Near Dark (Scot Harvath #20) - Brad Thor Page 0,104

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.

What she didn’t know was that Alexander Kovalyov would never contact her again. He was sitting in a former U.S. black site in Lithuania and had made a deal with the new acting Director of the VSD, Filip Landsbergis.

In agreeing to communicate with the Contessa, based on a script Harvath and Nicholas had put together, Kovalyov had been able to secure certain assurances from the Lithuanian government. If he continued to cooperate, his boss would continue to receive medical care, and their entire four-man team would eventually be allowed to leave and return to Russia.

If he didn’t cooperate, Harvath and the Norwegian woman would be back, the Lithuanians would step aside, and the Russians would be at their mercy. There was only one smart path out of this and Kovalyov had taken it. So far, it appeared to be working.

With the meeting set, the biggest question was how far Harvath was willing to push things with the Contessa.

“Have you ever tortured a woman?” Sølvi had asked.

“Interrogated, yes. Tortured, no.”

“It’s different with women. What frightens them. What they respond to. The pressure