the man’s business. He was lucky to be breathing.
Once Harvath knew who was behind the kill orders, he wanted to know why.
“According to Middleton,” Bremmer replied, “your group had been turned. He said you were conspiring with a foreign entity that was planning an imminent terrorist attack on the United States.”
“And he brought this to you, rather than to the FBI?”
“He said your people had every agency penetrated; that it had to be handled this way.”
“And you believed him?” asked Harvath, though he could tell from the look on the man’s face that he didn’t.
“I didn’t have much choice.”
Harvath wanted to rip the man’s throat out. “You are the worst excuse I have ever seen for a human being. You have no code at all. There are barrels of innocent blood on your hands. You know that? There is nothing I want more at this moment than to snap your flabby neck with my bare hands.
“The people you are responsible for having killed were patriots who repeatedly went into the darkest corners of the globe to battle the most hideous evil you have ever seen. Middleton lied to you, and you knew he was lying, yet rather than do the right thing, you went along with him to save your own fat ass. You’re disgusting.”
Bremmer tried to hang his head, but Harvath wouldn’t let him. “Don’t you dare, you son of a bitch. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
When the man looked back up, Harvath railed for several more moments before resuming his interrogation. The more questions he asked, the more useless Bremmer proved himself. He had no idea what Middleton was attempting to frame the Carlton Group for, and he was completely unfamiliar with the term “digital Pearl Harbor” or what it might entail.
The only other thing he could offer was an interesting suggestion about how to get to Middleton. For a paper pusher, it was rather ingenious. Harvath asked a couple of follow-up questions but beyond that, showed no interest in pursuing the man’s suggestion.
Before letting him go, he gave the corpulent colonel a final warning. “You sent the best you had after me and none of them returned alive. There is nothing you can do to me. I am beyond anyone’s grasp. I also have a lot of friends, several of whom will be keeping an eye on you and your family. If you vary your routine even the slightest bit or try to take a sudden vacation, they have explicit instructions on what to do to you.
“If you tell anybody about our little talk, if you attempt to contact Craig Middleton, I will do worse than kill your wife and cripple your daughter. I know a very sadistic Bedouin who would love to add a young girl like Molly to his harem, and I’ll make sure you get complete video documentation of it.”
“No. I promise. I won’t say anything,” Bremmer pleaded.
“And if I even
The Colonel nodded. Harvath cut him loose and motioned for him to get out of the truck. Casey watched from the front seat as Bremmer walked back to his car.
“Do you think we can trust him?” she asked.
Harvath, who was also watching, shook his head. “No. But we really don’t have any choice.”
“Listening to him speak, I wanted to put a bullet in him. I still do, for what he did to Riley.”
“I probably couldn’t have stopped you. Why didn’t you do it?”
“Because you told me this was the right way to handle this and I trust you.”
It was a frank and honest admission, one that he respected her for.
“When this is all over, though,” she added, “I’m not the one who promised to let him live.”
“I understand.”
“Does that also mean you’ll understand if Megan and I decide to do something about it?”
Harvath held her gaze for a moment. “I can’t tell you what to do, one way or the other. Do I think the guy deserves to be croaked? Absolutely. But he also has a wife and daughter.”
“How about the operators from your group who were killed?” Casey asked. “How many of them had spouses and children?”
“Most of them.”
“So?”
“So, I think Bremmer should be made to pay, without killing him.”
“Are you moralizing now?”
“Maybe,” Harvath replied. “In fact, yeah. I am. At some point, there has to be a process. Putting a gun against his head and pulling the trigger is no better than what he had done to Riley and the others.”
“At least justice would be served.”
“Do you believe that?”
Casey looked away. “I’m done talking about this.”
It was a convenient way to dump out of the argument, but Harvath let it go. She was going to do whatever she wanted to in the end.
What mattered now was getting to Craig Middleton and preventing whatever he had planned. Though it was fraught with more than a few pitfalls, Bremmer had given them a halfway decent suggestion as to the first part. Harvath just had to figure out how to make sure they weren’t walking straight into a trap.
CHAPTER 56
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The trick for Reed Carlton wasn’t finding the men he needed, it was keeping them sober, or relatively sober, long enough to do their job. The operation was an exact duplicate of one he and Tommy Banks had run more than thirty years ago.
“Look for the Barbour jackets” was a piece of advice given to many Western intelligence operatives, especially in the early 1980s. The famous green, British all-weather jackets had many pockets to hide equipment, were stylish without being too flashy and quite popular with people in the intel game. If you ever found yourself in trouble, recruits were taught, look for the Barbour jackets. Chances were, you’d find a friendly.
The Soviets, it was rumored, had heard of this advice, and all their agents, from Bangkok to Berlin, had been taught to keep their eyes peeled for the low-key yet distinct outerwear. Whether this was true or simply Cold War– era paranoia, Banks wasn’t certain, but he had decided to play it up. It could only help his plan, and certainly couldn’t hurt.
He and Carlton had been working on a very sensitive operation behind the Iron Curtain. They had a highly placed Hungarian intelligence agent who wanted to defect and had been dispatched to Budapest to make contact with him. Their job was to ascertain if he was the real deal and, if so, to gauge his value and then mount an operation to get him out of Hungary and into Austria, where he’d be fully debriefed in Vienna before being flown back to the United States.
The two CIA operatives arrived in Budapest separately, and each was set upon by teams of Hungarian secret service surveillance teams augmented by Russian KGB. It was almost as if they knew they were coming. Both of the Americans sensed a trap, but they had little choice except to move forward.
They tried a series of different gambits to shake the surveillance teams, none of which worked. Someone, somewhere, was very invested in their not succeeding in their assignment. It was Banks who finally came up with the ruse that allowed them to give their pursuers the slip. Decades later, it was the same ruse that Carlton planned to employ, though not to give their pursuers the slip but rather to draw them into the open.
Washington, D.C.’s Union Station was a busy commuter hub. It was crowded during both the morning and evening rush hours, but the evening’s rush was different. Instead of people pouring out of the station, anxious to get to their jobs, people were pouring into it, and their end-of-the-day, exhausted-from-work pace was less intense. While some moved with energy and purpose, many moved slowly and en masse, as if on some sort of collective autopilot.
Assuming his former mentor had been surrounded with digital tripwires, Carlton had chosen to e-mail Banks. He’d been careful, though. He wanted to pique the other side’s interest, but he had to do so without appearing
