Page 10 of Shadow of Doubt

Harvath closed the folder and slid it back to her. “This guy’s a walking, talking golden ticket. He could have defected anywhere. You guys at CIA would’ve showered him with so much money, he’d have drowned. So with all due respect to the Norwegians, why defect here?”

“That’s what we want to know.”

“So ask your counterpart over at Norwegian Intelligence. You and Vice Admiral Iversen are friendly enough, right?”

“The Norwegians don’t know that we know that they’ve got him.”

Harvath reached into his pocket and pulled out another packet of pain pills. Hayes was beginning to give him a headache. “Sounds to me like ayouproblem.”

“All we want you to do is to keep your ears open. Maybe ask a few questions—”

“We.Meaning the CIA.”

The station chief nodded.

“And by ‘keep my ears open and ask a few questions,’ what you want is for me to spy on Sølvi—the woman I’m about to marry.”

“We’ve picked up intelligence that suggests the Russians are up to something.”

“For fuck’s sake, Holidae. It’s the Russians. They’realwaysup to something. Sorry. I’m not your guy. I’m not going to spy on my fiancée.”

“You’re the only person we’ve got.”

“Technically speaking, you don’thaveme. I work for a private agency that contracts with you guys. I get to say ‘no’ anytime I want. And for the record, the CIA should’ve known I’d say ‘no,’ especially to something like this.”

“To be honest,” she replied, “they actually anticipated that would be your answer.” There was something about her tone that unsettled him,but before he could respond, she produced another folder and slid it across the table.

“I want you to know that this wasn’t my idea. In fact, I was against it.”

More alarm bells.

He opened the folder and looked inside. There were only a few sheets of paper. The executive summary made clear what he was looking at. Slowly, he flipped through it.

When he was finished, he closed the folder and gently slid it back. “I have no idea what this is.”

“Now who’s jerking who around?” she asked.

Harvath looked at her, his expression flat, unreadable.

“Since we’re getting things about the CIA on the record,” Hayes continued, “I want you to know that I pushed for using a carrot. It was Langley that decided to go with the stick.”

“Well, wrong stick.”

“That’s not the way the seventh floor sees it. They think the evidence is pretty compelling.”

“What evidence?”

“After your wife was murdered, you launched a far-reaching revenge campaign. Right up to and including the drug-addled, psycho son of President Peshkov of Russia. But what you hadn’t banked on was the boy’s oligarch godfather putting a one-hundred-million-dollar, winner-take-all bounty on your head.

“Of course you being you, you ignited another kill chain and took out everyone involved with that plot too. Everyone, that is, except for the man who put up the bounty—the boy’s aforementioned godfather, Nikolai Nekrasov. For some reason, you let him live. And that’s where it starts to get interesting.

“After running Nekrasov to ground, you left your team in a parking garage while you went into the building, alone, ostensibly to finish him off. But for some reason you changed your mind.

“Shortly thereafter, Nekrasov’s long-suffering wife, Eva, gets a magic deposit of fifty million dollars, half the value of the bounty, in an account in Bermuda. Then that same day, another account, this one buried in aweb of shell companies in Switzerland, its ultimate beneficiary unknown, also receives a fifty-million-dollar deposit.”

“That’s amazing,” Harvath deadpanned.

“What? That the CIA tracked it all down?”

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