by Vince Flynn
After five days Hurley asked Rapp to take a walk. “Have you gone over the last op in your head?”
“You mean Istanbul?”
“How many ops have you been on?” Hurley asked him with a wake-up expression on his face.
“Sorry,” Rapp said. “Yeah … I’ve thought about it.”
“Anything you would have done different?”
Rapp stared at the ground while they walked. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“The fact that you acted on your own is behind us. I already told you that. Part of my job is make sure you get better. What I’m asking you is a tactical question. When you look back on what happened in the park that morning, once you decided to kill him, is there anything that you would have done different?”
“I don’t know,” Rapp answered honestly. “It all just kind of happened.”
Hurley nodded, having been there before. “That’s good and bad, kid. It might be that you’re a natural at this. Ice in your veins, that kind of shit. Or … you got lucky. Only time will tell, but there’s one thing you did that jumps out as being pretty stupid.”
“What’s that?” Rapp asked. Hurley had his full attention.
“I read the police report.”
Rapp didn’t know why he was surprised, but he was.
“The shot to the heart … it was point-blank. Literally. The report was conclusive. The muzzle of the weapon was in direct contact with Sharif’s coat.”
Rapp nodded. He was there. He remembered it well.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I wanted to kill him.”
Hurley stopped and faced him. “Kid, I’ve seen you shoot. You’re not as good as me, but you’re damn good and you keep getting better. You don’t think you could have popped him from say ten feet?”
Rapp didn’t answer.
“Why did you sit down next to him?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Bullshit,” Hurley said with a smile. “You allowed it to get personal, didn’t you?”
Rapp thought back to that morning, not even a week ago. The feeling came back. That split-second decision to sit next to Sharif so he could look into his eyes. He slowly nodded. “Yeah … I guess I did.”
Hurley’s jaw tightened while he processed the admission. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you there haven’t been times … times that I took a certain amount of joy in sending some of these scumbags to paradise … but you have to be really careful. Pick the right environment. Never in public like you did. He could have had a gun, somebody could have seen you sitting next to him … a lot of things could have gone wrong.”
“I know.”
“Remember, in public, the key is to look natural. That’s why I showed you the shoulder holster technique. That’s why we practice it. You look at your watch and no one thinks twice about it. You’re a guy checking the time. You sit down on a park bench that close to another guy and someone might notice. Just enough to cause him to look twice, and that’s all it might take. The next thing you know the carabinieri are chasing you down the street shooting at you.” Hurley gave him a dead-serious look. “Trust me, I’ve been there.” Hurley shuddered at the memory.
“What?” Rapp asked.
“You ever been to Venice?”
“Yeah.”
“The canals.” Hurley made a diving motion with his hands.
“You dove into one of those canals?” Rapp asked while recalling their putrid shade of green.
“And this was thirty years ago. They’re a lot cleaner now than they were back then.”
The condo was raw exposed brick with heavy timber beams secured to each other by sturdy iron brackets with big bolts. The floors were wide plank, more than likely pine, stained light to add a little brightness in contrast to the dark mud-red bricks. The furniture was utilitarian. Grays and blues. Wood and metal frames. Long sleek lines and the kind of fabrics that could be cleaned. Pure bachelor efficiency. It was a corner unit, so it had two small balconies, one off the master bedroom and another off the living room. There was a second bedroom and a loft space with a desk and pullout couch. When they arrived Hurley had everything prepared.
The dining-room table was covered with a sheet. Hurley carefully pulled it back to reveal what he’d pieced together in three short days. The target was a banker by the name of Hans Dorfman. He looked innocent enough, but then again, to Rapp, most bankers did. Dorfman’s crime, as Hurley stated it, was that he’d decided to get into bed with the wrong people.
“You’re probably wondering,” Hurley asked, “why a well-educated man, who was raised a Christian, would decide to help a bunch of Islamic whack jobs wage terrorism.”
Richards looked down at a black-and-white photo of the sixty-three-year-old banker and said, “Yep.”
