Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 20

From Frankfurt it was a five-hour drive, nine if there was traffic. Harvath did it in four. And he did it with a body in the trunk.

Lydia Ryan had kept him waiting for an answer so long that he’d finally said fuck this, had gotten in his car, and had taken off. When seconds counted, too often the decisions at the CIA were hours away.

The name Mikhail Malevsky, though, was setting off alarm bells across Washington. Bad ones. Politics were now in play. Malevsky was related to the Russian Prime Minister.

They were second or third cousins, but close enough that Malevsky had managed to secure a position as a commercial attaché. By all accounts it was a charade, but it came with a diplomatic passport. And that put him in a gray zone.

He was suspected of being involved in a money-laundering operation in Munich. Everything was being run through a Russian-owned real estate investment company. While their transactions appeared legitimate, the source of the funds did not.

German authorities knew the money flowing into their country was tied to Russian organized crime. Proving it was another matter entirely. For the moment, Malevsky was beyond their grasp. But he wasn’t beyond Harvath’s.

The United States also knew Malevsky was dirty. They had seen enough evidence. His connection to Sacha Baseyev was one of the most damning details of all. Handling his diplomatic status and his family ties to the Russian PM, though, were the hard parts.

The Russians played a brutal form of hardball. If Harvath was caught, not only was he a dead man, but it would be open season on American diplomats everywhere. The Russians weren’t ones to let bygones be bygones.

In any other situation, the CIA would have found a way to work around Malevsky. Unfortunately, this wasn’t any other situation. There wasn’t a workaround. The path to Baseyev went straight through Mikhail Malevsky. He was the bad actor. They had no other choice than to take the chain off Harvath and trust him to do what he did best.

And what he did best was get results. No matter how much security or protection Malevsky had, Harvath would get to him. Where things went from there was entirely up to him. But considering the Russian’s background, Harvath didn’t expect him to be cooperative.

Based on the phone number from Eichel, Nicholas had been able to track Malevsky to a picturesque village in the Bavarian Alps called Berchtesgaden. The house wasn’t hard to find. It was a massive stone hunting lodge, painted lemon yellow, with its own private drive and wrought iron gates.

There was a FOR SALE sign in front. A check of German property rec-ords indicated that a real estate investment company two hours away in Munich owned it.

In addition to a twelve-million-dollar price tag, the home had a twelve-million-dollar view. It looked south over the valley toward the third-highest mountain in Germany, the Watzmann. Its jagged peaks still covered in snow, the rolling Alpine meadows below it were filled with spring flowers.

Towering above the village was a mountain known as the Hoher Göll. Along its rocky sweep, Adolf Hitler had built his expensive vacation residence, the Berghof.

The village itself was a beautiful symphony of pastel-colored buildings, sloped cobblestone streets, and pitched rooftops. Here and there, hand-painted murals depicted traditional Bavarian life. Centuries-old church steeples soared skyward.

The Aga Khan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Neville Chamberlain had all passed through Berchtesgaden to visit Hitler. Mussolini, Goering, and Goebbels had come too. Now Mikhail Malevsky was calling the village home.

It was hard to imagine that a place of such beauty could play host to such evil. Harvath, though, knew better.

He knew that evil could exist anywhere. And that evil was attracted to beauty. It was like a magnet and he had always wondered why.

He guessed it was because evil was incapable of creating anything. It only destroyed. And beauty, being the ultimate creation, was prized and desired by evil above everything but power.

Beauty was a prize, a pet — an illusion, meant to fool the rest of the world into believing evil was something else. It was why truly evil men craved it. It was an addiction that radiated from the very center of their dark souls. Don’t look at me, look at this. Now look back at me. See the beauty I am capable of?

Art collections, wives, mistresses, cars, homes, golden guns — even diamond-encrusted motorcycles — evil always wanted more, bigger, brighter, better. It was a self-perpetuating cycle, a need that could never be truly fulfilled. Harvath had seen it over and over again. There was only one, terrifying exception—jihadism.

Islamic fundamentalists rejected beauty. Women were to be kept covered. Depictions of the human form were forbidden. Ornamentation and ostentation also forbidden. Theirs was a monastic fanaticism.

And while their acts of savagery were unquestionably evil, within their own faith, these were seen as pious tributes to God. Their warriors were practicing the truest, most basic form of Islam. It was the Islam that their prophet, considered the perfect man, had taught them. It was the Islam laid out clearly in the Quran. They were not perverting their religion — they were purifying it.

The jihadists believed themselves to be true keepers of the Islamic faith. Their time on this earth was fleeting. Everything they did was in service of their god. How they dressed, how they ate, how they bathed, how they prayed — every action, no matter how small, was a step on the stairway to Paradise. That was where their reward lay.

The greater their acts in honor of Islam were here on earth, the greater their chances of reaching Paradise.

They were the worst enemy civilization had ever faced. And in its history, civilization had never been weaker.

The Western world had withdrawn, gone soft and cold. There were very few left to protect it. Fewer still who were willing to risk political careers over hard, consequence-ridden choices.

America’s President, though, was willing to take the risk. He didn’t have a choice. The survival of the United States depended on it.

Green-lighting the operation on Malevsky was the right decision. A bloody trail of American bodies, including the U.S. Secretary of Defense, might have started with ISIS, but it didn’t end there. It kept going, right to the Russians’ doorstep. He had no idea why, but he intended to find out. He also intended to end it. Right here, right now.

Harvath checked his GPS and continued on. He only wanted a quick look at the house. The sooner he got to his destination and emptied the trunk, the better he was going to feel.