Spymaster

CHAPTER 56

When Harvath heard Staelin’s voice, it was just after 4:00 a.m. He was lying, still fully clothed, atop his bed with his book on his chest.

“What is it?”

“Vella,” said Staelin. “He told me to come and get you.”

Shit, thought Harvath as he quickly got out of bed. This couldn’t be good news. “What happened? Is Kuznetsov okay?”

“Who?”

Harvath had forgotten that Staelin hadn’t been given the update. “Dominik Gashi’s real name is Ivan Kuznetsov.”

“Whatever his name is, Vella wants to talk to you about him. It sounds like maybe he wants to make a deal.”

A deal? Harvath was highly skeptical, but stranger things had happened, especially when it came to the Russians. Many had watched their politicians and ex — intelligence officers become billionaire oligarchs, only to want a piece of the action for themselves. It was worth at least listening to what he wanted and, more important, what he had to offer.

Grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, Harvath left his coat behind and followed Staelin across the motor court over to the main building. He took the stairs down to the basement, which had been transformed into a miniversion of the Solarium back on Malta, and was where they were interrogating Kuznetsov.

There were all sorts of medical equipment, video cameras, monitors, and a computer work station.

Kuznetsov was hooded and bound to a chair. Harvath recognized the hood. It had a special pocket in front into which Vella placed strips of cloth soaked in his special compound. He had let Harvath take a quick whiff of it once. It was like liquid fear.

Like the smell of fresh-baked cookies or bread, scent had a way of bypassing the conscious, rational part of the brain and going straight to where our memories were stored. Vella believed a similar mechanism could be used in interrogations. He had spent years studying, and testing, how scent could unlock certain pathways in the brain. In particular, he had been focused on how it could be used to break a subject, so that he was no longer able to resist and would reveal the truth.

Harvath looked at the bright halogen work lights that had the Russian lit up from the front and the sides.

“I have headphones on him,” said Vella, “so he can’t hear us right now.”

“What did you need to talk to me about?”

“He wants to make a deal.”

“What kind of deal?” asked Harvath.

“He’s willing to give up everything he knows.”

“And you believe him?”

“Come look at this,” replied Vella as he gestured toward his computer.

Harvath joined him and watched as he played back a short piece of video. Underneath it were a series of graphics, similar to a polygraph, but more sophisticated.

Pointing to several of the lines, the doctor said, “If there was even the slightest hint that he was being untruthful, it would show up here. He couldn’t be in this range if it was a ruse. He’s telling the truth. He wants to make a deal.”

“Maybe he’s just tired.”

“The more fatigued he gets, the more difficult it is for him to hide from me. That’s why I don’t let them sleep.”

“Maybe he’s just stringing us along in order to get pain meds. Have you given him any?”

“He’s definitely in pain,” said Vella, “but I haven’t given him anything for it. You’ve watched me do this before. You know how this all works.”

“I’m just making sure,” replied Harvath. “This is an option I wasn’t expecting.”

“This isn’t an option. It’s an opportunity. He’s ready to give you everything he has. I have been going at him for almost eight hours. Believe me, this is legitimate. It’s also why you brought me in; to speed things up.”

Harvath knew this kind of thing happened, but it wasn’t exactly his area of expertise. He had a lot more experience with turning Muslim terrorists against one another than he did negotiating with Russian intelligence officers to leave their service.

“Was he promised anything?” Harvath asked. “What did you tell him, exactly? And what did he tell you?”

“I started with the standard stuff. I told him he was a prisoner of the United States and was not going back to Russia, ever. His stress levels at this point were already pretty high and when he asked me where he would be taken, I told him Gitmo. That didn’t do anything to relax him, but when I told him he’d be placed in with the Muslim population, things really started to blast off.”

Harvath wasn’t surprised. Russia had made a lot of enemies in the Muslim world. Putting Kuznetsov in with hardened Al Qaeda operatives, who remembered all the bad things the Russians did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, would probably be worse than executing him.

“You’ll be surprised to know that he carries several grudges about the Russian military in general and the GRU specifically,” the doctor continued.

Right, big surprise. The Russian military was a pretty corrupt organization. What’s more, Russians were spectacular grudge-holders. Harvath liked to tell a joke about an angel appearing to three men — a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Russian. The angel tells them that tomorrow the world is going to end and asks what they each want to do with their last night on earth. The Frenchman says he will get a case of the best champagne and spend his last night with his mistress. The Italian says he will visit his mistress and then go home to eat a last meal with his wife and children. The Russian replies that he will go burn down his neighbor’s barn.

“Gotland was a huge failure,” said Vella. “He knows he will be blamed for it and that the GRU will take it out on his family, so that it serves as a lesson to other operatives. He wants asylum for himself and his family.”

“He wants to live in the United States?” Harvath asked.

Vella shook his head. “No. Italy. Florence, to be exact.”

“At least he’s not picky,” Harvath said with a grin.

“I didn’t push back on it. It represents something to him. I figured I would let you make the call. One would suppose that if he could help turn over evidence linked to the bombing in Rome, the Italians might cooperate.”

The Italians also had a thing about American intelligence operatives who snatched people and rendered them to foreign countries. He didn’t know if that was a road he wanted to go down, but for right now it didn’t matter.

The Swedes would also need to be massaged. Kuznetsov had killed a Swedish intelligence officer and had sliced open a cop. It would be hard to let a guy like that ride off into the Italian sunset.

Espionage, though, was a dirty business. Sometimes, unsavory deals had to be struck with bad actors — especially when it meant preventing a war.

“Anything else I need to know before I talk with him? What are his grudges against the military and the GRU?”

Vella glanced at some notes he had made. “He was born into a lower-class family. Despite being highly intelligent, he thinks the Russian military, and especially the GRU, have prohibited him from reaching the rank and responsibility he rightly deserves.”

“So he’s got a Fredo Corleone complex,” Harvath replied, referring to the middle brother in the Godfather saga.

“He seems to realize that if he’s going to make any sort of a deal at all, now is the time to do it.”

It made sense, but from what the Old Man had taught him about his days of brokering deals with Soviet defectors in the Cold War, these things usually required a lot of back and forth. The talks were often complicated and prolonged. The veracity of the information the defectors provided had to be confirmed and always checked against multiple sources.

But those were different times and a much different scenario. Kuznetsov wasn’t some embassy walk-in. He was a prisoner — one with a limited amount of bargaining power and one against whom the clock was ticking.

By the same token, though, the clock was also ticking for Harvath. He desperately needed information and, like it or not, his best option was to try to cut a deal. As Vella had correctly pointed out, he had been given an opportunity. He needed to make sure he did everything he could to take advantage of it.

Working together, he and Vella set up the room exactly the way he wanted it. The conversation would still be videotaped, but he didn’t want it done under the harsh glare of the halogen lights. Harvath wanted to sit across from the Russian in order to read him. Vella’s machines were one thing, but Harvath put his ultimate confidence in how he felt in his gut and what he could see with his own two eyes.

He called upstairs to Staelin and asked him to brew him some coffee and to bring it down along with some bottled water for their captive.

Kuznetsov, being Russian, might also want a smoke. Harvath knew that Vella used cigarettes as incentives with detainees and sure enough, the man had brought along several packs. He placed one on the table along with a small box of matches.

When everything was exactly as he wanted, Harvath walked over to Kuznetsov and removed his hood.