“Well, officially it’s none of your goddamn business. When we’re given an assignment it’s not our place to question … right?”
Both Rapp and Richards gave halfhearted nods.
“Wrong,” Hurley said. “I don’t care what anyone tells you, HQ can fuck up and they can fuck up big-time. Beyond that, you’ll run into the occasional yahoo who doesn’t have a clue how things work in the real world. When you get a kill assignment, you’d better question it, and you’d better be damn careful. We don’t do collateral damage. Women and children are strictly off limits.”
Rapp had heard this countless times from Hurley and the other instructors. “But people make mistakes.”
“They do,” he agreed, “and the more difficult the job, the greater the chance that you’ll make a mistake, but if you want to make it out of this one day with your soul intact, follow my advice on this. Question the assignments they give you. We’re not blind—or robots.”
Richards was still looking at the photo of the banker. “Stan, are you trying to tell us this guy isn’t guilty?”
“This guy,” Hurley waved his right hand from one side of the table to the other. “Hell no. This Nazi piece of shit is guilty as hell. In fact, guys like this piss me off more than the ones who shoot back. This prick lives in his fancy house, takes two months off every year, goes to the nicest places, and sleeps like a fucking baby every night. He thinks it’s no big deal that he helps these scumbags move their money around. No,” he shook his head, “this is one of those times when I will enjoy pulling the trigger.”
CHAPTER 31
HURLEY explained to them that the process wasn’t so much about finding the best option as it was eliminating the bad ones. That is, if you had the time to go through all the alternatives. After two days together, Hurley made the decision and they both agreed. Sunday night was the perfect time to make their move, and it would happen at the house. It was located thirty-five minutes outside of Hamburg, a nice wooded one-acre lot. Rapp was pretty sure Hurley had known from the get-go that this would be the appointed hour, but he wanted some push back. He wanted Rapp and Richards to tear into his plans and make sure there wasn’t a better time to go after Dorfman. For two days that’s pretty much all Rapp and Richards did.
For Rapp one of the more enlightening exchanges happened when he asked the salty Hurley, “What about the dogs?”
“Dogs,” Hurley said with a devilish smile, “are a double-edged sword. Take this fuck stick, for example.” Hurley pointed to Dorfman’s black-and-white photograph. Hurley had taken a black marker and drawn a Hitler mustache on him the night before. “He’s an anal retentive Nazi prick if I’ve ever seen one. Wants complete order in his life, so he gets two poodles … why?” He looked at Rapp and Richards.
“Because they don’t shed,” Richards answered.
“Exactly. Hans is a neat freak. Wants everything just so … wakes up the same time Monday through Friday, and Saturdays and Sundays he allows himself one extra hour of sack time. He thinks he’s too smart for the religion his parents raised him on, so on Sundays instead of going to church, he reads two or three newspapers, studies his Value Lines or whatever it is that a
German banker studies, and he takes his dogs for a walk along the river and comes back and takes a nap. He has pot roast, mashed potatoes, and green beans for dinner, watches some crappy TV on the couch, and then lets the dogs out one last time at ten o’clock and then it’s lights out.”
Richards looked at the surveillance info. “How do you know all these details? I don’t see any of it here.”
Hurley smiled. “This isn’t my first banker.”
Rapp set that thought aside for a second and asked, “But what about the dogs?”
“Oh, yeah. The dogs. The dogs run the show. They need to be let out four times a day. Every morning at seven on the dot, a couple more times during the day, and then one more time before they turn in. What does he have to do every time before he lets them out?”
“Turn the alarm off,” Rapp answered.
“You two see any alarms at the lake house?”
“No,” Rapp answered.
“That’s because they can make you lazy. You ever see me lock my hounds up?”
“No.”
“What good does a dog do you if he’s locked in his kennel?”
“If he’s a guard dog, not much.”
“That’s right.” Hurley looked at Rapp and said, “I bet I can guess your next question. You think we should take him while he’s walking the dogs by the river?”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“There’s three reasons why I would prefer to avoid that option. The first is that it’s harder to control things in a public setting. Not to say we couldn’t do it. We might get lucky and have no witnesses like you did in Istanbul, but that can’t be guaranteed. But two and three are why the park won’t work. I need to talk to him and a public park is hardly the place for the kind of conversation we’re going to have.”
