Black List

CHAPTER 21

BASQUE PYRENEES

SPAIN

THURSDAY

Padre Peio had work to do at the abbey and invited Harvath to join him. It was three hours farther into the mountains by horseback.

Harvath had been there before. It was everything a place of religious refuge should be, beautiful, peaceful, and remote. The problem was, it was a little too remote. The priests had some contact with the outside world, but it was very limited. When Nicholas had stayed there, he had brought most of his own equipment with him. It had been destroyed in a fire, and Peio was back to almost two tin cans and a string. Harvath couldn’t go with him. He needed to stay where he already had a solid connection to Skype. He needed to wait for the Old Man to relay further instructions.

And wait he did. All day, he checked his account on the hour and the half hour, hoping to see a message from Carlton. No message ever came.

Unable to avoid Harvath, as he was parked in the middle of his home, the ETA commander stuck his head inside the room and introduced himself. His name was Tello. He was an enormous man with large, rough hands and stained teeth. He wore a thick handlebar mustache along with several days’ growth of whiskers on his cheeks that suggested he’d been too busy to shave. Harvath had no idea what the man had been up to and he didn’t want to know. Supposedly, ETA had renounced all violence. But judging by the looks of Tello and the heavily armed men on his ranch, this crew hadn’t gotten the memo. The less Harvath knew about his host and his colleagues the better.

Colleagues. Harvath repeated the word to himself. Could the hit on the organization have been conducted not by some enemy hostile to the United States but actually by some sort of force within?

The idea was insane, yet here he was thinking it. And as crazy as it sounded, he knew better than to dismiss it out of hand. He had been trained to consider all possible options and that included trusting his gut.

Nevertheless, the possibility that any fellow Americans could be behind something like this was almost too far out of left field to be believed.

Harvath looked at his watch. It was after midnight—no wonder his mind was so jumbled. He needed to grab a couple hours of sleep. His thoughts were going in too many strange directions.

After checking Skype one last time and seeing no response, he logged off and shut the computer down.

A heavy fog had settled over the ranch, and Harvath fished a Surefire flashlight from one of the pockets in Riley’s backpack in order to light his way to the stables. The damp cold ate right through his coat. He had been trained to withstand extreme cold, but that didn’t mean he liked it. In fact, the data point that so many SEALs moved to warm-weather climes once they got out made him wonder if the Navy actually bred a deep-seated hatred for cold into its high-end operators, or if the resistance to cold had a relatively short half-life, beyond which SEALs could no longer tolerate it.

It was an interesting riddle but not one he had to solve tonight. He nodded to one of Tello’s heavily armed patrols, men with insulated barn jackets and the traditional black Basque berets the ETA men all wore, before climbing the stairs to the small apartment above the stables.

Inside, he turned on a small space heater in the bedroom and then poured himself a glass of water. Leaning against the bathroom sink, he looked over at Riley’s pack sitting on a chair in the bedroom. He’d gone through all her personal items multiple times, but none of them told him why she had been in Paris nor why he’d been sent to meet her at the safe house in the first place.

Why the hell had any of it happened? And more importantly, why to her? Why did such bad things so often befall the women he cared about? He knew that life wasn’t fair, but damn it, it was almost as if some force somewhere was purposefully undermining him.

There were very few women at all with whom he could even discuss what he did, or who would understand and support him when he went and did it. He had met a handful in his time, and they had been great, but in some form or another, his work had always interceded and the relationships had been turned upside-down. He had hoped things with Riley could be different since she was on the inside.

They had first met earlier that year. The Old Man had sent her in to take a prisoner off his hands during an operation in Switzerland. She was in her mid-thirties and off-the-charts attractive. Tall, with reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and a wide, full mouth. When they shook hands, he had felt a bolt of lightning pass between them.

She had been a competitive skier before retiring and going to medical school. While she enjoyed practicing medicine, there was a rush she craved and wasn’t finding in her work. She began doing research online, calling friends across the country, and even talking to a few friends of friends in Washington, D.C. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for but figured she’d recognize it when she saw it.

She was in the process of applying for an overseas position with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, when two U.S. Army representatives appeared on her doorstep. They were in the process of creating a program that was right up her alley and invited her to try out. Riley not only tried out, she blew the rest of the recruits out of the water and became one of the earliest members of the Athena Project.

The similarities between her and Harvath were uncanny. As he reminisced about her, he knew his mind would be pulled to the other women he had known. It was a dark psychological road overhung with the scarred branches of his past. He knew what happened when he began to walk down it, and it usually ended with too many glasses of whatever was in the nearest bottle. He decided to quit while he was ahead. Focusing on the odd-shaped tiles around the mirror, he tried to count as many of them as he could while he brushed his teeth.

When he was finished in the bathroom, he turned out the light, tried to ignore Riley’s bag, and climbed into bed.

The sheets were cold, and the space heater had done little to beat back the chill that gripped the room. It was just one of those nights when the damp seemed to permeate everything.

Pulling the blanket up around his chest, Harvath closed his eyes and willed himself to relax. He didn’t need a case of runaway thoughts right now. What he needed was sleep, if only for a couple of hours.

He took deep, long breaths and wiped his mind completely clean, focusing on nothing more than the darkness. His consciousness had become an iron box into which no thoughts could intrude. The monkey had been locked in its cage. Soon he was asleep.

A testament to the depth of his fatigue, he rapidly fell into a series of deep, vivid dreams.

They were so vivid in fact, that three hours later, he couldn’t tell if he had actually heard the ranch dogs bark, or if it was only a dream.

He was just about to put it out of his mind and drift back into sleep when he suddenly heard the blast of a gunshot and knew he was no longer dreaming.