Black List sh-11 Read online

  Schroeder waited for his boss to offer him a seat, but the offer never came, so he just stood there.

  “Well?” the boss asked, as he walked over to a wet bar and poured himself a drink.

  Schroeder took a deep breath into his lungs and let it out. “I’m sorry. Nothing yet.”

  “What do you mean, nothing yet?”

  “We haven’t been able to locate anything.”

  “Don’t give me that we bullshit,” the older man turned and said. “I made myself perfectly clear. I tasked you with this, and failure is not an option.”

  Craig Middleton was in his early sixties, had a thin build and curly gray hair that resembled a scouring pad. Despite sporting a perpetual tan and laser-whitened teeth, the most distinct feature of his rather unremarkable appearance were his deep-set eyes, which were rimmed with dark circles. Contrary to Craig Middleton’s opinion, he was not an attractive man.

  Schroeder eyed the matching purple silk tie and handkerchief that his peacock of a boss was sporting and, masking his distaste, focused carefully on his words. “It’s only a matter of time,” he replied. “Don’t worry.”

  Middleton eyed his subordinate as he took a long draught of scotch. “Do you like your job, Kurt?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said do you like your job?”

  “Of course I—”

  The older man shook his head and motioned for him to be quiet. “I could have taken anyone under my wing, but I took you.”

  “And I’m grateful for—”

  “I don’t think you are, Kurt. I think, like the rest of your spoiled, entitled generation, you take everything for granted. I don’t think you know the meaning of hard work. What’s worse, I don’t think you know the meaning of loyalty. Do you have any idea what I put on the line to bring you in and raise you up through the ranks? Do you have any idea at all?”

  Schroeder knew all too well. If it weren’t for Craig Middleton, he’d be sitting in a federal prison, or worse. “I think you know where my loyalty lies.”

  The older man took another sip and then looked at his watch. “Do I? I’m the one who has to go sit down with the board in ten minutes and look like I have zero control over this organization, and it’s all because you aren’t doing your job.”

  “We’re talking about a needle in a haystack.”

  “We own the fucking haystack,” Middleton spat. “Every last fucking straw of it. We own every rock. We own every drainpipe. We own every hollowed-out fucking tree. You can’t even change your fucking mind without us knowing about it. So don’t tell me you’ve got nothing yet. You’ve got everything you could possibly need at your disposal. Which means you’d better get me something and get it to me soon. Do you understand me?”

  Schroeder nodded.

  “Don’t you fucking nod at me,” snapped Middleton. “Answer me.”

  “Yes, sir,” he piped up. “I understand.”

  His boss then raised his hand and pointed at the door. The pep talk was over.

  As Schroeder left the house and climbed back into his car, Middleton crossed over to the desk and picked up the handset of his encrypted telephone, known as an STE, short for Secure Terminal Equipment. Inserting a dummy NSA Crypto Card into the slot, he dialed.

  After two rings, the call was answered. “What’s the verdict?”

  “I think he’s lying,” Middleton stated.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Follow him.”

  “And if he is lying?” replied the voice.

  “Add him to the list.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PARIS

  MONDAY EVENING

  Gun!” yelled Scot Harvath, launching himself into the apartment as a hail of bullets splintered the door frame around him.

  Knocking Riley Turner to the floor, he flipped onto his back and kicked the door shut.

  “Move! Move! Move!” he ordered as he struggled to get to his feet, but Riley didn’t stir.

  Looking down, Harvath saw blood and pieces of gray matter from where one of the bullets had torn through her head. He didn’t need to feel for her pulse. It would have been useless. She was dead. For a split second, everything stopped.

  But just as soon as it had stopped, his survival instinct kicked in, and right along with it, his training. The shock of seeing Riley dead was relegated to a far corner of his mind as he focused on the here and now. Running his hands along her body, he searched for a weapon but didn’t find one.

  Leaving his dead partner on the floor of the entry hall, he jumped up and ran for the living room. Everything now was about staying alive.

  All of the Carlton Group safe houses were set up in the same way. Rushing toward the two sleeper sofas, he yanked the cushions off the first one but immediately abandoned it when he saw the pullout mattress beneath. The next one was where the capabilities kit should be.

  Capabilities kits were Espionage 101. Though they could be tailored to fit specific assignments, in general they contained all of the hard-to-acquire items an operative might need in a foreign country: cash, sterile SIM cards, cell phones, lockpicking tools, a small trauma kit, tracking bugs, Tuff-Ties, a Taser, OC foggers, folding knife, multitool, an infrared and laser designator strobe, a compact firearm, suppressor, loaded magazines and extra ammunition, and a handful of other items.

  Removing the cushions of the other couch, Harvath tore out the faux panel beneath and exposed a long metal box. He punched in the code, a green light illuminated, and the box’s electronic lock released.

  As he threw open the lid, he didn’t need to hear the boots of the shooters staging outside in the hallway to know he didn’t have much time. Judging by the suppressors on their weapons, not to mention the fact that they had located the highly secretive safe house, they were professionals.

