by Brad Thor
He centered it on the woman’s forehead and began to depress the trigger. But before he could fully engage, he jerked the weapon to the left.
The barking of the dogs was so loud that Nicholas couldn’t hear himself think. They had raced forward and were straining to leap into the passenger seat to get at the figure outside. He yelled for them to be quiet.
He had never seen this woman before in his life. It wasn’t Caroline, but there was something familiar about her.
She reached down and tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. She looked back at Nicholas.
“She was wearing leather pants,” the woman said through the glass. “She had short, spiky black hair back then.”
Before he knew what was going on, the woman was reaching into her purse. Nicholas reflexively swung his weapon back toward her, ready to fire.
But she wasn’t reaching for a gun. From her purse she produced an old photograph and pressed it up against the window. He now realized why the woman standing there was so familiar to him.
Lowering his pistol, he reached behind him with his left hand and hit the unlock button.
As soon as she saw the lock pop up, the woman opened her door and climbed in. “I can explain everything,” she said, before Nicholas even had a chance to speak, “but we need to go. Now.”
CHAPTER 12
BASQUE PYRENEES
SPAIN
WEDNESDAY
The sun had just begun to rise when the knock fell upon the door. “It’s open,” Harvath said from the stove. He didn’t bother to turn around. He knew who it was.
A Basque man in his early forties stepped quietly inside and shut the door behind him.
“There’s coffee on the table.”
The man walked over and pulled out a chair. Sitting down, he withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it up. “It looks like I’m right on time.”
He had dark hair and a clean-shaven face. His serene countenance was juxtaposed by his impeccable, military-style posture and a pair of brown eyes that seemed a little too alert for a man of his profession.
“I heard the dogs as your horse got near,” Harvath said as he approached the table with a pan and spatula. “I hope you like eggs, Father.”
The priest took a deep drag on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment before releasing it into the air and nodding.
After serving the food, Harvath walked over, put the pan in the sink, and joined his visitor at the table. He was just about to begin eating when the priest fixed him with his gaze. Harvath set his fork down and waited.
Setting his cigarette on the edge of the table, Padre Peio bowed his head and gave the traditional blessing. When he was finished, he made the sign of the cross and looked up. “I probably should say that I’m surprised to see you, but I assume that was your intention.”
“I needed someplace safe.”
The priest picked up his cigarette and gestured with it. “I suppose you could do worse than the ranch of an ETA commander. But someone with your resources could also do much better.”
Harvath scooped up a forkful of eggs and nodded. “I needed a location that I couldn’t easily be connected to.”
The priest thought about this for a moment before responding. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to discuss specifics.”
“Fine, let’s discuss generalities.”
Harvath was silent for a moment as he reflected on what he knew about Peio.
The man had not always been a priest. In fact, his background was quite unusual among those who end up devoting their lives to God.
Peio and his family had left the Basque country for Madrid when he was in his first year of high school. With so many members of the family involved in the separatist movement, they had been worried about him and also his older brother becoming involved with ETA. They were right to have been concerned.
Within a year of graduating high school, Peio’s older brother had returned to the Basque country and joined up. Three months later, he died in a shootout with police. Peio, though, took another path.
He undertook his compulsory military service and proved quite adept in military intelligence. He stayed in the military while he completed his college degree and eventually transferred into Spain’s National Intelligence Service. It was there that Peio met his wife.
They deeply loved their jobs and each other. They had a plan to work five more years in the intelligence field and then transition into something less dangerous so that they could begin a family. They were six months away from that goal when, on a cold March morning in 2004, Alicia boarded a rush-hour commuter train for Madrid.
At 7:38 a.m., just as the train was pulling out of the station, an improvised explosive device planted by Muslim terrorists detonated, killing her instantly.
It was part of a series of coordinated bombings and became Spain’s 9/11. The entire nation was in shock. Peio was shattered. As an intelligence operative who specialized in Muslim extremism, he felt that he had failed his wife and his country by not having prevented the attack. This unhealthy sense of responsibility drove him over the cliff into a dark emotional abyss.
When he requested to be part of the investigation, his superiors said no, and placed him on forced medical leave in order to recover from his loss. Three days later, he disappeared.
Colleagues who had stopped by his home to check on him assumed that he had returned to the Basque country to get away from Madrid and the scene of his wife’s murder. They had no idea how wrong that assumption was.
Over the next thirty-six hours, Peio hunted down and brutally interrogated several Muslim extremists, severely hampering Spain’s investigation into the bombings. No matter which leads the authorities chose to follow or how fresh those leads were, they arrived to find that someone had already been there. That someone was Peio.
He finally captured two key members of the terror cell who had planned and facilitated the attacks. After torturing them for three days in an abandoned building, he executed them both. It was but a mile marker on his personal descent into hell.
