Brad Thor: Full Black

“No. We need to get someplace safe,” said Ralston. “We’ve got to think.”

“Think?” replied Salomon. “This guy killed Chip and Jeremy and was trying to make me the third. He could be some homicidal maniac, for all we know. We need to call the cops.”

Ralston stood up. “This is a professional wet work team. A Russian wet work team.”

“Team?”

“There was a driver outside and at least two others inside the house.”

Salomon was trying to piece it all together. “And you killed three of them?”

Ralston nodded.

“How did you know?”

“I saw tire tracks leading up the service road. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t get a signal.”

“My cell was down, too,” said Salomon.

“They must have some sort of jammer. Like I said, these guys were professional.” Ralston stepped off the towels and out of the bathroom. Reaching for the shotgun, he repeated, “There may be more of them. We need to get going.”

The producer shook his head. “I know how this plays out. If we don’t stay here and wait for the cops, we’ll look guilty.”

“And if we do stay and wait for the cops, we’ll both be dead. I’m not going to let that happen. The Russians have infiltrated a lot of police departments across the country.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” said Ralston. “We’re not trusting anyone else at this point. When these guys fail to report back in, whoever sent them might send more. They’re going to use every contact, every means they have at their disposal. We need to disappear.”

Salomon began to object, but Ralston was already making his way across the bedroom. “Are you comfortable using this?” Ralston asked as he handed his friend the suppressed pistol.

“I’d rather have the shotgun.”

Ralston nodded and handed it over. Raising the pistol, he prepared to enter the hallway and said, “Stay close. And if you see anything move at all, you pull that trigger. Got it? Don’t even worry about aiming.”

Salomon nodded and the pair slipped into the hallway and down the back stairs. They stopped at the dining room long enough for Ralston to grab his shoes. He thought about wiping his fingerprints off the handle of the knife that lay only feet away, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. They needed to get out of there as quickly as possible. His damaged Porsche was already going to tell the world that he had been there.

In the garage, Ralston grabbed a flashlight and walked over to the key box. He bypassed all of Salomon’s luxury automobiles and selected the keys for his vintage navy blue Wagoneer.

Disengaging the overhead opener, he rolled up the garage door and told Salomon to get in the truck. Hopping in beside him, he fired up the Wagoneer and pulled into the motor court.

The gates at the bottom of the drive were on a separate circuit from the house and opened as the Wagoneer rolled over the pressure plates. The marine layer had turned into a thick fog. That would work to their advantage and it helped Ralston decide in which direction to head.

“You’re bleeding,” said Salomon as they turned out onto the road.

Ralston touched the side of his head and looked at his fingers. The bullet that had whizzed by his ear had actually grazed him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

Salomon was worried about it, though. He was worried about all of it. He knew Ralston was right. More men would be coming after him. He had uncovered the truth, and the truth made him a liability.

Harvath had rented a farm on the outskirts of Uppsala for their safe house. It was far enough away from neighbors that they could interrogate their prisoner and come and go without attracting any attention.

In the city of Uppsala itself, he had rented an apartment where he had staged an assault team. Though they were outfitted with gear to look like members of the Swedish Security Service, the government of Sweden had no idea an American operation was taking place on their soil. They were purposely being kept in the dark for the time being. Somewhere in the intelligence community, there was a leak. Because of that leak, one of the highest-value terrorist targets the United States had ever bagged, Aazim Aleem, had been assassinated.

Sitting in the darkened room, Scot Harvath played the entire scene across the panorama of his mind’s eye for the millionth time. It was all there-all so vivid-the boom of the rocket-propelled grenade leaving its launcher; the whoosh as it blistered through the air en route to its target, and finally the deafening explosion as the RPG connected with the trunk and gas tank of his car and the vehicle went up in a billowing fireball.

In a blinding flash, his Yemen operation had gone from a resounding success to a spectacular failure. Aazim, who’d been in the trunk, would have purchased Harvath’s group some much-needed goodwill with the CIA, but it was too late for that now.

Staring out the window, he caught a glimpse of his reflection. Although he had crossed the threshold into his forties, he still looked as if he was in his early thirties. His sand-colored hair showed no traces of gray; his handsome, green-eyed face bore few if any lines, and his five-foot-ten body was in better physical shape than those of men half his age. To see the toll the years had taken, one would have to look elsewhere.

By most measures, Harvath was a success. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, he had made his vocation his vacation. He was a man of particular talents who was deeply committed to his country. Those talents and that commitment had propelled him to the pinnacle of his career. The cost to his personal life was something he didn’t like to think about.

Nevertheless, ever since Yemen his relationships had been very much at the forefront of his mind. But it wasn’t romantic relationships that he had been thinking about. Someone had professionally betrayed him, someone with intimate knowledge of his organization, someone close.

It was precisely because of this apparent leak that Harvath had requested permission to run this assignment himself. Somewhere there was a leak, and until that leak was plugged, there was a very short list of people Harvath could trust.

At the top of that list was a thirty-year CIA veteran named Reed Carlton. Carlton had watched as bureaucracy and inertia devoured what had once been the best intelligence agency in the world. As management became more concerned with promotions and covering its tail, and as the Agency’s leadership atrophied, Carlton could see the writing on the wall. By the 1990s, when the CIA stopped conducting unilateral espionage operations altogether, he was disappointed, but not at all surprised.

While there were countless patriotic men and women still left at Langley, the institutionalized bureaucracy made it all but impossible for them to effectively do their jobs. The bureaucracy had become risk-averse. Even more troubling was the fact that the CIA now subcontracted its actual spy work to other countries’ intelligence services. They happily handed over huge sums of cash in the hopes that other countries would do the dangerous heavy lifting and would share whatever they developed.

It was the biggest open secret in the intelligence world and it was both humiliating and beneath America’s dignity.

Once the secret was out that the CIA was no longer truly in the spy business, Carlton knew he had to do something. It was then that he began recruiting former Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations personnel and stood up his own venture-the Carlton Group. It was modeled upon the World War II intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. It was composed of patriots who wanted one thing and one thing only-to keep Americans safe no matter what the cost.