Black List

CHAPTER 17

FAIRFAX COUNTY

NORTHERN VIRGINIA

Reed Carlton had escaped his burning home with nothing more than a green Barbour jacket, a change of clothes, and a bugout bag he kept behind the panel in his bedroom closet. Ready to go at a moment’s notice, it contained cash, false ID and a credit card, a clean laptop, an encrypted IronKey thumb drive, three clean cell phones, maps, a suppressor, and a Les Baer 1911 pistol.

Staying off the main roads, it took Carlton over three hours to hike to the storage unit where he kept a green 1980s Jeep Cherokee loaded with additional supplies. Its license plates traced back to a dummy LLC and dead-ended with an aging attorney in a small Richmond law firm.

Avoiding the major thoroughfares, the Old Man drove northwest toward Winchester. As a county seat and home of Shenandoah University, there were plenty of affordable accommodations to be found. He picked a hotel with a business center, checked in under an alias, and got to work.

The Internet was like a vast pool of water and the best way not to be noticed on it was to avoid breaking the surface. Carlton knew that it was better to skim. If he had to take a plunge, he was well aware that the deeper he dove, the more attention he was going to draw to himself.

He started by surfing the websites of local newspapers. He didn’t enter any search terms, he merely clicked on links that led him from story to story, website to website. Eventually, he found mention of the fire. It was a short, “breaking news”–style article that reported only the name of the town and how many fire companies had been called in to respond to the blaze. He needed more information.

The easiest thing would have been to call his office, but only an amateur would have risked such exposure. Whoever had managed to kill his security team, lock him in his own safe room, and disable the alarm and sprinkler systems would surely be monitoring everything that was tied to him until they had confirmation of his death. And when they learned that he hadn’t died in the fire, then the noose was going to get a lot tighter. For the moment, he had the benefit of no one knowing that he was still alive, and he needed to leverage that advantage for all it was worth.

Logging off the business center’s computer, he poured himself another cup of coffee in the lobby and headed back out to his Jeep. He drove south on I-81 until he found a busy enough truck stop and pulled in.

After gassing up, he parked and walked inside the restaurant, where he took a small table and ordered breakfast. As he waited for his food to arrive, he fired up his laptop and plugged in the encrypted IronKey drive. The rapidity with which technology was advancing never ceased to astound him. The IronKey was an off-the-shelf device, available to anyone, built to military grade specs with 256-bit encryption and a self-destruct feature that kicked in if the correct password wasn’t entered within ten tries. Simply amazing.

Bringing up a list of cell phone numbers labeled “Car Club,” Carlton tried to decide which of his people to reach out to first. He settled on Frank Coyne, a former Delta Force sergeant major. Coyne was exceptional at gathering intel and had worked under him at the CIA before he was hired on at the Carlton Group. Removing one of the clean cell phones from his bugout bag, he turned it on and dialed the man at home.

The phone rang, but Coyne didn’t pick up and Carlton was dropped into voice mail. It was possible that Coyne was screening calls and, not recognizing the number, didn’t answer. The Old Man didn’t bother leaving a message.

Choosing the phone’s SMS feature, he typed a short text message—Blue#—to let Coyne know he was about to call him and that he should pick up. He waited two minutes and then dialed. It rang several times before ending up in voice mail. Carlton disconnected the call and looked back at his list.

He tried another operator named Douglas with the same results—no answer at home and no answer on his cell. He was 0 for 2 and a bad feeling was beginning to grow in the pit of his stomach. Not only had he been targeted but now he couldn’t reach two of his top people. He decided to pull out all the stops.

POL, or proof of life, was a term used in kidnappings as a prerequisite to a ransom being paid. Carlton had trained his people to utilize the term but had disguised it in order to protect its true meaning. He now went through his list and group texted his operators the message Earnings Report: Blue Petroleum, Oil, & Lubricant. It was both a warning that an imminent threat existed, as well as a call for them to report back to him via the cell phone he was using.

The phone should have begun vibrating instantly with responses. Not a single one came; not even from Scot Harvath, who, though overseas, had his phone with him 24/7.

Jumping on the truck stop’s free WiFi, he enabled the flash drive’s secure browsing feature. Using the Tor anonymity network, or the Onion Router as it was known, to help hide his location, he was routed through multiple servers worldwide before winding up at his final destination, Skype.

Carlton entered his name and password and then hit the sign-in button. He was greeted with the message, Can’t sign in. Wrong password. He tried two more times before coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t an accident. Somehow, someone had frozen him out and was denying him access. No one but his top people knew about his Skype account, or that it was his primary means of communicating with his operatives. That meant that his organization had been penetrated to its core.

There was only one reason to freeze him out of Skype. Someone wanted to cut off the team’s primary means of communication with one another. The fact that none of his people were responding to his calls and texts told him someone had wanted to make sure they were all isolated in order to take them out. It was a “night of the long knives,” and Carlton could only assume the worst.

But the worst was something he always planned for. PACE was an acronym for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. Carlton surfed to an assortment of predetermined Internet dating sites and left messages for his people just in case.

After shutting down his computer, he paid his bill and followed two truckers into the men’s room. At the urinal, he played the chatty retiree and was able to ascertain which direction they were headed, which rigs they were driving, and what their final destinations were. With that information in hand, the rest was just a matter of course.

Whoever he was up against was extremely adept at what they did. At some point, they were going to place him in that truck stop. Whether they back-traced him through his attempt to access his Skype account or the use of the cell phone didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to fool himself into believing he was safe. He needed to buy himself more time, or at least throw them off track.

He located the rig of the man driving to Bakersfield, sealed the cell phone in a Ziplock bag, and duct-taped it underneath good and tight. Until the battery ran out or it was discovered, the phone would leave a digital trail of bread crumbs, which would hopefully take his pursuers in a completely different direction.

Back at his hotel in Winchester, Carlton spent the rest of the day and into the evening on the computer in the business center, once again link-walking. But instead of searching for details on his attack, he looked for any stories that might be about attacks or “accidents” involving his operators. He was devastated to find multiple references, including one about a deadly firefight in Paris, which, while not mentioning names, had to have been about Harvath and the Delta Force operative he’d been sent to meet, Riley Turner.

Everything Carlton had built was destroyed; the center of his operation, the very backbone, had been ripped out. He should have felt lucky to be alive, but he didn’t. He was beside himself at having lost so many good operators, many of whom were like family. He was also angry, and that anger was turning into rage. He was all too familiar with the feeling and knew that if he didn’t control it, it would not only control him, it would consume him. He was too old and too experienced to allow his emotions to run roughshod and dictate his course of action. He needed to be cold and calculating; as cold as he had ever been, if not more so.

Returning to his room, he took a shower, shaved, and then drew the blackout drapes and stretched out on his bed. He hadn’t slept since escaping the fire. He needed to rest.

He was exhausted, and it didn’t take him long to fall asleep. But even as he slept, his subconscious was still working, trying to find answers, trying to find a way forward.

It was just after four in the morning when he awoke. He felt more tired than when he had gone to sleep, but he had something he didn’t have when he lay down. He had a plan.

Looking over at the clock on the nightstand, he realized he’d have to move fast. There was a very narrow window for what he was about to do.