After drawing all the money out of his bank account, he left Madrid for the tiny Spanish island of Cabrera. There, he drank. And when the drinking no longer assuaged his pain, he turned to heroin, and a whole new circle of hell was opened to him. He became addicted. When his money ran out, he attempted suicide.
He was already dead emotionally, and had it not been for a local priest who found him, he would have died physically as well.
The tiny island priest was tough but compassionate and dragged Peio back from the dead. “God has other plans for you,” he said, and when it came time for Peio to decide whether or not to return to Madrid and put the pieces of his life back together, God spoke to him directly and Peio learned what those plans were.
He confided in Harvath quite candidly not long after they had met that his biggest regret wasn’t over anything he had done. It wasn’t the brutal interrogations, the tortures, or even the executions of the terrorists he had captured. He had repented for those things and would ultimately answer to God. He had even forgiven himself for not having been able to prevent the attack that had taken his wife’s life. What he regretted the most was never having had children with her. If they had had children, even just one, he couldn’t help but wonder how different his life would have been in those days and months after Alicia’s death.
Harvath found that hard to believe. Any real man, especially a man with Peio’s background, would have done exactly what he had done. He would have hunted down and killed his wife’s killers. But Harvath had learned that, man of the cloth or not, what Peio said and what Peio did were often at odds with each other. And, as good as Harvath was at reading people, he also found it difficult to discern whether Peio had taken to him because of their similar operational backgrounds or because the priest saw in him a soul in need of saving.
Peio’s contradictions were most fully on display wh
en it came to the man who had introduced them—Nicholas, or simply the Troll, as the intelligence world referred to him.
Peio and Nicholas had met at an orphanage, in Belarus. Nicholas was one of its patrons and the priest had been doing missionary work there, ministering to the podkidysh, or “abandoned children,” many of whom were part of the continuing legacy of Chernobyl. Through their work at the orphanage, the two men had developed an unlikely, yet deep bond.
So strong was that bond that when Nicholas needed someplace safe, a place to disappear, he had turned to Peio, just as Harvath had done.
Peio lived two and a half hours farther up into the mountains at a remote monastery dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier. The ETA commander was a friend from his childhood and his fortified ranch served as a base camp and a gateway to the monastery beyond.
It was hard for Harvath to believe that it was less than a year ago that he and Peio had met. They had been drawn together by Nicholas, a man who had grown on both of them and whom each called his friend.
This same man had drawn Peio back into the field and his old way of life, though Harvath suspected the priest hadn’t put up much resistance.
Harvath had been thrown into an operation with Peio and had watched him work. He was good; his instincts on the money. So adept was he and so suited to the field that Harvath secretly wondered if the man would be able to remain a priest or if God might have yet another plan in store for him.
Whether He did or didn’t wasn’t Harvath’s concern. Right now he needed Peio. That meant he was going to have to trust him.
Reaching for his coffee cup, he settled on the words he was going to say and then began to fill the priest in.
CHAPTER 13
Padre Peio had only left the table once, to get an ashtray, and had motioned for Harvath to keep talking, which he did. When he finished, the priest exhaled a cloud of smoke and leaned back in his chair.
“I am deeply sorry for the loss of your colleague,” said Peio. “I will pray for her, as well as the other men you were forced to kill.”
The idea of Peio praying for Riley’s killers didn’t sit well with him at all, but Harvath kept that to himself.
“Now then,” continued the priest, “what else can I do for you besides provide sanctuary? I assume you want to make contact with your superiors?”
“I do.”
“Considering your circumstances, using a telephone, at least from here, is out of the question.”
“Agreed,” replied Harvath. “It would be too easy to trace. If I had access to a computer, though, I could route it so that it looks like I’m someplace else entirely. Is there one here that I can use?”
“There is. I’ll speak to your host and see what I can do.”
Twenty minutes later, Harvath was sitting in the main house in front of a small laptop. After laying a long digital trail through servers in multiple countries, he accessed his Skype account. Clicking on Reed Carlton’s icon in his contact list, he typed a message the Old Man would recognize, letting him know that he had gone to ground and that Riley had been killed. Am on the road. My companion couldn’t make the trip.
It was all he needed to say. Carlton was pretty much glued to his Skype account. If he wasn’t communicating with his people in the field via computer, he was doing it on his smartphone. Harvath sent the message and then sat back and waited. Forty-five minutes later, he was still waiting.
The Old Man’s icon showed that he was online, yet he still hadn’t responded. The only thing he could think of was that he had to be in a meeting of some sort. But with the time change, it didn’t make any sense. He didn’t like it, but he had no choice but to continue waiting.
An hour later, Peio knocked on the open door and asked, “Everything okay?”
Harvath shook his head. “No word yet.”
“It is the middle of the night back in the U.S.”
“I can’t reach Nicholas either and he’s always online.”
“I haven’t been able to contact him either,” said the priest.
“Since when?”
“Since yesterday. I reached out to him when I heard you were looking for me.”
“Via cell phone or the Web?” asked Harvath.
