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 when 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
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?”
