by Brad Thor
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Harvath replied as he placed his finger on the phone’s screen and swiped to the next photo. “I’ve got pictures of each of the shooters.”
He watched as McGreevy looked at each photo and then went back and looked at all of them again. If he recognized any of the men, he was very good at hiding it. Handing the phone back, he said, “Sorry. I can’t help you.”
“I think you can, and I need you to do me a favor.”
“You’ve got pretty big balls to come in here, show me pictures like that, and ask me for a favor.”
Harvath understood where the man was coming from. “I get it. You don’t know me. You did know Riley Turner, though.”
The man began to protest, but Harvath held up his hand to stop him. “For the record, you haven’t admitted anything. I’m coming to my own conclusions, which is something I need you to do as well.”
“Such as?”
“We’ve already passed the three-minute mark and I’m still here, so I’m guessing you’ve grasped that I’m the real deal. What you haven’t made up your mind about is if I’m one of the good guys or one of the bad guys.”
McGreevy smiled. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re one of the good guys and that I should trust you.”
“No,” said Harvath, and then dropped the name of another Athena Team member: “Gretchen Casey will tell you.”
Instantly, the smile fell from the man’s face. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.
“You’ve already got my call sign. Call Casey. If you can’t reach her, try Julie Ericsson, Megan Rhodes, or Alex Cooper.”
McGreevy looked like someone had just walked up and hit him with a pipe. The man sitting across from him had just rattled off the names of four operators from one of the most clandestine programs in the history of the United States military. “I don’t know any of those people, and if I did, why would I tell you? You won’t even give me your real name.”
“For good reason,” Harvath replied. “Whoever is responsible for Riley Turner’s death is trying to kill me. And for all I know, Casey, Ericsson, Rhodes, and Cooper may also be on their list. That’s why I need to talk to them.”
The man leaned back in his chair and exhaled. Harvath could sense the wheels spinning in his mind. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
McGreevy cocked an eyebrow at him. “Oh, you do. What’s that?”
“I think you’re trying to make up your mind. I think professionally you’re obligated to pick up that phone and place a call to someone back at the Unit. I understand that. For all intents and purposes, you need to assume I’m a threat and that I am here with bad intentions. You don’t want to be the guy who sells anybody out. That’s not how it works. We all cover each other’s backs.”
“We?”
Harvath nodded. “I’ve been on multiple assignments with those women. They know me. They’ll vouch for me. You only need to contact one of them, describe me to her, give her my call sign, or put me on the phone, and everything will be good. To do that, though, means circumventing your chain of command and doing me, a complete stranger, a favor.”
“You’re right, it would be a big favor, and I don’t even do little favors for people I don’t know.”
“I think in my case you’re going to make an exception.”
“Why is that?”
Harvath kept a close eye on the man’s face as he prepared to drop a final name on him. Over the summer, six Athena Project members had been tasked to work with him in chasing down a deadly terror ring. As they narrowed in on a team of suicide bombers, one had detonated. Rubble was strewn everywhere and the building he’d been in front of began to collapse.
Harvath held up his hands and showed them to McGreevy. “I dug Nikki Rodriguez out of that building in Amsterdam with my own hands. And as I was pulling her out, she was pulling somebody else out, even though she had a piece of metal sticking through her chest that had collapsed her right lung.”
McGreevy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Where’d you go after that?”
“We followed the terror cell back here to the States.”
“Where specifically?”
“Chicago.”
“Why wouldn’t you want me to go to the top with this?” McGreevy asked. “If your story checks out, I’m sure they’ll put you in touch with whomever you want. Hell, they might even be able to help you, but I have to call this in.”
Harvath had him. He knew it. He just needed to pull him the rest of the way into his camp. All McGreevy needed was the right reason, which was what Harvath gave him, “What if making that call sets off a chain reaction that puts Casey, or all of them in even greater danger? Shouldn’t they be allowed to decide what the next step should be?”
CHAPTER 49
Dan McGreevy had texted Casey and Rhodes simultaneously with a terse, three-word message. Get over here. Within twenty minutes, they were standing in the doorway of his office.
Megan Rhodes saw Harvath first. “Look who’s here,” she began excitedly but she fell silent when she saw the look on his face.
Gretchen Casey sensed something was wrong immediately. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s about Riley.”
It was identification enough. Dan McGreevy ushered the women in and offered up his office for them to talk in private. Anticipating Harvath’s next words, he held up his hand and stopped him. “At some point, the powers that be need to know what happened. All I am going to say is that it should be sooner rather than later. Other than that, I’ll leave it up to the three of you to decide.”
“What the hell happened?” Casey asked. “Is Riley okay? Where is she?”
