Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(107)

With time, the Vietnamese man broke. He gave up all the details, including how he and Aubertin intended to keep the bounty for themselves. Most important, he gave up the name of the man who had opened the assassination contract on Harvath—Andre Weber.

With Morrison and Gage standing guard outside, and Barton warming up their SUV, Harvath asked Haney and Staelin to leave him alone with Trang.

Once they had exited the abandoned warehouse in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Harvath spent a few more moments speaking with Trang before making sure the man would never run another drug ring, sex ring, or assassination ring ever again.

It turned out that Andre Weber lived and worked in Basel, Switzerland, which was too bad for him because Harvath had a very good friend in the Swiss government who lived and worked just south of Basel in Bern.

When, as a Secret Service agent, he had been framed for the kidnapping of the U.S. President, Claudia Mueller had helped him get the President back and clear Harvath’s name. They had been good together, and probably should have made a better go at carrying their relationship further. But things being what they were at the time, at least they had remained friends.

When he reached out to her, Claudia knew better than to ask too many questions. Trusting him, she quietly put a surveillance team on Weber, and arranged for a hangar and transport once The Carlton Group jet touched down.

She appeared only long enough to say hello and hand Harvath an address. Anything that happened after that, she made clear, she didn’t want to know about. He was on his own in Switzerland.

As the Americans pulled up outside Weber’s residence, Claudia’s surveillance team drove away. The handoff was complete.

The home was located in one of the most exclusive areas of Basel: St. Alban-Vorstadt. On an enormous lot, bordered by trees and green space, there was no reason for them to spirit Weber away as they had Trang. His interrogation could happen in the luxurious comfort of his own home.

Harvath decided to allow Morrison and Barton, the youngest guys on the op, to handle subduing Weber when he walked in.

Back in the home’s impressive kitchen, Gage brewed coffee while Haney and Staelin iced their knuckles from Paris, and Harvath sent an encrypted update to Nicholas. Finally, just after midnight, Weber got home.

Being somewhat of a gourmand, in addition to the hams, sausages, and salamis the man had hanging in his walk-in refrigerator, he owned a large stainless steel meat and cheese slicer like you might see in a deli. Morrison and Barton had both wanted to use it to “scare the fuck out of him.”

Harvath explained that the threat was only as good as their willingness to carry it out. Could they put his hands in there and start slicing off the tips of his fingers? Had they weighed what he had done? Did it warrant that kind of response? It was important to get the younger guys thinking.

As it turned out, none of it was necessary.

Unlike Trang, the moment Weber saw Harvath—he knew he was screwed. It was game over and the only hope he had of getting out of this alive was to cooperate.

Weber claimed not to know who had put up the money for the contract, but he had no problem revealing who had paid him to fly all the way to Vietnam and bring it to Trang.

The use of cutouts didn’t surprise Harvath. The name of this one, though, did. Harvath not only knew him, but had also dealt with him before. Years ago, he had been a middleman, charged with hiring an assassin to go after Nicholas.

As he had done at the end of Trang’s interrogation, Harvath asked the team to wait for him outside.

He conversed with Weber for a few more minutes, told him a little about Carl Pedersen, and then, marching him back to the walk-in cooler, made him answer for what he had done.

En route to the Nice C?te d’Azur airport, Harvath called Nicholas and shared with him the next name on their list—Gaston Leveque. A concierge at the famous H?tel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Leveque’s considerably more lucrative job was as a fixer for wealthy Russians. Drugs, murder, children for sex, the more horrific it was, the deeper he trafficked in it. One of Harvath’s deepest regrets was that he hadn’t killed the man years ago when he’d had the chance. At the time, though, letting Leveque live was the only thing that had gotten Harvath out of the situation alive.

Upon hearing the man’s name, Nicholas had gone ballistic—just like he had with the Contessa. They went back and forth for several minutes before ending their call. Nicholas let it be known that he trusted Harvath to do the right thing.

Though Leveque was a fixer for lots of wealthy Russians, there was one Harvath was particularly interested in—Nikolai Nekrasov, the billionaire owner of the H?tel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Harvath had a history with him too.

When he had originally come for Leveque, he had done so at the hotel not knowing that all of the rooms were wired with microphones and hidden cameras. He had only begun to interrogate Leveque when an armed security team had entered and Harvath had been forced to shoot several of them, though none fatally.

On the way out of the hotel, by necessity he had to temporarily take a woman hostage. That woman had been Nekrasov’s wife, Eva—and two things had immediately become apparent. One, she seriously disliked her husband, and two, she found Harvath very attractive.

She had certainly not resisted during the fifteen-minute kidnapping as they raced into Cannes in a stolen $400,000 sports car, and she had actively assisted him in escaping her husband and his band of men who were in hot pursuit. It was the most fun and excitement, she admitted, that she had had in years.