  Also, this wasn’t some Parisian ghetto where gunshots and violence might go ignored. Even suppressed weapons made a very distinct and audible sound. In all likelihood, neighbors had already called the police. The shooters would be under pressure to finish their job and get away from the building. Harvath had to work fast.

  His heart pumping and adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream, he snatched a .45-caliber Glock 21 pistol and spun the suppressor onto the weapon’s threaded barrel. After racking the slide, he shoved two additional magazines in his pocket and grabbed a couple of foggers.

  The only lights that had been on were in the living room and he quickly extinguished them. He needed every advantage he could get.

  Peering back into the darkened hallway, he could see Riley’s body still on the floor exactly where she had fallen. He punched the top of the fogger against his thigh and then pitched it into the hall.

  It rolled a few inches as it hit the floor and then began to hiss as an aerosolized cloud of pepper spray was released into the air. It wouldn’t prevent professional hitters from entering the apartment, but it was unlikely they had come prepared for it. Anyone who had trained to do entry work expected furniture and other obstacles, as well as the target being armed when they entered, but a fog of OC was an outlier, and that’s why Harvath had deployed it.

  True professionals would have been subjected to pepper spray as part of their training and could move through it, but it still sucked when immediately your mucus membranes dumped, your eyes began to water, and saliva ran from your mouth. Your lungs felt like you had breathed in thousands of needles. On top of everything, your eyes burned like hell and your vision was impaired, which was what Harvath was counting on. Now he could focus on the back door.

  No safe house had only one way in and one way out. There had to be at least two means of ingress and egress. The fact that the shooters had not only located the apartment but had waited until he had shown up to start shooting told him they had access to way too much information and had done their homework. They would have nailed down all means of entering and leaving the building and therefore had him at a distinct disadvantage.

  He had never be
en to this safe house before, though he’d been inside similar apartments in Paris. Often in these older buildings, there was a servant’s entrance via the kitchen.

  If this apartment had such an entrance, it wouldn’t have been left uncovered. In fact, there was likely another team assembling there right now, poised to burst in. Harvath wasted no time finding out.

  Entering the kitchen, he stood stock-still and listened, his eyes scanning the room. A shaft of ambient light spilled through a pair of weather-beaten French windows. Just as he had assumed, a door at the other end served as an exit.

  Slowing his breathing, Harvath readjusted his grip on his weapon. He couldn’t hear anyone on the other side of the door, but he didn’t need to. He could sense them. He was an apex predator—at the top of the food chain. People didn’t hunt him. He was the hunter, and he hunted them. Whoever had decided to put an X on his back had made a very, very bad mistake.

  Creeping to his left, he opened the cabinet beneath the sink and quickly rummaged through it until he came up with what he was looking for. He removed the top from the bottle of dishwashing liquid, crept to the door, and dumped it all over the floor. When it was empty, he laid it in the sink and backed out of the kitchen.

  Though the OC fog hung like a thick cloud in the entry hall, Harvath could already smell it from where he stood. His eyes weren’t watering yet, but they would be soon.

  He took one final deep breath and readied his weapon as an icy calm overtook him. It would be any moment now.

  Five seconds later, he heard the distinct thock from outside the apartment’s front door as the automatic timer turned off the lights.

  “One, one thousand. Two, one thousand,” he said to himself.

  Just before reaching five, the assault came as both the front and back doors of the apartment were kicked in at exactly the same time.

  CHAPTER 3

  The distractions Harvath had set up took both of the breaching teams by surprise.

  The two men who charged through the kitchen hit the slick floor and fell down in a tangled knot. Stepping into the kitchen, Harvath shot the first man in the head and the second in the back.

  He was on his way out, when the man he’d shot in the back raised his pistol and tried to fire. Harvath re-engaged with two rounds to the side of the head, and the man’s body fell limp.

  Quickly, Harvath approached, pulled aside the man’s jacket, and placed his hand against his torso. Body armor.

  From the direction of the entry hall, Harvath heard the cough of a muffled shot as someone must have put an additional round into Riley Turner to make sure she was dead.

  He knew there was absolutely nothing he could have done for her. Even if she had still been alive, the only first aid you provide in a firefight is to put rounds on your attackers. If you stop to tend to someone else, you’re both going to end up being killed. Riley had been trained the same way and would have done the same thing.

  She also would have kept her cool and would have focused on getting out, even if her colleague had just been killed. It was the professional, responsible thing to do, and Harvath knew it was exactly what he should do, but anger had gotten the better of him. He was now committed to a more dangerous and violent strategy, and he wasn’t leaving until every single one of the attackers was dead.

  With the element of surprise still on his side, he swept through the living room toward the hallway. The shooters knew he was in the apartment but had no idea where. He knew where they were, though, and he began putting rounds through the wall.

  On the fourth shot, he heard a man in the hallway grunt and fall to the floor. His partner had figured out what was going on and began returning fire through the wall. Harvath, though, had already inserted a fresh magazine into his Glock and moved to a new position.

