In the hospital room’s private bath were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, deodorant, and shaving cream. Laverna, the night nurse, had dropped them off shortly after Harvath had arrived on the morning of Tracy ’s shooting. It had been quite obvious that he had no intention of leaving. He was ready to stay for as long as it took to get her better.

Closing the door, Harvath took off his clothes and turned on the shower. When the water was good and hot, he climbed inside and let it pound against his body. When he closed his eyes, pieces of his nightmare came back and he fought to banish them to the far reaches of his psyche. Scrubbing himself with a tiny bar of courtesy soap, he tried to think of something else.

It was working, but he knew the demons would be back. They’d been hovering over him every day and night since Tracy had been shot.

One of the doctors who’d been standing in the room when Harvath came out of a particularly bad version of the dream suggested that he seek some therapy, but Harvath politely laughed him off. The doctor obviously didn’t know who he was talking to. Men in Scot’s line of work didn’t seek therapy. Who in the world could ever begin to comprehend the life he led, much less the incredible toll it had taken on him over the years?

Throwing the temperature selector all the way to cold, Harvath shocked his body awake and climbed out.

Wrapping a towel around his waist, he leaned against the sink and wiped a patch of fog from the mirror. For once in his life, he actually looked the way he felt-horrible. His normally bright blue eyes were dull and bloodshot, his handsome face drawn and haggard. His sandy brown hair, though not long by any stretch, was in need of a haircut. And though his taut, muscular five-foot-ten frame would have been the envy of men half his age, he’d barely eaten in the last five days and it was sadly undernourished.

Only once before had Harvath ever been filled with as much doubt and self-loathing as he was now.

Eighteen years ago, he had defied his father, a SEAL instructor at the Naval Special Warfare School near their home in Coronado, California. He had tried out for and been accepted to the U. S. Freestyle Ski Team. Though his father knew his son was an exceptional skier, he had wanted him to go to college after high school, not enter the world of professional athletics. Father and son were equally stubborn, and neither talked to the other for a long time afterward. It was Scot’s mother, Maureen, who managed to keep the family together. And though there was some communication between the two men, things were never really the same again. Father and son were more alike than either cared to admit, which was what made the tragedy of the elder Harvath’s death even more unbearable.

When Michael Harvath was killed in a training accident, Scot was never the same again. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his head back into competitive skiing. As much as he loved the sport, it didn’t seem that important to him anymore.

With a portion of his substantial winnings, he bought a backpack and traveled through Europe, eventually settling in Greece on a small island called Paros. There he found a job as a bartender, working for two mismatched, expat Brits. One was a former driver for a south London crime family, the other a disgruntled ex-SAS soldier. After a year, Harvath knew what he wanted to do.

He returned home and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied political science and military history. Upon graduating three years later, cum laude, he joined the Navy, eventually trying out for and being accepted to Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school (BUD/S) and a specialized program known as SQT or SEAL Qualification Training. Though the selection process and subsequent training were grueling beyond measure, his mental and physical conditioning as a world-class athlete, his refusal to ever give up on anything, and the belief that he had finally found his true calling in life propelled him forward and earned him the honor of being counted as one of the world’s most elite warriors-a U. S. Navy SEAL.

With his exceptional skiing ability, Harvath was tasked to the SEALs’ cold-weather experts, SEAL Team Two. There, despite a tragic loss on one of his first assignments, Harvath had excelled.

Eventually, he caught the attention of the members of the Navy’s famed SEAL Team Six, who helped hone his skills not only as a warrior, but also as a linguist, improving upon his rudimentary knowledge of French and teaching him Arabic.

It was while he was with Team Six that Harvath assisted a presidential security detail in Maine and caught the eye of the Secret Service. Wanting to bolster their antiterrorism expertise at the White House, they eventually succeeded in wooing him away from the Navy and up to D. C. Harvath soon distinguished himself even further, and after a short time was recommended for an above-top-secret program at the Department of Homeland Security being spearheaded by an old family friend and former deputy director of the FBI named Gary Lawlor.

The program was called the Apex Project. It was buried in a little-known branch of DHS called the Office of International Investigative Assistance, or OIIA for short. The OIIA’s overt mission was to assist foreign police, military, and intelligence agencies in helping prevent attacks against Americans and American interests abroad. In that sense, Harvath’s mission was partly in step with the official OIIA mandate. In reality, he was a very secretive dog of war enlisted post-9/11 to be unleashed by the president upon the enemies of the United States to help prevent any future terrorist attacks on America.

The rationale was that if the terrorists weren’t playing by any rules, then neither would the U. S. But because of sensitive PC biases that existed in America, which seemed to suggest our nation was the only one that should abide by the rules, the president realized that Harvath’s true mission could only be known by a key few, namely the president himself and Harvath’s boss, Gary Lawlor.

Harvath was to be backed with the full weight of the Oval Office, as well as the collective might of the U. S. military and the combined assets of the U. S. intelligence community. The program sounded fantastic on paper, but reality, especially in bureaucratic Washington, often turned out to be something else entirely.

Harvath didn’t want to think about his job now. It was because of it, because of him, that Tracy had been shot. He didn’t need the results of any investigation to tell him that. He knew it as surely as he knew that the woman lying in that hospital bed didn’t deserve any of what had happened to her.

The FBI had been able to piece together some of what had happened. They had discovered the hiding spot the shooter had used in the woods at the edge of his property. Their assessment was that whoever the assassin was, he’d dug himself in sometime during the evening, probably several hours before daylight.

The killer had left behind a shell casing with the message-That which has been taken in blood, can only be answered in blood.

There had also been the bizarre act of painting his doorframe with blood. The first run of analyses ruled out its being Tracy ’s. It had been painted there sometime during the night and had already dried before Tracy was shot.

Then there was the dog that had been placed on the doorstep as a gift in a picnic basket. Harvath had only to take one look at the thank you note that had been left with it to know who it was from. But if someone was going to target him or Tracy, why leave such a blatant calling card?

Weeks earlier, on a covert operation in Gibraltar, Harvath had saved the life of an enormous dog known as a Caucasian Ovcharka-the same breed as the one that had been left on his doorstep. The owner of the dog in Gibraltar was a contemptible little man-a dwarf, actually, who dealt in the purchase and sale of highly classified information. He had also helped plan the attack on New York. He was known simply as the Troll.