Black List

CHAPTER 14

ATS HEADQUARTERS

ANNAPOLIS JUNCTION

MARYLAND

That was actually worth getting out of bed for,” Craig Middleton said as he patted his protégé on the shoulder. “Well done.”

Kurt Schroeder tried to not grit his teeth. It was like working for Sybil. The man had to have been manic-depressive or bipolar or something. He ran so hot and cold, you never knew what the hell was going to come out of the faucet next. More often than not, though, the safe bet was that it would be pure liquid asshole. He was a screamer too, and prone to throwing things. Employees at ATS derisively referred to him as “Chuckles, the laughing boss” and called his twisted style of debasing encouragement “blamestorming.” Schroeder, though, seemed to be keenly adept at handling him or, more appropriately, ignoring his less than professional, the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves management style.

Middleton had never been able to hold an assistant for more than a year until he brought Schroeder in. Whether either of the men would ever admit it, they were made for each other.

Colleagues had marveled at Schroeder’s ability to ignore Middleton’s never-ending torrent of slights and petty insults. “Like water off a duck’s back,” they remarked, but they were incorrect. The insults didn’t just “roll” off. Each abusive strike found its target, which Schroeder quietly cataloged and buried. When he did exorcise his demons, he attempted to do so as far from the prying eyes of ATS and Craig Middleton as possible. He knew all too well the lengths his boss was prepared to go to in order to leverage information.

It was by understanding Middleton so intimately that he was able to work with him so closely. And understanding Middleton wasn’t difficult at all. He had to look no further than his own youth to find a nearly identical personality.

Schroeder had been born and mostly raised in a world of exceptional privilege, but in one afternoon, it had all been taken away. The fancy prep school, the magnificent house, the cars, the security afforded by bottomless bank accounts, all of it. Yet the worst part for Schroeder had been the loss of his father.

At the time, Schroeder was fourteen and a freshman in high school. The scandal was of epic proportions and its fallout horrible. It rained incessantly that autumn and the weather seemed to mirror the overwhelming sorrow welling up from the very pit of Schroeder’s young soul. As the media trampled their Greenwich, Connecticut, lawn, they pounded down on the boy’s sodden family and turned everything into mud.

Until that day, the family had been regarded with respect and admiration, even awe. Their wealth and prominence defined who they were. But it was all a lie, all of it. The media had a term for what Schroeder’s father had been doing, a term he had never heard before. They called it a “Ponzi scheme.”

In an instant, his father, the man he had idolized, the man he was named after, went from being a “wizard,” a “magician,” and a “genius,” to a “liar,” a “thief,” and a “con man.” As those words rained down, a vise clamped down on his heart, forbidding it to beat.

He loved his father, and even though he was no more than a boy, he desperately wanted to defend him. He refused to believe what everyone was saying. This was his father they were talking about. His father was a good man. He was being bullied, and Schroeder hated bullies.

As he reached out to him, looking for an explanation, looking for reassurance that everything was going to be okay, his father withdrew. Then a nightmare more horrible than anything he could ever imagine took place.

While home on bail, awaiting trial, Schroeder’s father committed suicide. The vise that had been clamped around his heart now ripped it fully from his chest. From that moment, it was a cold, dark spiral downward.

Everything the family had was taken from them. Every bank account was seized. Every asset, every car, all of it, gone. And with it, so too went their prominence and their identity. In their place was insupportable, unbearable shame.

His mother, an already unhappy woman battling depression and a host of her own problems, slipped into a vodka-induced haze and carpet-bombed what was left of her psyche with pills as their world fell apart around them.

She was already a strict authoritarian, but now she became downright abusive and mean. She and her son moved from their once exceedingly comfortable life in Greenwich to a threadbare, one-room apartment in Hartford, where she proceeded to drink through what little of her own savings she had managed to hide from the courts.

Soon after, they went on welfare. Schroeder’s few friends who hadn’t abandoned him in the midst of the scandal did so now. None of them came to visit. It was as if upon leaving the tony ZIP code, he suddenly ceased to exist.

The public school his mother shoved him into was beyond rough. With the continuing accounts in the papers of the suicide and all the lives his father had ruined, the students soon put two and two together and figured out who he was. They mercilessly bullied him.

They called him “poor little rich boy” and hurled insults at his deceased father. A stammer Schroeder had worked hard as a child to overcome returned with a vengeance and served only to further embolden the bullies. Soon psychological torment gave way to physical, and he was beaten up repeatedly after school. When he had his jaw broken in three places and his left ear cauliflowered, Schroeder dropped out.

He found a job delivering Thai food. His mother either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he was no longer going to school. When the social services people made inquiries, she told them in no uncertain terms to “fuck off,” and that it was her “right” to home-school her child. She reveled in being vile to anyone who crossed her path.

