Kill Chain by Dominic Martell

Pascual Rose could be called a terrorist. But he never pulled a trigger, lit a fuse, or pushed a button. His talent was setting it all up for others to do the dirty work. He was most active in the post-cold war years. His last assignment led to the deaths of a German couple. Since then, he has gone to ground in an attempt at atoning for his former life while stayting one step ahead of German investigators. Off the electronic grid, he now lives as Pascual March. His ‘wife’ (they never married. That would've put him on the grid) is a flamenco artist of note and they have a son who is a university student in the Netherlands studying what appears to be party science. 

The fact that Pascual is so fully ‘off the grid’, he is a perfect foil for blackmail. A criminal underground with some seriously long arms has found him. Threatening him with the safety of his wife and son, they force him to set up a string of shell companies and shadow accounts in the Caribbean, around the Med, and western Europe. Sounds like a money laundering scheme on a large scale. 

But Pascual isn’t some flunky. Planning and finding answers kept him alive back in the day. If he can back trace the electronic infiltration into his life, maybe he can find out who has a hold on him and, more importantly, what they are up to. With the help of a family friend, a young street tough from Tangiers, a computer security expert from Barcelona, and an investment lawyer from Madrid, Pascual searches for answers while doing this syndicate’s bidding.

He manages to determine the target, but still isn’t sure who is pulling the strings. Pascual realizes once he has established the last shell company that starts the laundering process, he is no longer necessary. Word gets to his wife and son to get to their secure, last ditch hiding spot in northern Spain. A few days of safety is just the lull before the eventual storm.

It appears that Martell had penned a trilogy about the repentant spy’s search for absolution in the 90’s. Fast forward to the mid 2010’s finds Martell asking himself what might’ve become of Pascual. Kill Chain is the beginning of the answer. Enough loose ends prevail to suggest that perhaps another trilogy is in the works. On one level, this re-engagement of an old spy sort of parallels Olen Steinhauer’s Milo Weaver – a once highly active ‘Tourist’ called back into the game. This book is based primarily in Barcelona so it’s treading territory less familiar to most political/mystery readers. And if one is looking for a primer about money laundering, this might be a reasonable start. Not to mention that I was glad I was reading this on my Kindle because I was checking word definitions in most every chapter – Martell audacious vocabulary takes us on quite the roller coaster.