by Brad Thor
“I don’t make the judgment. I simply carry out my orders,” said the man.
“Who gives you those orders?”
“None of your business.”
“I’m a traitor and you’re here to kill me, but who sent you is none of my business?”
“You talk too much,” the man snapped.
“And you don’t talk enough. You’re making a big, big mistake. I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Shut up.”
Harvath could sense he was running out of time. “You’re military, right? Or at least you were military at some point. What branch?”
The man ignored him.
“I was a SEAL before joining the Secret Service.”
“I’ve seen your file,” the man replied.
“Then you know what I’ve done for my country. You owe me an explanation.”
“I don’t owe you shit,” he stated, as he turned his attention back to his radio. “Red Two to Red One. What’s your status? Over.”
“Haven’t found anything yet, Red Two. Over.”
“Hurry up. Red Two out.”
There was something about this guy that didn’t make sense, something Harvath couldn’t put his finger on. He acted military, but at the same time there was a street thug vibe about him. “Listen,” Harvath stated. “You can’t kill an American citizen without benefit of a trial.”
“I can if you’re on the list, traitor.”
“List? What list? What the hell are you talking about?”
The man was distracted by something and didn’t reply. When Harvath tried to get him to answer his question, he dropped his voice and whispered sternly, “Shut the fuck up.”
There was the barely perceptible creak of a floorboard as the man began to shift his weight, turning to his right.
It was followed by a thunderous blast that set Harvath’s ears ringing. Reaching for his pistol, he spun and brought it up just in time to see the man fall forward and land flat on his face, dead. A shotgun blast had ripped through his neck all the way up and through the base of his skull.
Standing in the dining room, a smoking lupara in his hands, was Padre Peio.
Before Harvath could say a word, he saw a shadow of movement behind the priest from the kitchen. “Peio! Gun! Get down!” he yelled. He was too late. Instead of dropping, Peio spun.
It was hard to tell who fired first, Harvath or the man who must have been the voice from the radio, Red One.
As Peio dropped to the floor, Harvath depressed the trigger again and again, walking his shots up from the top of the attacker’s chest into his throat and finally into the cleft beneath his nose.
The attacker’s weapon clattered to the kitchen floor as he collapsed and Harvath rushed to the aid of his friend.
CHAPTER 23
Thankfully, Padre Peio’s wounds weren’t life threatening. He had taken two rounds to the shoulder. One passed clean through, the other was still inside, and judging from the reaction when Harvath applied a pressure bandage, it was near the bone and more than a little painful.
He kept trying to stand up. “I need to minister to the deceased.”
Praying for the dead was the last thing Harvath wanted to do right now. He wanted answers—foremost among them, who had labeled him a traitor and put a hit out on him? And for what? What had he supposedly done? How had they tracked him down?
That last question was the easiest to answer. It had to have been through the Old Man. Their exchanges over Skype were the only connection to his location. He’d tried to hide himself by routing and rerouting through servers around the planet, but someone had untangled his Web.
Peio struggled to get up again, and Harvath’s mind was drawn back to stopping the priest’s bleeding. As soon as he had stemmed the bleeding the best he could, he helped the priest to his feet.
Peio walked over to Tello and prayed for the dead Basque, while Harvath searched the corpses of the two attackers. Like the others, they were young and not carrying any identification at all. The kid who had been about to kill Harvath had a handful of tattoos, a couple of which were crude and obviously not inked by a professional.
After praying over the two attackers inside, Peio let Harvath help him out the door and showed him where the other two were. The priest said a few words and they moved on.
Approaching the dead Basque halfway between the main house and the stables, Harvath figured out where Peio had picked up the lupara. What he didn’t understand was why he had come back.
He put the question to the priest, but he declined to answer. He wanted to save his strength. Harvath understood and offered Peio his shoulder. They could speak afterward.
He knew the ranch well enough to navigate them through the slowly lifting fog and locate the bodies. Whoever the team was, they had been good. Tello’s men were all dead, including Eyebrows and Scarface. Not a single one of them had been left alive. What the hell was going on? Why were these killers so young, and what was this “list” the kid had said Harvath was on? More importantly, why had he called him a traitor? None of it made any sense.
They soon came across the dogs. Harvath hated for animals to be killed. He understood why it was done in a raid, but he still hated it. Even when animals had been a factor in his assaults, he always tried to find another way to handle the situation without killing them.
When Peio was satisfied that he’d accounted for all of the dead, Harvath tried to lead him back to the main house to rest, but he refused. “The sun will be coming up soon,” Peio said. “You need to go.”
“What about you?” Harvath replied. “You need to see a doctor.”
The man shook his head. “A priest with a bullet wound would fuel enough gossip to last a century around here. I cannot be connected to what happened here. Father Lucas will take care of my wounds.”
“Do you have any idea how highly contaminated bullet wounds are?” Before the words were even out of his mouth, Harvath regretted uttering them. Of course Peio knew. He’d had plenty of experience with bullets before becoming a priest. “You’re going to need antibiotics.”
