Black List sh-11

by Brad Thor

  It had been an incredibly effective beating, but what had pushed him into acquiescence was the waterboarding. It was absolutely impossible to hold out against, and for a man who was afraid of very few things in life, it had created inside him a surge of raw, animal panic. In short, it was terrifying and something he never, ever wanted to experience again.

  After winding two spirals of toilet paper and shoving them into the prisoner’s nostrils, Carlton had begun his questions. Banks stood in the hallway, with the iron kept hot and nearby as requested.

  Vignon didn’t have a lot of answers. He was a thug and a drone. He did, though, have one key piece of information to share—the names of those whom he worked for. Both Carlton and Banks had heard of Craig Middleton and of ATS, but neither had ever met the man.

  One of the many questions Vignon was unable to answer was who had killed Carlton’s security team and tried to burn his house to the ground with him in it. Vignon swore up and down it wasn’t him or his people and that he didn’t know anything about it. Carlton believed him.

  He also believed the white-haired man when he said he had no idea who had killed the Carlton Group’s operators. Though he admitted to having a paramilitary background, his job was running corporate security for ATS.

  Carlton asked dozens of questions more, but Vignon was of no further help. When it came down to the inner workings of the company or why Middleton would have wanted Carlton and his people dead, the white-haired man knew absolutely nothing.

  Carlton decided it was best to stick with what the man did know and try to uncover something from that. Slowly, he had him unpack his side of the operation that had ended up with his capture.

  Halfway through his account, Carlton made him stop, back up, and repeat something. “You were prepared to engage how many men?”

  “Three,” Vignon replied.

  “But there weren’t three of us. There were only two.”

  The white-haired man nodded. “Middleton thought you might be making contact with a third man.”

  “Who? What third man?”

  Vignon paused for a moment, trying to remember the name and then it came to him. “Harvath. Scot Harvath. A former SEAL. Middleton said that if Harvath showed up, he wanted us to kill him.”

  Carlton couldn’t believe what he was hearing. For the last week, he had grieved for Harvath. He thought he was dead. He didn’t want the possible disappointment of allowing himself even a sliver of hope, only to have it dashed. All the same, it was the first good news he’d had since this entire thing started, and his heart leapt, even as he fought to keep his emotions under control. “Harvath is alive?”

  The white-haired man nodded. “According to Middleton; alive and extremely dangerous. That’s all I know.”

  “And Middleton believed he might show up at the meeting in D.C.?”

  Vignon nodded.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, Carlton walked into the kitchen and motioned for Banks to follow.

  “That’s a piece of good news,” the older man said.

  “I need to get to a computer,” Carlton replied. “Right now. Do you have a laptop or something?”

  Banks shook his head. “I don’t have any of that here. Staying off the radar means using as little electricity as possible.”

  Carlton parted the curtains above the sink and looked out toward the farmhouse. “What about your landlord? It’s pretty dark over there right now.”

  “That’s because they’re out of town.”

  “They’ve probably got a computer and an Internet connection, right?”

  Banks shrugged. “Maybe. It’s definitely worth a look.”

  Carlton didn’t even bother to respond. He was halfway to the door when Banks yelled to get his attention. When Carlton turned, he tossed him his ring of keys. “One of those opens their back door. The missus has a home office under the stairs. If there’s a computer, it’ll probably be in there.”

  He should have known Tommy would have availed himself of a key to his landlord’s house and would be familiar with its layout. He was still the best field agent Carlton had ever met.

  Bounding down the stairs and out of the barn, he took off across the grass to the house.

  It took four keys before he found the right one and was able to let himself inside. He was grateful for the tip to check under the stairs, because it was a place he would probably not have thought to search for a computer. Sure enough, there it was.

  Pulling the chair out from the desk, he squeezed into the tiny space, sat down, and fired up the computer. It was an old Dell model on a dial-up connection. Once it was ready to go, Carlton opened its Web browser.

  He chastised himself for having left the IronKey drive back at the barn. While not perfect, it did help hide one’s IP address and location. It wasn’t the only way, though, and Carlton took several minutes, using a variety of different methods to cloak himself and his trail before landing on the dating site he and Harvath had designated as a means of communication of last resort.

  As he clicked on his ad, he held his breath. The damn page seemed to take forever to load, but finally it did, and there, among multiple responses, was Harvath’s. Carlton exhaled, and out of joy, slapped the narrow desk so hard that the bulletin board behind it fell down.

  He quickly hung it back up and clicked on the tab along the top of Harvath’s response inviting him to “private chat.” Once inside the private chat, he left Harvath a message coded in pickup terms that authenticated that it was really Carlton communicating and that he was doing so of his own free will, not with someone holding a gun to his head. He closed by giving Harvath the number for his last clean cell phone.

  Leaving the dating site, he shut down the computer, pushed back in his chair, and closed the door to the little office beneath the stairs.

  Walking back to the barn, he pulled the phone from his bag in back of the Suburban and turned it on. Now all he could do was wait.

