Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(46)

On the appointed day, the diplomat drove his family to the airport and saw them off. Later that night, he met with S?lvi and presented both the list and the underlying intelligence files for each person on it—all of which she copied and transmitted to Carl for verification.

When word came back that everything was in order, S?lvi informed the diplomat that he had been cleared to travel to Norway and join his family. The man was overjoyed.

After entreating him to act normal and get a good night’s sleep, she wished him safe travels.

“You’re not taking me to the plane tomorrow?” he had asked.

“Absolutely not,” she had replied. “You delayed a trip with your wife and kids. The last thing you want is to be seen with some strange woman. That goes double if anyone from your intelligence service is watching you.”

“Watching me? Why would they be watching me?”

She had been speaking candidly, but it had spooked him. It was important to calm him down. “You have nothing to worry about. Nobody is watching you. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“How could you possibly know that?” he asked, growing more tense with each passing exchange.

“Think of Norway,” she replied, trying to soothe him. “You and your family are going to have a wonderful life there. Keep your mind focused on that and everything will be okay.”

“How do you know we’ll be safe?” he asked, his anxiety still getting the better of him.

“We talked about this. No one will know you are in Norway. A trail of evidence will show that you had arranged for a car to meet you at the delegation hotel and that it drove you and your family to a private airfield. There, a private jet was waiting, which flew all of you to South Africa. Outside Cape Town your trail will go cold, except for a few conflicting rumors that a foreign family was trying to figure out how to quietly get to Botswana. Or was it Namibia? No, wait. I think the family was trying to get into Zimbabwe.”

It had taken a lot of handholding, but she felt she had gotten him to the right point. All he had to do was get through the night and get to the airport the next morning.

When the time came for him to leave his apartment building, she was sitting in her car, watching, from a half block down. He never appeared.

A million things raced through her mind. Had he overslept? Was he sick? Hungover? Had he suffered a heart attack? A stroke? What the hell was going on?

She waited for as long as she could and then gave in to the character trait that killed the cat. She had to know why the diplomat hadn’t left.

Locking her car, she walked casually up the street, pretending to be engrossed in her phone.

They had established a way to signal each other through Instagram. Based on what she could see, he hadn’t been active since they had spoken yesterday. Something was definitely up. He should have logged onto his account before doing anything else this morning. He hadn’t.

Walking past the apartment building, she kept a casual watch for anything out of the ordinary—stray figures in doorways, occupied parked cars, or anything else that might signal some sort of surveillance. She didn’t see anything. As far as she could tell, the street was clean.

Against her better instincts, and with no team to back her up, she had decided to check out his apartment.

It was an old building. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to break into. As it turned out, that hadn’t been necessary.

In their push to get to work, a stream of residents had been pouring out. None of them even bothered looking behind them to make sure the lobby door had closed and locked shut. All S?lvi had to do was stand nearby and wait. When the next person exited, she slipped inside.

The diplomat lived on the third floor. Shunning the elevator, she took the stairs, making sure to be as quiet as possible.

She could hear the sounds of a struggle coming from inside the apartment before she had even arrived at the door at the end of the hall.

While the NIS had issued her a firearm, Carl had told her to leave it in Oslo. Any weapon she carried abroad should never be traceable—and whenever possible, should always be standard issue of a foreign, hostile government. For her work in the Baltics, he had recommended several types of pistols. He had then handed her an envelope with a thousand U.S. dollars and the name of a black-market arms dealer he trusted.

Based on what the man had available at the time, she had selected a Russian-made Pistolet Besshumnyy, which translated to “Pistol Silent” in English, and was also known as a “PB” for short.

A Soviet design from the late 1960s, it was still in service and manufactured by Kalashnikov—Russia’s largest arms manufacturer. Built for the 9x18mm Makarov round, it used an integral suppressor, which consisted of two parts. This meant that the PB could be easily concealed. The pistol, with half its suppressor already attached, could be placed in one coat pocket—the remaining half in another.

It took minimal training to become adept at rapidly drawing, assembling, and firing the weapon. S?lvi had practiced the routine so many times that she could do it in her sleep. By the time she was halfway down the hall, she had already put it together.

She had never been inside the diplomat’s apartment. The handful of times they had met, it had always been in an NIS safe house on the outskirts of the Lithuanian capital. She had no way of knowing how it was laid out. If it was like most of the other apartments of its age she had seen in Vilnius, the door would open onto a corridor leading to a living room, dining room, and kitchen. Along the way, there’d be a bathroom and, likely, two bedrooms.