Gretchen Casey, or “Gretch,” as she was known to her teammates, had grown up in East Texas and studied prelaw at Texas A&M. Her mother was a semisuccessful artist and her father a former Army Ranger who had her shooting from the first day she could hold a rifle. Her love of cross-country in high school and skill at shooting had led her to become a world-class summer biathlete. She dropped out of the sport when she fell in love with a hedge fund manager and moved to New York City. She received her law degree at NYU but moved back to Texas and resumed her career as a summer biathlete when the relationship ended. She was eight months back into the sport when a Delta Force recruiter spotted her and made her an offer that she found hard to resist.
She had brown, shoulder-length hair with highlights, and green eyes. At five-foot six, she was the smaller of the two women in the room, but that had no impact on her leadership abilities, which had seen her put in charge of her Athena brick.
Megan Rhodes was the quintessential “American” girl; blond-haired and blue-eyed. Her mother passed away when she was very young and her father, a cop, raised her in the Chicago suburbs.
Rhodes attended the University of Illinois, where she was a successful competitive swimmer. Thanks to her striking Nordic features and five-foot-eleven height, she’d been nicknamed the Viking Princess, and it had stuck with her all the way to Delta. Those who knew her loved the moniker. She was every bit the Viking, but there wasn’t an ounce of princess in her. She was a stone cold killer when she had to be and endured the worst situations any assignment threw at her without ever complaining. Like her teammate Casey, Rhodes was in her early thirties, fit, and very attractive.
Harvath didn’t feel comfortable speaking in Dan McGreevy’s office. There was no telling if he had it wired or not. Unless he knew for sure, he always assumed the worst.
Signaling his concern, he asked, “Is there someplace else we can talk?”
Outside the nail salon, Harvath swapped the memory cards and handed Mike Strieber’s phone back to him. Strieber eyeballed the two attractive yet serious-looking women across the parking lot but didn’t say anything. He knew this was business.
Strieber had plenty of customers he could see in and around Bragg and told Harvath to simply buzz his cell phone once he had figured out what he wanted t
o do. Harvath thanked him and as Strieber fired up the courtesy van and exited the lot, Harvath joined Casey and Rhodes at their car.
Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting in Casey’s living room. Rhodes came back from the kitchen and handed him a beer. “You look like you can use one.”
Harvath accepted it, twisted off the top, and proceeded to tell the two women everything that had happened. When Casey paused to ask him about the photographs, he pulled the microSD card from his pocket and handed it to her.
She slid it inside her phone as Rhodes leaned over to stare at the images. Both women, though tough as hell, were visibly upset by what they saw.
“We have no idea who did this?” Casey asked.
Harvath shook his head. “No. I only have the name of the person who supposedly tasked the kill teams, Colonel Chuck Bremmer.”
“He’s active U.S. military?” replied Rhodes.
“As far as I know. He was a special DoD liaison to the White House and the National Security council back when I was on the President’s Secret Service detail.”
“Was he running kill teams then?”
“He and I weren’t exactly chatty.”
“So we have no idea,” Casey interjected, “whether or not Riley was specifically targeted or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Harvath looked at her. “Have you spoken with Cooper and Ericsson?”
“I spoke with both of them last night. Julie is on leave visiting her family in Hawaii, and Cooper is doing a training rotation in New Mexico.”
“What about Rodriguez?”
“She’s fine; still recovering, but she’s okay,” Casey said.
“If nobody else was targeted on your team, then Riley had to have been killed because of me.”
“What were the two of you doing in Paris anyway?” Rhodes asked.
“Carlton has an Israeli contact there. He sent me to pass off some information. After the meeting was over the Israeli handed me an envelope. Inside was the address for the Paris safe house written in Carlton’s handwriting. When I got to the building, Carlton texted me the apartment number. I rang the bell, was buzzed in, and went upstairs. Riley opened the apartment door and that’s when the shooting started from the stairwell.”
“Do you know why she was there?”
“I never got the chance to ask.”
Casey removed the SD card from her phone and handed it back. “Where’s Reed Carlton now? Do you have a way to contact him?”
“Yeah, but there’s no way to be certain it’s secure. Based on everything else, I have to assume he’s being watched.”
“By ATS.”
Harvath nodded.
Megan Rhodes balanced her beer on her thigh. “So in addition to not knowing if Carlton is alive or dead, we don’t know who’s pulling all the strings.”
“Correct. We’ve got no idea.”
Casey looked at her teammate and then at Harvath. “It seems like there’s only one person at this point capable of giving us any answers. I think we need to pay Chuck Bremmer a visit.”
“I agree,” said Harvath. “But there are a few things we need to do first.”
CHAPTER 50
VIRGINIA
Reed Carlton knew he wouldn’t be able to stay long, maybe only a day, two at most, and even that would be pushing it. He was a fugitive and had to keep moving. If he stayed too long in one place, he risked being discovered.
He passed through the sleepy towns of Lancaster County as he wended his way north. The crowds of summer vacationers who thronged to this area near the Chesapeake Bay had long since gone, and many of the shops had closed for the season. He found a small ethnic grocery and bought a bag of supplies. The man behind the counter took little interest in his customer, transfixed by some foreign soap opera being beamed to his TV from a dish on the roof. There were no cameras, and Carlton paid in cash.
