- Thor, Brad.
Black List.
New York: Pocket Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4391-9302-0.
-
This is the twelfth in the author's
Scot
Harvath series, which began with
The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010).
Brad Thor has remarked in interviews that he strives to write thrillers
which anticipate headlines which will break after their publication,
and with this novel he hits a grand slam.
Scot Harvath is ambushed in Paris by professional killers who murder
a member of his team. After narrowly escaping, he goes to ground and
covertly travels to a remote region in Basque country where he has
trusted friends. He is then attacked there, again by
trained killers, and he has to conclude that the probability is high
that the internal security of his employer, the Carlton Group, has
been breached, perhaps from inside.
Meanwhile, his employer, Reed Carlton, is attacked at his secure compound
by an assault team and barely escapes with his life. When Carlton tries
to use his back channels to contact members of his organisation, they all
appear to have gone dark. To Carlton, a career spook with tradecraft flowing
in his veins, this indicates his entire organisation has been wiped out,
for no apparent motive and by perpetrators unknown.
Harvath, Carlton, and the infovore dwarf Nicholas, operating independently,
must begin to pick up the pieces to figure out what is going on, while
staying under the radar of a pervasive surveillance state which employs
every technological means to track them down and target them for
summary extra-judicial elimination.
If you pick up this book and read it today, you might think it's based
upon the revelations of
Edward Snowden
about the abuses of the NSA
conducting warrantless surveillance on U.S. citizens. But it was published
in 2012, a full year before the first of Snowden's disclosures.
The picture of the total information awareness state here is,
if anything, more benign than what we now know to be the case in reality.
What is different is that when Harvath, Carlton, and Nicholas get to the
bottom of the mystery, the reaction in high places is what one would
hope for in a constitutional republic, as opposed to the
“USA! USA! USA!” cheerleading or silence which
has greeted the exposure of abuses by the NSA on the part of all too many
people.
This is a prophetic thriller which demonstrates how the smallest compromises
of privacy: credit card transactions, telephone call metadata, license
plate readers, facial recognition, Web site accesses, search engine queries,
etc. can be woven into a dossier on any person of interest which makes going
dark to the snooper state equivalent to living technologically in 1950.
This not just a cautionary tale for individuals who wish to preserve a
wall of privacy around themselves from the state, but also a challenge for
writers of thrillers. Just as mobile telephones would have wrecked the
plots of innumerable mystery and suspense stories written before their
existence, the emergence of the
panopticon
state will make it difficult for thriller writers to have both their
heroes and villains operating in the dark. I am sure the author will
rise to this challenge.
August 2014 