The officer rolled to a stop and killed his lights outside what looked like some sort of private, VIP terminal.

  After retrieving his bag from the trunk, the cop opened the door, handed it to him, and motioned for Harvath to follow him into the building.

  The lobby, with its polished reception desk, resembled something out of a boutique hotel. The cop nodded at the woman behind the desk and kept moving, leading Harvath down a brightly lit hallway decorated with pieces of modern art.

  On a glossy orange door with “Suite 7” written in an oversize font, he swiped a keycard and then stepped inside followed by Harvath.

  “Wait here,” the officer ordered, stepping back into the hall and closing the door behind him.

  The room was decorated with chic Scandinavian furniture and had a private, marble bathroom, complete with a walk-in shower, just off to the side. A large flat-screen TV was tuned to a local Norwegian station. There was a buffet with fresh fruit, an array of snacks, a full bar, and a coffee station. Harvath made a beeline for the coffee.

  As he dropped in a pod and waited for his espresso, he opened a drawer and found a range of amenities, including individual packets of pain relievers. Tearing one open, he popped the two pills, chased them with a water from the mini fridge, and put the rest of the packets in his pocket. He also grabbed a fresh toothbrush and some disposable razors. If this was the level at which the Norwegian police were conducting interviews these days, he was all for it.

  When his coffee was ready, he walked over to the long leather couch and sat down. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided a terrific view of planes taking off and landing. Removing his boots, he put his feet up, and grabbed the remote. As long as he was being detained, he figured he might as well enjoy himself.

  He dialed around until he found an English language news station and then only half paid attention as the host ran through the headlines.

  In his mind he was in the city center, forty minutes away, already halfway through a great bottle of wine with Sølvi, catching her up on everything that had happened since they had last seen each other.

  Part of him regretted not having picked her up a gift. He had searched for one at the airport shops in Kraków, but there hadn’t been anything special. It was all either too crappy or just not her style. He knew she’d understand. Making it back to her in one piece was the only thing that she had said she truly wanted.

  The more he thought about her, the more he wanted his passport back and to be on his way.

  He was also getting to the point in his pain threshold where ice packs were no longer going to do the trick. He was going to need a full-on ice bath. Where the hell he was going to buy large bags of ice in Oslo, however, was beyond him. That American culinary specialty had yet to pierce the Scandinavian market.

  After polishing off his espresso, he was about to hop up and brew another one when there was a knock on his door, followed by the chime of a keycard opening the lock.

  He looked up, expecting to see the officer who had brought him over from the plane, but instead he was greeted with the sight of Holidae Hayes, chief of the CIA’s Oslo station.

  “Bumpy flight?” she asked, stepping into the room.

  “I’ve had better,” Harvath replied, taking his feet off the table and sitting upright. “What are you doing here? Is Sølvi okay?”

  Hayes held up her index finger, pointed toward the ceiling, and drew imaginary loops with it, indicating that the room might be bugged. “She’s fine. I came to give you a ride.”

  “I can’t leave yet. Some cop has my passport.”

  The tall, redheaded CIA operative removed Harvath’s passport from her pocket and tossed it to him.

  He opened it and flipped it to the most recent page. “Even got it stamped for me.”

  “Professional courtesy.”

  “They don’t want a statement?”

  Hayes shook her head. “Only if you want to press charges.”

  It was now Harvath’s turn to shake his head. The man on the plane was already going to be facing a host of charges. He was also probably going to get added to Europe’s no-fly list. He needed psychiatric help, not Harvath piling on.

  They brewed two coffees to go and Harvath followed Hayes out to her black Chevy Suburban with its yellow diplomatic plates.

  After throwing his bag in the cargo area, he hopped into the front passenger seat and they drove out of the airport.

  “Safe to talk now?” he asked, checking his side mirror as they got onto the pine-studded A10 highway, which led into the city.

  “I want to save the shop talk until we’re back at the office.”

  Interesting, he thought as he nodded in response and took a sip of his coffee.

  When Hayes had indicated her reluctance to speak because the VIP private jet suite might be bugged, that hadn’t been surprising. Corporate espionage, even among allied nations, was big business. The French and Israelis, some of the worst offenders, were even said to bug the business and first-class sections of their national airlines.

  But the fact that she didn’t even want to speak in a moving U.S. Embassy vehicle was significant. Whatever this was, it was serious. Very serious.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tilting his seat back, Harvath had tried, without much luck, to get comfortable, and they had passed the rest of the drive making small talk.

  Hayes was a fascinating woman. She was exceedingly bright and exceedingly ambitious. In an arena still dominated by the old boys’ network, she had carved out quite a career for herself. She had even come to the president’s attention and there was talk of her jumping from CIA to the State Department for an ambassadorship after the next election.

  He also knew that Sølvi really admired her—especially as Hayes had succeeded despite her good looks, not because of them. No one had given her anything. She’d had to fight for every single thing that she had achieved.

