Black List (10 page)

He thought about pouring himself more espresso but decided against it. He was amped up enough already. “Focus,” he told himself as he continued to scan the faces throughout the Casa De Palmas. Nobody was like Caroline Romero. If she was here, he had to be able to pick her out.

He watched the video feeds for another forty-five minutes, until it was time for him to get in place. Removing the custom pistol from inside the armrest, he placed it in his lap and covered it with a jacket. It was showtime.

Placing the Denali in reverse, he backed out of the parking space and pointed it toward the street. At the edge of the lot, he sent the “bump” to the monitors of the hotel security office. There was a flash of snow and then everything was fine. If the guard had been watching and not distracted by paperwork or texting on his cell phone, it would have appeared as if the power had momentarily dipped before coming back full strength. Unless he was attentive enough to notice that the valets taking cars at the
front of the hotel weren’t driving those same cars into the garage, then everything would be fine.

Nicholas wasn’t worried about the guard. He had enough camera feeds to keep him busy without making distinctions among the separate feeds. Besides, from what his personnel file said, the guard was a twenty-eight-year-old single male. With all the attractive women in short dresses climbing out of low-slung sports cars at the front door, it was easy to determine where his attention would be focused.

With a quick SDR to make sure he wasn’t being followed, Nicholas rounded the corner, passed the entrance to the Casa De Palmas, and drove into the parking structure.

He kept his eyes open for any vehicles that didn’t belong there or might portend trouble, such as a delivery truck or a large windowless van. As he wound his way to the third floor, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

After conducting a slow crawl of the upper deck to examine the other cars, he found a spot toward the center and pulled in. The sun had set over an hour ago. A smattering of lights on tall poles cast an incandescent pallor over the exposed roof of the parking garage.

In his rearview mirror, Nicholas could make out the pedestrian bridge that led back to the hotel. As he was studying it, a chime rang from his computer.

He looked down and clicked on one of the windows he had left open. Caroline had just posted a message for him:
Coming out.

Nicholas looked around.
Was she in one of the cars? The hotel?
He couldn’t be certain.

When none of the car doors opened, he assumed she meant she was coming out from the hotel itself. Bringing up the live camera feeds from inside the hotel, he began searching for her.

Near the bar area on the ground floor, a woman stood waiting for an elevator.
Was that her?
She wasn’t facing the camera. Her head was down and she seemed to be looking at her phone. She was about the right size, but so was every other woman who had walked into the hotel that night. When the elevator doors opened, she stepped inside and disappeared.

Less than a minute later, the elevator arrived at the third floor and the
woman walked out. Once again, he couldn’t see her face. She seemed to know where all the cameras were. Nicholas’s heart had begun beating faster but not because he was excited to see Caroline Romero. He had a bad feeling something wasn’t right.

Even so, he tried to tell himself to calm down. Caroline was an exceedingly intelligent woman. If she was in enough trouble to call him for help, she was very likely in enough trouble that she didn’t want her face captured on a security camera. Nicholas wanted to believe in her abilities, but he was having a hard time. Instinctively, he reached down and wrapped his hand around the butt of his pistol. The dogs could sense their owner’s unease and leapt up in back, their eyes scanning out the cargo area windows as they tried to figure out what was going on.

Suddenly the woman appeared on the pedestrian walkway. She stopped when she got to the parking area and looked around, unsure of where to go.

Nicholas took a deep breath and tapped his brake lights. The woman began walking forward.

She was attired like the other women he had seen entering the hotel that night, in heels and a short dress that clung to her body. A small cocktail purse hung from her left shoulder. The phone now gone, both of her hands appeared empty. His eyes flicked from her hands to her face, which he still couldn’t see. She walked with her head tilted down.
Was she trying to throw off the cameras? Or was this all about throwing me off?

The woman was closing in on the Denali, and Nicholas’s trepidation was going through the roof. As she neared, alarm bells started going off inside his head. Everything inside him was yelling that danger was approaching.
Put the truck in gear and go—drive and don’t look back,
the voices told him. Yet he ignored them. Argos and Draco had started growling.

Any time he may have had to react was now gone. The woman was so close she could touch the vehicle. And as quickly as that, he lost sight of her.

The dogs were now barking as they lunged at the back window. Nicholas craned his tiny neck from side to side as he tried to figure out where she had gone.
A trap.
He should have known.

Revving the Denali, he prepared to slam it into gear, when a face suddenly
appeared at the passenger-side window. Without even thinking, Nicholas raised his pistol to fire.

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

B
ASQUE
P
YRENEES
S
PAIN
W
EDNESDAY

T
he 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.