Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(35)

“Yeah. It turned ugly fast. We made it, though.”

“Barely,” Nicholas added once more.

“All right,” said Lawlor, trying to get them to focus. “If you don’t think Jasinski would have given up Carl, what about this Landsbergis guy? Someone must have connected Carl to you. Of the three possible, Landsbergis is the one you’re least able to vouch for.”

“I only spent a few hours with him,” Harvath admitted, “but he seemed reliable. Without his help, we never would have been able to get into Kaliningrad, much less snatch Tretyakov and get back out. He was critical.”

“Do we know of anyone he might have spoken with? Colleagues at the VSD?”

“Landsbergis said one of the recurring problems Lithuania faced was penetration by Russian spies. Like the Norwegians, he didn’t want Moscow to know his country was helping us. In order to do that, he claimed that he limited any knowledge of the operation to just himself. And even then, just to be safe, he insisted on not knowing all of the details.”

“That’s admirable, but he would have needed to involve other Lithuanians. You landed a giant C-130 right at one of their air bases.”

“Thankfully,” said Harvath, “?iauliai is where the air policing for NATO’s Baltic member states is based. U.S. planes go in and out of there all the time. One more probably wasn’t going to raise a lot of eyebrows—especially a transport aircraft—but, again, it was Landsbergis who got it cleared. He basically hid the plane in plain sight.”

Nicholas raised his coffee mug. “Here’s to Landsbergis and hiding in plain sight.”

Harvath understood what his colleague was trying to say, but the way Nicholas had said it gave him pause and raised a question in his mind.

Lawlor recognized the look on Harvath’s face. “What is it? What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m wondering, if the situation were reversed, how would we piece together what had happened?”

“I can tell you exactly what we’d do,” said Nicholas. “When the Russians took you, we vacuumed up every piece of evidence, kicked over every rock, and broke every rule until we found you and figured out how to get you back.”

“So do you think that’s what this is all about?” asked Lawlor. “Them trying to get Tretyakov back?”

Harvath shook his head. “If that were the case, if they wanted to extract information from me, they would’ve sent in a team, not a lone hitter. The shooter in Key West wasn’t there to interrogate me. He was there to kill me.”

“You seem pretty certain.”

“I could hear the police cars getting closer. Believe me, he didn’t have time to ask questions.”

“Let’s go back to Kaliningrad then,” said Lawlor, tapping the cap of his green dry-erase marker against his chin. “You said it ‘turned ugly fast.’ What did you mean?”

“The only thing that went correctly,” Harvath replied, “was our insertion. We managed to breach their airspace without being detected. We landed in a farmer’s field, spent the night in a barn, and the Lithuanian truck driver met us along a nearby road the next morning.”

Lawlor made a note on the whiteboard. “The drop zone had been selected with assistance from Landsbergis, correct?”

Harvath nodded.

“Presumably, if he had been working for the Russians, this would have been the perfect time to roll up you and your team?”

Again, Harvath nodded.

“Keep going.”

“The truck driver was hauling a load of fruits and vegetables in a refrigerated trailer. He had blankets stacked up in back for us and we all piled in. When we arrived in the city, he dropped us off, handed us four public transportation tickets, and we didn’t see him again until our exfiltration.”

“And then what happened?”

“We set up surveillance on Tretyakov’s apartment. We knew where he lived, where he worked, and a small park he occasionally went to. That was it. There was no intel about any girlfriends, boyfriends, bars, restaurants, or hobbies. We had very little to work with and knew we were going to have to improvise. Which is exactly what I did when we saw him leave his apartment. Instead of getting inside and wiring the place, I decided to follow him.”

“Why?” asked Lawlor.

“Call it a hunch.”

Nicholas hopped off his chair ostensibly to get some more coffee, but more to walk off a wave of nervous energy. What had happened following Harvath’s “hunch” still bothered him. Harvath had acted with incredible recklessness.

“What would you call it?” Lawlor asked the little man, sensing this had been an inflection point in the operation.

Nicholas didn’t even bother to turn around. Stepping onto a footstool to get more coffee he answered, “I don’t second-guess people in the field.”

Loyalty. Lawlor liked that. He pressed on.

“What was your hunch?”

“That it was time to grab him.”

Lawlor looked at him. “Right there? On the street in front of his apartment?”

Harvath shook his head. “In the park. If that’s where he was headed.”

“And was it?”

“It was exactly where he was headed,” Nicholas replied, topping off his mug and turning off the spigot with a little too much flourish.