Black List by Brad Thor

MRB power rotation author Brad Thor brings Scot Harvath back with a vengeance.

Caroline Romero's employer, Adaptive Technology Solutions, is after her. ATS security has been told that she has stolen secrets and plans to give them to The Carlton Group, a super secret security company, funded by the government but with little oversight. Caroline knows that she is being followed while in a mall, stops in a lingerie shop, picks up a few things for her sister in Texas for the store to send, then heads out only to be hit be a car when she darts out of the mall.

The gift of lingerie has something else in the box.

Dominoes start to fall all around The Carlton Group . . . Scot Harvath, chief operative of The Carlton Group, is on a simple assignment in Paris. Opening the door to his safe house, he is greeted by Riley Turner, a hottie from the Athena Group that Harvath has his eye on only to be followed by a 4-man hit team who kills Turner, but fails to get Harvath . . . Reed Carlton, the 'Old Man' of The Carlton Group, is quietly sleeping at his rural Virginia farm outside DC. A hit team has breeched the perimeter, killed all the guards, and set fire to Carleton's home. . . . The Troll, aka Nicholas, a dwarf dealer in information whom Harvath turned in an earlier book, receives a cryptic message from Caroline to come to the southernmost tip of Texas where he is led to her sister  and that extra item in a package of lingerie . . . each and every Carlton group operative is either dead or deeply underground . . . Harvath goes to ground far back into the Basque Country mountains of Spain. Again, a hit team makes an ill-advised attempted hit on Harvath . . . attempts by Harvath and Carlton to contact each other fail leaving each to believe the other is dead.

ATS is a privately held contractor to the National Security Agency and the have been amassing an unprecedented amount of information on US citizens in the name of national security - bank records, credit card transactions, medical information, utility bills, travel patterns from car GPS and OnStar systems, tax data, phone calls, CCTV, traffic cameras, passport control at every entry point to the US - every pretense of independence and privacy is slipping away as fast as ATS can store data on a new server farm that the NSA is putting up in Nevada for ATS. They have illusions of having a file on every living, breathing person on the planet.

No warrants, no oversight. They appear entirely above board because their Board of Directors includes past Joint Chiefs, Senators, cabinet members, a US Vice President, etc. What Craig Middleton, the megalomaniac in charge of ATS really wants, is to crash the internet, create worldwide panic and chaos only to bring in, when he feels the public is at its most vulnerable, his internet version 2.0 where virtually every piece of information transmitted digitally will be housed by ATS. To do this, he plans to crash the internet using a scenario that IT security geeks refer to as the digital Pearl Harbor.

While every digital fingerprint is being analyzed for the whereabouts of Carlton and Harvath, they and the Nicholas resort to some old fashioned trade craft designed specifically to 'stay off the grid.' Nicholas arranges for Harvath to slip out of Spain and into Texas via Mexico; another attempted hit on Harvath fails, this time in Texas. Carlton reaches out to his cold warrior sage. Independently, they piece together just what is going on and who is behind it.

What they discover is that ATS has told all their operatives that Carlton Group agents are all guilty of treason, that Carlton and Harvath are the last names on "the blacklist' that remain alive. The extent of the reach of ATS is entirely unknown to all those oversight folks who keep awarding the contracts.  Even the heads of the NSA, CIA, and FBI are unaware not only of the breadth of actions by ATS, but ATS is so adept at manipulating information that each has no clue they are being manipulated.

Thor has delivered, once again, a high octane thriller, plotted out and delivered at light speed that has the real potential to keep you from your work, sleep, errands, chores . . . Thor gobbles up your time like  ATS gobbles up data. Don't plan to do much once you start on this one.  As I read this, I picked up parallels with other characters in fiction. For example, Harvath sounds a great deal like a slightly younger Bob Lee Swagger (by Stephen Hunter) in his skill to manipulate circumstances to meet his ends. The lack of privacy brought me back to my current thread from Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 and The Secret Speech, the difference being that the hint of some talk, action, or darn near thought that didn't adhere to Stalinist Russia meant the secret police will be coming after you, only here, the secret police is ATS. The scary thing is that according to the book's preface, all the technology described in the book is real.

It's a chilling treatment on just how little privacy one has anymore thanks to the digital age coupled with  the lust for power and information by those who have some measure of control on the flow of digital information. Makes one a bit worried about the fate of our grandchildren who will never know the independence and privacy based on the freedoms envisioned by the founding fathers.

East Coast Don