Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26

E ZE , F RANCE

The clock had begun ticking before Harvath had even returned to the safehouse. He had the rough outlines of a plan and was trying to put the pieces into place. But for the plan to work, all of the dominoes had to be perfectly aligned. If one of them was even the slightest bit out of line, everything was going to rapidly unspool. And the moment that happened, bullets were going to start flying. It was his job to make sure that didn't happen.

Part of the plan involved following Tsybulsky from Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat to Monte Carlo. In order to do that, they were going to need a very specific type of boat. And while the Agency had all the specs and was working with a yacht broker out of Nice to find and charter the right vessel, Harvath wanted to make sure it didn't get screwed up and assigned Tim Barton to keep an eye on the process. He was the only other Navy operative on the team and, as such, was the only other person with the proper experience necessary to handle a boat like that.

Setting up shop in the villa's library, Harvath sat next to Nicholas and monitored their flight-tracking software. The Ukrainian commandos had been given the green light and were already wheels-up out of Bournemouth Airport, a short helicopter hop from Royal Marines Base Poole. Their flight to Nice C?te d'Azur would take less than two hours. Haney and Staelin would meet them at the airport and drive them back to the villa.

While the longer lead items had been set in motion, Harvath was concerned that he hadn't yet heard back from Eva. She had promised to text him as soon as she'd received confirmation from Inessa. He tried not to think about it and instead focused on the other elements of the operation.

The idea had been to make Inessa an offer she couldn't refuse. Dinner, or at the very least just drinks, at Muse—one of her favorite spots in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Even if she was busy packing for Russia, the hope was that she could peel herself away long enough to have a quick visit with Eva and say goodbye.

Muse was perched directly above the harbor and offered breathtaking views of the Mediterranean. It had upstairs and downstairs dining, a busy bar scene, and a terrace that was consistently jammed. Even more to Harvath's liking, there were multiple forms of ingress and egress. Eva had recommended the perfect spot. She also had enough pull (as the wife of the owner of the Hotel du Cap in Antibes) to reserve a table at the last minute.

Naturally, Harvath would want to get there early and see everything for himself, but the little bit he was able to discover online had given him a high degree of confidence that the location would suit their needs. Which left him with the last, and most difficult, stage of his plan.

Everything would come down to Inessa. And the more he thought about her, the more he was plagued by one very important question. How good an actress was she?

Courtesans, by profession, were skilled liars, but convincing men that you found them attractive and that they were good in bed was a lot different than lying to your highly trained security team. They were practiced in the art of deception. It was the single most important skill in keeping them alive and employed.

After seeing Grechko, would she be able to keep it together? Or would she inadvertently give herself, and the entire plan, away?

It had eaten at him during the drive in to see Eva. If Inessa buckled, if Tsybulsky or his men sensed something was amiss and pressed her, she could burn a lot of people, including Eva. As they were saying goodbye, Harvath had felt it necessary to warn her. It was important for her to know what was at stake.

Eva, however, was two steps ahead of him. She had already decided she was going to leverage her illness and "play the cancer card."

Her plan was to tell Inessa she didn't know how much time she had left. Because she wasn't going to Russia, it would mean a lot to her to get together for dinner. She wasn't sure she'd still be around if and when Inessa came back. The final step in her plan was to get Inessa slightly tipsy in order to add a little steel to her spine.

By dropping the health bomb on her, it would allow Inessa—in case she'd been invited—to back out of going to Monte Carlo with Tsybulsky. More importantly, if he or any of her security detail thought she was acting strange, she'd be able to legitimately blame it on her concern over Eva's cancer.

It was a win-win, yet it was also something that Harvath never would have asked Eva to do. The fact that she had offered to, unsolicited, only reinforced that bringing her on board had been the right idea.

He could only hope that Inessa would be as tough and as reliable. A key moment was coming and she would need to absolutely knock it out of the park. If she didn't, everything else would be all for naught.

He had dwelled so much on how to make her disappear that it had been practically impossible to think of anything else. In his head, however, he had slowly begun to hear the voice of his mentor, Reed Carlton—the man who had taught him everything he knew about the art of espionage. Had Carlton been standing in front of him right now, he would have been encouraging him to slow down and keep the plan simple.

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.