Path Of The Assassin

At that exact moment, the driver of the Mercedes began firing through the open space where the rear window of the Mercedes used to be. Harvath jerked the wheel of the Audi hard to the left as enormous bullets tore holes straight up its hood. The car spun through a slick puddle and Scot saw everything happen in slow motion. Neither vehicle could escape its fate. As the Audi swerved in its inescapable trajectory toward a pile of scaffolding and construction equipment, the Mercedes barreled down on a row of parked cars.

The Audi hit hard on Cheng’s side and all the air bags deployed.

Upon slamming into the row of parked cars, the Mercedes was thrust high into the air and came down with a loud crash.

Once he had shaken off the shock of the impact, Harvath’s eye caught the bullet hole in the Audi’s windshield. Even before he turned to look at Sammy Cheng, he knew his friend had been hit. Harvath could hear the sound of gurgling blood coming from the hole the bullet had carved through Cheng’s throat. He tried to stanch the flow, but it was no use. Within seconds, Cheng stopped breathing and was dead.

Enraged, Harvath climbed from the Audi and stumbled down the block to where the Mercedes lay upturned and burning. He approached the car from the rear, trying to steady his Glock. He began applying pressure to the trigger as he neared the driver’s side door. In one fluid motion that belied the battered state of his body, he swung the pistol through the window, searching for the car’s driver. The Mercedes was empty. Harvath searched the street, thinking that maybe the driver had been thrown clear. There was nothing. Absolutely no sign. The deadly, silver-eyed assassin had vanished into the storm.

5

It was a week since the debacle in Macau and Harvath still couldn’t shake his feelings of failure. He had come to Switzerland after Cheng’s death to lick his wounds and be with Claudia, but things weren’t turning out as he had hoped.

Harvath rolled over and felt the empty space next to him. It was cold. Claudia had long since left for her office. Although he wasn’t the sentimental type, it bothered him that she had stopped doing so many things lately. She had stopped kissing him good-bye in the morning, had stopped leaving a coffee cup out for him, had stopped leaving notes in her bathroom, and worst of all, she had stopped trusting him.

When Harvath returned from Hong Kong and Macau, he had expected to be spending a few days with Claudia at her parents’ farm in Grindelwald before Gerhard Miner’s trial started. Instead, Claudia had “decided” that she needed to spend more time preparing the case and Scot was left in Bern to his own devices.

He knew why she was doing this. No matter how many times he answered her questions, which began the minute she picked him up at the airport in Zurich, she just refused to believe him. Claudia didn’t like being stonewalled, nor did Harvath for that matter, but matters of national security couldn’t be shared, even if two people were sharing other things, like the same bed.

Though Harvath couldn’t say where he had been and refused to let Claudia look at his passport, she knew he had been in Asia. She also knew that he was somehow involved in the killing of Philip Jamek. Jamek would have been useful in her pending prosecution of Miner, but now he was of no use to anyone.

It pained Harvath to see a rift developing between him and Claudia, but he couldn’t tell her the truth, not the full truth. He had tried to assure her that he’d had nothing to do with the killing of Jamek. That much was true. Someone else had wanted Jamek dead, but why? The Chinese wouldn’t have put a hit out on him. That wouldn’t have made any sense. Maybe Jamek had double-crossed somebody in one of his arms deals and the hit was payback. Or maybe it was something else entirely. All Harvath really knew was that the eyes of the assassin still haunted him.

Whether he had been in Asia, Macau specifically, during Jamek’s killing was classified and something he couldn’t discuss. Claudia would just have to deal with that. And she did.

She dealt with it by burying herself in her work. After helping Scot rescue the president and arrest Gerhard Miner, she had been promoted. She was now a full-fledged prosecutor, her dream come true, and was part of the team that was going to make sure Gerhard Miner never again walked the streets as a free man.

In a move that stunned the rest of the world, Switzerland had steadfastly refused to extradite Miner to stand trial in the United States. The Swiss assured the Americans that they would see to it that justice was done, but that Miner would not be put to death for his crimes. If found guilty, which the Swiss government assured the United States was going to happen, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.