Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(59)

Harvath told him to sit back down and the man obeyed.

In addition to the TV remote, some magazines, and two empty bottles of beer, there was a plate of half-eaten food on the coffee table along with several bottles of prescription medication. The house, even with all of its windows open, smelled like fried fish.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Luk?a demanded.

“I heard you were in a car accident. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine. Now you can go. Same way you came in.”

Harvath smiled. The man was just as gruff as he had been on their operation in Kaliningrad.

There was something else about him, though. Once he had recognized Harvath, he had stopped looking him in the eye. At first he thought it was guilt, but then he realized it was something even more intense—shame.

Harvath studied him, allowing several moments to pass, which only added to the man’s discomfort. “Do you want to tell me what really happened?” he finally asked.

“Like you said, car accident.”

The doctor had been right. Luk?a was lying. Harvath was positive. Like any good smuggler, he was good at hiding his lies, but he wasn’t perfect—at least not when it came to hiding them from Harvath. There was a subtle microexpression—a twitch near his left temple—that gave him away.

“Antanas,” Harvath replied, using the man’s first name to further unsettle him, “you have a pretty good idea of who I am or, at the very least, the kinds of things I do for a living. Which means you know I didn’t come all this way to be lied to. So, in order to save us both a lot of time, I’m going to give you a choice. You either tell me the truth, or I’m going to drag your wife in here by the hair and make her pay for your lies. What’s it going to be?”

The truck driver glared at him. Involving his wife was beyond the pale. “I didn’t think Americans played so dirty.”

Harvath smiled again, but there was no mirth in it. “You have no idea how dirty.”

He waited for Luk?a to say something and when he didn’t, asked, “Who did this to you? And for the record, before you answer and I have to go fetch Mrs. Luk?a, no one believes you were in a car accident. I’d be willing to bet that she doesn’t even believe that. Now, tell me what happened.”

The truck driver exhaled a long breath of air and his tense body sank into the couch cushions. His eyes looked up at the ceiling. The fight had gone out of him. He wasn’t going to put his wife through any sort of pain—not even the threat of it.

“A couple of weeks ago, men came.”

“What kind of men?”

“Big men,” said Luk?a. “Russians.”

“They came here? To your house?”

The truck driver nodded.

“What did they want?”

“You.”

The response was what Harvath had feared. Russian intelligence had reverse engineered—at least partially—his assignment in Kaliningrad.

“What did you tell them?” he asked.

“At first, nothing,” said the truck driver. “That’s when they started beating me. Two of them held me down—the two biggest ones—while a third man, with a shaved head and a thick red beard, did his worst to me. Yet, I still said nothing. Then he broke my hand. Next, my knee.”

Though he kept a stoic expression, Harvath felt terrible. He had been the source of so much pain and so much death for so many people. Looking at Luk?a, he said the only thing he could say, “I’m very sorry that happened to you.”

The Lithuanian grew terse. “What you should be sorry about is coming to my house with your threats and disrespecting not only me, but also my wife.”

Harvath understood the man’s anger. “You’re right. I apologize. To you and your wife.”

The response seemed to mollify the man, at least a little bit, and he went from staring daggers at Harvath to once again studying his ceiling.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but I need to know what you told them.”

Luk?a took his time gathering his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Even when they were beating me, breaking my bones, I tried to lie. Then the man asking the questions removed a phone and showed me a video.”

“What kind of video?”

“It was a video of me, buying the public transportation tickets I gave you.”

The Russians really had done their research. Not only had they identified Luk?a as a potential suspect, they had gone through all of their CCTV footage, looking for corroborating evidence. And they had found it.

“The man asking the questions, what did he look like?”

“Big like the others, but slimmer. He had black hair, like a raven, and a mustache with a small beard that wasn’t connected.

“A Vandyke?” Harvath asked, pantomiming on his own face what one looked like.

Luk?a nodded and Harvath encouraged him to continue. “What happened after the man with the black hair showed you the video?”

“He knew my wife was away, visiting her sister in the countryside. If I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, he threatened to wait for her to come back and do horrible things to her.”

Harvath now felt even worse for threatening the man’s wife.

“So you told them. Everything.”