It also gave her a perverse pleasure to exercise her rights as she saw them and lord even an illusion of power over the same sector of the government that was subsidizing her rent, groceries, and utility bills. She didn’t give a damn what they thought of her.

She also didn’t give a damn if her son was getting any sort of education at all. She certainly wasn’t going to waste any of her time on him.

That was fine with Schroeder. He had lost his taste for dealing with people and when he wasn’t working, he preferred to be alone.

He immersed himself in a world of books. He read title after title whenever he could steal away from his mother, or while she lay passed out on the sofa bed after an all-night bender.

As his shattered life failed to improve, he went from missing his father to blaming him, and he blamed his lousy excuse for a mother as well. When the day came that he had saved up enough of his hidden money, he left.

Her abuse had become insufferable. The alcohol had eaten away at her brain and had completely destroyed any vestiges of a nurturing, mothering instinct. He taped a two-word note to a half-empty vodka bottle, which read, “Fuck you.” At least he knew she’d find it.

For the next two years, he read the Hartford papers daily until he came across her obituary. After that, he never read another newspaper again.

He moved from his private world of books to the world of computers and the Internet. There he could carry on conversations without worrying that his stammer, which he fought daily to bring back under control, would draw any attention.

On the Internet, he found companionship and common purpose. He also found an exceptional outlet for his anger. With a soaring IQ, no adult supervision, and a moral compass that had been crushed beneath the tank treads of life, he quickly became one of the Net’s leading “hacktivists.”

He worked his way through a couple of years of easy hacks and then started getting into the harder stuff. For a long time, he took a perverse joy in targeting the media, but even that grew tiresome after a while. Finally, he arrived at a challenge worthy of his intellect and his skill set: hacking government and military networks around the globe.

While Schroeder focused on symbols of power, he wasn’t above hacking NGOs and charitable organizations that offended his unbalanced sense of right and wrong. Organizations he thought were “phonies” or were failing to live up to their own mission statements particularly drew his ire. He was a perpetually angry loner who had a bone to pick with almost everyone, from the Red Cross to Amnesty International. When they finally identified and located him, he was the perfect hire for ATS.

Schroeder didn’t just feel he was smarter than everyone else, he knew it. Nothing pissed him off more than stupid people, and as far as he was concerned, almost everyone he came across was stupid. He had an elitist streak running through his core that Craig Middleton loved and exploited to the fullest.

The more authority he was given, the more Schroeder wanted. Middleton had doled it out to him slowly, always watching to see what he would do with it.

Though he tried to hide it, he craved it like a drug and would do anything to get more. He was incredibly intelligent, but as far as Middleton could tell, he possessed zero courage. At his most base level, Schroeder was a coward. He wanted power so he could use it to punish others in order to feel better about himself. The man was a sadist. He took pleasure from giving other people pain. He was a weakling, and behind his back, Middleton referred to him as Renfield, the quisling mortal who served Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel.

Middleton had had high hopes that Schroeder would one day rise to a position of prominence within the organization, but after trying to develop his management talents, he had given up hope. Schroeder had very poor people skills and, like many of his kind, he related much better to computers. He lacked empathy, and worse, didn’t appear capable even of faking it.

Middleton had resigned himself to the fact that Schroeder was exceptionally gifted, but that those gifts were limited. That was where the other nickname he used for him, Rain Man, came from. On occasion, if Middleton was pissed off enough, he mocked Schroeder by rocking back and forth in his chair as he shouted lines at him from the movie. Because Schroeder’s stammer reared its ugly head from time to time, Middleton took particular pleasure in drawing out the line, “I’m d-d-d-definitely a good driver.”

Schroeder buried that insult along with the rest and added another entry to the long and ever-growing list.

Now, backing out of Carlton’s Skype account, Schroeder looked up at his boss and asked, “Do you think he suspects anything?”

“Of course not. Why the hell should he?”

“Because guys like him are paid to be suspicious.”

“We’re all paid to be suspicious. Get used to it. That’s how we make our money.”

“Yeah, but—” began Schroeder.

“Stop worrying about it,” Middleton interrupted. “You’ve isolated his account so no one can contact him on it, right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Good, then. Now, what have you got on his midget data wizard? The Gnome or whatever the fuck he’s called.”

What an imbecile, Schroeder thought. He can’t even keep a simple code name straight. “He’s called the Troll,” Schroeder clarified, “and I don’t have anything on him. He’s gone completely dark.”

“This is the twenty-first century and you work smack dab in the middle of its power center. There’s no such thing as completely dark.”

“I know. I’m working on it.”

