by Brad Thor
“It doesn’t matter anyway. The men I’m using have had exceptional training and the proof is in the pudding. They’ve taken care of Carlton and every one of his people on the list.”
“Everyone but Harvath,” Middleton corrected.
The Colonel wasn’t interested in rehashing the failed Paris operation. They had already had that pissing contest. “They’ll get Harvath.”
“They’d better.”
Bremmer changed the subject. “In the meantime, I’m still waiting on you to give me the whereabouts of that dwarf.”
“You’ll get it soon enough.”
The Colonel kept his eyes locked on Middleton as he raised his coffee mug and took a sip. The dislike between the two men was palpable. Lowering the mug, he walked over and deactivated the lock mechanism on the door.
“I guess that’s it then,” said Middleton as he rose from his seat. “Keep me up to speed on Spain.”
Bremmer stood back and allowed the man to pass. Pausing before leaving the office, Middleton allowed a smile to crease his mouth. “I hear your daughter’s field hockey team is doing pretty well this year. She’s at Fredericksburg Academy, isn’t she?”
The Colonel’s frosty glare intensified. “You stay the fuck away from my family,” he said, slamming the SCIF door and securing himself inside.
The smile on Middleton’s face broadened. He loved pushing Bremmer’s buttons. The man would do exactly as he was told. He had entirely too much to lose and Middleton had every shred of it buttoned down. Blackmail was an art form and Middleton a master at its execution.
What was about to happen next, though, was where the real art would unfold. Taking out the Carlton Group was only the first step. America was about to see an attack like it had never seen before. And once the dust had settled, things would never be the same again.
CHAPTER 17
FAIRFAX COUNTY
NORTHERN VIRGINIA
Reed Carlton had escaped his burning home with nothing more than a green Barbour jacket, a change of clothes, and a bugout bag he kept behind the panel in his bedroom closet. Ready to go at a moment’s notice, it contained cash, false ID and a credit card, a clean laptop, an encrypted IronKey thumb drive, three clean cell phones, maps, a suppressor, and a Les Baer 1911 pistol.
Staying off the main roads, it took Carlton over three hours to hike to the storage unit where he kept a green 1980s Jeep Cherokee loaded with additional supplies. Its license plates traced back to a dummy LLC and dead-ended with an aging attorney in a small Richmond law firm.
Avoiding the major thoroughfares, the Old Man drove northwest toward Winchester. As a county seat and home of Shenandoah University, there were plenty of affordable accommodations to be found. He picked a hotel with a business center, checked in under an alias, and got to work.
The Internet was like a vast pool of water and the best way not to be noticed on it was to avoid breaking the surface. Carlton knew that it was better to skim. If he had to take a plunge, he was well aware that the deeper he dove, the more attention he was going to draw to himself.
He started by surfing the websites of local newspapers. He didn’t enter any search terms, he merely clicked on links that led him from story to story, website to website. Eventually, he found mention of the fire. It was a short, “breaking news”–style article that reported only the name of the town and how many fire companies had been called in to respond to the blaze. He needed more information.
The easiest thing would have been to call his office, but only an amateur would have risked such exposure. Whoever had managed to kill his security team, lock him in his own safe room, and disable the alarm and sprinkler systems would surely be monitoring everything that was tied to him until they had confirmation of his death. And when they learned that he hadn’t died in the fire, then the noose was going to get a lot tighter. For the moment, he had the benefit of no one knowing that he was still alive, and he needed to leverage that advantage for all it was worth.
Logging off the business center’s computer, he poured himself another cup of coffee in the lobby and headed back out to his Jeep. He drove south on I-81 until he found a busy enough truck stop and pulled in.
After gassing up, he parked and walked inside the restaurant, where he took a small table and ordered breakfast. As he waited for his food to arrive, he fired up his laptop and plugged in the encrypted IronKey drive. The rapidity with which technology was advancing never ceased to astound him. The IronKey was an off-the-shelf device, available to anyone, built to military grade specs with 256-bit encryption and a self-destruct feature that kicked in if the correct password wasn’t entered within ten tries. Simply amazing.
Bringing up a list of cell phone numbers labeled “Car Club,” Carlton tried to decide which of his people to reach out to first. He settled on Frank Coyne, a former Delta Force sergeant major. Coyne was exceptional at gathering intel and had worked under him at the CIA before he was hired on at the Carlton Group. Removing one of the clean cell phones from his bugout bag, he turned it on and dialed the man at home.
The phone rang, but Coyne didn’t pick up and Carlton was dropped into voice mail. It was possible that Coyne was screening calls and, not recognizing the number, didn’t answer. The Old Man didn’t bother leaving a message.
Choosing the phone’s SMS feature, he typed a short text message—Blue#—to let Coyne know he was about to call him and that he should pick up. He waited two minutes and then dialed. It rang several times before ending up in voice mail. Carlton disconnected the call and looked back at his list.