  As the man continued firing through the wall, Harvath appeared like a wraith at the end of the hallway. The OC gas began to burn his eyes and before it could take full effect, he lined up his sights and fired.

  The shot caught the man in the head and he dropped instantly. Harvath then locked in on the other man, who had been shot through the wall and was lying in a heap on the floor but still alive. The man was bringing his pistol up to fire when Harvath depressed his trigger and fired a round into him just inches above his body armor, right into his throat.

  The attacker’s weapon clattered to the floor as blood gushed from his wound. Harvath closed in and finished him with a shot aimed right at the bridge of his nose. He fired another round into the man’s accomplice just in case.

  With his lungs burning and his eyes and nose watering, he retreated from the hall and rushed into the living room. He wanted to throw open one of the windows and suck in a deep breath of cold, clean air, but he knew he couldn’t. The shooters might have had more men positioned outside, possibly even a sniper, so he stayed away from the windows and moved around the darkened apartment as quickly as possible. Outside in the distance, he could hear the wail of approaching Parisian police cars.

  He located a black Camelbak backpack that contained Riley’s wallet, passport, and multiple personal effects. He stuffed the remaining items from the capabilities kit inside and zipped it up.

  One of the safe house closets contained an array of spare clothing in different sizes. He hurriedly switched into a larger jacket to help downplay his muscular, five-foot-ten frame and grabbed a dark baseball cap to cover his brown hair. It wasn’t the best of disguises, but it was better than nothing.

  Shouldering Riley’s pack, he returned to the apartment’s entry hall only long enough to snap photographs of her, as well as the two dead shooters, both of whom looked to be in their early twenties.

  He turned their pockets inside out, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper to be found on them. Besides their weapons and extra magazines, they were completely clean. For communications, they carried cheap walkie-talkies and headsets—all likely sourced at a local outdoors or electronics store.

  With no time to say a proper good-bye to Turner, Harvath made for the kitchen where he conducted a similar quick search of the men lying on the floor. Both of the men looked to be in their mid-twenties and were clean of any pocket litter as well.

  Normally hitters were older, more seasoned. Besides their youth, everything else suggested a thoroughly professional job.

  After grabbing a kitchen towel and a container of milk from the fridge, Harvath photographed the men and tossed another fogger down the back stairs. He listened for sounds of movement down below and when he didn’t hear any, he stepped into the service stairwell and cautiously made his descent.

  When he reached the ground floor, he moved away from the fogger and soaked the kitchen towel in milk. After wiping his face and hair as well as he could to mitigate the effects of the OC, he tossed the towel and put the baseball cap on.

  He then removed the battery, as well as the memory and SIM cards from his phone, and slid them into one of his coat pockets. He did the same with the suppressor, after unscrewing it from his weapon. He tucked the Glock into one of the jacket’s larger pockets on his right side, where he could hold it in his hand and shoot through the fabric if necessary. That done, it was time to step outside.

  The apartment building chosen for the group’s safe house was part of a cluster of buildings that formed a rough oval and shared a communal courtyard. Exiting his building and walking across the courtyard, Harvath gained access to the service corridor of another building facing an entirely different street. There was only one way of knowing if the hit team had every exit covered.

  Using his left hand, he turned up the collar of his coat and stepped out.

  He quickly scanned up and down the street. The kind of men he was looking for wouldn’t be hard to spot—they had a certain build, a certain bearing. There were a handful of people about, but none of them even noticed him. Turning north, he began walking.

  He needed to get out of Paris fast. He needed to get someplace safe where he could let Reed Carlton, the he
ad of the Carlton Group and his boss, know that Riley had been killed and that their safe house had been “burned.”

  The sounds of police cars were now practically right on top of him and seemed to be coming from every direction. Soon the neighborhood would be locked down and cordoned off. Harvath picked up his pace.

  He knew they would eventually get around to checking security camera footage. Paris, like London and Chicago, was a very dangerous city to operate in. It contained innumerable security cameras, which the authorities had networked and which recorded everyone and everything that happened. Keeping his head down and his chin tucked in, he tried to avoid being photographed.

  He ran options through his mind as he moved. He could steal a car, but that would only increase the odds of getting caught. His only course of action was to get out of Paris, and then France, as quickly as possible without being noticed. The best way for that to happen was by train.

  There were seven major stations in Paris that served a combination of domestic and international destinations. All Harvath had to do was decide where he was going.

  He knew he needed to remain inside the EU for the time being. Though he carried a fake Italian passport, crossing into a non-EU country would subject him to a potential customs inspection. Considering what he was carrying in Riley Turner’s backpack, that wasn’t something he wanted to risk.

  He needed to pick a destination where he had someone who could help him. And until he knew what was going on, whomever he turned to for help should be as far removed from his professional life as possible. The greater the degree of separation, the more difficult it would be for someone to make any connection and track him down.

  He raced through a list of people he believed he could trust as he skirted the Montparnasse cemetery. The Gare Montparnasse was the closest train station to him, and it served western and southwestern France. From there, he could make his way into Spain and the Basque country, where he knew someone who could help. But would there be any trains running from Montparnasse this late at night?