“Well, work harder. People run, but they can’t hide. What about that coroner’s report we’ve been waiting for?”

“It hasn’t been filed yet,” said the young man. “IDs after a fire, especially a bad one like that, take longer. It’ll hit their server soon enough, and when it does, we’ll have it.”

“I want it before it hits their server. Understood?”

Schroeder wanted to call his boss an asshole, or grab a pencil and plunge it into his eyesocket, but his rational self delivered a more appropriate response. “I’ll get it to you as soon as it’s available.”

“Good,” said Middleton as he rose. “How much longer until we’ll have a lock on Harvath’s location?”

Schroeder glanced back at his computer. “It’s populating now,” he said, studying a map that was unwinding all the servers the Skype connection had been routed through. “It looks like he’s in Bulgaria. No, wait. I take that back. It’s not Bulgaria.”

Middleton was getting impatient. “Where the hell is he?”

“I’ve almost got him. One more second. It looks like… Got him. Spain.”

“Spain? You’re sure?”

“Yes,” said Schroeder. “Near a village called Ezkutatu.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s in Basque country. The Pyrenees.”

“Send it all to my screen,” Middleton ordered as he opened the door and started to step out into the hallway. Halfway there, he stopped and turned. “I almost forgot,” he said. “About that data Caroline Romero stole.”

“What about it?”

“Were you aware that she had a sister?”

Schroeder looked up from his computer. “A sister?”

“Am I not speaking English, jackass? Yes, a sister,” he said, drawing the word out like Schroeder was an idiot. “Actually, she’s her half sister. Same mother, different father.”

“She never mentioned her.”

“Really?” replied Middleton. “It never came up any of those times you two were out shopping for shoes or having your nails done?”

Weathering the insult, Schroeder made another hash mark in his emotional catalog and came back with a response a bit more caustic than usual. “You’re aware that if I hadn’t been friendly with Caroline, we never would have caught on to what she was doing?”

Middleton laughed in his face. “Bullshit. Like every other guy in this place, you just wanted to get in her pants. You didn’t find out about her by being her friend. You found out because you were stalking everything she did.”

“I wasn’t stalking her. She was nice to me.”

“You’re a fucking sap, you know that? She was nice to you, moron, because you work for me. It’s what a woman like that calls job security. Look it up. And while you’re at it, check out strategic alliance. You’re a flipping eunuch. God didn’t give you balls, he gave you a pair of fucking raisins. You never would have said word one to her unless I’d ordered you to do so. And even then, she probably already suspected we were on to her. God only knows how much information you unwittingly passed to her during your friendship.”

Schroeder was indignant and fought to keep himself under control. “I-I-I…,” he stammered.

“You-you-you what?” Middleton mocked. “Spit it out.”

The young man could feel his cheeks flush and he balled his fists, digging his nails into his palms. He took a deep breath and let it out. “I d-d-d-d-didn’t pass anything to her. And f-f-for the record, I never wanted to get in her p-p-p-pants. She-she-she wasn’t my type.”

Middleton laughed even louder. “You’re either an idiot or a liar. She was everybody’s type. In fact, I think that sexy piece of ass made you forget who butters your bread.”

“I haven’t f-f-forgotten.”

“If that idiot Powder knew a flash drive from a fucking coffee cup, I would have given him the assignment. But he doesn’t know shit about what we do around here, so I asked you. What a mistake that turned out to be.”

“It w-w-wasn’t a m-m-m—”

“Stop stuttering,” Middleton snapped.

“Then stop m-m-mimicking m-m-me,” Schroeder replied. “It m-m-makes it w-w-worse.”

Middleton locked eyes with him and gave him an icy glare. “What makes it worse is that I can’t trust you.”

“That’s not true. I’ve always been l-l-l-loyal to you.”

“You’d better be.”

“I’ve been g-g-giving this everything I’ve got.”

“Yet you still didn’t know about her sister.”

Schroeder broke his gaze and looked toward his monitor. “I would have found her eventually.”

“Of course you would have,” the older man said, his tone thick with condescension. “You know what, Kurt? You have no idea what it’s like to count on someone, only to have them consistently disappoint you.”

Schroeder knew all too well and wished his boss would just leave him alone and let him go back to his job. “D-d-do you want me to look into the sister?” he offered, eager for the conversation to be over.

“Half sister,” Middleton retorted. “No. I’m already working on her. I just wanted you to know that she’s out there and that I have to be the one wasting my time trying to find her. Maybe that’ll incentivize you to work harder.”

There was only one thing that could incentivize Kurt Schroeder to work harder than he already was, but there was no way in hell he was ever going to reveal it to Craig Middleton. Before he could summon a response, his boss had left the room.