“Should I even ask where you are?” she said, turning the laptop back around.
He smiled. She not only understood him, she understood what he did, and that he couldn’t always talk about what he was up to.
“Nowhere near Turkey,” he replied. In the background, he could see that she had a fire going in the fireplace. “That cold back home?”
“Cold enough. And overcast. How about where you are?”
“Could be worse. How are things at home?”
“Good,” she replied. “We miss you.”
Harvath smiled again. “I miss you, too. Where’s Marco?”
“Taking a nap. He woke up way too early this morning.”
“What’d you do for breakfast?”
“I offered to make pancakes, but he said he didn’t want ‘mommy’ pancakes, he wanted ‘Scot’ pancakes. So we had eggs instead.”
“Tell him I’ll cook up a huge stack when I get back,” he responded.
“Any idea when that will be?”
Harvath shook his head. “Hopefully, soon.”
Lara appeared about to reply when she heard something and turned to look over her shoulder. “Speak of the devil,” she said, turning back to the camera. “Guess who I think just woke up.”
Harvath laughed. It wasn’t the first time Marco had interrupted an intimate moment. “Go check on him. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Before I let you go, I talked with Lydia last night.”
“About what?”
“I called to catch up and she told me Reed isn’t doing well, that he’s getting worse.”
The gravity of the situation was evident in Harvath’s voice. “I know,” he replied. “She told me, too.”
“Promise me we’ll go see him when you get back.”
“I promise.”
Marco could be heard in the background calling for her.
“I love you,” she said, blowing him a kiss. “Stay safe.”
“I will. I love you, too,” he answered, as she logged off.
For a moment, he sat there, just looking at the blank screen. In his mind, he pictured her path from the study to the small guest bedroom they had converted for Marco. He really did miss them both. He missed the Old Man as well. He felt the guilt again of not being there for him, but he also hoped the Old Man would understand the importance of what he was doing and why he needed to do it.
Over the next couple of minutes, he allowed his thoughts a little freedom before putting them in a far corner of his mind and walling them off.
Hopping back over to his email, he checked to make sure there were no requests from Ryan. He didn’t see any.
Opening a new message, he sent her a quick update to let her know that Vella had arrived, that he was proceeding with “caution,” and that Nicholas was running down the name they had gotten from Sergun. He told her he’d update her with more information when it became available. After reading it over, he hit Send.
Having checked in with his home and office, he had a decision to make. He could go downstairs and check back in on Nicholas, go across to the main building and check on Vella, or leave them both alone and trust them to do the jobs they were being paid to do. He chose the last option and to have confidence in his people.
“Hire the best and set them loose,” the Old Man had once said to him. “Don’t be a pain in the ass unless you have to be. Let people know what you expect of them, and then get out of their way. Allow them to surprise you.”
It was good advice. And while some of it had sounded like a string of platitudes from a motivational seminar, the Old Man knew how to manage people.
Though he could be gruff at times, there wasn’t a single person who wouldn’t go to hell and back for him. That was the kind of loyalty he inspired.
Committed to leaving his team alone, he set his laptop aside on the bed and picked the book about Hemingway’s being a Russian spy back up from his nightstand.
Whether it contained any secrets about the Russians that might be valuable today was anyone’s guess.
What he hoped it would do was take his mind away for a while and give it a chance to rest. He had learned long ago how to make tough decisions under pressure, but sometimes, when he stopped thinking about things was when breakthroughs occurred.
Operating on only a few hours of sleep, he made it through about two chapters before his eyes got so heavy that he couldn’t keep them open and he was out.
CHAPTER 56
* * *
When Harvath heard Staelin’s voice, it was just after 4:00 a.m. He was lying, still fully clothed, atop his bed with his book on his chest.
“What is it?”
“Vella,” said Staelin. “He told me to come and get you.”
Shit, thought Harvath as he quickly got out of bed. This couldn’t be good news. “What happened? Is Kuznetsov okay?”
“Who?”
Harvath had forgotten that Staelin hadn’t been given the update. “Dominik Gashi’s real name is Ivan Kuznetsov.”
“Whatever his name is, Vella wants to talk to you about him. It sounds like maybe he wants to make a deal.”
A deal? Harvath was highly skeptical, but stranger things had happened, especially when it came to the Russians. Many had watched their politicians and ex–intelligence officers become billionaire oligarchs, only to want a piece of the action for themselves. It was worth at least listening to what he wanted and, more important, what he had to offer.
Grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, Harvath left his coat behind and followed Staelin across the motor court over to the main building. He took the stairs down to the basement, which had been transformed into a miniversion of the Solarium back on Malta, and was where they were interrogating Kuznetsov.
There were all sorts of medical equipment, video cameras, monitors, and a computer work station.
Kuznetsov was hooded and bound to a chair. Harvath recognized the hood. It had a special pocket in front into which Vella placed strips of cloth soaked in his special compound. He had let Harvath take a quick whiff of it once. It was like liquid fear.
Like the smell of fresh-baked cookies or bread, scent had a way of bypassing the conscious, rational part of the brain and going straight to where our memories were stored. Vella believed a similar mechanism could be used in interrogations. He had spent years studying, and testing, how scent could unlock certain pathways in the brain. In particular, he had been focused on how it could be used to break a subject, so that he was no longer able to resist and would reveal the truth.
Harvath looked at the bright halogen work lights that had the Russian lit up from the front and the sides.
“I have headphones on him,” said Vella, “so he can’t hear us right now.”
“What did you need to talk to me about?”
“He wants to make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” asked Harvath.
“He’s willing to give up everything he knows.”
“And you believe him?”
“Come look at this,” replied Vella as he gestured toward his computer.
Harvath joined him and watched as he played back a short piece of video. Underneath it were a series of graphics, similar to a polygraph, but more sophisticated.