Brad Thor - Full Black

It was the man who had captured Aazim Aleem, had stuffed him in the trunk of that white Toyota Corolla, and had driven him to the cafe to be given up to the CIA. The threat from Standing left no room for confusion.

Ashford’s migraine flared. He reached into his desk drawer for the bottle of painkillers, but then stopped. He’d have to work through the pain. He couldn’t afford to have his brain muddled.

He’d made a mistake trusting Standing. Actually, that wasn’t correct. He had never truly trusted the billionaire. He’d trusted their commitment to a shared cause, but he shouldn’t have overlooked Standing’s self-preservation instinct.

Ashford leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes, and massaged his temples with the heels of his hands. He was in a dangerous box and would have to chart a very careful course. Injecting Scot Harvath, the man from the cafe, into the game had just raised the stakes to a new level.

H arvath knew the Old Man was right. He was always right. Sightseeing was for tourists, not for counterterrorism operatives. They needed to get off the X, as it was called, as soon as possible.

The operation had been designed to last only a matter of hours, twenty-four, tops, and no more. Because of how vulnerable Chase would be, the insertion had been done completely clean. There were no follow cars and he wasn’t carrying any weapons or tracking devices. The assignment was incredibly dangerous. No one wanted to add to the jeopardy he was already in by throwing another ingredient into the mix that could get him killed. If anything happened to him, the Agency would devote its full attention to driving a stake through the Carlton Group’s heart.

Ever since the Old Man had started his organization, the powers that be at Langley had wanted it shut down. The Carlton Group was doing everything the Agency claimed couldn’t be done, and doing it better, faster, cheaper, and often a lot more quietly.

It upset the CIA to no end that the Old Man had sucked up a lot of their talent and was employing them in a much more streamlined organization that wasn’t afraid to take risks. They knew they were too top-heavy. They also knew that they were choking themselves to death on their own red tape. When the next major terrorist attack hit the United States, America was finally going to wake up to how inefficient the Central Intelligence Agency was and call for a stake to be driven through their heart. That fact, more than any other, was what kept CIA bureaucrats lying awake in their beds every night. America had been too forgiving after 9/11. It wouldn’t make that mistake again.

But instead of fixing its leaking ship, the CIA focused on protecting its turf. The writing was on the wall. Eventually, they were going to be replaced by a leaner, more productive organization. They were in a fight for their very existence and they lashed out accordingly at anyone or anything they saw as a competitor. And that was exactly how the Carlton Group was perceived.

While there was no love lost between the Old Man and Langley, he didn’t want to be sucked into their petty games. Already, a handful of stories had been leaked to the New York Times about his organization in an effort to discredit it. He had enough sources, both within the paper and back at the Agency, to know who’d been behind it. Though he found it unprofessional, he understood why the CIA was doing it. That’s why he’d been intent on mending fences.

Like it or not, his organization was here to stay. No matter how badly the CIA didn’t want them around, the Carlton Group now had the top cover and protection of the DoD. That didn’t mean, though, that Langley couldn’t make it difficult for them. The Old Man had decided the best way to stop the pissing match was to offer an olive branch. That’s what the Yemen operation had been all about.

Was it the best idea to swoop into the country and in a matter of days pinpoint and roll up the bad guy that the CIA had been trying to track down for a month? Probably not, but handing him right over and not wanting any credit was a very good idea. Had the attack on Harvath’s vehicle not happened and had Aazim been turned over to the Agency, it might have improved the relationship. At least that was what the Old Man had believed. Harvath hadn’t been so sure.

Though he had kept them to himself, Harvath had reservations. He thought they might see it as having had their faces rubbed in it. He also doubted they’d share any of the intel they gleaned from wringing Aazim Aleem out like a dishcloth.

Carlton had to be part mind reader. Without Harvath saying anything, the Old Man knew exactly what he was thinking. He was quick to remind Harvath of several things, each of which stung a bit and therefore stuck with him.

The Old Man made it clear that Harvath was an exceptional operative, but not yet as smart or as experienced as he was. He also stated that while one of Harvath’s greatest skills was his ability to think and act on his own, it was also one of his greatest flaws.

That last part burned the hottest, most likely because it was right on target. Even in the SEALs, Harvath had danced just on the edge of being a team player. Despite the fact that he was very well liked, his superiors had warned him again and again about his individuality. While there wasn’t any one thing they could specifically point to, he was warned that if he wasn’t careful he was eventually going to get his teammates killed.

Harvath hadn’t liked hearing it then and he certainly didn’t like hearing it now from a man he had so much respect for. Under the former president, Harvath had been expected to operate alone and to do things his way. He had excelled, but those days were behind him. For better or worse, Harvath was back on a team again, which required that he perform accordingly. He was determined to make it work.

That was a big reason he was upset to lose Riley Turner to the care of Mansoor Aleem. The very reason the Athena Project had been created by Delta was that an attractive woman’s beauty automatically disqualified her as a threat.

Harvath chastised himself for not remembering one of the SEALs’ maxims, Two is one and one is none. They all knew that Mansoor could have been injured in their manufactured car accident. He should have brought another member from the Athena Project along just in case. But he hadn’t, and he knew why.

He’d felt chemistry the moment he met her. He thought she might have felt it, too, but he couldn’t be sure. She was very hard to read. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

All he knew was that he thought about her entirely too much. He didn’t like that. It meant that something was going on that he couldn’t control, and Harvath was all about control. It was one of those traits that had interfered with his ability to be a proper team player.

He had avoided bringing another Athena Project member on the assignment because he had wanted her to himself, so to speak. He didn’t want to share her. It was stupid, but if given a mulligan he knew he’d do it the same way again.

Harvath was not only exceedingly good at what he did, he was also a fun guy to be around. Nevertheless, the landscape of his personal life was like a tropical beach scattered with the wreckage of broken relationships. As long as you looked at the sand closest to you, it looked pretty good, but the further you glanced down the beach, the more you realized there had to be something out there, just beneath the surface of the water, to have wrecked all those ships.

There was certainly a reef out there, but it was only recently that he had begun to understand what it was made of. The razor-sharp coral that gashed the hull of anyone who got too close to him was in part due to his career. There were very few people whom he could tell exactly what he did. And even fewer who could tolerate his frequent and often unannounced absences.