Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(49)

Returning to the diplomat, she asked. “Are you injured?”

The man shook his head. “No.”

“Can you move?”

He nodded and S?lvi helped get him to his feet.

“You’ve been shot,” he said, eyeballing the dark spread of crimson across her midsection.

“I’ll be okay. Do you have any bandages?”

The man nodded again.

“Go grab them. And then we need to get the hell out of here.”

As the man went to do as she had instructed, S?lvi patted down the corpses. There was nothing on them—no passports, no wallets, no cell phones. Nothing.

When the diplomat came back into the dining room, S?lvi had trouble standing up and he had to assist her. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied. “Let’s go.”

Buttoning her jacket to hide the blood, S?lvi checked the hallway first before signaling to the diplomat that it was safe to follow.

Taking the stairs down to the ground level in her condition was out of the question, so she, the diplomat, and the one suitcase she had told him he could bring when they had originally hatched their plan, all crammed into the little cage elevator and headed down.

She kept her weapon handy in case any more assailants might be waiting, but the lobby was empty. Plenty of neighbors had heard the gunfire and many could be seen peeking out of doorways and peering over the stairwell railing.

Outside on the street, she guided the diplomat to her vehicle and reluctantly agreed to let him drive. After getting her into the passenger seat, he threw his bag in back and they took off for the airport.

“Slow down,” she admonished, as she kept one eye on her side mirror while bandaging her wound. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Are you sure? It looks bad.”

“I’ve seen worse. Just get us to the airport in one piece and you’ll be back with your family before you know it.”

Once the bandage was in place, she took out her cell phone and sent Pedersen an encrypted message. She had been shot and had lost a lot of blood. She was now traveling with the diplomat and they were on the way to the private aviation side of the airport. She needed a doctor.

Pedersen had only one thing to say in response—I’ll take care of it.

And that’s exactly what he had done. It wasn’t until days later, recuperating in a private hospital in Oslo, that she learned how he had made it happen.

Carl had reached out to his number one contact in Lithuanian Intelligence—Filip Landsbergis of the VSD.

It was Landsbergis who had rushed a trauma physician to the jet Carl had chartered for her to fly home on. Without that doctor’s expert care, she wouldn’t have survived. She owed Landsbergis her life.

But based on what Holidae Hayes had told her, specifically that Harvath and Carl had been recently involved in an operation in Lithuania, that made Landsbergis a suspect in her book.

If he had compromised Carl, or had played any role whatsoever in his murder—she didn’t give a damn if the man had helped save her life. He was going to die. That’s why she had come back to Lithuania, all these years later.

According to Hayes, Carl had helped pave the way for two aircraft to secretly land at an air base in Lithuania. One was a private jet from Scot Harvath’s company, The Carlton Group. The other, which arrived shortly thereafter, belonged to the U.S. military. Whatever they had been up to, the entire mission had been highly classified.

S?lvi knew that there was only one person Carl would have trusted enough to put something like that together—Filip Landsbergis.

She needed to see him, to look him in the eye and put the question directly to him about Carl’s murder. Only then would she be satisfied. Only then could she know what her next move would be.





CHAPTER 22


SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC

Age hadn’t softened Gary Lawlor. In fact, if anything, it had made him more of a pain in the ass.

He had hated Harvath’s plan—had hated it with a passion. The symphony of profanity he had composed upon hearing it would have shamed the hardest of hard-core sailors. The more Lawlor had raged against it, though, the more Harvath knew he was right on the money.

Nicholas, on the other hand, liked it, but wasn’t convinced it could be pulled off in time. There were a ton of hurdles that would need to be surmounted, all of them by him. It was a technological nightmare and would take days, if not weeks, to pull together.

Similar to the military’s use of chaff to distract radar-guided missiles, Harvath wanted to flood the zone with disinformation. Using deepfake technology, he wanted to be “seen” on CCTV cameras at multiple airports and train stations around the world.

To make it look like the same person traveling under different identities, he also wanted Nicholas to insert his legit biometric information into each corresponding port of entry computer system, but always attached to a different, fake passport.

Any professional worth their salt would eventually uncover the breadcrumb trail. And, if The Carlton Group played their cards right, they could funnel one, if not more, of the assassins into a trap. Meanwhile, Harvath would be freed up to pursue his own, parallel agenda.

The plan was classic Harvath—audacious, difficult to implement, and likely to change a million times once under way. He had an undeniable talent for getting out ahead of the curve, though. Often, his genius didn’t fully reveal itself until the battle was on and the chess pieces had begun to fall. The big question now was—could he stay ahead of the curve?