Free Foreign Agent by Brad Thor

was Bob McGee’s right hand at Langley and, like McGee, had been an outstanding field operative, handpicked by the President to help rebuild the Central Intelligence Agency from within.
    By using The Carlton Group, the CIA was able to push the boundaries of what they were legally allowed to do. It also presented them, and, more important, the President, with plausible deniability if any of those actions came to light.
    Dry hole, he typed. No sign of Pitchfork.
    Pitchfork was the code name they had assigned to Baseyev.
    Stand by, Ryan replied.
    Several seconds later, his phone rang.
    “Was it empty?” she asked when Harvath activated the call.
    “No. It’s furnished and in use.”
    “How long since he was last there?”
    “No clue. We could do a search for CCTV cameras and pull the footage if you want.”
    “Right,” said Ryan, distracted.
    “You should also put a full surveillance package on the building.”
    “Right.”
    Harvath could tell she wasn’t paying attention. “Do you want to call me back?”
    “What? No. I’m sorry.”
    Something was up. “What’s going on?”
    “More intel just came in regarding what happened in Turkey,” she said.
    “ Turkey? What happened?”
    There was a pause. “Nobody told you?”
    “Told me what? I’ve been in the field.”
    He could hear her let out a long exhalation. It sounded like air being let out of a tire.
    “Defense Secretary Devon is dead,” said Ryan. “His motorcade came under attack.”
    “Where? When?”
    “Antalya. About four hours ago.”
    Harvath had known Richard Devon and had liked him, a lot . He had also known several of the men on his protective detail. “Did anyone survive?”
    “No,” Ryan replied. “They’re all dead.”
    He couldn’t believe it. “How the hell did this happen?”
    “We don’t know. There’s a lot of moving pieces. We’re trying to get our arms around it.”
    “Who’s behind it?”
    “It looks like ISIS.”
    “Come on, Lydia,” he replied. “First Anbar, and now this? ISIS isn’t that good. And nobody is this lucky. Who the hell is helping them?”
    “That’s the question we’re all asking.”
    There were a ton of things he wanted to say. None of them were helpful, or appropriate. Holding his anger in check, he asked the only question he could: “What can I do?”
    The Deputy Director of the CIA didn’t hesitate. “Find Pitchfork,” she said. “Fast.”

CHAPTER 14

    O BERURSEL
    17 KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF F RANKFURT
    I f Baseyev was using Lufthansa as cover to move from country to country, the Russians had to have had someone inside. Harvath had charged Nicholas with figuring out who that someone was.
    The biggest obstacle Nicholas faced was wrapping his head around how Lufthansa booked its passengers and scheduled its crews. Once that began to crystalize for him, his search picked up speed.
    As someone who dealt with data, Nicholas was obsessed with patterns. Even when there was no pattern, that was a pattern, he would say. And the more he studied Baseyev’s travel, the more he began to figure the man out. He definitely had someone on the inside. It was someone very good at covering his tracks. Very good , but not perfect.
    Now that they had his employee identification number, they could track all of Baseyev’s Lufthansa travel as Peter Roth. That included not only his work trips but also trips where he was traveling for free as an airline employee or “dead-heading” to another destination in order to work a specific flight. There were even instances where he showed up in a foreign city somewhere and hopped onto a Lufthansa flight without any indication as to how he got there.
    Throughout it all, Nicholas kept looking for a constant, something that repeated itself—something that would point them to whomever the Russians had inside. Finally, he found it.
    Jörg Strobl was a senior IT specialist who worked in Lufthansa’s crew management division. He oversaw one of the many teams that