Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(37)

“Good plan,” said Lawlor.

“That’s what we thought,” Harvath replied. “Under the guise of having been ‘friends’ for such a long time, Matterhorn had been pressing to see him.”

“Do you think it was genuine?”

“Maybe. I also think Moscow was pushing for Matterhorn to do an assessment and report back. Both reasons served my purposes, so I agreed.”

“Served your purposes how?”

“Matterhorn was still useful to us. It had been the Old Man’s intention that he become my asset and that I start running him. Allowing him to say a final goodbye was a good way to build rapport. I also hoped that if he could see for himself how far gone Reed was, that the Russians would write Reed off and not attempt to get to him.”

“So you set up a meeting.”

“I did,” said Harvath. “Short of throwing a bag over his head, I took as many safeguards as I thought were warranted. Not until now would I have believed the Russians could pull together the hit murdering Lara, Lydia, and Reed that quickly. It happened in a matter of hours.”

“Have you talked to this Matterhorn since then?” Lawlor asked.

“No.”

“Did he speak with anyone who would have known you were in Key West?”

“No,” Harvath repeated.

“Did he know about your relationship with Carl Pedersen?”

“No.”

Lawlor pulled the cap off the green marker and wrote the codename Matterhorn on the whiteboard, only to draw a line through it.

“Okay,” Lawlor continued, “for the moment, let’s take him off our list of active suspects and go back to something Nicholas was just talking about. If you were the Russians, how would you go about reverse engineering what happened to Tretyakov?”

“I’d go back to CCTV footage. I’d want it from any cameras that may have picked up something—cameras around his apartment, his office, and the park where he was abducted.”

“Were there any?”

“Not any that caught our team.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Harvath replied.

“So then what would you do?” asked Lawlor.

“I’d widen the net. I’d review all footage from all ports of entry in the days leading up to his disappearance. Examine everybody and everything coming into Kaliningrad. Every bus, train, car, boat, and truck.”

“Same for vehicles leaving the exclave immediately after Tretyakov’s abduction?”

“It depends on how smart the Russians are,” said Harvath. “We had a major shootout with their soldiers leading up to our exfil. Those who survived saw us pile into a boat and race off across the lake into Poland. We didn’t hide our method of extraction.”

“But the Lithuanian truck driver helped get you close to the lake, correct?”

Harvath nodded.

“Where was he headed after he dropped you?”

“He said he was going home.”

“Back to Lithuania?” Lawlor asked, just to be clear.

Harvath again nodded.

“It’s a pretty big haystack—vehicles that entered and left Kaliningrad around Tretyakov’s disappearance—but if they looked at vehicles crossing back into Lithuania near the time you conducted your exfil, it narrows the field considerably.”

Nicholas, who had been clicking away on his laptop, asked, “What kind of details can you give me about the driver and his truck?”

“The truck was a Swedish make,” said Harvath, pulling up a picture in his mind. “Scania. It was old. Nineteen-nineties, maybe. Manual transmission.”

“Color?”

“Blue.”

“Did you get a number plate?”

Harvath shook his head.

“Tell me about the driver,” Nicholas continued.

“Caucasian. Gray hair. About five-foot-seven. Forty-five to fifty pounds overweight. Somewhere in his sixties. According to Landsbergis, the man came from proud stock. His father, grandfather, and two uncles were Forest Brothers—Baltic partisans who waged guerrilla warfare against the Soviets during and after World War II.”

“You’ve got exceptional recall. How about a name?”

Harvath knew this was the logical next question. “We were never given his name. That was part of protecting him.”

Nicholas consulted his notes. “So, overweight, mid-sixties, Lithuanian driver of a blue 1990s Scania whose ancestors harassed the Red Army. That’s all we have? Nothing else? Nothing at all?”

“In his defense,” stated Lawlor, “you don’t get to see a lot from inside a refrigerated trailer.”

“Except I wasn’t inside the trailer,” Harvath replied, searching his memory. “Not on the exfil.”

“You weren’t?”

“No. The entire op had gone sideways. Everyone was looking for us. We were hiding out in an old, broken-down car wash. A couple of Kaliningrad cops had shown up and Chase had been left with no choice but to take them both out. It had been hard on all of us. Regardless, in the midst of all that heat, I didn’t want to be in the back, blind, and so had told the driver I would be riding up front with him in the cab.”

“Did you see anything there that might help?”