Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(36)

There was tension between these two. Lawlor wanted to know why.

“Let’s skip ahead to where it started getting ugly.”

Nicholas expelled a burst of air through his nostrils and shook his head as he climbed down from the footstool and returned to his seat at the conference table.

“I found Tretyakov sitting on a bench,” said Harvath. “I thought I had the drop on him. In reality, he had the drop on me.”

“He knew you were coming.”

“Yes. It was an ambush. I walked right into it.”

“How did he know?”

“We had cracked the Norway cell and not long after, the cell on Gotland Island,” said Harvath. “Gotland was not just another cell, it was his most important cell. Their job was to help defeat the Swedish garrison and hold off reinforcements until Russia could take complete control. Once they had their missile batteries in place, they would have been in a position to prevent any ships from entering the Baltic. That was the final domino they needed to fall before invading Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. By taking down that cell, we denied the Russians the strategic advantage they needed to carry out their plan.”

“But it didn’t end there, did it?”

Harvath shook his head. “We didn’t know what Plan B was, much less whether they had a Plan C, D, or E. Without Tretyakov, we couldn’t be totally sure we had scuttled the invasion. We had no choice but to go into Kaliningrad and pull him out.”

“Again, how would he have known you were coming?”

“I think he was also playing a hunch. Two of his cells got taken down, right in a row. The leader of the Gotland cell was a colleague of his—someone who knew where he lived and where he worked. Tretyakov had to have known it was only a matter of time before we got to him.”

“So he sets a trap and waits for whoever shows up.”

“Exactly.”

Lawlor looked at him. “When the Russians grabbed you, did they ask about Tretyakov?”

“They asked me a lot of things.”

“I’m sure they did. You’ve been a thorn in their side for a long time. But what about Tretyakov?”

“They asked,” Harvath replied, “about him and a bunch of other Russians we had gone after over the years.”

“The important thing,” Nicholas offered, “is that Scot didn’t tell them anything.”

“Nothing of value, at least,” Harvath clarified. “I gave them a lot of disinformation—stuff I knew was going to be hard to source—in order to buy myself time. Had I not escaped when I did, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I can tell you what would have happened,” said Lawlor. “It would have gotten worse. Beyond your imagination worse. They know what we know—everyone breaks, eventually.”

Harvath, his expression grim, nodded in response.

“All right, then. Let’s say this isn’t about Tretyakov—not directly. This is, though, about you. And, let’s say the Russian President is behind it. This time, instead of taking you alive so he can interrogate you and eventually put a bullet in your head, he’s skipping right to the bullet part. But to do that, he needs to find you. How’d he do it the first time?”

“I led him right to me.”

“I don’t understand. How?”

“Matterhorn,” Nicholas interjected.

“What’s Matterhorn?”

“Not what,” the little man replied. “Who. He’s a European intelligence officer who had been doubled back on his home country by the Russians. When the Old Man figured it out, he decided that instead of exposing him, he’d play dumb and draw the man, whom he had become friends with, even deeper into his confidence. From time to time, he provided the Russian spy with high-level intelligence.”

Lawlor didn’t know how to take that. “He did? Why?”

“So that when he fed him bogus intel, the European not only bought it, he ran with it straight to Moscow.”

Harvath, who felt compelled to defend his mentor, added, “Reed only handed over intel that we believed the Russians already had, would eventually have, or that we felt was worth surrendering. For our disinformation to continue to be pumped straight into the Kremlin, we needed to make Matterhorn appear to be a superstar.”

“I assume the Russians gobbled it up.”

“Hook, line, and sinker.”

“What does Matterhorn have to do with leading them to you?”

“Not long after the Old Man was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, his brakes started failing. He started regaling his caretakers with tales of derring-do, chock-full of classified, national security information. We likened the situation to a loose nuke. If the enemy got a hold of him, there was no telling what damage it might do.

“Word of his illness had begun to spread and so I made the decision to move him. He had spent summers as a boy at his grandparents’ cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. As the oldest memories tended to be the last to fade, we thought that he might enjoy returning. I rented a place for him up there and the President okayed a request for a team of Navy corpsmen to rotate shifts around the clock. They all had security clearance, so he got the care he needed and, no matter what he might say, we knew nothing would go beyond the cottage.”