“The Web,” replied Peio.
Harvath went back into his contact list to check Nicholas’s Skype status. It showed him as being off-line. Nicholas was never off-line. Something was wrong.
Scrolling through his contact list he pinged one of the other operators he worked with at the Carlton Group, a man named Coyne. His icon showed him as being online, but he wasn’t responding. Harvath decided to call him on Skype. Clicking on the number, he activated the call and listened to it ring until it went to voice mail.
He then tried another operator, a man named Moss, and had the same results. Working his way down the list, he reached out to the two dozen or so other operators. Not a single one of them answered. Something definitely wasn’t right. In fact, something was very wrong.
Peio could see the look on Harvath’s face. “What is it?”
“I can’t reach anyone. Not on their Skype accounts. Not on their mobile phones. Nothing.”
“Could there be a reason?”
Harvath was sure there was a reason, but the only one that came to mind was so unfathomable that he didn’t want to even think about it. But he had to. There was no such thing as coincidence, not in his line of work. He had to assume that something very bad had happened. “I need to get back.”
“To the States?”
“Yes. Now. As soon as possible.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” asked Peio. “You have no idea what you might be rushing back to.”
The man had a point. He could be rushing right into a trap. That said, he couldn’t just sit still. He had to do something.
He was running options through his mind when a chime rang from the computer and a message from the Old Man suddenly appeared on his screen. Received your message. Are you okay?
Peio had heard the chime and saw the expression on Harvath’s face change. “What is it?”
“The Old Man just responded,” stated Harvath as he keyed in his response to Carlton. Am okay. No damage.
There were a million things he wanted to tell his superior, but he knew better than to do that, even on Skype. Instead he waited.
Moments later, the Old Man typed, Are you somewhere safe?
Yes.
Good. Stay there. Wait for further communication.
It was just like the Old Man to tell him to sit and wait, without giving him any further information. The fact that he didn’t ask where Harvath was or try to move him to one of the other Carlton safe houses was a bad sign. The organization must have been very deeply penetrated.
Roger that, Harvath replied.
Do not communicate with anyone else, the Old Man added. Not until I figure out what is going on. No one.
That was a prohibition Harvath should have expected. Technically, he had already “communicated” by reaching out to the other team members, but there was nothing he could do about that and decided to keep it to himself.
He wanted to ask what, if anything, the Old Man knew about the Paris attack, but he knew better. Carlton had contacts everywhere and had probably already been in touch with French intelligence. The fact that he wasn’t asking for any details at this point spoke volumes. When he wanted Harvath’s report, he’d ask for it. In the meantime, Harvath would do as he had been instructed.
Understood, he typed and then watched as the Old Man’s icon changed from green to gray, indicating that he had logged off.
CHAPTER 14
ATS HEADQUARTERS
ANNAPOLIS JUNCTION
MARYLAND
That was actually worth getting out of bed for,” Craig Middleton said as he patted his protégé on the shoulder. “Well done.”
Kurt Schroeder tried to not grit his teeth. It was like working for Sybil. The man had to have been manic-depressive or bipolar or some
thing. He ran so hot and cold, you never knew what the hell was going to come out of the faucet next. More often than not, though, the safe bet was that it would be pure liquid asshole. He was a screamer too, and prone to throwing things. Employees at ATS derisively referred to him as “Chuckles, the laughing boss” and called his twisted style of debasing encouragement “blamestorming.” Schroeder, though, seemed to be keenly adept at handling him or, more appropriately, ignoring his less than professional, the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves management style.
Middleton had never been able to hold an assistant for more than a year until he brought Schroeder in. Whether either of the men would ever admit it, they were made for each other.
Colleagues had marveled at Schroeder’s ability to ignore Middleton’s never-ending torrent of slights and petty insults. “Like water off a duck’s back,” they remarked, but they were incorrect. The insults didn’t just “roll” off. Each abusive strike found its target, which Schroeder quietly cataloged and buried. When he did exorcise his demons, he attempted to do so as far from the prying eyes of ATS and Craig Middleton as possible. He knew all too well the lengths his boss was prepared to go to in order to leverage information.
It was by understanding Middleton so intimately that he was able to work with him so closely. And understanding Middleton wasn’t difficult at all. He had to look no further than his own youth to find a nearly identical personality.
Schroeder had been born and mostly raised in a world of exceptional privilege, but in one afternoon, it had all been taken away. The fancy prep school, the magnificent house, the cars, the security afforded by bottomless bank accounts, all of it. Yet the worst part for Schroeder had been the loss of his father.
At the time, Schroeder was fourteen and a freshman in high school. The scandal was of epic proportions and its fallout horrible. It rained incessantly that autumn and the weather seemed to mirror the overwhelming sorrow welling up from the very pit of Schroeder’s young soul. As the media trampled their Greenwich, Connecticut, lawn, they pounded down on the boy’s sodden family and turned everything into mud.
