Black List

CHAPTER 49

Dan McGreevy had texted Casey and Rhodes simultaneously with a terse, three-word message. Get over here. Within twenty minutes, they were standing in the doorway of his office.

Megan Rhodes saw Harvath first. “Look who’s here,” she began excitedly but she fell silent when she saw the look on his face.

Gretchen Casey sensed something was wrong immediately. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s about Riley.”

It was identification enough. Dan McGreevy ushered the women in and offered up his office for them to talk in private. Anticipating Harvath’s next words, he held up his hand and stopped him. “At some point, the powers that be need to know what happened. All I am going to say is that it should be sooner rather than later. Other than that, I’ll leave it up to the three of you to decide.”

“What the hell happened?” Casey asked. “Is Riley okay? Where is she?”

Gretchen Casey, or “Gretch,” as she was known to her teammates, had grown up in East Texas and studied prelaw at Texas A&M. Her mother was a semisuccessful artist and her father a former Army Ranger who had her shooting from the first day she could hold a rifle. Her love of cross-country in high school and skill at shooting had led her to become a world-class summer biathlete. She dropped out of the sport when she fell in love with a hedge fund manager and moved to New York City. She received her law degree at NYU but moved back to Texas and resumed her career as a summer biathlete when the relationship ended. She was eight months back into the sport when a Delta Force recruiter spotted her and made her an offer that she found hard to resist.

She had brown, shoulder-length hair with highlights, and green eyes. At five-foot six, she was the smaller of the two women in the room, but that had no impact on her leadership abilities, which had seen her put in charge of her Athena brick.

Megan Rhodes was the quintessential “American” girl; blond-haired and blue-eyed. Her mother passed away when she was very young and her father, a cop, raised her in the Chicago suburbs.

Rhodes attended the University of Illinois, where she was a successful competitive swimmer. Thanks to her striking Nordic features and five-foot-eleven height, she’d been nicknamed the Viking Princess, and it had stuck with her all the way to Delta. Those who knew her loved the moniker. She was every bit the Viking, but there wasn’t an ounce of princess in her. She was a stone cold killer when she had to be and endured the worst situations any assignment threw at her without ever complaining. Like her teammate Casey, Rhodes was in her early thirties, fit, and very attractive.

Harvath didn’t feel comfortable speaking in Dan McGreevy’s office. There was no telling if he had it wired or not. Unless he knew for sure, he always assumed the worst.

Signaling his concern, he asked, “Is there someplace else we can talk?”

Outside the nail salon, Harvath swapped the memory cards and handed Mike Strieber’s phone back to him. Strieber eyeballed the two attractive yet serious-looking women across the parking lot but didn’t say anything. He knew this was business.

Strieber had plenty of customers he could see in and around Bragg and told Harvath to simply buzz his cell phone once he had figured out what he wanted to do. Harvath thanked him and as Strieber fired up the courtesy van and exited the lot, Harvath joined Casey and Rhodes at their car.

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting in Casey’s living room. Rhodes came back from the kitchen and handed him a beer. “You look like you can use one.”

Harvath accepted it, twisted off the top, and proceeded to tell the two women everything that had happened. When Casey paused to ask him about the photographs, he pulled the microSD card from his pocket and handed it to her.

She slid it inside her phone as Rhodes leaned over to stare at the images. Both women, though tough as hell, were visibly upset by what they saw.

“We have no idea who did this?” Casey asked.

Harvath shook his head. “No. I only have the name of the person who supposedly tasked the kill teams, Colonel Chuck Bremmer.”

“He’s active U.S. military?” replied Rhodes.

“As far as I know. He was a special DoD liaison to the White House and the National Security council back when I was on the President’s Secret Service detail.”

“Was he running kill teams then?”

“He and I weren’t exactly chatty.”

“So we have no idea,” Casey interjected, “whether or not Riley was specifically targeted or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Harvath looked at her. “Have you spoken with Cooper and Ericsson?”

“I spoke with both of them last night. Julie is on leave visiting her family in Hawaii, and Cooper is doing a training rotation in New Mexico.”

“What about Rodriguez?”

“She’s fine; still recovering, but she’s okay,” Casey said.

“If nobody else was targeted on your team, then Riley had to have been killed because of me.”

“What were the two of you doing in Paris anyway?” Rhodes asked.

“Carlton has an Israeli contact there. He sent me to pass off some information. After the meeting was over the Israeli handed me an envelope. Inside was the address for the Paris safe house written in Carlton’s handwriting. When I got to the building, Carlton texted me the apartment number. I rang the bell, was buzzed in, and went upstairs. Riley opened the apartment door and that’s when the shooting started from the stairwell.”

“Do you know why she was there?”

“I never got the chance to ask.”

Casey removed the SD card from her phone and handed it back. “Where’s Reed Carlton now? Do you have a way to contact him?”

“Yeah, but there’s no way to be certain it’s secure. Based on everything else, I have to assume he’s being watched.”

“By ATS.”

Harvath nodded.

Megan Rhodes balanced her beer on her thigh. “So in addition to not knowing if Carlton is alive or dead, we don’t know who’s pulling all the strings.”

“Correct. We’ve got no idea.”

Casey looked at her teammate and then at Harvath. “It seems like there’s only one person at this point capable of giving us any answers. I think we need to pay Chuck Bremmer a visit.”

“I agree,” said Harvath. “But there are a few things we need to do first.”