Page 59 of Shadow of Doubt

One of the Old Man’s favorite stories had been “The Purloined Letter,” by Edgar Allan Poe. Though a mystery about a letter stolen from the French queen’s boudoir, in Carlton’s mind it embodied the essence of tradecraft. An unscrupulous minister switches a letter with a fake and uses information from the original to blackmail the queen. And no matter how many times the police tear apart the minister’s home, they cannot find the letter.

Eventually, it’s the prefect of police who figures out that the minister is such an adept student of human psychology that he has hidden the letter in plain sight. Despite the cops searching all the places they would have hidden such a valuable item, it had actually been sitting right out in the open.

The idea of doing something similar with Inessa was tempting. The more he had thought about it, the more it had grown on him. He knew it was incredibly dangerous, which was why he would work to shield her from as much of the fallout as possible. The only thing missing from his operation was a contingency plan.

Harvath knew from bitter experience that all too often Murphy, of the eponymous law, liked to show up and scatter a game’s pieces, if not completely flip the board over. There was no guarantee as to whether he’d show up for this operation, but they had to be prepared.

What bothered Harvath the most was that Inessa was being left exposed. He’d gamed out the situation a thousand different ways, but it always ended the same. There was no way to fully protect her. To do that they would need a person on the inside, and that kind of infiltration took weeks, if not months. There was no way they’d be able to accomplish it in a matter of hours. Unless he was struck by a bolt of genius, it would just be part of the operation that they would have to accept.

Which brought him to Grechko. He planned on telling the Russian as little as possible. The man was not entitled to a say in how things were going to go down. He had made his number one priority clear—if Inessa said yes, he wanted to fix it so that neither Tsybulsky nor anyone else ever came looking for her. That was all Harvath owed him, and it was all he was prepared to do for him.

As he watered down what he planned to say to the defector, his phone chimed. It was a text from Eva.

Inessa had agreed to meet.

CHAPTER 27

With the news that Inessa had accepted Eva’s invitation, the operation kicked into the next gear.

Before speaking with Grechko, Harvath had wanted to run everything by Sølvi. The Russian was her defector, after all.

But when he tried to grab her, she was already late for her call with Oslo. Nicholas had established an encrypted video link from the makeshift debriefing room in the basement. It had been lined with soundproof blankets. In addition, Nicholas had added a loop of white noise to help mask her audio. Until she was ready to tell her superiors where she was, she didn’t want to reveal any information about their location. Once the NIS had uncovered the mole, then they could begin discussing her return to Norway with Grechko.

This left Harvath with only one option. Rounding up Ashby and Palmer, they hopped into the Range Rover and headed in to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. He needed to get the lay of the land for himself.

Only two and a half kilometers in size, the tiny peninsula looked like a slightly misshapen version of Italy. It was home to sixteen hundred people and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Winston Churchill, two American presidents, artists like Matisse, Chagall, and Picasso, countless royalty, business tycoons, and a myriad of actors, actresses, and authors had all vacationed there. The coolest visitors in Harvath’s opinion, however, were the Rolling Stones.

They arrived in the summer of 1971, looking to escape a ton of personal and financial problems back home, including a relentless press that hounded them day and night. At a sixteen-room mansion named VillaNellcote, overlooking the ocean, they installed a mobile recording studio and began laying down songs for their 1972 album,Exile on Main Street,which would go on to be considered one of the best albums of all time.

Harvath asked Ashby to pull it up on her phone and play it through the Range Rover’s speakers. Just because they were on the job, that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a little background music.

It started off with one of Harvath’s favorites, “Rocks Off,” and a few songs later slid into another, “Tumbling Dice.” Next to funk music, there was nothing Harvath liked more than classic rock and roll. And the more the artists pushed the limits of their genre, like Parliament-Funkadelic and the Rolling Stones, the more he liked them.

The Stones put Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the map as a star-studded, celebrity sanctuary. And as more luminaries flocked to this part of the French Riviera, the real estate prices only continued to soar.

Most of the homes were hidden behind stone walls, wrought-iron fences, and massive hedgerows. Harvath had Palmer drive them past Tsybulsky’s, which was out at the end of the Pointe du Colombier, along the Chemin de Saint-Hospice.

All you could see of it was the front gate and glimpses of a few rooftops. Had Palmer and Ashby not been out earlier on the Promenade des Fossettes with the drone, all they would have had were a few satellite images of the estate to go on.

Having crossed Tsybulsky’s house off his list, Harvath now wanted to go back to the port and check out the restaurant where Eva and Inessa would be getting together.

He asked Palmer to drop him off a couple of blocks away, as it was best they not all be seen together. There was also another reason why Harvath wanted to head to Muse on foot: it would allow him to take a look at Tsybulsky’s boat.

The great thing about the small Port of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat was that, unlike many marinas in the United States, none of its docks were off-limits to the public. There were no gates that required an access code. You could walk down any and every pier, admiring the watercraft, and no one could tell you to get lost.

Even better was the fact that Tsybulsky had the hottest vessel in theharbor. As a result, everybody wanted to see it up close. There was a constant stream of pedestrians stopping to take photographs. The boat was a floating piece of art and Harvath was immediately drawn to it.

Dubbed the Tecnomar for Lamborghini 63, it was 63 feet long, could reach 63 knots, there were only 63 of them made, and the number 63 was meant to commemorate the founding of Lamborghini by Ferruccio Lamborghini in 1963.

The wordsleekdidn’t begin to do the stunning craft justice. It looked like it had been plucked from a hundred years in the future and dropped into the azure blue waters of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. With its razor-sharp lines and stealthy, high-tech aesthetic, it was a yacht designed to turn heads and break necks.

Both because of its appearance and its V-12 engines, it reminded Harvath of what a Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 would look like if it were turned into a high-performance, luxury speedboat. As much of a dirtbag as Tsybulsky was, his yacht was first-class.

Harvath hung back and took in the scene from a respectable distance. He didn’t need to end up in anyone’s social media photos. From where he stood, he could see everything he wanted, including Tsybulsky’s crew. Ashby’s description of them had been spot-on. Dressed in white polos and blue shorts that appeared two sizes too tight, they all looked like they were on steroids or human growth hormone—popular drugs of choice for ex–Russian Special Forces soldiers now in the private security market. For these guys, and their employers, bigger was always better.

Carrying a to-go cup with a camera hidden inside, Ashby had been able to record her entire visit to the boat. Within minutes of being handed the cup’s SD card, Nicholas had identified the crew members and had accessed their military records. As Eva had warned, these were not good men. All were ex-Spetsnaz, and all had been involved in unprovoked violence and unlawful killings from Syria and Ukraine to the Central African Republic.

Having seen enough, Harvath headed back down the dock and continued toward his ultimate destination.

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