“We have all that at the abbey. Don’t worry.”
Peio was one tough guy. “You still haven’t told me why you came back.”
“I heard from Nicholas.”
Harvath stopped and turned to look at the priest. “When? How?”
“We use the website of the orphanage where we met in Belarus to leave messages for each other. Nicholas set it up in such a way that our communications couldn’t be seen.”
Harvath had trusted his Skype communication with the Old Man, but after what had just happened, nothing was safe. “How do you know you were actually communicating with Nicholas? How can you be sure?”
“There’s an authentication process,” Peio answered. “It’s similar to a dead drop. There is another site where I leave a nonspecific indicator. I believe Nicholas uses it for a lot of his contacts; sort of a messaging radar screen. I leave an indicator there to signal that there is a message waiting for him on the orphanage site. He then comes to the orphanage site, but cannot unlock my message and reply without using my indicator and how it was placed as a password.”
“How many other people know about your chat system?”
Peio looked at Harvath to see if he was serious. “Have you ever met anyone more concerned with the security of his communications than Nicholas?”
The priest had a good point, and while no system was ever one hundred percent secure, Nicholas had developed some of the toughest to crack, often by hiding them right in plain sight like the orphanage. “What did he say?”
Peio grimaced suddenly as he took in a breath.
“You’ve got to let me get you to a hospital, Father. You can’t make the ride back to the abbey.”
The man forced a smile. “I can and I will.”
“Peio, it’s three hours on horseback.”
“And I will need every minute of it to make peace with God and atone for wha
t I did.”
“You saved my life. Thank you.”
The priest held up his hand. “We don’t have much time. Let me tell you what Nicholas said.”
Harvath nodded.
“When you reached out to me through the tobacconist, I knew something was wrong. As I said, I left a message for Nicholas. I wanted to know why you were coming. Several hours ago, I finally heard back. He said that he’s uncovered something and he needs you to get back as soon as possible.”
“Did he tell you what it was?”
“No. When we communicate, we do so in generalities. Despite Nicholas’s belief that he’s created a secure system, he’s still careful. Everything is disguised to sound like orphanage business. He did, though, want me to pass along a specific message to you.”
“What was it?”
“‘Make sure you do not promise or tip anyone anything.’ Does that make sense to you?”
Indeed it did. The message referred to two software programs used by intelligence agencies around the world. PROMIS was the acronym for the first program—the Prosecutors Management Information System. It was the precursor of TIP—the Total Information Paradigm.
PROMIS worked 24/7, looking for correlations between people, places, and organizations. It was brilliantly adept at accessing proprietary databases like those of banks, credit card companies, e-mail providers, phone companies, and other utilities. Running complex algorithms, it built detailed relationship trees outlining a subject’s every move, whom they knew, and with whom they interacted.
Because it could develop a baseline from utility records, if the subject of an investigation started using more water or power, it would realize that people had likely joined the suspect at the suspect’s residence. It would then search through the suspect’s phone records and e-mails and look for contacts whose utility consumption had gone down. It would go through credit card receipts to see if the contacts with diminished utility usage had purchased airline or train tickets, and if so, where. It would find all the towers that the contacts’ cell phones were pinging off of, as well as where they were paying for tolls and gasoline, all in an effort to try to figure out who was inside the subject’s home contributing to the increased use of power and water.
It worked around the clock, never sleeping, never stopping, and so had earned itself the nickname the Terminator. It was an appropriate moniker for its day, but the real terminator is what followed—TIP.
The Total Information Paradigm took PROMIS and wedded it with artificial intelligence. At that moment, the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the world’s intel agencies went supernova. It was like going from a Prius to a Lamborghini. Not only could TIP think like a person, it was alleged that it could actually anticipate human behavior.
Nicholas didn’t need to warn him about staying “off the grid.” He was the one, after all, who had schooled Harvath so deeply on both the PROMIS and TIP programs. Aside from observing good tradecraft, those programs were why Harvath had chosen to reach out to Peio and to do so in the manner he had. The priest was outside of practically any relationship tree anyone or any data-mining program could assemble around him.
For Nicholas to reinforce the need to avoid getting flagged by either program had to mean those programs were actively seeking him out.
“Did he say anything else?” Harvath asked the priest.
“He told me I needed to do everything I could to help you get back. Unfortunately, my contacts aren’t what they used to be. Getting you a new passport under a different name is going to take some time.”
“I already have one, so don’t worry.”
Peio nodded. “I should have expected that.”
“What I need, though, is a means to buy my airline ticket. All I have is cash, and that sends up red flags immediately.”
“I know someone with Iberia Airlines. Employees often book tickets for friends through their intranet system. The employee pays with a personal credit card and the friend reimburses the employee.”
Peio had obviously used this “friend” for similar travel arrangements before. No doubt, “reimbursement” meant the price of the ticket plus a premium for Peio’s contact who did the booking.
