Black List

CHAPTER 52

VIRGINIA

MONDAY

Harry P. Davis Field in Manassas was a small, regional airport about thirty miles from D.C. It was easy to get into and out of and had a much smaller surveillance apparatus than Dulles or Reagan National. Mike Strieber used it whenever he had business in Washington. His aircraft’s tail number, or N-number as it’s called, appearing in their logs wouldn’t be unusual.

He arranged to have his plane refueled and then went over to Hertz to select a rental car. He surveyed what was available, then filled out the paperwork in his name and drove off in a black Chevy Suburban.

After picking up Harvath, Casey, and Rhodes, Strieber parked out of sight of the rental car offices and the private aviation building known as the Fixed-Base Operator or FBO, so Harvath could remove the SUV’s license plates. Five minutes later, he returned and attached the plates from another black Suburban on the small, unattended Hertz lot. It was a short-term fix, but if Mike’s name was being put through PROMIS, TIP, or any of the other database screening systems, they’d have the plates tied to the rental contract, not the plates that were actually on the vehicle at the moment. If the police, for any reason, ran a check, it would come back as a black Suburban owned by Hertz. Harvath had yet to see a cop ever verify a vehicle identification number.

They dropped Strieber in downtown Manassas, where he planned to kill a few hours before returning to the airport by cab and flying his plane back to Texas.

Harvath, along with Casey and Rhodes, had spent the prior afternoon and well into the evening doing research on Colonel Charles Bremmer. Using DoD resources was out of the question. Harvath had no doubt that his name was flagged throughout their systems. That meant Casey or Rhodes would have to do the dirty work, and any search they did would trace right back to them. Harvath wasn’t willing to risk it. They’d have to limit themselves to open source information.

As they began their search, it became apparent that Bremmer wasn’t a total fool when it came to protecting his personal data. Neither his phone number nor his address was listed in any phone books, and it didn’t appear that he had ever been mentioned in any news articles. Harvath thought about using ZabaSearch but decided against it, knowing that individuals could set up e-mail alerts on Zaba to notify them when someone ran their name.

They continued digging, hitting every popular military site and went as far as checking the business-networking site, LinkedIn. None of them turned up even a shred of information on Bremmer.

Harvath was beginning to get discouraged when Casey came up with a very promising lead. It was a list of benefactors who had donated to a small, private school in Virginia called Fredericksburg Academy. Among those thanked for their contributions in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, were “Mr. and Mrs. C. Bremmer.”

Was it their “Charles” Bremmer? Possibly, but despite the somewhat uncommon name, it could have been any of the C. Bremmers in the world. Harvath hadn’t known Bremmer very well. He had no idea if the man was an alumnus of Fredericksburg Academy or if he even had a child, or children, who attended the school. Their big break came when they began skimming the school’s website.

Laid out in beautiful script atop images of the Fredericksburg Academy campus was a page dedicated to testimonials from parents. One of them was from “Patricia Bremmer, FA parent.” It was followed by her child’s class year, indicating that she, and ostensibly whoever Mr. Bremmer was, were parents to a current Fredericksburg Academy junior. Their search had just been narrowed.

It didn’t take long to uncover a Ms. Molly Eileen Bremmer, who in addition to being a varsity field hockey player, also had an active Facebook account. The page included geo-tagged pictures of the Bremmer family home, their vehicles, and Molly Bremmer’s parents.

As soon as Harvath saw the first one he said, “That’s him. That’s Chuck Bremmer.”

Just as good as finding the family photographs was reading through the posts back and forth between Molly and her friends. It was in doing so that they discovered Ms. Bremmer had a major field hockey game the next afternoon and that her biggest wish, next to winning it, was that her dad would honor his promise and not be late to this one. Before Harvath could say anything to Casey, she was already pulling up satellite images on Bing and had begun planning all the potential routes Colonel Bremmer could possibly take to and from the match.

They spent the rest of the evening formulating their plan. He saved the last thing he needed to do on the Internet for the next morning before they took off. As Strieber readied his plane, Casey drove Harvath to a FedEx office in Fayetteville and waited in the parking lot while he went inside.

Paying with an untraceable $50 debit card that Rhodes had had a friend of a friend pick up the night before, Harvath got back on the Net and went to the dating site the Old Man had designated for use in absolute emergencies. Knowing that the majority of analysts would be male and loath to sift through ads of men seeking men, that was exactly where Carlton had explained their ads should be.

Harvath had resigned himself to the worst. Going from one ad to the next was like scrolling through the obituaries. The Old Man was more than a mentor. He was like a father, and Harvath had already lost one father in his life.

It was an agonizing process, and Harvath was tempted to skip right to the end, until one ad in particular caught his eye.

Seconds went by. He didn’t blink, he didn’t breathe; it felt like even his heart had stopped beating. Then everything started up again in a rush.

It was Carlton’s ad. There was no question. It had been posted four days ago. That meant two days after the attack on him in Paris and a day before the attack in Spain. It had to be the Old Man. Even the burn code he used was right on the money. No matter how badly he was ever tortured, Harvath didn’t want to believe that he’d give up their ultimate code, the code that existed just between the two of them.

Nevertheless, it troubled Harvath that a personal ad had been posted on the very same day that he had thought he’d been conversing with Carlton over Skype. Damn it, he thought to himself. This entire thing was so hard to make sense of. He was starting to second-guess everything. This was exactly the kind of doubt that he and the Old Man loved to sow in America’s enemies. He didn’t like that the shoe was on the other foot.

There were three status levels that Carlton could have conveyed in his transmission, coded X, Y, or Z. Z meant charcoal, the absolute worst; that he was completely burned and Harvath shouldn’t try to find or contact him. But that wasn’t what Carlton had transmitted. He had selected Y—situation severe, but he was okay and attempting to regroup. Harvath decided that for now he’d play along.

Making sure to mirror the language used in the other male-to-male ads he had read through, he crafted a careful, short response:

Really turned on by your ad. Am going to be in town on business. Would love to hook up.

Harvath then closed with the phrase he and Carlton had devised so that he would know it had come from him:

Let’s do dinner, but not sushi. Am only into meat eaters.

With that, Harvath had logged out of the dating site and had signed off of the computer he was working on, and exited the FedEx office.

“So?” Gretchen Casey asked as Harvath slid back into her car. “Any news?”

Harvath took a moment to gather his thoughts before answering. Finally, he turned to her and with a reserved smile said, “I think, at least as of four days ago, he was still alive.”

Casey turned her high-wattage smile right back at him. “That’s fantastic. If he slipped the hit they put on him, he would have gone right to ground and there’s no way they’d be able to track a man like him.”

“I hope you’re right,” Harvath had replied.

That had been more than ten hours ago. Now they were in Virginia, Harvath was lying in the Suburban’s cargo area, and Casey was unbuttoning her shirt. It was time for them to get it on.