He tried another operator named Douglas with the same results—no answer at home and no answer on his cell. He was 0 for 2 and a bad feeling was beginning to grow in the pit of his stomach. Not only had he been targeted but now he couldn’t reach two of his top people. He decided to pull out all the stops.
POL, or proof of life, was a term used in kidnappings as a prerequisite to a ransom being paid. Carlton had trained his people to utilize the term but had disguised it in order to protect its true meaning. He now went through his list and group texted his operators the message Earnings Report: Blue Petroleum, Oil, & Lubricant. It was both a warning that an imminent threat existed, as well as a call for them to report back to him via the cell phone he was using.
The phone should have begun vibrating instantly with responses. Not a single one came; not even from Scot Harvath, who, though overseas, had his phone with him 24/7.
Jumping on the truck stop’s free WiFi, he enabled the flash drive’s secure browsing feature. Using the Tor anonymity network, or the Onion Router as it was known, to help hide his location, he was routed through multiple servers worldwide before winding up at his final destination, Skype.
Carlton entered his name and password and then hit the sign-in button. He was greeted with the message, Can’t sign in. Wrong password. He tried two more times before coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t an accident. Somehow, someone had frozen him out and was denying him access. No one but his top people knew about his Skype account, or that it was his primary means of communicating with his operatives. That meant that his organization had been penetrated to its core.
There was only one reason to freeze him out of Skype. Someone wanted to cut off the team’s primary means of communication with one another. The fact that none of his people were responding to his calls and texts told him someone had wanted to make sure they were all isolated in order to take them out. It was a “night of the long knives,” and Carlton could only assume the worst.
But the worst was something he always planned for. PACE was an acronym for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. Carlton surfed to an assortment of predetermined Internet dating sites and left messages for his people just in case.
After shutting down his computer, he paid his bill and followed two truckers into the men’s room. At the urinal, he played the chatty retiree and was able to ascertain which direction they were headed, which rigs they were driving, and what th
eir final destinations were. With that information in hand, the rest was just a matter of course.
Whoever he was up against was extremely adept at what they did. At some point, they were going to place him in that truck stop. Whether they back-traced him through his attempt to access his Skype account or the use of the cell phone didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to fool himself into believing he was safe. He needed to buy himself more time, or at least throw them off track.
He located the rig of the man driving to Bakersfield, sealed the cell phone in a Ziplock bag, and duct-taped it underneath good and tight. Until the battery ran out or it was discovered, the phone would leave a digital trail of bread crumbs, which would hopefully take his pursuers in a completely different direction.
Back at his hotel in Winchester, Carlton spent the rest of the day and into the evening on the computer in the business center, once again link-walking. But instead of searching for details on his attack, he looked for any stories that might be about attacks or “accidents” involving his operators. He was devastated to find multiple references, including one about a deadly firefight in Paris, which, while not mentioning names, had to have been about Harvath and the Delta Force operative he’d been sent to meet, Riley Turner.
Everything Carlton had built was destroyed; the center of his operation, the very backbone, had been ripped out. He should have felt lucky to be alive, but he didn’t. He was beside himself at having lost so many good operators, many of whom were like family. He was also angry, and that anger was turning into rage. He was all too familiar with the feeling and knew that if he didn’t control it, it would not only control him, it would consume him. He was too old and too experienced to allow his emotions to run roughshod and dictate his course of action. He needed to be cold and calculating; as cold as he had ever been, if not more so.
Returning to his room, he took a shower, shaved, and then drew the blackout drapes and stretched out on his bed. He hadn’t slept since escaping the fire. He needed to rest.
He was exhausted, and it didn’t take him long to fall asleep. But even as he slept, his subconscious was still working, trying to find answers, trying to find a way forward.
It was just after four in the morning when he awoke. He felt more tired than when he had gone to sleep, but he had something he didn’t have when he lay down. He had a plan.
Looking over at the clock on the nightstand, he realized he’d have to move fast. There was a very narrow window for what he was about to do.
CHAPTER 18
TEXAS
Nicholas probably shouldn’t have brought her back to the ranch. In fact, he shouldn’t even have let her into his SUV, but the picture she had removed from her purse and pressed up against the window had changed everything.
It showed her hugging her older sister, Caroline, and the two of them laughing. But it wasn’t just the picture that had changed his mind, it was the look on her face. She was absolutely terrified. It wasn’t a show, it was genuine, and so he had unlocked the Denali’s door and let her in.
Nina had the same high cheekbones and deep green eyes as her sister, but her hair was jet black, probably dyed, Nicholas figured, and she wore a tiny stud through her left nostril.
Exiting the garage, he began a long SDR to make sure they weren’t being followed. Right away, Nina began talking, but Nicholas stopped her. It wasn’t safe. Not yet.
He asked if she had any electronics with her. All she had was a cell phone; she took it out and showed it to him. As they passed the Donna Reservoir, he had her pull the battery and throw all the pieces out the window into the water. She did exactly as he asked while he continued to drive.
Just before the Rio Grande, he changed direction and headed west, and shortly afterward changed direction again and headed north up through Las Milpas and back toward the Three Peaks Ranch.
