Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(80)

“I can’t see the third tango,” said Kost. “He’s under my window.”

“Don’t worry about him,” said Preisler. “Get the two you’ve got in your sights. You’re cleared hot.”

“Roger that.”

Moments later, there were two muffled cracks from outside on the street followed by a SITREP. “Tangos down,” said Kost. “I repeat, tangos down.”

“Blue Sonata inbound hot,” Johnson warned from his vantage point out on the street. The driver had already looped around and was trying to get to their location. “Fifty meters out.”

“Good copy,” said Kost, as he leaned out the window and looked for Shanty Irish, as well as the vehicle. “Blue Sonata. I see it.”

There was suddenly the sound of gunfire from down on the street.

“Tango down,” said Johnson, who had killed the third man on foot.

When the blue Sonata was in range of his Honey Badger, Kost fired multiple rounds into the windshield. The vehicle swerved wildly, bashing into parked cars on both sides of the narrow street.

Johnson drilled a racing stripe down the side as it passed. The heavy 45 ACP rounds from his Kriss Vector tore through both the door and the driver.

The Sonata, its driver dead, began to slow, but didn’t stop. Rolling through the red light at the intersection, it was T-boned by a Chevy Suburban, ironically plastered with Boston Celtics and “Luck of the Irish” stickers.

After helping Lara’s parents to their feet, Preisler once again scooped Marco into his arms. “Time to go,” he said.





CHAPTER 37


LOMBARDY REGION

NORTHERN ITALY

The transport plane, per Admiral Proctor’s promise, had been fueled and waiting for them when they arrived at ?iauliai.

After swinging by S?lvi’s vehicle to grab her gear, they had hit the road in Harvath’s Land Cruiser. With all of the texts and emails that he had to deal with, she had graciously offered to drive. There was no classic rock and Rolling Stones for him on this return leg.

Nicholas had been quick to get to two pieces of bad news. The first was a rundown of what had happened in Boston.

They didn’t know who was responsible, although they had plenty of photos of the perpetrators. One of the men was apparently off-the-boat Irish, and two others had extensive police records tied to Irish organized crime in Boston. The fourth perpetrator, the team’s driver, had an Irish surname and a rap sheet filled with petty crimes. The working theory was that he was either a low-level initiate or had been hired just for this job.

The fact that the attack had been foiled, and all of the offenders were dead, was a testament to the skill of the team that Harvath had sent in. They had done exactly what he had assigned them to do. Marco and Lara’s parents were safe. And now that they had been confirmed as active targets, he was having them moved to a new location.

While there were four fewer bad guys in the world, the flip side of all of the offenders being dead was that there was nobody to interrogate. It was a price he was willing to pay.

After filling in a couple more details, Nicholas then moved on to his second piece of bad news.

The deepfake software was turning out to be impossible to work with. Unless you had a subject sitting still and speaking directly to the camera, the superimposing of another face just wasn’t convincing. You couldn’t yet take a random person walking through an airport, bus, or train station and make it look like somebody else. They had thought they could do it, but it just didn’t work.

The little man did have an alternative suggestion. Despite their age difference, Chase was a close enough match to Harvath that they could send him through the ports of entry and then reverse hack the customs and immigrations systems, replacing his passport with the fake identities Harvath had wanted to spread along his route. If Chase was careful not to look directly into one of the CCTV cameras and if he kept his head down—the way a smart fugitive would—it might be believable.

This meant, of course, that they would have to pull Chase off the protective detail for Harvath’s mom. Nicholas didn’t think it unreasonable, especially considering the highly secure bubble she’d been placed in. Harvath didn’t agree.

Boston proved that they needed to be on their toes. His remaining loved ones were all potential targets. The teams stayed as they were, where they were. Politics, as well as one-hundred-million-dollar bounties, could make for strange bedfellows. There was no knowing who was hiring whom to do what.

At least they had a lead—Tatiana Montecalvo, or as Nicholas had called her, the “Contessa.”

She wasn’t a Contessa at all, but that had never stopped her from calling herself one. Born in Sicily to a Russian mother and an Italian father, her family moved to Rome, where she barely finished high school. Possessed of a voluptuous body, she worked as an artist’s model at several of the city’s art schools. Tired of taking her clothes off for such meager wages, she soon found other ways to do it for lots more money.

But as the youth that had made her so alluring began to disappear, so too did the men willing to pay to be with her. There was only one truly marketable skill she had left—her languages.

The Russian embassy had lost three members of its secretarial pool in the space of a week. One had left to have a baby, one had fallen off a table drunk while dancing in a bar and had broken both wrists, and another had fallen in love with a local and refused to come back. The embassy was in desperate straits.