Near Dark (Scot Harvath #19)(9)

There was nothing in his eyes, nothing in his face that signaled a motivation—no rage, no vengeance, no passion. He didn’t look like someone Harvath had directly wronged. No, this was a transaction—cold, detached, and impersonal.

While Harvath wanted to know who had sent the man and why, he refrained from asking. He wasn’t going to give the killer, or more importantly his employer, the satisfaction.

Besides, there was no need to drag the whole thing out. If this was how his life was going to end, he planned to exhibit some modicum of stoicism. Might as well just do it and get it over with.

Stopping just at the edge of the shadows, the killer maintained his distance, bolstering Harvath’s assessment that he was a professional. He didn’t need to come any nearer. He had watched Harvath fight and would know that getting too close could end badly. Better to stay where he was, take the shot, and disappear back into the darkness before anyone knew what had happened.

What’s more, if he was a pro, he would have done his homework. He would have known Harvath was too smart and too well trained to have risked sneaking up on him.

Sending two knuckle-draggers to lure him outside was smart. They’d probably been paid to beat him within an inch of his life and take off before the cops got there. What the hooligans wouldn’t have known, was that once they had fled, the hitter’s plan was to materialize and finish the job. Smarter still, the cops wouldn’t have been looking for a lone, mysterious gunman. Based on the accounts of everyone in the bar, the knuckle-draggers would have been the prime suspects. The hitter would have walked away clean. Harvath had completely thrown a wrench in that plan.

No doubt, the two bruisers were expendable. Whether they regained consciousness and escaped before the police arrived was their problem. The killer had only one priority at this moment—taking out his target.

In the distance, the klaxons of emergency vehicles could already be heard. The assassin was running out of time. It was now or never.

As if reading his mind, the man took a deep breath, looked down the slide of his pistol, and adjusted his sight picture.

Harvath wasn’t afraid to die. He didn’t look away or close his eyes. In fact, he kept them locked right on his killer.

The assassin began to apply pressure to the trigger and Harvath knew the moment had arrived. He braced for the worst. And then it came.

There was a muffled pop followed by silence. That was it. He felt no pain. In fact, he was still very much alive.

How was that possible? Had the assassin missed? Had his weapon malfunctioned? A fraction of a second later, Harvath had his answer.

Blood began to trickle from a hole in the would-be killer’s forehead. And as he collapsed to the ground, Harvath realized the man had been shot by someone else. But by whom?

Suddenly, four men carrying suppressed weapons appeared out of nowhere. Their faces were obscured by balaclavas and night vision goggles. What the hell was going on?

“Time to go,” one of them ordered. Harvath instantly recognized the voice.

Before he could reply, two of the men had grabbed him under the arms and were steering him toward a narrow gangway.

Glancing over his shoulder, he caught a glimpse of the other men swiftly unfurling a body bag and placing the dead man inside.

When they emerged from the gangway, a dark panel van was idling at the curb. As they approached it, the door slid open and he climbed in. The two men with him stood guard outside. It smelled like disinfectant.

Seconds later, the other men arrived with the body bag. Once the corpse was loaded, everyone piled in, and the van took off. As it did, the occupants began removing their night vision goggles and balaclavas. One by one, the faces of his teammates were revealed.

The first one belonged to the man whose voice he had recognized—Mike Haney. With his square jaw and close-cropped hair, the six-foot-tall Force Recon Marine looked like he had stepped out of a recruiting ad.

“What the hell just happened?” Harvath asked.

“We saved your life,” Haney replied. “Again.”

The man was right of course. If it hadn’t been for them, Harvath wouldn’t have made it back to the United States from his last mission alive. But what were they doing here?

Tyler Staelin, the team’s de facto medic, removed a penlight from his medical kit, clicked it on, and asked Harvath to follow it with his eyes. Once the five-foot-ten former Delta Force operative was satisfied with his colleague’s neurological function, he began running through a checklist of questions to assess other possible injuries.

Harvath replied to about three of them before growing frustrated. “I’m fine,” he said. “Answer my question.”

Staelin cracked a pair of cold packs and handed them to him. “Place these wherever you need them.”

Harvath slid them under his shirt and, with great discomfort, held them against his rib cage. “What the hell’s going on?” he repeated. “What are you doing here?”

Their silence was unsettling. Gallows humor came with the territory and ran deep with this crew. Normally, he couldn’t get them to shut up. The fact that nobody was answering could only mean one thing. They had bad news.

It was Chase Palmer, the team’s other ex–Delta Force operative, who finally spoke up. In addition to looking like a younger version of Harvath, he had also been personally recruited by the Old Man. “We got a tip from the Norwegian Intelligence Service,” he stated.