  Arriving at the ten-acre embassy campus, Harvath was reminded of the attention to detail that had gone into its design. Horizontal roofs were meant to honor traditional Norwegian longhouses, while boulders placed throughout mimicked the landscape of the Norwegian fjords. The most impressive design element, however, was the copper cornices, which were identical to the copper used for the Statue of Liberty, which was also mined in Norway. The entire project was a testament to the enduring friendship between the two nations.

  Hayes badged Harvath in and after leaving his bag in her office, they headed for the sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as the SCIF. It was an ultra-secure room, about the size and shape of a shipping container, designed to foil all manner of high-tech eavesdropping. As such, they were required to leave their cell phones in a cubby outside.

  Once in the SCIF, with the door securely closed behind them, the CIA station chief pulled out the chair at the head of the conference table. Harvath took the chair to her right.

  “You did an exceptional job in Ukraine. Langley, the White House… everyone’s very happy.”

  “Good. That’s what I’m paid for,” he replied, following up with the first of many questions he had. “What was all of that back at the airport? Why pick me up? In fact, how’d you even know I was going to be on that flight?”

  Hayes smiled. “I’m CIA.”

  “Don’t jerk me around, Holidae. I’m not in the mood. Not today. Okay?”

  “Fair enough,” she responded. “I apologize.”

  “So what happened? The pilots called in the disturbance, the Norwegians ran the manifest, and what? They contacted the embassy to let you all know there was at least one Amcit on board?”

  The station chief shook her head. “I wasn’t aware of the disturbance until I got to the airport and Chief Inspector Borger filled me in. He was the officer who escorted you off the plane and got your customs and immigration expedited for me.”

  Now Harvath was even more confused. “If you didn’t show up because of what happened during the flight, what were you doing there?”

  “I needed to see you before you saw Sølvi.”

  In the back of his mind, alarm bells began to go off. “Holidae, if you’ve got something to tell me, tell me.”

  Hayes took a breath and cut to the chase. “The Norwegians have a Russian defector. Came across a couple of days ago. Sølvi’s in charge of him.”

  “I know.”

  She looked at him. “You know?”

  “Yeah. She told me.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “Nothing else. It’s none of my business.”

  Hayes removed a folder and pushed it across the table to him. “His name is Leonid Grechko,” she said as Harvath opened the man’s jacket and began flipping through it. “High-ranking operative in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. He was in charge of their Active Measures Department. His job was to shape world events via political warfare. Espionage, sabotage, assassination, propaganda… he had every conceivable tool in his toolbox and he used them all. With a frightening level of precision.”

  Harvath closed the folder and slid it back to her. “This guy’s a walking, talking golden ticket. He could have defected anywhere. You guys at CIA would’ve showered him with so much money, he’d have drowned. So with all due respect to the Norwegians, why defect here?”

  “That’s what we want to know.”

  “So ask your counterpart over at Norwegian Intelligence. You and Vice Admiral Iversen are friendly enough, right?”

  “The Norwegians don’t know that we know that they’ve got him.”

  Harvath reached into his pocket and pulled out another packet of pain pills. Hayes was beginning to give him a headache. “Sounds to me like a you problem.”

  “All we want you to do is to keep your ears open. Maybe ask a few questions—”

  “We. Meaning the CIA.”

  The station chief nodded.

  “And by ‘keep my ears open and ask a few questions,’ what you want is for me to spy on Sølvi—the woman I’m about to marry.”

  “We’ve picked up intelligence that suggests the Russians are up to something.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Holidae. It’s the Russians. They’re always up to something. Sorry. I’m not your guy. I’m not going to spy on my fiancée.”

  “You’re the only person we’ve got.”

  “Technically speaking, you don’t have me. I work for a private agency that contracts with you guys. I get to say ‘no’ anytime I want. And for the record, the CIA should’ve known I’d say ‘no,’ especially to something like this.”

  “To be honest,” she replied, “they actually anticipated that would be your answer.” There was something about her tone that unsettled him, but before he could respond, she produced another folder and slid it across the table.

  “I want you to know that this wasn’t my idea. In fact, I was against it.”

  More alarm bells.

  He opened the folder and looked inside. There were only a few sheets of paper. The executive summary made clear what he was looking at. Slowly, he flipped through it.

  When he was finished, he closed the folder and gently slid it back. “I have no idea what this is.”

  “Now who’s jerking who around?” she asked.

  Harvath looked at her, his expression flat, unreadable.

  “Since we’re getting things about the CIA on the record,” Hayes continued, “I want you to know that I pushed for using a carrot. It was Langley that decided to go with the stick.”

  “Well, wrong stick.”

  “That’s not the way the seventh floor sees it. They think the evidence is pretty compelling.”

  “What evidence?”

  “After your wife was murdered, you launched a far-reaching revenge campaign. Right up to and including the drug-addled, psycho son of President Peshkov of Russia. But what you hadn’t banked on was the boy’s oligarch godfather putting a one-hundred-million-dollar, winner-take-all bounty on your head.

