Black List sh-11

by Brad Thor

  At the top of the stairs, a narrow hallway gave way to a door for the bedroom over the living room, a bathroom, and the rear bedroom over the kitchen area where all the shouting was coming from.

  Slowly, Harvath crept down the hallway, his weapon up and at the ready. He didn’t need to look back to know that Rhodes was doing the exact same thing. Everything was going perfectly until, four feet away from the door, Harvath put his foot down on a warped floorboard that groaned beneath his weight.

  Instantly, he froze. And just as quickly, the woman’s voice from inside the rear bedroom fell silent. There were a couple of muffled words of protest from the man, wondering what was going on, but those were cut off so fast, you would have thought the woman had clapped her hand over the man’s mouth.

  Harvath didn’t move a muscle, but his brain was screaming, Damn it! He had to make up his mind. Would the man convince the woman it had been nothing? Maybe, but he doubted it. They’d lost the element of surprise. It was time to hit the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 59

  Taking two steps forward, Harvath raised his foot and kicked in the bedroom door. What he discovered was much less dungeon-like than he had expected.

  It looked like some sort of a cell, the kind which would have been appropriate for the SuperMax prison or for holding Hannibal Lecter. The walls and ceiling were lined with sheets of stainless steel and studded with attachment points—for what, one could only imagine. The floor was concrete and had a drain in the center. The window was also covered with stainless steel, leaving only the width of an arrow slit covered in opaque Lucite and lit from behind by a dim fluorescent bulb. Another fluorescent bulb hung inside a fixture attached to the ceiling. In the corner was a cage so small that the only way you could get a human being inside was if he folded himself into the tightest fetal position possible.

  The only thing that could have taken the freaky factor any higher were the room’s two occupants. Sitting on a rolling stool next to the stainless steel cot suspended from the opposite wall was a very tall woman in her late fifties. She was dressed in some sort of police or military uniform and next to her was a tray of bizarre and unmentionable items. Harvath had no desire to know what any of them were or what any of them did.

  In her hands was a pair of medical shears, which she had used to cut through the clothing of the man shackled to the cot in front of her. She had just begun cutting off Kurt Schroeder’s underwear when Harvath kicked open the door.

  “What the hell is this?” the woman demanded as Harvath and Rhodes burst into the room with their weapons drawn. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Shut up,” said Harvath as he snatched the shears from her and kicked her tray over.

  “You’d better have a fucking warrant because my lawyer loves going after dumbshit cops.”

  “Elizabeth, do what the man says,” Schroeder stated.

  The woman was taken aback and, for a moment, didn’t know how to reply. “What?”

  “These aren’t cops.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Number one, they’re carrying suppressed weapons, and number two, I know one of them. Or more accurately, I should say I know who he is.”

  “This is because of you, then?” the woman asked, her indignation growing. “People break into my place of business, kick in doors, and wave guns in my face and I’m supposed to go along with it? I don’t think so. In fact, I think somebody better tell me what the fuck is going on here or I’m going to call the police myself.”

  Harvath looked at Rhodes. “Get her out of here.”

  “Like hell you will,” the woman declared as Rhodes tucked her pistol away and approached.

  “Easy way or the hard way,” said Rhodes. “It’s up to you.”

  The woman scoffed. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Wrong answer,” Rhodes replied, knocking the woman off her stool with a lightning-fast jab to the face.

  The blow was meant to stun more than injure, and before the dominatrix had even hit the floor, Rhodes was on top of her and had her Flex-Cuffed.

  “Make sure she stays quiet,” Harvath said as he kicked over a rubber ball-gag that had spilled from the tray.

  Rhodes secured it around the woman’s mouth, picked her up, and led her toward the door.

  As they reached it, Harvath added, “Find out if she has a CCTV system in here. If so, I want to know where the DVR is.”

  Rhodes nodded as she exited. Harvath and Schroeder were now alone.

  Walking to the overturned tray, Harvath set it upright and tucked his pistol into his waistband at the small of his back. He then began emptying out the contents of his coat pockets and methodically arranging them on the tray. The contents included a knife, a pair of pliers, two road flares, and a hickory-handled Ball Pein hammer. To these, he added the woman’s medical shears.

  The young man tried to appear calm. “Those won’t be necessary.”

  Harvath ignored him.

  “I said those won’t be necessary.”

  Taking off his coat, Harvath tossed it into the corner and rolled up his sleeves.

  The young man’s calm was beginning to crack. “I’m serious, you don’t need those.”

  Harvath checked the young man’s restraints and then drew the stool and tray table alongside him and sat down.

  “Can you not hear me?” Schroeder pleaded as Harvath gave his tools a final once-over. “You don’t need those!”

  “Really?” Harvath responded, still focused on his instruments. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because I don’t want to be tortured.”

  Glancing slowly around the room, Harvath looked back at him and said, “I thought you liked it.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on Schroeder. “Something tells me you and I aren’t going to have a safe word.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Then I can do us both a favor. There’s nothing in my head you need to torture me for. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. Just please don’t hurt me.”

