Free Black List by Brad Thor Page B

detonated, killing her instantly.
    It was part of a series of coordinated bombings and became Spain’s 9/11. The entire nation was in shock. Peio was shattered. As an intelligence operative who specialized in Muslim extremism, he felt that he had failed his wife and his country by not having prevented the attack. This unhealthy sense of responsibility drove him over the cliff into a dark emotional abyss.
    When he requested to be part of the investigation, his superiors said no, and placed him on forced medical leave in order to recover from his loss. Three days later, he disappeared.
    Colleagues who had stopped by his home to check on him assumed that he had returned to the Basque country to get away from Madrid and the scene of his wife’s murder. They had no idea how wrong that assumption was.
    Over the next thirty-six hours, Peio hunted down and brutally interrogated several Muslim extremists, severely hampering Spain’s investigation into the bombings. No matter which leads the authorities chose to follow or how fresh those leads were, they arrived to find that someone had already been there. That someone was Peio.
    He finally captured two key members of the terror cell who had planned and facilitated the attacks. After torturing them for three days in an abandoned building, he executed them both. It was but a mile marker on his personal descent into hell.
    After drawing all the money out of his bank account, he left Madrid for the tiny Spanish island of Cabrera. There, he drank. And when the drinking no longer assuaged his pain, he turned to heroin, and a whole new circle of hell was opened to him. He became addicted. When his money ran out, he attempted suicide.
    He was already dead emotionally, and had it not been for a local priest who found him, he would have died physically as well.
    The tiny island priest was tough but compassionate and dragged Peioback from the dead. “God has other plans for you,” he said, and when it came time for Peio to decide whether or not to return to Madrid and put the pieces of his life back together, God spoke to him directly and Peio learned what those plans were.
    He confided in Harvath quite candidly not long after they had met that his biggest regret wasn’t over anything he had done. It wasn’t the brutal interrogations, the tortures, or even the executions of the terrorists he had captured. He had repented for those things and would ultimately answer to God. He had even forgiven himself for not having been able to prevent the attack that had taken his wife’s life. What he regretted the most was never having had children with her. If they had had children, even just one, he couldn’t help but wonder how different his life would have been in those days and months after Alicia’s death.
    Harvath found that hard to believe. Any real man, especially a man with Peio’s background, would have done exactly what he had done. He would have hunted down and killed his wife’s killers. But Harvath had learned that, man of the cloth or not, what Peio said and what Peio did were often at odds with each other. And, as good as Harvath was at reading people, he also found it difficult to discern whether Peio had taken to him because of their similar operational backgrounds or because the priest saw in him a soul in need of saving.
    Peio’s contradictions were most fully on display when it came to the man who had introduced them—Nicholas, or simply the Troll, as the intelligence world referred to him.
    Peio and Nicholas had met at an orphanage, in Belarus. Nicholas was one of its patrons and the priest had been doing missionary work there, ministering to the podkidysh, or “abandoned children,” many of whom were part of the continuing legacy of Chernobyl. Through their work at the orphanage, the two men had developed an unlikely, yet deep bond.
    So strong was that bond that when Nicholas needed someplace safe, a place to disappear, he had turned to Peio, just as Harvath had