State Of The Union

“Probably,” replied Harvath as he watched Alexandra scan the dance floor yet again. She seemed nervous and very tightly wound. “Are you expecting somebody else?”

“I don’t know.”

Bad events seemed to radiate a certain electricity that Harvath was often able to pick up on. The hair on the back of his neck began to rise and seconds later he heard someone scream.

Alexandra wasted no time. She pulled the silenced Walther P4 from beneath her coat and ran for the booth.

When she finally fought her way through the crowd, she found the man in the bad suit laying slumped in the booth and bleeding profusely from several stab wounds to his neck and chest. It was soon complete pandemonium, with patrons screaming and running toward the front of the club. Not knowing how close the attacker was, Alexandra turned and swept her weapon back and forth, looking for any face in the crowd that didn’t look right.

Harvath was only two steps behind her. He arrived at the booth with his H amp;K drawn and he Ivanova both saw the attacker at the same time, but it was too late. Expertly using the stampeding crowd as cover, the man smiled before disappearing into the sea of rushing people. Harvath had seen the man’s face before. It was the same man who had pulled off the attack at the King George, but how could he have followed Harvath all the way to St. Petersburg?It was impossible.

Harvath glanced at the man slumped in the booth and leaned in to feel for his pulse. It was very weak, and Scot was taken by surprise when the man suddenly reached out and beseechingly grabbed for his arm. He told him to stay calm, that help would be there soon, but the man just shook his head. He withdrew something from his pocket and pressed it into Harvath’s hand. He opened his mouth to speak and but collapsed before he could get the words out. Harvath once again felt for the man’s pulse, but there was none. He was dead.

“Cover Nesterov!” Ivanova said as she kept her weapon trained on the quickly dissipating pack of fleeing customers.

“There’s nothing to cover,” replied Harvath as he stepped away from the booth. “He’s dead.”

“Damn it,” swore Ivanova.

Who was he?”

“A scientist.”

“What was he working on?”

“It’s not important now.”

“Not important? Obviously somebody thought it was important enough to kill him over. Do you have any idea who was shooting at us?”

Ivanova stood and said, “Russian military.”

“Well that makes sense,” responded Harvath.

“If you knew the depth of what was going on here, itwould make sense,” snapped Ivanova.

“I think I understand well enough. The man who killed your scientist, I’ve seen him before. He tried to kill me two nights ago in Berlin.”

“Helmut Draegar was in Berlin? What was he doing there?”

Harvath was floored. Gary Lawlor hadn’t been ranting. He had been trying to warn him. “That doesn’t make any sense,” continued Harvath. “Helmut Draegar was killed fifteen years ago.”

“You don’t know very much, do you?”

“Why don’t you fill me in?”

“There’s no time,” replied Ivanova, as she nervously scanned the room.

Harvath could hear what sounded like several men in heavy boots making their way toward them.Probably the club’s bouncers coming to investigate. “We need to get out of here.”

“We can’t. Not yet,” replied Ivanova, turning back to the booth. “I need to check his pockets. He was supposed to have something for me.”

“Like this?” said Harvath, holding up the folded piece of paper Nesterov had given him.

Alexandra couldn’t believe her eyes.

“It looks like we’re going to be working together after all,” said Harvath as he grabbed her arm. “Now let’s move.”

Chapter 41

After leaving the oxygen bar and retrieving Harvath’s backpack, Scot and Alexandra looked for a place to rest and decide what their next move would be. The Hotel Oktyabrskaya was situated in a busy neighborhood just across from St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky railway station and was a perfect place for them to hole up while they waited for morning.

Harvath grabbed a pen and a small pad of paper from next to the telephone in the bedroom and began to reexamine Nesterov’s note. After several minutes replacing the Cyrillic letters with corresponding characters from the English alphabet and rearranging bits and pieces in the lines of text, Harvath could finally read it. “Universal Transverse Mercator.”

“Mercator?As in latitude and longitude?”

“Exactly. Hours, minutes and seconds both north and east. What we’re looking at is a Geo coordinate.”

“A Geo coordinate for where? What does it point to?”

“According to his note,” replied Harvath, “somebody named Albert.”

“Ring any bells?”

“None at all,” said Alexandra.

Harvath set the note aside. “Then the first thing we need to do is to pinpoint those coordinates.”

“There’s a twenty-four-hour internet café in St. Petersburg calledQuo Vadis. All we’d have to do is get on line with one of their computers and find a web site where we can enter in the coordinates.”