of the river. When I tried to cross, I fell through the ice and almost drowned. Somehow, I made it inside and was able to start a fire before I passed out. When I woke up, I realized he had been sitting in a chair near me the entire time, but it was only what remained of him. He had passed away days, maybe even weeks before I arrived at the cabin. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was a heart attack or something like that. All I know is that it’s because of him that I’m alive.”
“And the blood? Are you actually injured? Or did that come from someone else?”
“May I?” he asked, gesturing that he wanted to lift up his shirt and show her.
She nodded, and Harvath lifted up his shirt. With his free hand, he began peeling away the pieces of duct tape that had been covering his bite wounds.
Her eyes grew wide. “What did that to you?”
“Wolves.”
“That explains the bite marks, and perhaps the bruising was suffered during the crash, but it doesn’t explain the lacerations. They look like they were caused by some sort of a whip, like you have been tortured.”
Harvath lowered his shirt but didn’t respond.
When he failed to provide an explanation, she pressed him. “I still don’t understand why you had to break into my clinic. The evening telephone number is written outside. You could have stopped anyone in town and they would have brought me to you. Why do this?”
It was the moment of truth. Harvath had to decide if he was going to bring her into his confidence or not. His espionage training, all of the lessons the Old Man had drilled into him, told him to lie. His gut and his hard-won experience, though, implored him to tell her the truth. He decided to go with the truth.
“Three days ago, maybe four, my wife was murdered and I was taken captive. Two other people I cared for very much were also killed. The men who did this put me in shackles and loaded me onto a plane. When we landed in Murmansk, we changed planes. It was the second plane that crashed.”
The woman didn’t believe him. “Something like that would have been all over the news. Whenever a boat or plane goes missing, they always ask us to keep an eye out—especially our woodsmen, the hunters and trappers.”
“If your government is anything like mine, the flight would have been kept very quiet,” he said. “It would have been off the books.”
“Why?”
“Because sending a team to kidnap an American citizen on American soil is an act of war.”
She didn’t know how to respond. It was an absolutely outrageous claim, but nothing about the man’s demeanor suggested he was lying. In fact, he struck her as serious. Deadly serious.
“What did you do that made them take such a risk?”
Harvath shook his head. “It’s a long list.”
“Name one thing.”
“The suicide bomber that leaped the fence and detonated just outside the White House, did you hear about that?”
“Yes. It was a Muslim terrorist.”
Harvath kept going. “How about the assassination of the American Secretary of Defense in Turkey?”
“Also Muslim terrorists.”
He smiled. “All Muslims, yes. But they were recruited and trained by the same man. He had been a student at Beslan during the terrible school siege and hostage crisis. His father had been the principal, his mother an art teacher.
“After it was all over, Moscow had combed through the survivors. They had interviewed all of them. It was an experiment of sorts. Their hope was that the trauma those students had experienced could be weaponized. Only one child showed any promise, and he was off the charts.
“They poured everything they had into training him. He worked with all of the best Moscow had to offer—spies, Spetsnaz, everything. I heard someone refer to him as Russia’s Jason Bourne. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but he was incredibly valuable to the GRU.”
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“I tracked him down and then put him in a deep, dark hole.”
“And so that’s why you were kidnapped?”
He shrugged. “That’s just one reason. There are plenty of others—things that never made it into newspapers or onto television. Like I said, it’s a long list, but what connects them all is me. I have a tendency to prevent Moscow from getting what it wants.”
There was a beat, and then the woman said, “Good,” as she lowered her rifle.
“Good?”
“You have your reasons for not liking Moscow. So do I.”
“What