, the men were eager for the rest of their money, and the only way they’d get it was to finish the job properly.

  From where he sat, Carlton had a commanding view of what was about to go down. The thing he worried about the most was the cameras. If the two homeless men didn’t walk exactly as he had shown them, and someone panned in and got a good enough look at one of their faces, it would be over before any of it got started. So far, though, the men seemed to be doing everything exactly as they’d rehearsed. All they were waiting for now was for their star to arrive.

  Banks would have spent most of the afternoon conducting elaborate SDRs. If he hadn’t lost his touch, which Carlton had every reason to believe he hadn’t, he might have even lost his surveillance team once or twice. If he did, the plan was to allow them to reacquire his trail, but to do so in a manner that appeared as if it was entirely of their doing. When Banks did make for Union Station, it was to be at the very last minute. They couldn’t afford to give the other side any time to set up a trap. The only way the con worked was to keep it moving and never give the other guys a chance to catch their breath. It would be a physically and mentally grueling day for everyone involved but especially for a man Banks’ age.

  The station was teaming with commuters when the old spymaster entered wearing a wide-brimmed Orvis hat, his old Barbour Beaufort jacket, and carrying a battered leather satchel. According to plan, he purchased a ticket on the high-speed Acela line to New York City and then milled with the crowds and made his way toward the restrooms.