Free Black List by Brad Thor Page A

swung his weapon back toward her, ready to fire.
    But she wasn’t reaching for a gun. From her purse she produced an old photograph and pressed it up against the window. He now realized why the woman standing there was so familiar to him.
    Lowering his pistol, he reached behind him with his left hand and hit the unlock button.
    As soon as she saw the lock pop up, the woman opened her door and climbed in. “I can explain everything,” she said, before Nicholas even had a chance to speak, “but we need to go. Now. ”

CHAPTER 12

    B ASQUE P YRENEES
S PAIN
W EDNESDAY
    T he sun had just begun to rise when the knock fell upon the door. “It’s open,” Harvath said from the stove. He didn’t bother to turn around. He knew who it was.
    A Basque man in his early forties stepped quietly inside and shut the door behind him.
    “There’s coffee on the table.”
    The man walked over and pulled out a chair. Sitting down, he withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it up. “It looks like I’m right on time.”
    He had dark hair and a clean-shaven face. His serene countenance was juxtaposed by his impeccable, military-style posture and a pair of brown eyes that seemed a little too alert for a man of his profession.
    “I heard the dogs as your horse got near,” Harvath said as he approached the table with a pan and spatula. “I hope you like eggs, Father.”
    The priest took a deep drag on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment before releasing it into the air and nodding.
    After serving the food, Harvath walked over, put the pan in the sink,and joined his visitor at the table. He was just about to begin eating when the priest fixed him with his gaze. Harvath set his fork down and waited.
    Setting his cigarette on the edge of the table, Padre Peio bowed his head and gave the traditional blessing. When he was finished, he made the sign of the cross and looked up. “I probably should say that I’m surprised to see you, but I assume that was your intention.”
    “I needed someplace safe.”
    The priest picked up his cigarette and gestured with it. “I suppose you could do worse than the ranch of an ETA commander. But someone with your resources could also do much better.”
    Harvath scooped up a forkful of eggs and nodded. “I needed a location that I couldn’t easily be connected to.”
    The priest thought about this for a moment before responding. “What happened?”
    “I don’t want to discuss specifics.”
    “Fine, let’s discuss generalities.”
    Harvath was silent for a moment as he reflected on what he knew about Peio.
    The man had not always been a priest. In fact, his background was quite unusual among those who end up devoting their lives to God.
    Peio and his family had left the Basque country for Madrid when he was in his first year of high school. With so many members of the family involved in the separatist movement, they had been worried about him and also his older brother becoming involved with ETA. They were right to have been concerned.
    Within a year of graduating high school, Peio’s older brother had returned to the Basque country and joined up. Three months later, he died in a shootout with police. Peio, though, took another path.
    He undertook his compulsory military service and proved quite adept in military intelligence. He stayed in the military while he completed his college degree and eventually transferred into Spain’s National Intelligence Service. It was there that Peio met his wife.
    They deeply loved their jobs and each other. They had a plan to work five more years in the intelligence field and then transition into something less dangerous so that they could begin a family. They were sixmonths away from that goal when, on a cold March morning in 2004, Alicia boarded a rush-hour commuter train for Madrid.
    At 7:38 a.m., just as the train was pulling out of the station, an improvised explosive device planted by Muslim terrorists