  Harvath was so used to dealing with ideologically hardened jihadists that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to interrogate a man who was only out for himself. Could he trust him? That was yet to be seen.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kurt Schroeder,” the young man replied.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes. Scot Harvath.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I work for a company called Advance Technology Solutions.”

  “Who specifically?”

  “The chief executive officer, Craig Middleton.”

  Harvath was studying his face, looking for any sign that he was being lied to. Thus far, everything indicated that the young man was telling the truth. Even so, Harvath wanted to make sure he remained incentivized. And with someone whose whole identity was defined via a keyboard, there was one very direct route for doing so.

  Picking up the Ball Pein hammer, he spoke very slowly. “There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. On the first lie, I’ll break all of the bones of your right hand. On the second lie, I’ll break all the bones in your left. If you lie to me again, I’ll either cut off your fingers or I’ll go for your eyes.”

  Schroeder was terrified and his voice shook with fear. “But I’m not lying. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Tell me why the Carlton Group was targeted.”

  “Because of the attack you’re planning.”

  “What attack?”

  “I don’t know,” Schroeder insisted. “I wasn’t given the details.”

  “You just took it on face value that we were behind a terrorist attack on the United States?”

  “That’s what I was told. I was only following orders.”

  Un-fucking-believable. It was the one rationalization that had been used to justify the murder of more people throughout human history than any other. “And what exactly is your role in all of it?” Harvath demanded.

  “Noth
ing. I really didn’t do—” he began, but his protestation was cut short as the Ball Pein hammer came crashing down on his right hand.

  Schroeder screamed in excruciating pain and his body went rigid. He tried to pull his hand away, but the shackles held it in place.

  “Keep lying to me,” Harvath said into his ear, “and I’ll keep swinging until every bone in that hand is broken, and then I’ll move on to the other.”

  He waited for a full two minutes for Schroeder to stop crying. It took slapping him to get him to stop blubbering and focus.

  Harvath asked him again, “What’s your role?”

  This time, Schroeder answered with the truth. “M-M-M-Middleton had me compile d-d-d-dossiers on all the targets,” he sputtered.

  “Which were given to the kill teams.”

  “Yes. B-b-but, I was only doing my job. We-we-we track people. We f-f-f-find people. It’s wh-wh-wh-what we do.”

  Harvath wanted to crush the man’s skull like an overripe melon. “What you did, you son of a bitch, was help kill a ton of innocent people; people with more character and integrity at the bottom of their coffee cups than you’ll ever have in your pathetic body. How many Carlton Group personnel dossiers did you do?”

  “A-a-all of them.”

  “You knew their backgrounds, their service histories, all of it; yet you believed every one of them was guilty of treason?”

  “I-I-I—” he stammered.

  Harvath interrupted him by raising the hammer. “If you tell me once more that you were only following orders, I’m going to fucking knock all of your teeth out. You killed people I care about. You killed them.”

  Schroeder drew his lips in and closed his mouth.

  “Smart boy,” said Harvath, dropping the hammer onto the tray. “Who’s Caroline Romero?”

  Schroeder was afraid to open his mouth, but he knew he had to answer the question. “She-she-she—” he began.

  Harvath had no idea the man had a stammer. At this rate, the interrogation could take weeks. The last thing he wanted to do was show him any mercy whatsoever, but it couldn’t hurt to pull him back a little bit from the edge. “Kurt, I want you to take a deep breath,” he said, and waited for the man to do so. “Now take another.”

  When Schroeder did, Harvath continued. “You lied to me and that’s why your hand is now broken. Are you going to lie to me again?”

  Schroeder shook his head.

  “Good. Take one more deep breath, relax, and tell me who Caroline Romero is.”

  “She used t-t-to work at ATS. She’s dead.”

  “You mean she was killed.”

  “She ran into traffic and got hit by a-a-a car.”

  “While being chased by ATS goons.”

  Schroeder nodded.

  “Do you know why she was being chased?”

  “She stole data from ATS to help the Carlton Group with their attack.”

  This guy was an idiot. “There is no Carlton Group attack,” said Harvath. “Caroline Romero stole that data to expose what ATS is up to. They’re the ones planning the attack.”

  “ATS is planning the attack?”

  “What do you know about a digital Pearl Harbor?”

  Schroeder looked at him. “It’s o-o-one of the worst kinds of attacks we c-c-could face. A large part of what we d-d-do is try to guard our clients against a d-d-digital Pearl Harbor. It would crash the Net and bring the country to its knees.”

  “So ATS is especially qualified to know not only how a successful attack like that would be carried out, but where the weaknesses in America’s cyber infrastructure would be.”

  “Y-y-yes,” Schroeder replied as what Craig Middleton was planning began to dawn on him. “But w-w-why? Why w-w-would they want to do that?”

  “That’s where Caroline Romero comes in, but first, where are the clothes you planned on wearing home?”

  “In t-t-the coat closet. Why?”

  “Because we’re all going to take a little drive.”

  CHAPTER 60

  RURAL VIRGINIA

  The same tenant had rented the dilapidated barn and its run-down loft apartment for more than fifty years. In all that time, Tommy Banks had never told anyone about it, nor had he ever brought anyone here, until tonight.

