Black List

He cooked himself a modest meal from his provisions and heated a pot of coffee on the aging stove. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he took out a pad of paper and began to make a list.

In it, he cataloged every operation he and his organization had been involved with since its inception. He drew relationship and impact diagrams, detailing every single person and every single agency, whether foreign or domestic, that they had cooperated with or even brushed past in their assignments. It was an exhausting exercise, and when he had poured it all out, he had a pile of pages and a pounding headache. The Hydra in his mind’s eye had sprouted so many heads, he couldn’t focus on any of them.

Pushing himself away from the table, Carlton stood up and walked into the living room. On the mantel above the fireplace, just as he remembered, was a little armada of brightly colored wooden sailboats. He picked up the blue one, recalling how his hostess’ grandson had dropped it and broken its mast.

The little boy had been panicked. Carlton could still remember how he had cried, certain that he had damaged some priceless antique and was in a mountain of trouble.

In fact, he hadn’t stopped crying until Carlton had assured him that not only could the boat be repaired but that they would do it together and that it would be their secret—no one else needed to know. The two were inseparable for the rest of the boy’s visit. Such was the power of a secret.

Secrets could isolate people from one another, but when shared, they could also draw people together. One had to choose very carefully, though, with whom to share and exactly what to share. Of Benjamin Franklin’s many witticisms, few seemed as relevant to Carlton as the warning from Poor Richard’s Almanac that three people may keep a secret only if two of them are dead.

That was the kind of world he lived in. Its very currency was secrets, and it was populated with lies, deceptions, and half-truths. For some in that world, trust was impossible, but those incapable of trust didn’t last long. You needed to be on guard, but you also needed to be able to let your guard down. No one could be at code red twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At some point, you had to let people get close.

Carlton returned the sailboat to the mantel, its secret still intact, and his mind was drawn back to what Franklin had said.

Even though he didn’t know what it was, Carlton was party to a secret, and someone was trying to make sure the secret remained kept, by having him and his people killed. The secret involved treason somehow, which made him think about the charge itself.

If accused of the right kind of treason, whereby there were pressing national security concerns, review of the case could be done in complete secrecy. The people who passed sentence could remain anonymous, and very few details, if any, would ever be made public.

Pressing national security concerns could also get a subject placed on a kill list. The speed with which the sentence was carried out would be pegged to how immediate the threat was believed to be. This was the point around which Carlton’s thoughts began to crystallize. Whoever was after him had used the treason charge as a means of expediting his execution, as well as that of his operators.

But whoever had wanted him dead had to have known that he and his people wouldn’t be easy to kill. To pull off the night of the long knives, someone would have needed personnel with exceptional training and access to very closely guarded intelligence.

That brought Carlton to the question of why? Why did someone want him and his people dead?

Murder, and the motivations for committing murder, had existed since Cain and Abel. The first answer that had come into his mind was that he and his people knew something they shouldn’t and someone had ordained that they be silenced. But he had dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come to him. He purposefully kept all of his people compartmentalized. Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with one specific piece of intelligence or operational detail that he and his men all shared in common and that could make them a threat.

Is there a different motivation? Was Tommy Banks right? Was this about revenge? Carlton turned the possibility over in his mind once more.

Yes, his group had been good at what they did, exceedingly so, but as bad as the blood had been between them and the CIA, this wasn’t the Agency’s style. If they had wanted to get rid of him, they would have done it through incessant and damaging leaks to the media and by pushing for congressional hearings. They would have trumpeted the Carlton Group as a rogue organization that answered to no one and made up their own rules as they went along. The powers that be at Langley would have targeted the group’s contacts at the Defense Department and would have publically embarrassed them into severing the relationship.

That’s how the CIA would have handled it. But what if it wasn’t the Agency? What if it’s someone else?

Returning to the kitchen and to his stack of notes, with a fresh cup of coffee, Carlton found his thoughts getting complicated again. If it wasn’t an intelligence organization trying to take out his group for stepping on its turf, he wasn’t left with many alternatives.

Carlton and his people had targeted only enemies of the United States. Most of those enemies had been Islamic terrorists. It was almost impossible to believe that somewhere a Muslim sphere of influence so powerful existed that it both knew about the Carlton Group and could also strong-arm the United States into wiping it out. Was there a cog in the wheel missing?

His group had recently dismembered two major terrorist rings—one in Europe and one in the United States —but not before the terrorists had succeeded in killing scores of Americans. It had been very bloody.

The attacks, though, were rumored to have only been a precursor to a much more sophisticated wave to follow. Someone had likened it to water draining from a bay before a tsunami came rushing in.

All of the attacks, Carlton’s people had discovered, were part of a master plan, a blueprint entitled “Unrestricted Warfare.” Suicide bombers and Mumbai-style shooters were meant to soften America up. The attacks that followed were to be even grander in scale and meant to cause such havoc that Americans would beg for any semblance of order, and would surrender much, if not all, of their freedom in exchange.

The man who had orchestrated the plot had been dealt with and his remaining coconspirators swept up and sentenced. For all intents and purposes, it had appeared that the cancer had been completely cut out. But what if it wasn’t? Could what was happening now be some sort of payback? With all of the people they had rolled up, could they have missed one?

Carlton didn’t think so. The number two man in the operation, the person who controlled all the moving parts, had been extensively interrogated. The man had broken and had given them every detail. Although Carlton knew better than to shut his mind off to any possibility, he needed to keep searching for the right answer.

This brought him to his most recent theory, admittedly his weakest: somewhere, another plot was under way, and the Carlton Group somehow stood in the plotter’s way.

It was a concept he had trouble completely wrapping his mind around. With the extensive capabilities of America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies, it would seem that anyone intending to do the nation harm would have much more to worry about than Carlton’s burgeoning organization. One thing bothered him about that, though. The ability to frame him and his people for treason, unleash kill teams, and highlight him in a nationwide law enforcement bulletin suggested that this was coming from somewhere within the government itself. If that was the case, it could only mean one thing—a coup of some type was brewing. It also explained why his organization would be perceived as a threat.

In a coup scenario, chaos reigned. Depending on what kind of influence the plotters had over agencies like the FBI and CIA, they could easily keep those groups tied up in bureaucratic knots, while the plot unfolded and they got the ball across the goal line. In that kind of situation, the Carlton Group would definitely be a wild card. It operated outside the law and could do things no other group could. One call from the DoD was all it would take, if even that. Carlton could task his own organization without a DoD request. The bottom line was that Carlton could move swiftly and effectively, but he would only move against an enemy of the United States.

The more he mulled that scenario, the more believable it became. He knew it was a possibility. Stripping the United States of its sovereignty was the ultimate goal of the last plot they had foiled. Simply put, there were many in the world who saw the U.S. not as a force for good but as a roadblock, an impediment that had to be crushed and bulldozed out of the way. Though he didn’t have all of the pieces yet, the ones he did have were starting to click into place.

His operational hypothesis, until he developed any information to the contrary, had to be that there was a very serious threat against the nation, that it was being coordinated from within the government, and that team or