Traveling on an Italian passport, Harvath wanted to select a U.S. point of entry popular with Italians. “How often does Iberia have flights to New York City?” he asked.
“That’s just it,” replied Peio. “I think Nicholas has a different plan for you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Before coming home, he suggested you stop at an orphanage he has a relationship with.”
“The one in Belarus?” asked Harvath.
“No, this one’s in Mexico.”
CHAPTER 24
MARYLAND
There were over 1,300 historical structures within the 184.5 mile long Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park. Many of them were open to the public, including six “lockhouses,” or “canal quarters,” as they were known, which visitors could rent for overnight stays in order to experience what life was like along the once thriving canal that ran parallel to the Potomac. They came complete with all the modern conveniences of full kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms with showers. They were known as Lockhouses 6, 10, 22, 25, 28, and 49. The “blue” lockhouse, so named for the color of its shutters and front door, was also very historic and equipped for overnight stays, but it had never been opened to the public—and with good reason.
The blue lockhouse was the property of the Central Intelligence Agency. Inside, some of the most valuable defectors from the Soviet Union had been debriefed over the course of the Cold War. The term “Behind the blue door” had become synonymous with interrogations at the highest level. The majority of the agents who used the term had no idea where the blue door was, much less that it was attached to a diminutive C&O canal house. Many simply assumed the door existed somewhere deep within the bowels of headquarters, where only the Director and a handful of privileged others were ever allowed to go.
Reed Carlton saw the signal—a bird feeder propped against the porch—and knew the front door would be open. He didn’t bother knocking; he didn’t need to.
In a chair near a small, wood-burning fireplace a man sat reading. He didn’t look up when Carlton walked in. He seemed content to read his book and listen to the crackle of the fire.
The man’s name was Thomas Banks. Those who knew him called him Tom. Those who knew him from the war called him Tommy. Carlton hadn’t served with him, but he had served under him and eventually took over for him at the CIA and had earned the right to call him Tommy.
One of the youngest OSS operatives in World War II, the exploits of Tommy Banks had been the stuff of legends. With no other marketable skills other than “Indian fighting,” as Banks liked to call it, he had agreed to help establish the Central Intelligence Agency. He found his niche in the Directorate of Plans, which would eventually be called the National Clandestine Service—the branch of the CIA that recruited foreign assets and ran clandestine operations around the world.
For decades, Banks worked in the field before settling down to “raise his chicks,” as he called the younger operatives, and teach them how to conduct ops even better than he had. Eventually, Banks would head the division as its deputy director, back when it was known as the Directorate of Operations.
Much of what Reed Carlton had learned about espionage and clandestine activity, he had learned from this incredible man, a quiet rock star in America’s intelligence and political arenas. Though most citizens would never know his name, there wasn’t a single powerful person in D.C. he couldn’t get on the phone in minutes.
“I could hear you crunching up the path from a mile away,” the man said as Carlton closed the door. “Looks like we’re going to have to train you all over again.”
He shook his head. “I think I’m getting too old for any more training, Tommy.”
“You’re never too old, Peaches. Just too lazy.”
Peaches. Ca
rlton hadn’t heard that nickname in a long time. He had trouble remembering exactly who’d given it to him, but it had been in reaction to his style of interrogation. Though in every other way he maintained the appearance and persona of a gentleman, he could be absolutely ruthless when interrogating a prisoner. If Americans or American interests were on the line, he would do anything it took to get the information he wanted. He could be the antithesis of sweetness, which is why so many of his colleagues and even a supervisor or two so enjoyed his ironic nickname.
“Speaking of lazy,” Banks continued, the slight Tennessee drawl still evident in his voice despite having spent the bulk of his life living within a half a tank of gas of the nation’s capitol, “You didn’t bring a cell phone to this meeting, did you?”
“I was taught better than that.”
Banks grunted his approval. “All this damn technology is dangerous. You didn’t use a GPS to get here, did you?”
Carlton shook his head. “I drove my old Jeep. It doesn’t have GPS.”
“And none of that damn OnStar either?”
“No. No OnStar.”
“Good,” replied Banks. “People have grown so soft they’d rather allow a company to catalog their every move and listen in to their private conversations than learn to read a map.”
Carlton hung his coat on a peg near the door. “It’s not all useless. They helped unlock my assistant’s car once when she had locked her keys inside.”
“That’s why God gave us rocks,” Banks stated. “No offense, but if you’re dim enough to lock your keys in your car, maybe you need an hour or two to sit and wait for the man with the slim jim to arrive while you reflect on your IQ.”
The man was as irascible as ever. He didn’t have much time for stupid or lazy people. He came from an age, as did Carlton, where people were expected to make their own way. They didn’t sit and wait for people to do things for them. “Thank you for meeting me like this, Tommy.”
“You made it irresistible,” the older man responded as he closed his book and waved his guest over.