  “Of course you being you, you ignited another kill chain and took out everyone involved with that plot too. Everyone, that is, except for the man who put up the bounty—the boy’s aforementioned godfather, Nikolai Nekrasov. For some reason, you let him live. And that’s where it starts to get interesting.

  “After running Nekrasov to ground, you left your team in a parking garage while you went into the building, alone, ostensibly to finish him off. But for some reason you changed your mind.

  “Shortly thereafter, Nekrasov’s long-suffering wife, Eva, gets a magic deposit of fifty million dollars, half the value of the bounty, in an account in Bermuda. Then that same day, another account, this one buried in a web of shell companies in Switzerland, its ultimate beneficiary unknown, also receives a fifty-million-dollar deposit.”

  “That’s amazing,” Harvath deadpanned.

  “What? That the CIA tracked it all down?”

  “No. That you don’t know who the second account belongs to.”

  Hayes smiled. “We didn’t know bin Laden would be in that house in Abbottabad either, but we had a high enough level of confidence to move on it.”

  “You took your shot and it paid off.”

  “As this could for you. Fifty million is a hell of a nest egg. And no one is blaming you.”

  “Blaming me for what? I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The station chief put up her hands in surrender. “Maybe you and Mrs. Nekrasov came to some sort of an understanding. I don’t know and I don’t care. The Russians are butchers. They killed your wife. And you made them bleed, big-time. If that bleeding also meant keeping the bounty Nikolai had placed on your head in exchange for letting him live, even better. All I want you to do at this point is think about it. Okay? It’s a big ask. I get it.”

  “What’s the carrot?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said Langley opted for the stick, but you wanted to offer me a carrot. What was it?”

  Hayes smiled again. “It doesn’t matter. That Swiss account, stuffed with fifty million dollars, isn’t yours.”

  “But,” said Harvath, pausing for effect, “if it was.”

  “If it was, then I’d do you two favors. First, I’d let you know that an elite unit at the U.S. Treasury has it ringed with tripwires.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Sounds dangerous.”

  “They don’t mess around at Treasury.”

  “And the second favor?” he asked.

  “The second favor is the carrot. I’d help make all those tripwires, in fact the entire file, disappear.”

  CHAPTER 6

  By the time Harvath exited the SCIF, he had already made his decision. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it went against almost everything he stood for. That said, it was the only way forward.

  Retrieving his phone from the cubby, he powered it back up and was greeted by several messages from Sølvi. The news about what had happened on the flight from Kraków must have made its way to her.

  He texted back that he was okay and would be at the apartment soon. Grabbing his bag, he left the embassy and picked up an Uber a block away.

  He made two stops en route to her apartment. One was for a bouquet of flowers. The other was for a bottle of Krug and a small tin of Desietra caviar. Harvath had a few, very specific reasons why he bought this particular brand. Yes, the caviar tasted great and was the perfect accompaniment to champagne—although so were pizza and popcorn, he had found—but Desietra was completely sourced in Western Europe, not Russia or Iran, and the brains behind the company belonged to a successful American entrepreneur from, of all places, Wisconsin. Harvath’s patriotism didn’t stop at the U.S. border; he took it with him wherever he went.

  When they arrived at the address he had provided, Harvath thanked the driver, tipped him via the app, and gave him five stars.

  Once the car had driven off, he turned and walked the two short blocks back to Sølvi’s. It was a minor inconvenience; an investment in making sure that he wasn’t being followed and that the apartment wasn’t under surveillance.

  It also gave him a few more minutes to sort out his words. He had never been placed in this kind of position before. The territory was completely foreign. In his mind, he knew what he had to do. His gut, however, was ripping him apart.

  When he arrived at the entrance of the building, he took one last look up and down the street. Confident it wasn’t being watched, he stepped inside, locked away any misgivings in the attic of his mind, and headed up to the apartment.

  Sølvi was already there waiting for him.

  He threw his arms around her and they shared a long hug, followed by an even longer kiss.

  Once they had peeled themselves off each other, he handed her the flowers and said, “These are for you.”

  “They’re beautiful,” she replied. “Thank you.”

  He couldn’t believe they were finally together again. “You’re beautiful. God, you have no idea how much I missed you.”

  “I think I’ve got a little idea.”

  She flashed her megawatt, million-dollar smile that he loved so much, and for the moment, nothing else mattered.

  “Bedroom or living room?” he asked, holding up the bottle of Krug.

  “Neither, I’m afraid.”

  “Balcony?” he pressed, seductively raising an eyebrow.

  Sølvi laughed. “For now, refrigerator. But later…” Her voice trailed off as she leaned in and gave him another kiss.

  “So you’re not staying.”

  “I wish I could, but I have to get back to the Woods.”

  The Norwegian Intelligence Service was located just outside the city center, on a lake, surrounded by heavy forest. The nickname for their headquarters had practically created itself.

  “Maybe dinner?” he asked.