Black List

CHAPTER 23

Thankfully, Padre Peio’s wounds weren’t life threatening. He had taken two rounds to the shoulder. One passed clean through, the other was still inside, and judging from the reaction when Harvath applied a pressure bandage, it was near the bone and more than a little painful.

He kept trying to stand up. “I need to minister to the deceased.”

Praying for the dead was the last thing Harvath wanted to do right now. He wanted answers—foremost among them, who had labeled him a traitor and put a hit out on him? And for what? What had he supposedly done? How had they tracked him down?

That last question was the easiest to answer. It had to have been through the Old Man. Their exchanges over Skype were the only connection to his location. He’d tried to hide himself by routing and rerouting through servers around the planet, but someone had untangled his Web.

Peio struggled to get up again, and Harvath’s mind was drawn back to stopping the priest’s bleeding. As soon as he had stemmed the bleeding the best he could, he helped the priest to his feet.

Peio walked over to Tello and prayed for the dead Basque, while Harvath searched the corpses of the two attackers. Like the others, they were young and not carrying any identification at all. The kid who had been about to kill Harvath had a handful of tattoos, a couple of which were crude and obviously not inked by a professional.

After praying over the two attackers inside, Peio let Harvath help him out the door and showed him where the other two were. The priest said a few words and they moved on.

Approaching the dead Basque halfway between the main house and the stables, Harvath figured out where Peio had picked up the lupara. What he didn’t understand was why he had come back.

He put the question to the priest, but he declined to answer. He wanted to save his strength. Harvath understood and offered Peio his shoulder. They could speak afterward.

He knew the ranch well enough to navigate them through the slowly lifting fog and locate the bodies. Whoever the team was, they had been good. Tello’s men were all dead, including Eyebrows and Scarface. Not a single one of them had been left alive. What the hell was going on? Why were these killers so young, and what was this “list” the kid had said Harvath was on? More importantly, why had he called him a traitor? None of it made any sense.

They soon came across the dogs. Harvath hated for animals to be killed. He understood why it was done in a raid, but he still hated it. Even when animals had been a factor in his assaults, he always tried to find another way to handle the situation without killing them.

When Peio was satisfied that he’d accounted for all of the dead, Harvath tried to lead him back to the main house to rest, but he refused. “The sun will be coming up soon,” Peio said. “You need to go.”

“What about you?” Harvath replied. “You need to see a doctor.”

The man shook his head. “A priest with a bullet wound would fuel enough gossip to last a century around here. I cannot be connected to what happened here. Father Lucas will take care of my wounds.”

“Do you have any idea how highly contaminated bullet wounds are?” Before the words were even out of his mouth, Harvath regretted uttering them. Of course Peio knew. He’d had plenty of experience with bullets before becoming a priest. “You’re going to need antibiotics.”

“We have all that at the abbey. Don’t worry.”

Peio was one tough guy. “You still haven’t told me why you came back.”

“I heard from Nicholas.”

Harvath stopped and turned to look at the priest. “When? How?”

“We use the website of the orphanage where we met in Belarus to leave messages for each other. Nicholas set it up in such a way that our communications couldn’t be seen.”

Harvath had trusted his Skype communication with the Old Man, but after what had just happened, nothing was safe. “How do you know you were actually communicating with Nicholas? How can you be sure?”

“There’s an authentication process,” Peio answered. “It’s similar to a dead drop. There is another site where I leave a nonspecific indicator. I believe Nicholas uses it for a lot of his contacts; sort of a messaging radar screen. I leave an indicator there to signal that there is a message waiting for him on the orphanage site. He then comes to the orphanage site, but cannot unlock my message and reply without using my indicator and how it was placed as a password.”

“How many other people know about your chat system?”

Peio looked at Harvath to see if he was serious. “Have you ever met anyone more concerned with the security of his communications than Nicholas?”

The priest had a good point, and while no system was ever one hundred percent secure, Nicholas had developed some of the toughest to crack, often by hiding them right in plain sight like the orphanage. “What did he say?”

