Without a solid lead, Harvath wasn’t keen on driving around Rome, hoping to get lucky. All the man’s belongings were in this room. They had every reason to believe he was coming back. Whether that was in five minutes or five hours there was no way to tell.
In the meantime, though, they could begin moving guests and isolating this end of the hotel. Already the room next door and the one across the hall were empty. If there was a shootout, or worse, they’d be glad they had minimized collateral damage as much as possible.
While Harvath remained in the room, Argento went back downstairs to speak with the desk clerk and wait on the tactical team.
Pulling out his phone, Harvath scrolled through to see if he had received any messages. There was one from Haney, letting him know that he and Gage had made it back to the United States and . . .
Harvath’s thoughts were interrupted by a sound at the door. Argento would have knocked. This was not a knock. It sounded as if someone had started to dip his room key into the card reader, had second thoughts, and had suddenly stopped.
Picking up his pistol, he began to move off the bed when a hail of bullets tore through the door. Rolling hard onto the floor, he returned fire.
He ran his H&K dry, ejected the spent magazine, and inserted a fresh one. Depressing the slide release, he focused on the door and waited for another round of incoming fire, but it didn’t come.
Pulling the alarm clock off the nightstand, he yanked the cord out of the wall, tossed it at the door, and waited. Nothing happened.
Hugging the floor, he crawled over to the door. Reaching up, he released the handle and opened it just far enough to get his fingers in between the door and the jamb. Taking a deep breath, he pulled it the rest of the way open.
From the other end of the hall, there was another barrage of gunfire, but it all went high, where the man had expected him to be.
Harvath returned fire, hitting him in both legs. He heard him cry out and fall back into the stairwell.
Down in the lobby, Argento had to have heard the gunfire. Without radios, their cell phones were their only means of communication.
Harvath pulled his out to call him and tell him what was going on, but he saw that Argento had already texted him.
I’m coming up south stairwell.
He couldn’t let him do that. That was where the injured shooter was. Argento would run right into him.
Pushing into the hall, he hit the Dial button on his phone as he rushed toward the south stairs with his gun up and ready.
Before he could get there, the whole building shook with two horrible explosions.
They had come from the stairwell. Without even opening the door and seeing the destruction, he knew what had happened—a pair of grenades had been detonated.
Bracing for gunfire, or even more grenades, Harvath flung open the stairwell door. One flight down, bleeding badly from both legs, was the man they had been chasing.
It took everything Harvath had not to finish the job and put a bullet in him right there. “Hands!” he yelled. “Show me your hands! Do it now!”
Slowly, the man complied.
With his gun trained on him, Harvath descended the stairs and kicked his pistol away. When he was sure he wasn’t hiding a live grenade, ready to blow them both up, he rolled the man onto his stomach, flex-cuffed his hands behind his back, and searched him for other weapons.
Confident that he was clean, Harvath peered over the railing. There, halfway between floors, was Argento. The grenades had torn him apart. Harvath had no words.
From the ground floor, he could hear the tactical team, finally on scene, entering the stairwell.
CHAPTER 91
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* * *
RURAL VIRGINIA
THREE WEEKS LATER
Harvath stood at the windows of the Old Man’s study and looked out. The weather was already changing. There wouldn’t be an Indian Summer this year. Winter would be here soon, and by all accounts, it was going to be long, hard, and cold.
He had stayed in Italy long enough to clean everything up and attend Argento’s funeral. Lovett put on a tough show, but it was obvious that his death disturbed her deeply.
If there was anything good that had come out of it, it was that the attack on St. Peter’s had been averted. Once they had the cell phone used to communicate with the other mortar teams, the ROS waited for the next communications window to open up and then tricked the terrorists into leaving their phones on. While they thought they were awaiting further instructions about the attack, the ROS was zeroing in on their locations.
The terrorists did not go peacefully. Many of them fought and were killed. Three ROS operatives were injured. The number of lives that were saved, though, was incalculable.
Once Tursunov was stable, the Italians agreed to let Harvath have a short window to interrogate him. He flew Vella in and let him do the work. With the information they gleaned, they were able to roll up high-level ISIS members across Europe and even in the United States. He turned out to be full of useful information. They were even able to locate the chemist who had helped assemble the shells for the St. Peter’s attack.
Harvath would have been happy to take any or all of them out, but they were considered of significant intelligence value. What’s more, the countries in which many of them had committed their grisly crimes wanted them to stand trial.
The families and victims needed closure. He understood. Though, if they had known what he was willing to do, he was certain many of them would have quietly chosen to have him handle things.
Part of handling things his way had been to get Staelin, Barton, and Morrison to pump Vottari full of Rohypnol and leave him naked in a cheap hotel room on Sicily. It wasn’t the justice he deserved, but that had been Harvath’s agreement with Argento, and he intended to honor it.
After a seventy-two-hour hold, the ROS operatives in Palermo blindfolded Ragusa, Naya the bartender, as well as the two bodyguards and dropped them in the middle of the street in front of the Black Cat.
Upon returning home, Bob McGee and Lydia Ryan had requested a private debriefing with Harvath. They met, as they had previously, at the blue lockhouse.
After taking them through everything that had happened, Ryan then explained all that she and the Old Man had been wrestling with.
Susan Viscovich had spilled the beans on Andrew Jordan. Working with Jake Fleischer, Nicholas had been able to connect Jordan and a ton of offshore accounts to Paul Page and Page Partners, Ltd.
In fact, they had been able to identify two other sources inside the Agency that Page had been buying information from without Jordan’s knowledge.