The turn-off to the rental home was exactly where he remembered it. Three summers earlier, a lady friend of his had rented the home for a month to entertain family and friends. Carlton had made the hour drive from D.C. to visit with her on the weekends. He remembered it as if it had been yesterday.
It had been July. All of the little towns up and down the Rappahannock were decorated in red, white, and blue. It was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and American flags flew for as far as the eye could see.
The weather had been hot and of course summer-in-Virginia humid. Carlton had consumed more ice cream and Popsicles over that month than in the previous ten years of his life combined. During those weekends, he had allowed himself to forget who and what he was. The only paper he had picked up was the small local gazette, with its schedule of parades, fireworks, and pancake breakfasts. The house didn’t even have a television. It was the most relaxed he had felt in ages.
The yellow house with its wraparound porch and white shutters brought back a flood of memories, none of which he had time for. He crept around the perimeter to make sure there was no one inside. Window stickers from a nonexistent alarm company were the extent of the property’s security. Carlton ignored the management company’s key box hanging from the doorknob in the breezeway and removed a set of picks from his jacket pocket. Unlocking the door, he walked inside.
It smelled clean but empty, as if it had been buttoned up for the season. Walking into the kitchen, he checked the refrigerator. It had been emptied out and unplugged. No one was planning on using this house anytime soon.
Carlton checked the garage. All the summer toys were neatly arranged along one wall. Against the other was a neat row of plastic garbage cans, a lawn mower, rakes, brooms, and assorted tools. There was a kettle grill and a half-empty bag of charcoal.
Opening the overhead door, he walked out to the Cadillac and pulled into the garage. He retrieved his groceries from the passenger seat, along with the few items he had in the trunk and then closed the garage door and returned to the house.
He cooked himself a modest meal from his provisions and heated a pot of coffee on the aging stove. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he took out a pad of paper and began to make a list.
In it, he cataloged every operation he and his organization had been involved with since its inception. He drew relationship and impact diagrams, detailing every single person and every single agency, whether foreign or domestic, that they had cooperated with or even brushed past in their assignments. It was an exhausting exercise, and when he had poured it all out, he had a pile of pages and a pounding headache. The Hydra in his mind’s eye had sprouted so many heads, he couldn’t focus on any of them.
Pushing himself away from the table, Carlton stood up and walked into the living room. On the mantel above the fireplace, just as he remembered, was a little armada of brightly colored wooden sailboats. He picked up the blue one, recalling how his hostess’ grandson had dropped it and broken its mast.
The little boy had been panicked. Carlton could still remember how he had cried, certain that he had damaged some priceless antique and was in a mountain of trouble.
In fact, he hadn’t stopped crying until Carlton had assured him that not only could the boat be repaired but that they would do it together and that it would be their secret—no one else needed to know. The two were inseparable for the rest of the boy’s visit. Such was the power of a secret.
Secrets could isolate people from one another, but when shared, they could also draw people together. One had to choose very carefully, though, with whom to share and exactly what to share. Of Benjamin Franklin’s many witticisms, few seemed as relevant to Carlton as the warning from Poor Richard’s Almanac that three people may keep a secret only if two of them are dead.
That was the kind of world he lived in. Its very currency was secrets, and it was populated with lies, deceptions, and half-truths. For some in that world, trust was impossible, but those incapable of trust didn’t last long. You needed to be on guard, but you also needed to be able to let your guard down. No one could be at code red t
wenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At some point, you had to let people get close.
Carlton returned the sailboat to the mantel, its secret still intact, and his mind was drawn back to what Franklin had said.
Even though he didn’t know what it was, Carlton was party to a secret, and someone was trying to make sure the secret remained kept, by having him and his people killed. The secret involved treason somehow, which made him think about the charge itself.
If accused of the right kind of treason, whereby there were pressing national security concerns, review of the case could be done in complete secrecy. The people who passed sentence could remain anonymous, and very few details, if any, would ever be made public.
Pressing national security concerns could also get a subject placed on a kill list. The speed with which the sentence was carried out would be pegged to how immediate the threat was believed to be. This was the point around which Carlton’s thoughts began to crystallize. Whoever was after him had used the treason charge as a means of expediting his execution, as well as that of his operators.
But whoever had wanted him dead had to have known that he and his people wouldn’t be easy to kill. To pull off the night of the long knives, someone would have needed personnel with exceptional training and access to very closely guarded intelligence.
That brought Carlton to the question of why? Why did someone want him and his people dead?
Murder, and the motivations for committing murder, had existed since Cain and Abel. The first answer that had come into his mind was that he and his people knew something they shouldn’t and someone had ordained that they be silenced. But he had dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come to him. He purposefully kept all of his people compartmentalized. Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with one specific piece of intelligence or operational detail that he and his men all shared in common and that could make them a threat.
Is there a different motivation? Was Tommy Banks right? Was this about revenge? Carlton turned the possibility over in his mind once more.
