Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(63)

Luk?a, the truck driver, was less difficult because he had already been broken. Thanks to the interrogation the Russians had subjected him to, he had no desire for a repeat. He had put up very little resistance and had cooperated quickly. Landsbergis, on the other hand, might be something else entirely.

What confused Harvath about this whole thing was that Carl had trusted the Lithuanian. Really trusted him. Pedersen knew, going in, how dangerous it could be for Norway if the Russians discovered what he had done. Helping Harvath get in and out of Kaliningrad to snatch one of their top people was a big deal. And it was just as big a deal for Landsbergis and Lithuania.

Yet both men had gone along with the plot. They had supposedly taken great care to make sure that their involvement, and thereby the involvement of their nations, wasn’t discovered. But in the end, just as with the truck driver, perhaps the Russians had gotten to Landsbergis. Maybe they had found a pressure point so excruciating that he had broken.

Outside of morbid curiosity, it really didn’t matter to Harvath what that pressure point was. Granted, it was important that if Landsbergis was the leak, he answer for what he had done and reveal what was so important that it was worth trading Carl’s life for.

He doubted it would be anything too sophisticated. In the end, the Russians weren’t subtle when it came to this stuff. They were brutish thugs and their default setting was to resort to brutish tactics. Taking the time to develop a menu of clever extortion options wasn’t really part of how they did business anymore. There were exceptions, of course, but that took higher-level thinking, something very much in short supply in post-Soviet Russia. The Great Game, as it was once known, had ended at about the same time the Wall had come down.

It was now a different age with different players and much different rules. These days, it was less high-stakes chess, and more short-term checkers. A crude, even simplistic analogy to be sure—but probably one that was overly generous to the Russians. After all, even checkers demands obedience to a set of rules and, at the most basic level, appreciation for strategy.

Harvath’s own strategy was simple. He planned to confront Landsbergis and ferret out what he knew about Carl’s death. If he had been the one who gave him up, Harvath would extract the details, and then put a bullet in him. If everything went according to plan, he’d be done and on his way out of the country by midnight.

Checking the drone feed, he pressed on toward the house, choosing his steps carefully, just as he had been trained. The gated community wouldn’t have gone to the effort to place sensors, or worse, in the woods, but there was no telling what Landsbergis might have done.

Two hundred meters from the property, Harvath pulled his phone back out and retasked the drone.

It had been flying high overhead, looking for heat signatures and any signs of motion. He now wanted it to look directly inside the house. Because it was a big glass box, the assignment was a piece of cake.

None of the window treatments had been drawn and the drone was able to peer into multiple rooms on every side. There was no sign of life.

Harvath increased the drone’s altitude and placed it back into surveillance mode. Then, he inserted an earbud and called Nicholas.

Their conversation, like their texts, was encrypted and, via an added layer of security, their voices were also distorted. It gave a weird, otherworldly feeling to their back-and-forth. They sounded like a couple of robot hostage-takers discussing a ransom. While the drone technology may have come a long way, the communications technology Nicholas was using left a bit to be desired.

“How’s your view?” he asked when the little man answered.

“Not bad,” said Nicholas, watching the drone footage back in the United States. “Nice place our guy has.”

“Maybe crime does pay,” Harvath replied. “We’ll find out. In the meantime, what about the alarm company?”

“The whole community uses the same one. It’s the Lithuanian version of ADT. I’ve already accessed his account. When you’re ready to make entry, let me know.”

“Roger that. Stand by.”

He didn’t believe anyone was home, but out of an abundance of caution double-checked his pistol and then unslung his pack and removed the Taser, so that he could have it handy.

Taking another deep breath, he reshouldered his pack and crept forward.

When he got to his next waypoint, he announced, “One hundred meters out.”

“Good copy,” Nicholas responded. “Norseman, one hundred meters out.”

Norseman had been the call sign given to Harvath as a SEAL. Like most military call signs, there was a funny story behind it.

With his blue eyes and sandy-brown hair, Harvath looked more Germanic than Nordic. The nickname hadn’t come from any special attachment he’d had to the Vikings, but rather his penchant for dating Scandinavian flight attendants who flew in and out of LAX.

Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes—they’d all been gorgeous. Something else, though, about them had been rather telling. None of them had been U.S.-based. They had all been based back in Scandinavia. Like him, they were unavailable, except for short, carefree bursts. It was only as he had gotten older and more mature, that he had begun to realize the futility of dating women so geographically unavailable.

It didn’t mean that he had lost his appreciation for Scandinavian women—not by a long shot. He had always found them incredibly sexy, incredibly confident, and tantalizingly independent. There was no drama and no bullshit with them. They told you how it was, one hundred percent of the time. And when it came to sex, they were amazing—no guilt, no inhibitions, and no problems communicating what they enjoyed.