Peio grimaced suddenly as he took in a breath.

“You’ve got to let me get you to a hospital, Father. You can’t make the ride back to the abbey.”

The man forced a smile. “I can and I will.”

“Peio, it’s three hours on horseback.”

“And I will need every minute of it to make peace with God and atone for what I did.”

“You saved my life. Thank you.”

The priest held up his hand. “We don’t have much time. Let me tell you what Nicholas said.”

Harvath nodded.

“When you reached out to me through the tobacconist, I knew something was wrong. As I said, I left a message for Nicholas. I wanted to know why you were coming. Several hours ago, I finally heard back. He said that he’s uncovered something and he needs you to get back as soon as possible.”

“Did he tell you what it was?”

“No. When we communicate, we do so in generalities. Despite Nicholas’s belief that he’s created a secure system, he’s still careful. Everything is disguised to sound like orphanage business. He did, though, want me to pass along a specific message to you.”

“What was it?”

“‘Make sure you do not promise or tip anyone anything.’ Does that make sense to you?”

Indeed it did. The message referred to two software programs used by intelligence agencies around the world. PROMIS was the acronym for the first program—the Prosecutors Management Information System. It was the precursor of TIP—the Total Information Paradigm.

PROMIS worked 24/7, looking for correlations between people, places, and organizations. It was brilliantly adept at accessing proprietary databases like those of banks, credit card companies, e-mail providers, phone companies, and other utilities. Running complex algorithms, it built detailed relationship trees outlining a subject’s every move, whom they knew, and with whom they interacted.

Because it could develop a baseline from utility records, if the subject of an investigation started using more water or power, it would realize that people had likely joined the suspect at the suspect’s residence. It would then search through the suspect’s phone records and e-mails and look for contacts whose utility consumption had gone down. It would go through credit card receipts to see if the contacts with diminished utility usage had purchased airline or train tickets, and if so, where. It would find all the towers that the contacts’ cell phones were pinging off of, as well as where they were paying for tolls and gasoline, all in an effort to try to figure out who was inside the subject’s home contributing to the increased use of power and water.

It worked around the clock, never sleeping, never stopping, and so had earned itself the nickname the Terminator. It was an appropriate moniker for its day, but the real terminator is what followed—TIP.

The Total Information Paradigm took PROMIS and wedded it with artificial intelligence. At that moment, the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the world’s intel agencies went supernova. It was like going from a Prius to a Lamborghini. Not only could TIP think like a person, it was alleged that it could actually anticipate human behavior.

Nicholas didn’t need to warn him about staying “off the grid.” He was the one, after all, who had schooled Harvath so deeply on both the PROMIS and TIP programs. Aside from observing good tradecraft, those programs were why Harvath had chosen to reach out to Peio and to do so in the manner he had. The priest was outside of practically any relationship tree anyone or any data-mining program could assemble around him.

For Nicholas to reinforce the need to avoid getting flagged by either program had to mean those programs were actively seeking him out.

“Did he say anything else?” Harvath asked the priest.

“He told me I needed to do everything I could to help you get back. Unfortunately, my contacts aren’t what they used to be. Getting you a new passport under a different name is going to take some time.”

“I already have one, so don’t worry.”

Peio nodded. “I should have expected that.”

“What I need, though, is a means to buy my airline ticket. All I have is cash, and that sends up red flags immediately.”

“I know someone with Iberia Airlines. Employees often book tickets for friends through their intranet system. The employee pays with a personal credit card and the friend reimburses the employee.”

Peio had obviously used this “friend” for similar travel arrangements before. No doubt, “reimbursement” meant the price of the ticket plus a premium for Peio’s contact who did the booking.

Traveling on an Italian passport, Harvath wanted to select a U.S. point of entry popular with Italians. “How often does Iberia have flights to New York City?” he asked.

“That’s just it,” replied Peio. “I think Nicholas has a different plan for you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Before coming home, he suggested you stop at an orphanage he has a relationship with.”

“The one in Belarus?” asked Harvath.

“No, this one’s in Mexico.”