Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(86)

“I remember you getting out the whiskey at Landsbergis’s. How bad is your drinking?” she asked, gently. “Is it a problem?”

“Is it a problem? No,” he admitted, appreciating her perceptiveness. “Is it too heavy, too often, and too much? Probably.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Jesus, she was direct. Maybe that was the Scandinavian in her, but it was uncomfortable to have it put to him so bluntly like that. Nevertheless, he appreciated her honesty and attempted a smile. “I’m going to enjoy this nice, full-bodied mineral water and then focus on business.”

“Good,” she responded, taking a sip of hers. “Just know that I’ve been on the other side. Not alcohol, but similar things. If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

He wouldn’t have guessed by looking at her that she’d had a substance abuse problem—or any kind of problem for that matter. Because of her looks, he wanted to graft a perfect story, a fairy tale onto her. He knew that was wrong. He knew that everyone you met was grappling with something—maybe not as rough as a drug problem, but something.

We all have our crosses to bear. What’s more, we wouldn’t trade ours for someone else’s. If you and ten other people walked into a room and all laid their crosses on the table, everyone would be walking out with the same cross they walked in with.

He supposed that was because we got used to ours, but it was more than that. Our cross, we realize, helps define who we are. How we wrestled with our problems, how we battled the demons that often accompanied them, was what built character. And as much as her straightforwardness had unsettled him, it was good to have that reminder.

She was a good person. The world was full of people who would tell you what you wanted to hear. The valuable ones—the people worth holding on to—were those who told you what you needed to hear.

There was a lot to this Norwegian ninja. Still fjords, apparently, ran quite deep. On the list of things he found attractive, he had never really considered wisdom. Not, at least, until now.

She appeared to have taken a lot from her experiences. It added something to her, made her even more interesting. He wanted to know where she had been, what she had seen, and the lessons she had learned. But now wasn’t the time.

Now, they needed to focus on the Contessa. Because if they didn’t get this right, nothing else was going to matter.





CHAPTER 40


Tatiana Montecalvo—the Contessa—had indeed been glad to hear from Alexander Kovalyov again—especially when she learned that he had additional intelligence on Scot Harvath. Specifically, he claimed to have signals intelligence pinpointing Harvath’s exact current location. “If what you have is authentic,” she had told him, “I am very interested.”

They had haggled over the price first. She had warned him that pigs got fed and hogs got slaughtered. He suggested that maybe one of her competitors would be willing to pay his asking price. Someone, perhaps, like the Troll.

Even mention of the little man’s name made her skin crawl. She despised him. He was a glutton filled with despicable appetites, adrift on a fiendish sea of never-ending pleasure-seeking, and to this day, she was still angry at herself for having played a part in filling his greedy, tiny little belly.

Knowing his predilections for exotic sex acts and women of a certain look, she had thought she could play him. Before the ubiquitous cloud, in the days of mainframe computing, her goal had been to send her smartest, best-trained girl to him in order to plant a virus. Anything that already existed on his hard drives, as well as anything that ever crossed his computer screen from that point forward, would belong to her.

Instead he had double-crossed her, sending the girl back with a Trojan horse virus of his own. Once it had been uploaded to her system, he had cleaned her out and had set her operation back years.

It was a painful lesson in the art of war; one which she had never forgotten. When she took her shots these days, she took them with much more precision. And one of the easiest shots was outbidding a competitor before they even knew there was a contest.

This wasn’t information she would have to shop. She had a buyer already interested in Harvath. He would pay three times what Kovalyov was asking. It would be very nice to get such an easy payday, and to do it while shutting out the Troll would make it even nicer.

So, she had agreed to the man’s price—if the information could be authenticated. That’s when the second round of haggling had started.

He wouldn’t transmit any of what he had electronically. Once she had the treasure map, why should he expect her to pay for it? No, this was going to have to be done in person. The Contessa, not seeing she had a choice, agreed.

Then came the next point. Kovalyov was concerned that his absence from the embassy in Vilnius would be noticed. He would send a courier instead—someone he trusted. A woman. Once the Contessa had authenticated the intelligence, there would be an immediate transfer of funds into his account, and he would okay the courier to hand everything over to her.

While she didn’t like working with a middleman or, in this case, a middlewoman, she didn’t want to be so difficult that she nuked their deal. Once again, she agreed to his demands. All that was left were the details of the meeting.

After he had laid out how he wanted it to go down, she had to give him credit—he had done his homework. He was a clever, resourceful man. She was glad to have him in her pocket. There was no telling what other valuable intelligence he might bring her in the future. If he kept going in this direction, they stood to make lots of money together.