  CHAPTER 64

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  When Bremmer had dangled Kurt Schroeder as a means to get to Craig Middleton, a million things had gone through Harvath’s mind—one of which was that Bremmer was a pretty devious son of a bitch. Another was that Harvath didn’t fully speak the language of a man like Schroeder, but he did have someone on his team who could—Nicholas.

  It was a risk, a big one, taking him from the Strieber’s farm in Texas and bringing him to D.C., but no one knew technology and data the way Nicholas did. He not only wanted him to be part of debriefing Schroeder but also close by in the event ATS launched its digital Pearl Harbor.

  When they had cut loose the stunned and visibly shaken Bremmer at his daughter’s field hockey game, Harvath used one of Casey’s clean cell phones to reach out to Strieber. Despite the fact that the man had landed back in Texas only a handful of hours before, he told Harvath not to worry and that he’d have Nicholas on the next Strieber Airlines flight to Manassas.

  When he landed at the airport, he texted Harvath who dispatched Rhodes in the Suburban to pick everyone up and bring them back to the loft. Because they had left Schroeder’s vehicle around the corner from the dominatrix’s house, they were able to come and go via the building’s underground parking structure and park in his full-size spot.

  Elizabeth, the dominatrix, had been another problem. They had brought her from her town house at gunpoint and she now sat bound and gagged in Schroeder’s master bedroom. Rhodes and Casey had taken turns supervising her bathroom breaks, but he was going to need them to help go after Middleton. It was a good thing he had called Strieber, and he was thankful that Strieber would be arriving with extra manpower.

  When Rhodes, Strieber, Nicholas, Nina, and the dogs poured out of the elevator, it looked like the circus had come to town. But judging by the equipment cases they were lugging, this circus had brought a little slice of hell with them.

  Harvath, who didn’t want Schroeder left alone for a second, again Flex-Cuffed his hands behind his back, and when the crew
arrived, dragged him out of his computer room. Schroeder didn’t say anything to Nina, but the way he looked at her was enough to set Nicholas off. Literally going toe-to-toe with him and actually kicking the larger man’s shoe to get his attention, Nicholas looked up at him with the ultimate don’t-fuck-with-me expression and proclaimed, “Back off. She’s mine.”

  Schroeder was so surprised he didn’t know what to say. He simply nodded.

  Not wanting to undermine his friend, Harvath swallowed his grin, handed over custody of Schroeder to Casey, and motioned for the little man to follow him into the computer room so they could debrief.

  Harvath kept it as short and as simple as possible, bringing him up to speed on Bremmer, Schroeder, and Middleton. Nicholas chose not to sit down and instead listened as he examined all of the room’s equipment.

  When Harvath had finished filling him in, Nicholas’s first question was about Caroline. “Was one of Bremmer’s kill teams responsible for her death?”

  “No. Schroeder says that on the day she died, ATS had its own people pursuing her. She ran into traffic and was struck by a car.”

  Nicholas didn’t like the answer, but it seemed to satisfy him for the time being. “Does Schroeder know Nina is Caroline’s sister?”

  Harvath shook his head.

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way. What about the attack?”

  “Bremmer knows nothing about it and Schroeder seems to have been kept out of the loop as well. Middleton and the people around him are playing this very tight.”

  “Maybe not tight enough.”

  Harvath looked at him. “Did you find something else on that drive?”

  Nicholas nodded. “Something called the Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I think it’s the answer to the ‘why now’ question we’ve been asking, the trigger for a digital Pearl Harbor.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Nicholas held up his index finger and explained. “The Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center is known by its acronym, CNCI, or better yet by its nickname, Spy Center. The cover story is that the NSA had amassed so much data and drew so much power to cull, analyze, and house that data, it outgrew its capacity at Fort Meade. Therefore, a new facility needed to be built.”

  “Wait a second,” said Harvath. “A whole new facility needed to be built? What was the point of the server farms they’ve been building, like down in San Antonio?”

  Nicholas winked at him. “You’re a little too informed for your own good and should know better than to ask questions like that. The thing is, you’re right. The NSA, or more importantly ATS through the NSA, succeeded in pitching the need for a totally brand-new facility. The NSA really is beyond capacity at Fort Meade. It’s like a black hole; they can’t get enough electricity there. But here’s where things get interesting.

  “They assembled a list of thirty-seven possible locations, giving each a code name. Camp Williams, in the high mountain desert outside Salt Lake City, was code-named Site Blue.”

  “Blue Sand!” Harvath said.

  Nicholas nodded. “And guess which location ended up being selected?”

  “Camp Williams. Also known as Site Blue.”

  “Precisely. There, the NSA began its two-billion-dollar construction project. Spy Center covers more than one million square feet of data storage, technical support, and administrative space—five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. It includes its own power stations, backup generators, and massive stores of fuel and water.

  “But here’s the most dramatic feature. According to Caroline’s notes, the Comprehensive National Cyber-security Data Center isn’t just about collecting and storing data. Its real purpose is to be the nucleus of the brand-new, government-controlled Internet. So, in answer to your question, Why now?, it’s because ATS is ready. Finally, all the technology exists. The only thing they need to make the change—”

  “Is a crisis,” Harvath said, finishing his sentence for him, “explosive enough to justify it.”

