Black List

Lieutenant Bremmer wasn’t picky. To steady his nerves he helped himself to what vaguely resembled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Unscrewing the cap, he tossed it on the floor and stepped out onto the roof. Immediately, his heart dropped through his boots. He couldn’t make out a single landmark. Placing the bottle against his lips, he turned it upside- down and took a long swallow.

The substandard booze tasted like shit, but instantly its heat began to radiate throughout his body. He followed his first swig with two more and then tossed the bottle into a planter. He could get bombed later. At the moment, he needed to get his story straight.

Bremmer ran everything that had happened through his mind multiple times. With his driver dead, there wasn’t another American to contradict his story. The locals could say anything they wanted, and he expected them to, but he knew whose side the military would want to come down on. The key to making everything work was to tell as much of the truth as possible. If he did that, the locals would actually end up unwittingly supporting the tale he would weave. And what a tale it was.

By the time the extraction team arrived to pull him out, Bremmer’s story was airtight. It was so simple, so ingenious, that he surprised even himself.

The military not only bought it, their investigation actually supported it. Bremmer even received a commendation. Everything would have worked out perfectly, except for one thing. One of the men crushed by the SUV was the brother of a local CIA asset, who raised so much hell with his handler that the CIA’s Kuwait City station chief launched his own, quiet investigation of what had happened. If ever the word clusterfuck deserved to be applied to an event, this was it.

When the station chief tried to share his findings with U.S. military command, he was told in no uncertain terms where to file his report. They had conducted their own investigation and stood by the findings. The station chief had stepped outside his authority and was threatened with all sorts of recriminations.

Bremmer was damned if he was going to have his career dragged through the mud and possibly even destroyed over a few dead Kuwaitis. The station chief filed his report back to Langley, along with a recommendation that no further action be taken. As a result, no further action was taken. Chuck Bremmer had slipped the noose and in the process had crafted an action-guy history for himself, which invariably grew a little bit larger each time it was told.

Basking in the glow of a lie that had helped boost him up the ladder of success, he had never harbored any concern that one day all of his accomplishments might be undone. All of that changed the day Craig Middleton had stepped into his life, armed with much more than just the truth of what had happened in Kuwait City. Middleton had come loaded for bear.

Colonel Bremmer had allowed himself to become the biggest believer of his own bullshit and enabler of the misplaced confidence his superiors had in his abilities. As his ego exploded, he had engaged in all sorts of indulgences he felt he was entitled to, including extramarital affairs and influence peddling in the realm of military contracts in order to line his own pockets.

When Middleton showed up and dropped it all on him like an atomic bomb, Bremmer knew he only had two choices—cooperate or lose everything. He might have been sorely lacking in character, but he certainly wasn’t lacking in self-preservation skills. He knuckled under, and Middleton had owned him from that point forward.

When Middleton stepped into Bremmer’s office, the Colonel, who never knew when he might be summoned to the White House, was wearing his blue service uniform.

Pointing at the door for Bremmer’s SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, Middleton said, “Shall we?”

No good morning, no nothing, the Colonel thought to himself as he picked up his mug and stood. What an asshole.

Walking over to the SCIF, he punched his code into a small keypad. When the locks released, he pulled the door open and waved Middleton into the secure conference room.

Once the door was closed, they picked their conversation up where they had left off. “So you’re sure this information on his location is good?”

Middleton pulled out one of the leather chairs and sat down as if he owned the place. “I already told you it was good.”

“Fine. The team will need access to some sort of surveillance.”

“You’ll have everything I can give you. How quickly can you get them there?”

“I’ve already got a team in Lyon. Harvath bought a ticket on the high-speed train from Paris the night before last.”

“Why wasn’t I told?” asked Middleton.

“I’m telling you now.”

“Well, that’s pretty stupid considering the resources I have.”

“They’re professionals,” said Bremmer, ignoring the man’s condescension. “They know what they’re doing.”

“That’s why they’re in France looking for a guy who’s in Spain?”

“They’ll be retasked. Is there anything else?”

“Yeah, there is. Why haven’t I heard anything back from you on Kurt Schroeder?”

“Schroeder? You mean the kid in your office?”

“No, the kid from the Peanuts cartoon. Of course the kid from my office.”

A twitch rippled across Bremmer’s jowls. Middleton was an insufferable prick. “I assume you haven’t heard anything because the men following him haven’t found anything.”

“Bullshit. There’s something there. I know it.”

“If you’re so sure,” said Bremmer, “then you should yank his access before we have another Caroline Romero on our hands.”

Middleton thought about Caroline Romero for a moment before his thoughts shifted back to Schroeder. “He knows too much to simply yank his access.”

“Then we’ll add his name to the list. Just make up your mind.”

Middleton didn’t like the man’s tone. “Is that an order, Colonel?”

“Take it however you want. I’ve got enough of my own problems without dealing with yours.”

“Listen to me, Chuck. My problems are your problems and don’t you forget it. This is a national security issue. The names on that list represent the most pressing threat to this nation. If this is not handled properly, people will burn, including you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Me? Threaten a full-bird colonel? A special adviser to the National Security Council? Of course not. Let’s just call it a friendly piece of career advice.”

“I’ll take it under advisement. Anything else?”

“We don’t have closure on the concierge yet.” Concierge was their code name for Reed Carlton.

“You’re paranoid,” Bremmer replied. “You saw the pictures from that fire. He got burned to a crisp. No one could have survived that. He’s dead. Trust me.”

“Oh, I trust you,” said Middleton. “It’s your men I’m having trouble with. We should have used real operators.”

“For all intents and purposes, these guys are real operators.”

“Like hell they are. They’re fucking criminals, and on paper it might have seemed like a great idea to secretly arrange commutations and spring them from the stockade to join your wet work team, but they’re a disaster.”

Bremmer didn’t care for having his judgment called into question. “I told you, the Spec Ops community is too small. We couldn’t send true operators after operators. There was too much of a risk they’d know one of the targets and not do the job. I don’t care what we told them they were accused of….

“It doesn’t matter anyway. The men I’m using have had exceptional training and the proof is in the pudding. They’ve taken care of Carlton and every one of his people on the list.”

“Everyone but Harvath,” Middleton corrected.

The Colonel wasn’t interested in rehashing the failed Paris operation. They had already had that pissing contest. “They’ll get Harvath.”