Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 25

Harvath had secured enough buildings, events, and estates in his time to know that the key was to limit entry and exit points. With estates, that normally meant the owners came and went via the garage or front door. Servants came, went, and normally received deliveries via some unseen service entrance.

In the case of the Villa Malzoff, it was the grand, restaurant-sized kitchen in back. It was connected to the staff apartments by a small service lane that split off from the driveway.

Harvath used the trees for concealment as he made his approach to the main house. During his tour, he had seen staff coming and going through the main kitchen door.

Unlike the other doors in the hunting lodge, the alarm system didn’t chime every time it opened or closed. It probably saw so much traffic that the chime had been disabled.

But was it reactivated at night? That was Harvath’s biggest question mark at this point.

It didn’t matter that he had a set of keys and that one of them likely opened the door in question. If opening the door meant setting off the alarm, things would instantly go from game on to game over.

He checked out the fifty-meter dash he was going to have to make to a row of garbage cans near some stairs outside the kitchen. Stopping behind the last tree, he requested a SITREP. Three squelch clicks came back in response. All clear.

A couple of lights were on in the kitchen, but he couldn’t see any activity. The rest of the house was asleep, its windows dark. Harvath decided to make his move.

Unlike his last sprint across open ground, this one went down without incident. Flattening his back against the outer wall of the house, he crouched down between two of the cans and waited.

There were two things Russians could always be counted on to do — drink and smoke. The chef had been passed out drunk, just as Harvath had anticipated. Based on what he had seen during his tour, there were no ashtrays in the house and it didn’t smell of cigarettes. Wanting the place to show well, Malevsky had likely issued a ban on smoking indoors.

All Harvath needed now was someone to step out for a cigarette break. Once they used the kitchen door, he’d be able to ascertain a lot about its security.

Twenty minutes went by. The temperature continued to drop. The air was frigid. It was like a saw made out of ice, slicing at him, carving into every fold of clothing it could find.

He had long since given up crouching. It was too rough on his knees. Nobody could hold that position for that long.

Sitting, with his knees pulled against his chest, he continued to wait. In the back of his mind he began to formulate a Plan B. If no one came out, what would he do? Would he risk the door? Abort the operation?

He was running through his options, when he heard someone unlock the kitchen door. Quickly, he got into a crouch.

A man stepped outside with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Removing a Zippo from his pocket, he flipped open the top and struck the flint wheel against the side of his leg. Raising the lighter, he lit his cigarette. Harvath was so close he could almost smell the lighter fluid.

Once the cigarette was lit, the man flicked his wrist, the lid snapped shut, and the flame was extinguished. The man took a deep, long drag. He filled his lungs and put his head back, savoring the hit from the nicotine as it raced into his system.

The man stepped the rest of the way out, and closed the door behind him. Harvath noted that there had been no sound of a chime from the alarm pad just inside. The door appeared safe.

The man was larger than the security guards he had seen earlier. He was bald with a thick neck. He looked like a circus strongman minus the handlebar mustache. When Harvath pictured low-rent, Russian mob muscle in his mind, this was exactly the kind of person he envisioned — gold jewelry and all.

He looked to be in his late fifties, maybe older. It was hard to tell. Russians lived hard and aged badly, particularly in the criminal arena.

In his crouch, Harvath tried to slow his respiration. He didn’t want the sight of his breath rising into the cold night air to give him away.

The man took a couple more puffs off his cigarette and then stubbed it out. But instead of flicking the remainder somewhere into the service lane or the grass, he began walking toward the line of garbage cans.

Fuck was the first word that came to Harvath’s mind. What’s this idiot doing? Was he going to throw his recently lit cigarette in the trash?

But when he heard the first lid open, it only took him a matter of seconds to realize what was up.

There was the sound of glass against glass as the Russian fished a bottle of who knows what out of the trash and unscrewed the cap.

Whatever he had found, there wasn’t much of it because the bottle went quickly back into the trash and he moved to the next can.

He was close now. Way too close. Fuck, Harvath said to himself again. Even with subsonic ammo in his suppressed H&K, the 9mm pistol still made a lot of noise. It would sound even louder this close to the house. Somebody was going to hear it. And whoever did was going to come to investigate. Fuck.

He tried to think. Improvise, he told himself as he looked around. He could hear the large man fishing another bottle out of the can two down from where he was hiding.

Harvath was going to have to shoot him. There was no getting around it. The man seemed determined to rut through every garbage can before he turned and went back inside. Booze and cigarettes, he thought. Fucking Russians.

Leaning against the wall, he shifted his weapon into his left hand. This was going to screw everything. He’d have to find a place to hide the body and hope it bought him enough time to do what he needed to do inside.

Somehow, he’d have to figure out how to grab Malevsky and get him out of the house. He hated the idea, but he was going to have to use one of the mobster’s kids. Damn it.

The Russian was one garbage can away now. It was only a matter of seconds before he came to the gap between the cans and saw him.

Harvath would have to move fast. In order to muffle the sound of his weapon, he’d need to get it up against the man. He planned to shoot him in the back of the head or the heart — multiple shots in quick succession. Then he would drag his body around the side of the house and place it out of sight.

This was not how any of this was supposed to go down. There had to be a better way. Think, he told himself. But it was too late. He had to act. The man was now on top of him.

Launching full force up out of his crouch, he came at him like a battering ram. He delivered a searing punch into the best target he had, right up between the man’s legs.

The air whooshed from the man’s lungs and he doubled over. As he did, Harvath slipped past, turned, and then drove his elbow as hard as he could into the base of his skull, knocking him the rest of the way to the ground.

He drew back his foot to kick him in the head, but stopped. The man was lying on the ground, on his stomach, not moving.

Harvath figured he was out cold. Leaning forward, he placed his pistol to the back of his head and began applying pressure to his trigger. Then he noticed his eyes. They were open, but he wasn’t breathing.

He reached down and checked his pulse. He didn’t have one. He was dead.

Harvath could smell the alcohol wafting off him, and that gave him an idea. The stairs.

Grabbing the huge man under the arms, he dragged him over to the flight of six stone stairs that led downhill and took him to the bottom. He posed the body as best he could and then ran back up to the garbage cans to fish out a bottle of liquor.

Returning to the body, he tucked the bottle halfway underneath. He then placed his knee on the corpse and applied his weight until the bottle broke.

The accident scene was complete. Whether or not Malevsky would buy it was another matter entirely.

All Harvath knew was that he had caught a break. He didn’t expect to catch another one. Moving quickly up the stone steps, he headed for the kitchen door.

Slipping into the house, he closed the door behind him and quietly climbed the back stairs. He had a good feeling he knew which room was hers.

The door was unlocked. He opened it slowly.

Despite the hour, she wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t even in bed. A small, semiautomatic pistol was in her hand. She looked at him as he entered the room and said, “You shouldn’t have come back.”