As they drove, they talked, or more specifically Nina talked, and Nicholas interrupted from time to time to ask questions.
She explained how a package from a D.C.-area lingerie shop had arrived and that in it were a couple of bra and panty sets, a tiny flash drive, and a recordable greeting card with a message from her sister.
The message warned Nina not to plug the drive into any computer but to wait until she found Nicholas, and then Caroline quickly explained how to contact him. There wasn’t a lot of recording space, so she had to be fast. She told Nina that she was in trouble and that she loved her. That was it.
Nina tried repeatedly to contact her sister after receiving the message, but to no avail. Very soon thereafter, she had a bad feeling that she was being watched, both at her apartment and at work, and so decided to go to ground.
After calling in sick, she had holed up at the home of a wealthy Mexican family for whom she pet-sat from time to time. They were back in Reynosa until at least Christmas and had left their Hide-A-Key in the usual spot. She knew from past experience that they never bothered to set the alarm.
She was a sharp woman with good instincts, and Nicholas was impressed. He was equally impressed when she glanced back again at the dogs and said, “Ovcharkas, right?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m a vet tech.”
“Do you see a lot of Caucasian Sheepdogs in south Texas?” he had asked.
Nina’s mood seem to brighten, if just for a moment, as her thoughts were distracted from her concern over her sister, and she smiled. “Not really,” she replied. “I just like dogs. Especially big ones.”
After ascertaining that she had burned the greeting card, per Caroline’s instructions, and watching as she pulled the flash drive from the left cup of her bra to show to him, he decided to keep their conversation light for the rest of the drive.
He asked personal questions in an effort to help keep her mind off her sister. It worked for a while, until he ran out of things to ask. He wasn’t as socially skilled as he would have liked and felt awkward not being able to come up with anything else to talk about.
They fell into an uncomfortable silence that lasted the rest of the way back to the ranch. He was relieved when they finally arrived at the property and suspected that she was too.
At the guesthouse, he gave Nina her pick of the remaining bedrooms and placed a call to Maggie Rose asking if she could bring over some additional women’s size 6 clothing.
Fifteen minutes later, Maggie dropped off a small bag, smiled, and left Nicholas alone. She didn’t ask who the clothes were for or who was in the far bathroom taking a shower. He appreciated her professionalism.
Nicholas placed the items in Nina’s room and then retreated to the kitchen. They tried to open the flash drive right away, but it was encrypted. Despite working with Nina for several hours trying to come up with the password, they had no luck. He needed a break.
∗ ∗ ∗
Cooking was one of his greatest passions, providing a Zen-like experience in which he could lose himself. In fact, when Nina emerged from the guest room and entered the kitchen, he didn’t even notice she was there.
Standing on a stepstool with his eyes closed and his nose in a glass of recently opened chardonnay, he was like nothing she had ever seen. For several moments, she just watched him. Finally, she asked, “Blackberries, apricots, or green apple?”
“Excuse me?” Nicholas replied, surprised to find her standing there.
“Somebody once told me that if you wanted to sound like you knew about wine, all you had to do was say you found a hint of blackberries, apricots, or green apples when you breathe one in like that.”
Nicholas smiled and set his glass down. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Oh, yeah. Then you roll out the gardening terms.”
“Gardening terms?”
Nina thought for a moment and then gave him her list. “Grassy, oaky, mossy, or peaty.”
“I think those last two are for scotch.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Nicholas affirmed.
“I’m obviously not an expert.”
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“Do you like wine?”
“Yes.”
Picking up the bottle in his tiny hands, he poured a glass for her. “That’s all that matters,” he said as he placed the bottle back on the counter, slid the glass toward her and then picked his back up. “To Caroline.”
Nina stood where she was. “They killed her, didn’t they? She had the lingerie store mail me the package and then she ran out of the mall and got hit by a car. It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
Nicholas had no idea. They had talked about Caroline’s death multiple times since he had picked her up in McAllen, but he just didn’t have enough information.
“They aren’t going to stop until they kill me too,” Nina continued.
“No,” said Nicholas. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. Okay? I know it’s hard, but you need to stay positive.”
She didn’t respond, so the little man repeated his toast.
Slowly, she reached for her glass and said, “To Caroline.”
They each took a sip.
Nicholas waited a beat and then asked, “So?”
“So what?”
“Blackberries, apricots, or green apples?”
A reluctant smile spread across her lips. “I don’t know, green apples?”
“Definitely green apples,” he agreed.
Whether it was the wine or the fact that he was in his element in the kitchen, Nicholas was much more successful at keeping their conversation upbeat this time. He talked about two of his favorite things, food and wine, and Nina seemed genuinely interested. Before she knew it, dinner was ready.
Nina helped serve and they sat down to a meal of roast chicken with thyme and garlic mashed potatoes. Comfort food, something she was sorely in need of.
After dinner, they returned to the flash drive and Nicholas opened another bottle of wine to “help him think.” He was throwing every tool in his toolbox at it, but the damn drive wouldn’t open.