  CHAPTER 65

  That was it, Harvath thought to himself. It didn’t matter how they planned to do it, all that mattered was what they were planning to do, and now all of it made sense to him.

  When the Internet was collapsed, it was going to be deadly—airplanes and trains would collide, the power grid would shut down, banks and financial services would fail, utilities and emergency services would grind to a halt and so would the delivery of fuel, food, and medicine. Tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions, would die. And while society crumbled, Craig Middleton and the board of directors from ATS would sit on their secure, well-stocked 200-acre estate in Virginia and ride out the storm. Harvath, though, wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Even if he stopped the attack from happening, the political fallout would be off the charts. The board of directors at ATS read like a who’s who of the most powerful in government. Politicking and diplomacy had never been his thing. That was an area in which the Old Man excelled. Which reminded him of something.

  Turning to Nicholas, he pointed at the wall of screens and asked, “Can you open up a connection to the Net on one of those for me?”

  The little man climbed into Schroeder’s chair and got to work. A few moments later he said, “Got it.”

  Harvath gave him the URL he wanted him to plug in. Nicholas paused and looked over his shoulder. “Seriously?”

  “Long story. Just do it, please.”

  Nicholas turned back around and did as he was told. When he had navigated to the page, he pushed back from the desk and surrendered the system to Harvath.

  Harvath rolled his chair over, grabbed the mouse, and began to click through the ads until he got to the Old Man’s. There was a response! He couldn’t believe it. The response invited him into a private chat section. Harvath decided to follow the link.

  Based on the wording, he had zero doubt that it had been written by the Old Man. It was him and he was alive. There was also a phone number.

  Harvath had to assume it was a burner, a chat-and-chuck that the Old Man could dump if and when he needed to. The question was, was ATS on to it? Would calling the Old Man lead their goons here to Schroeder’s loft?

  Harvath thought about going downstairs, getting in the Suburban, and driving somewhere to make the call, but if someone was listening and trying to track him, they’d probably use one of the many CCTV cameras in the city to pinpoint his vehicle and follow it when he drove back.

  On the other hand, according to Schroeder, he was the only one Middleton had tasked with tracking down Harvath and the Old Man. There wasn’t an army of analysts at ATS working on it around the clock.

  It made sense. Middleton was all about compartmentalization. The less his staff knew, the better. Schroeder had proven capable enough. He had tracked Harvath to Paris, Spain, and Texas—not to mention all the other operators he had tracked. Roping more employees in, regardless of how little he told them, would only end up risking exposure for Middleton. Harvath decided it was worth it.

  On the third ring, Reed Carlton picked up the phone. After a quick back-and-forth to establish their bona fides, the Old Man said, “I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “Yours too,” Harvath replied. “We need to meet. There’s a lot I need to fill you in on.”

  “Are you in town?”

  “I am. How about you?”

  “No. I needed some fresh air,” said Carlton.

  “That’s probably a good idea. Why don’t I come to you?”

  The Old Man agreed and once their call was complete, he transmitted the specifics.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  An hour and a half later, the two men were reunited in a tavern parking lot, not far from Tommy Banks’ barn apartment. Carlton wrapped his arms around Harvath and gave him a huge hug. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I th
ought the same,” Harvath said, hugging him back, happy beyond words that the Old Man was still alive. His mood, though, shifted when he let go of Carlton and shared, “It happened so fast. There was nothing I could’ve done for Riley.”

  The Old Man shook his head. “We’re going to make those bastards pay. I just wish we had more help.”

  “We’re not completely alone,” he replied. Removing his flashlight, he cupped his hand partly over the lens and gave it two quick flashes.

  Harvath had dropped off the two Athena Team members a half mile up the road and they had circled back. Casey appeared out of the darkness first, followed by Rhodes, who was carrying a long nylon case that contained a LaRue PredatAR rifle outfitted with a night vision scope that Strieber had brought along on his return trip “just in case.”

  The women had never met Carlton in person. After shaking hands, he suggested they continue their conversation back at the farm. Harvath agreed and they climbed into their two vehicles. Once the Old Man had pulled out onto the road, Harvath fell in a safe distance behind him.

  Back at the farm, Banks kept watch over Martin Vignon above the barn, while Carlton made coffee for the team in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Tommy told him not to worry and assured him he would straighten everything out with his landlords when they returned from their trip.

  Harvath filled Carlton in on everything that had happened, and then Carlton took his turn. He began by explaining why he had sent Riley to Paris. A French banker had been helping several rogue nations circumvent financial sanctions and had also begun assisting in arms transactions. There was a fear that the CIA station in Paris might have been compromised, so Carlton had been asked to send in his own team. Before he could task Riley and Harvath with the assignment, though, the night of the long knives had come.

  The Old Man walked him through everything else that had taken place. In his inimitable fashion, he revealed only those facts he thought Harvath needed to know and kept the rest to himself. Casey and Rhodes sat quietly and listened, taking in all the details.