The Destroyed Read Online Free PDF

but just as Nate passed him, the monk grabbed him from behind and twisted him around, intending to knock Nate to the ground.
    Nate was ready for it. Since the first moment he’d seen the monk, he knew the man would not simply back down. There was a roughness to him, a spark in his eye, and a set to his stance that spoke of a life not unfamiliar with violence.
    Nate shifted his weight, bringing his shoulder under the monk’s chest then heaving him upward and tossing the man to the side. Freed, he continued toward the temple.
    But the monk was not through with him. Before Nate had gone ten feet, the man came at him again, slamming Nate in the back and knocking him off the path into a knee-high, white stone fence.
    Off-balanced, Nate jumped as best he could over the obstruction, scraping his left shin on the top, but maintaining his footing as he landed on the other side. He whirled around, sure that the monk would come at him again.
    The man hit Nate in the chest like a linebacker, and together they fell onto the ground with a thud. A dull ache throbbed for a moment in the upper left of Nate’s chest. About nine months earlier he’d been shot there. The wound had healed well, and he’d done everything he could to regain the strength he’d had before, but on occasion, the injury would still remind him of its presence.
    The monk wrapped a leg over Nate’s waist, and attempted to pin the cleaner in place. With all his strength, Nate pushed the man to the side and spun after him.
    “Nate! Daeng! Enough.”
    Both men stopped struggling, and looked over at the man standing twenty feet away.
    “Get up,” Jonathan Quinn said. “You’re making fools of yourselves.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
     
    I N THE EARLY hours of the morning on Mila’s first day in the Swedish capital, she had set up a camera aimed at the door of an apartment building in Södermalm, an island neighborhood just south of the center of Stockholm. Over the next two days, she’d kept track of the comings and goings, something easily done given that the building only had three units.
    But it was now the third day, the day she needed to make her move. She checked the video feed on her phone again. Still quiet. The most activity had been just after seven a.m., when two people had left within a few minutes of each other, but in the four hours since nine o’clock, the door had remained closed.
    “Come on, you idiot,” she whispered to herself. “You’ve got to eat sometime.”
    If the man she was waiting for didn’t leave the building soon, she would have to find another place to watch from. She’d already been at the café longer than she should have been, having stretched her solo lunch to nearly an hour and a half. Every time her waitress walked by, the woman gave Mila a look that said, “You’re still here?”
    Mila picked up her coffee cup. At most it had two sips left. She took the first, thought Screw it , and drank it all. The last thing she wanted was for people to remember her, something that was probably too late in the case of the waitress. She put enough kronor on the table to cover the check and an appropriate tip, then left.
    The place she was surveilling was three blocks away, a four-story building divided into three apartments—one on the ground floor, one on the floor above it, and the third taking up the top two. That top apartment was the one she was interested in.
    The man who lived there was named Mats Hagen. He was a freelance tech, who, for a sizeable fee, could obtain almost any information a client might ask for as long as it was on a computer somewhere. When Mila had known him several years earlier, he’d been fairly new to the scene. He took on work wherever he could get it, meaning he was on the road most of the time. Since then, he’d apparently established a reputation that now allowed him to do most jobs from home.
    After the fiasco in Tanzania, Mila had spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what her