Black List

But would there be any trains running from Montparnasse this late at night?

He decided that the Gare d’Austerlitz would be a better bet. Among its many destinations, it ran trains directly into Spain.

Near rue Boissonade, Harvath found a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Gare de Lyon, on the other side of the river from the Gare d’Austerlitz. There he purchased a first-class ticket on the high-speed TGV for Lyon in his name and presented his American passport to the cashier when she asked for ID. He had no intention of going to Lyon, but the more red herrings he dragged across his path, the better.

Slipping out of the Gare de Lyon, he executed a surveillance detection route, or SDR, to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Finally, he crossed back over the Seine and entered the Gare d’Austerlitz.

On the schedule, there was an overnight train leaving for Hendaye, a town in the French Basque country along the Spanish border. It was the fastest and most direct route available, so he purchased a second-class ticket in cash. He was ready with his Italian passport just in case, but the cashier didn’t ask to see it.

With his ticket in hand, all he could do was keep as low a profile as possible until it was time to leave.

At 11:06 p.m., five minutes before the train was scheduled to depart, he boarded.

It wasn’t until the train had gotten beyond the outskirts of Paris that he closed his eyes. But even then he was only pretending to sleep. Too much had happened. Too much didn’t make sense. His mind was struggling to put together the pieces and figure out what to do next.

He was anxious to contact his boss, but he knew he had to follow protocol. The rules were clear—in a situation like this, there couldn’t be any communication until he had gotten away to someplace safe. Even then, he would have to be very careful about everything he did.

In the meantime, he kept replaying the scene from the Paris safe house. He couldn’t believe that Riley, whom he had slowly been getting to know beyond their professional relationship, was dead. He was crushed.

How the hell had it happened? No one outside of their group should have known about that safe house. It was only the beginning of the many questions he had. Carlton had sent him to Paris on an errand. Once it was complete, he had been instructed to go to the safe house. He had no idea Riley was going to be there, but when she answered the door, he had been thrilled to see her. Then the shooting had started and she had been killed.

What was she doing there? What was Carlton planning for them? Had someone sold them out? Someone in the organization? He had made a vow as he had left the apartment building and he reaffirmed it to himself now. If it took the very last drop of blood in his body, he was going to find whoever was responsible for this attack and make them pay with their life.

CHAPTER 4

RIO GRANDE VALLEY

TEXAS

A swath of green at the southernmost tip of Texas, the Lower Rio Grande Valley rests upon the northern bank of the Rio Grande, which separates the United States from Mexico.

Referred to by locals simply as “the Valley,” or “El Valle” depending on your choice of language, the area stretches over four counties and has a population of about 1.1 million people. Its two biggest cities are Brownsville and McAllen, its two biggest “legal” industries agriculture and tourism. Its two biggest illegal industries are also of the agriculture and tourism variety; drugs and human smugglers passing through daily on their way north.

The Valley was a popular destination for wealthy Mexican families looking to escape the violence on the other side of the border, and many had second homes there. It was also a magnet for wealthy Texans, who had established stunning private ranches complete with every luxury imaginable, even private airfields.

It was upon one such private airfield that a Citation X had just landed.

The jet taxied to the end of the runway, where a white Ford F-150 was waiting. Emblazoned on the side of the truck were the words Three Peaks Ranch. Beneath the words appeared the ranch’s brand, a row of three triangles that looked like jagged mountain peaks.

Coming to a stop near the truck, the plane’s engines were shut down as the crew opened the forward door and lowered the air stairs.

The Valley’s subtropical climate meant that May through September could be oppressively hot, with humid daytime highs in the hundreds and evening lows remaining in the seventies. In October and November, though, the Valley was a completely different place. At this time of year, upper seventies to mid-eighties were the usual highs, with evenings in the fifties or sixties.

It was exactly sixty-seven degrees when the private jet discharged its passengers—a dwarf followed by two enormous white dogs.

Known to Western intelligence agencies only as the Troll, the little man had made an extremely lucrative career for himself in the sale and purchase of classified and highly sensitive information. He was a hacker par excellence and had also distinguished himself by engineering highly sophisticated trading algorithms and secretly selling them to some of the world’s largest banks.

Following him down the air stairs, his dogs, Argos and Draco, were equally unique.

Standing over forty-one inches tall at the shoulder and weighing more than two hundred pounds each, the giant animals, known as Russian Ovcharkas or Caucasian Sheepdogs, had been the canines of choice for the Russian military and the former East German border patrol. They were exceedingly fast, intensely loyal, and could be absolutely vicious when the situation called for it. They made the perfect guardians for a man suffering from primordial dwarfism, who stood just under three feet tall and had some of the most powerful enemies on the planet.

On the tarmac with their noses in the air and their ears forward, the dogs took in the scents and sounds of this new environment. So too did their master. He could just make out the scent of honey carried, no doubt, on the wind from the many honey mesquite trees this part of Texas was known for. It was a part of America he had never been to before, and it was quite different from where he had been raised.

As a boy, his Soviet parents had abandoned him, selling him to a brothel on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Sochi. There he had been starved, beaten, and made to participate in unutterable acts that no child should ever be witness to, much less engage in.

It was there, though, that he learned the real value of information. Pillow talk from the alcohol-loosened lips of the brothel’s influential clients proved to be a gold mine, once he knew what to listen for and how to turn it to his advantage.

Much like him, many of the women who worked in the brothel were society’s castoffs, and they took pity on him. They were the first human beings to ever treat him with respect. They became the only family he had ever known, and he repaid their kindness one day by securing their freedom. And for their inhuman cruelty and the years he had spent suffering at their hands, he also had the madam who ran the brothel and her husband appropriately dispatched.

Despite having put significant physical distance between himself and the horrors of his youth, doing the same thing mentally hadn’t been as easy. He carried with him a tremendous burden of shame that had shaped his character and had been his excuse for the many unsavory things he had done after leaving the brothel in Sochi.

But even in the dark, black pit inside himself that he thought was devoid of any soul, there actually was some light. Not all of the things he had done were bad. With the vast amounts of money he had accrued over the years he had actually done some good things, things that even bordered on noble.

He was a study in contradiction, but it would be a fatal mistake to assume that any contradictions in his character hinted at a hidden weakness. Human beings are the most successful of animals because of their capacity to learn, and an abused animal learns very quickly how to defend itself. It also learns very quickly to trust very few people—if any.

The handful of people the little man had allowed himself to get close to knew him as Nicholas. It wasn’t his given name, but seemed to him just as good a name as any. It was an odd choice, though, for someone who had