  The barn was an insurance policy; the kind that he had encouraged all of his students over the years to invest in. Some had listened to him, some had not. When transferred to permanent desk duty at Langley, or under the financial stress of raising a family, many had shut down their phantom bank accounts and had allowed their rental agreements at similar properties to expire. While Banks refused to judge anyone else’s financial situation, having an unattributed redoubt was like owning a fire extinguisher or wearing a seat belt—you might not ever need it, but the day you do, you‘ll thank God you thought ahead. Tonight was that moment for Banks.

  Once they had successfully made it out of D.C., they had disabled the vehicle’s tracking systems, disassembled the white-haired man’s cell phone, and made their way to the farm.

  They hid the Suburban inside the barn, and after cutting away the restraints at the white-haired man’s ankles, they pulled a hood over his head, yanked him out of the cargo area, and encouraged him to walk up the wooden steps to the apartment by threatening to use the Taser on him again if he didn’t comply.

  Once there, they secured his arms and legs to a sturdy dining chair, and Carlton used a pair of pliers to yank out the Taser’s barbed probes.

  Near an old TV set was an equally old VCR and rows of VHS tapes. Banks was a fan of Westerns and WWII films. Carlton only wanted background noise, but he didn’t want anything that their prisoner might find heartening or inspirational, so he kept looking. He found a tape with Cyrillic writing and assumed correctly it had been from the Cold War days and was either research or material to keep Banks’ Russian language skills sharp. Either way, it would do the trick. Carlton slipped it in, turned on the TV, and turned up the volume.

  With the white-haired man unable to hear their conversation over the TV, Carlton stood in the bathroom with Banks and explained what he wanted to do.

  The only question the older man had was, “Hood on or hood off?”

  “Hood on,” Carlton replied. “Sight deprivation increases the effect.”

  “He’s a good-sized fellow. I’m afraid I can’t be much help with the up-and-down.”

  “It’ll work like a fulcrum. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll do the trick. Don’t worry.”

  “This is your specialty, Peaches. I’m just here to help carry your briefcase.”

  With everything decided, the men walked back into the one-room apartment and their prisoner, whereupon Carlton cupped his right hand and struck the man through the hood against his left ear.

  “First question,” Carlton shouted so he could hear him above the ringing. “What’s your name and who sent you?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” the white-haired man said from beneath the hood.

  “You first,” Carlton replied as he reached down, grabbed the man’s testicles through his trousers, and gave them a vicious twist.

  The prisoner’s howl went from a low-throated roar to a high-pitched scream.

  “You want to play cute with me, asshole?” Carlton demanded as he let go. “I can do this all day long and it only gets worse and worse and worse.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re not going to disappoint me, are you? I hate it when they give in right at the beginning.” Looking at Banks, he said, “Heat up the iron.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you,” the prisoner spat from under his hood.

  “You’ve never had your suit pressed while you’re still in it?” Carlton asked. “It saves a shitload of time, but it’s quite literally the equivalent of being burned alive. By the way, I hope you don’t have any polyester on. It sticks worse than napalm.”

  “You’re a dead man! I’m going to fucking kill you! Do you hear me?”

  “You hear me, motherfucker. I’ve
planted more people than you can begin to imagine, and I have zero reservations about killing you. But get one thing straight, you are going to talk to me. Your men are dead and no one knows where the hell you are. Whether you get out of this alive or your heart gives out before I’m done with you, it’s your choice.”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  “Yeah, you said that already,” Carlton replied. Turning to Banks again, he said, “Grab the bucket and those crates from under the sink and follow me.”

  Carlton then walked behind the prisoner’s chair and, with an explosive show of strength, tilted it onto its rear legs and dragged it, along with its occupant, into the bathroom.

  “You don’t fucking scare me,” the prisoner taunted from beneath his hood.

  “Don’t worry,” Carlton replied, “I will.”

  Banks stood outside with the bucket and crates as Carlton stepped into the tub and retrieved a block of yellow soap on a thick brown rope that was hanging from the showerhead. He then stepped out of the tub, moved around to the front of the white-haired man, and began beating him brutally with it.

  The man was one tough bastard and didn’t even make a sound until the fifth or sixth strike. Carlton didn’t give a rat’s ass and let the blows rain down.

  He wasn’t out of control. On the contrary, he was in complete control and knew exactly how far he could push it. When he let up, the prisoner was in agonizing pain.

  “What’s your name?” Carlton demanded.

  The prisoner didn’t answer.

  “What’s your name?” he repeated.

  The response came, same as before, but with considerably less vigor. “Fuck you.”

  “Fine by me,” Carlton replied. “Next circle of hell it is. Buckle up.” Nodding to Banks he said, “Bring in the crates.”

  Sliding the chair up against the tub, Carlton squatted down, grabbed hold of the rear legs, and counted to three. In another burst of power, he brought the chair up, balancing it on the edge of the tub so that the prisoner was now horizontal, facing the ceiling. Banks stacked the two crates and placed them beneath the legs, so that Carlton could let go.