Black List (37 page)
“Can I help you?” he asked.
It wasn’t exactly the way one normally greeted a friend of a friend who had stopped by to say hello. “Hey, Dan,” Harvath replied, sticking his hand out. “Kevin Kirk.”
The man shook his hand, but only briefly. “What can I do for you?”
“A mutual friend suggested I pop in and see you when I got to town.”
“What friend?”
“Is there someplace a little less public where we can talk?”
It was quite apparent that McGreevy wasn’t fond of people dropping in on him unannounced. “Why don’t you give me this friend’s name first?” he replied.
Harvath locked eyes with him and said, “Turner. Riley Turner.”
A sudden microexpression gave him away. “Never heard of him.”
“It’s not a
him,
it’s a her, but I can see you already know that. Listen, you’re going to want to hear what I have to say. I’ll be out of your hair in five minutes.”
McGreevy jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the rear of the salon. “We can talk in my office. And I’m not giving you five minutes. You’ve got three.”
M
cGreevy pointed at one of the chairs in front of his desk and told Harvath to take a seat. “Your three minutes start now.”
Harvath decided to get right to the point. “Six days ago, Riley Turner was shot and killed in Paris.”
“Let’s assume for a moment that I even knew who this Riley Turner was and that I’d be interested in this information. Why would I believe you?”
“Because I was there,” said Harvath, taking note once again of another tell when the man mentioned Riley by name.
“Were you the one who shot her?”
“No, but I killed the men who did.”
“Men?”
McGreevy repeated.
Harvath nodded. “Yes. There were four of them; a wet work team.”
“And not only can you identify a
wet work
team, but you managed somehow to kill all four of them?”
“Yes.”
“Your name isn’t Kevin Kirk, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re not going to tell me who you are, are you?”
Harvath shook his head. “My call sign is Norseman. How about that?”
“I’ve never heard of you,” McGreevy countered.
Harvath had anticipated the man’s reaction and slid Mike Strieber’s cell phone from his pocket. The SIM card had been removed and its memory card replaced with the card Harvath had been carrying in Paris. Clicking on the photo of Riley, he handed the phone over to McGreevy.
“Jesus,” he said, all pretense of not knowing her now gone. “Who the hell did this?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Harvath replied as he placed his finger on the phone’s screen and swiped to the next photo. “I’ve got pictures of each of the shooters.”
He watched as McGreevy looked at each photo and then went back and looked at all of them again. If he recognized any of the men, he was very good at hiding it. Handing the phone back, he said, “Sorry. I can’t help you.”
“I think you can, and I need you to do me a favor.”
“You’ve got pretty big balls to come in here, show me pictures like that, and ask me for a favor.”
Harvath understood where the man was coming from. “I get it. You don’t know me. You did know Riley Turner, though.”
The man began to protest, but Harvath held up his hand to stop him. “For the record, you haven’t admitted anything. I’m coming to my own conclusions, which is something I need you to do as well.”
“Such as?”
“We’ve already passed the three-minute mark and I’m still here, so I’m guessing you’ve grasped that I’m the real deal. What you haven’t made up your mind about is if I’m one of the good guys or one of the bad guys.”
McGreevy smiled. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re one of the good guys and that I should trust you.”
“No,” said Harvath, and then dropped the name of another Athena Team member: “Gretchen Casey will tell you.”
Instantly, the smile fell from the man’s face. “Who the
fuck
are you?” he demanded.
“You’ve already got my call sign. Call Casey. If you can’t reach her, try Julie Ericsson, Megan Rhodes, or Alex Cooper.”
McGreevy looked like someone had just walked up and hit him
with a pipe. The man sitting across from him had just rattled off the names of four operators from one of the most clandestine programs in the history of the United States military. “I don’t know any of those people, and if I did, why would I tell you? You won’t even give me your real name.”
“For good reason,” Harvath replied. “Whoever is responsible for Riley Turner’s death is trying to kill me. And for all I know, Casey, Ericsson, Rhodes, and Cooper may also be on their list. That’s why I need to talk to them.”
The man leaned back in his chair and exhaled. Harvath could sense the wheels spinning in his mind. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
McGreevy cocked an eyebrow at him. “Oh, you do. What’s that?”
“I think you’re trying to make up your mind. I think professionally you’re obligated to pick up that phone and place a call to someone back at the Unit. I understand that. For all intents and purposes, you need to assume I’m a threat and that I am here with bad intentions. You don’t want to be the guy who sells anybody out. That’s not how it works. We all cover each other’s backs.”
“We?”
Harvath nodded. “I’ve been on multiple assignments with those women. They know me. They’ll vouch for me. You only need to contact one of them, describe me to her, give her my call sign, or put me on the phone, and everything will be good. To do that, though, means circumventing your chain of command and doing me, a complete stranger, a favor.”
“You’re right, it would be a
big
favor, and I don’t even do
little
favors for people I don’t know.”
“I think in my case you’re going to make an exception.”
“Why is that?”
Harvath kept a close eye on the man’s face as he prepared to drop a final name on him. Over the summer, six Athena Project members had been tasked to work with him in chasing down a deadly terror ring. As they narrowed in on a team of suicide bombers, one had detonated. Rubble was strewn everywhere and the building he’d been in front of began to collapse.
Harvath held up his hands and showed them to McGreevy. “I dug Nikki Rodriguez out of that building in Amsterdam with my own hands. And as I was pulling her out, she was pulling somebody else out, even though she had a piece of metal sticking through her chest that had collapsed her right lung.”
McGreevy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Where’d you go after that?”
“We followed the terror cell back here to the States.”
“Where specifically?”
“Chicago.”
“Why wouldn’t you want me to go to the top with this?” McGreevy asked. “If your story checks out, I’m sure they’ll put you in touch with whomever you want. Hell, they might even be able to help you, but I
have
to call this in.”
Harvath had him. He knew it. He just needed to pull him the rest of the way into his camp. All McGreevy needed was the right reason, which was what Harvath gave him, “What if making that call sets off a chain reaction that puts Casey, or all of them in even greater danger? Shouldn’t they be allowed to decide what the next step should be?”
D
an 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.