Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(2)
“Task all of them,” said Weber.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Task them all. Whoever gets to him first, and kills him, wins. That’s what the client wants.”
Trang smiled again. “He really did fuck with the wrong people, didn’t he?”
Weber nodded and, standing up from the table, prepared to leave.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?” asked Trang. “Anything that’s not in the file?”
“Only one thing,” Weber replied, as a torrent of rain slammed against the windows. “Don’t underestimate Scot Harvath. If you do, it’ll be the last mistake you ever make.”
CHAPTER 1
KEY WEST
FRIDAY, TWO WEEKS LATER
Looking back on it, Scot Harvath probably shouldn’t have punched the guy. Flipped him on his ass? Sure. Put his wrist into a painful, yet harmless joint lock? Even better. But uppercut the guy so hard that he knocked him out cold? Not one of his better decisions.
And therein lay the problem. Lately, Harvath seemed to be out of the good-decision-making business altogether.
Forget for the moment that the other guy had it coming. A wealthy Wall Street type, he appeared to take great pleasure in verbally abusing his female companion. The more the man had to drink, the worse it got. It was uncomfortable for everyone sitting nearby. What it wasn’t, though, was any of Harvath’s business.
People got into relationships for all sorts of reasons. If she was willing to sit there and get berated by some jackass, that was her problem.
At least it had been until she took off her shawl. The moment she did, everything changed.
On such a warm evening, in the resort’s open-air lounge, it had seemed odd to be wearing a wrap. Then Harvath noticed her bruises. She had tried to conceal them, but to his discerning eye they were unmistakable, running up and down both arms. Apparently, Wall Street could get rough with more than just his words.
In Harvath’s book—hell, in any decent human being’s book—men who beat women were scum. Did this guy need to be taught a lesson? Absolutely. Did Harvath need to be the one doing the teaching? That was debatable. Karma would catch up with the guy eventually. It was one of those things from which you could run, but never hide.
Nevertheless, Harvath felt for the woman. Maybe it was all the cocktails he had consumed that were talking. Maybe it was the amount of personal trauma he had unsuccessfully been trying to escape. Either way, the emotional and physical pain radiating from her was undeniable.
And so, when Wall Street next popped off, Harvath didn’t even think. He just reacted. Standing up, he walked over to their table. Her problem had just become his problem.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“Come again?” the man replied, an angry look on his face as he rose to confront Harvath.
“You heard me. Leave the lady alone.”
“Mind your own business,” Wall Street snapped, giving him a shove.
That was when Harvath laid him out.
It was a dramatic escalation of the situation and drew a collective gasp from the other guests. The punch could have killed him. Or, he could have hit his head on one of the tables as he fell. A million and one things could have gone wrong. Thankfully, nothing did.
And while Harvath could have made the legal case that Wall Street had made contact first, it hadn’t come to that. He wasn’t interested in involving police or pressing charges. That didn’t mean, though, that it was over.
The staff at Little Palm Island Resort liked Harvath. He was a repeat customer known for his easy smile and engaging sense of humor. But on this visit, something was off. Something had happened to him; something unsettling.
He was withdrawn and quiet. A dark cloud hovered over him wherever he went. He rose early to work out, but other than that spent the rest of his time drinking, heavily.
Had the resort been empty, the management might have been able to ignore his self-destructive behavior. It wasn’t empty, though. It was at full occupancy and none of the upscale clientele wanted to spend their luxury vacation watching a man drink himself to death in the bar.
Harvath didn’t care. He knew his alcohol consumption was dangerous, but after everything he had been through, all he wanted was to be released—released from the guilt, the shame, and the pain of what had happened.
The real problem was that there wasn’t enough booze in the world to wash away what had happened. His wife, Lara, was dead. His mentor, Reed Carlton—a man who had become like a second father to him—was dead. And one of his dearest colleagues, Lydia Ryan—who had stepped up to helm his organization when he wouldn’t, was dead. All of them had been killed in an effort to get to him and he hadn’t been able to do a single thing to stop the carnage.
With all of his training, with all of his counterterrorism and espionage experience, he should have been able to protect them. At the very least, he should have seen the attack coming. But he hadn’t.
Helpless to save them, he had been forced to watch as they were murdered. Horrific didn’t even begin to describe it. The physical torture he was subjected to afterward paled in comparison.
Dragged by a foreign intelligence service back to their country for interrogation and execution, he had managed—through sheer force of will—to pull himself together long enough to orchestrate his own escape. Then, on behalf of Lara, Reed, and Lydia he had carried out his own bloody revenge.