This came as a complete surprise to Rapp and Richards. Richards asked, “Why?”
“I’ll explain it later.”
“What’s the third reason?” Rapp asked.
“We can’t let anyone know he’s dead before 9:00 A.M. Monday.”
“Why?” Richards asked.
Rapp answered for him. “He’ll tell us when we’re done.”
The Dorfman file was shredded and burned late Saturday night. By Sunday morning the ashes were cool enough that they could be scooped into a bag and thrown down the garbage chute. They spent two hours that afternoon sanitizing the condo. If they had to come back they could, but Hurley wanted to avoid doing so if possible. At eight in the evening they packed the last of the gear into the trunk of the rented four-door Mercedes sedan and left.
Rapp was the wheel man for the evening. Hurley and Richards were going in. It occurred to him that he was being punished for taking the initiative in Istanbul, but what could he say? Someone had to stay with the car. On the drive down the E22 Hurley went over the plan one last time. Every minute or so, he threw a question at Rapp or Richards asking them how they would react if this or that thing did not go as planned. Traffic was almost nonexistent, so they made it in just thirty minutes.
It was a dark, cold, windy night with temperatures expected to dip near freezing. They were all dressed in jeans and dark coats. Hurley and Richards also had black watch caps on their heads. The neighbor behind Dorfman was a widower with cats, but no dogs. The plan was to access his property from her backyard. At nine they did a final radio check and then at nine-fifteen Rapp turned the silver Mercedes onto the winding country road. The dome light was set to off. Rapp downshifted and coasted to a near stop several hundred feet from the widower’s house. Richards and Hurley stepped from the slowly moving vehicle, carefully nudged their doors closed, and then disappeared into the trees. Rapp continued. A little less than a minute later he turned onto Dorfman’s street and did a slow drive-by. The house was set back from the street about seventy-five feet. The front of the house was dark, but faint lights could be seen beyond what they knew was the living room and dining room.
Rapp pressed the transmit button on the secure Motorola radio, “All’s clear up front.”
Hurley and Richards found their way through the overgrown property of Dorfman’s neighbor with relative ease. This was not Hurley’s first trip, and he didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for not telling the new recruits. They did not need to know everything. He had personally put together the surveillance package on Dorfman eight months earlier. The stuff about the dogs he knew from many years of experience, and as far as bankers being anal retentive, it was a fairly accurate statement. The stuff about Dorfman having left the church that his parents raised him in and being a Nazi prick, he’d learned by keeping an eye on the man for close to two years.
To run an effective organization you need money. Hurley and Kennedy had been working overtime trying to map out how these various groups moved their money around the globe, and they had decided Dorfman was the key. In this, the ultimate asymmetric war, where they could not use even a fraction of the might of the United States military, they needed to get creative. If they couldn’t openly bomb the terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley, then maybe there was another way to hurt them.
Hurley and Richards took up position near the back door at nine-thirty. If they had missed him somehow, Hurley was prepared to cut the phone line and break in. That option presented two problems, however. If he busted the door in, the security system would be tripped, and although an alarm would not be received at the monitoring station, the house’s siren would begin to wail and would likely arouse the attention of one of the neighbors. Dorfman also owned a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle. That Dorfman might react quickly enough to stop the intruders was unlikely, but Hurley didn’t like unlikely.
The back light, above the kitchen door, was turned on at ten-oh-one. Hurley was crouched closest to the door on one knee and Richards was right behind him. From where he was positioned, Hurley could hear the chimes on the keypad as the digits were entered. The door opened, and the two standard poodles bounded out the door and onto the patio. Hurley had to trust Richards to do his job and stay focused on his. He sprang from his position and put his shoulder into the door before it could be closed. He hit it with enough force that it bounced back and hit an unsuspecting Dorfman in the face.
Over his shoulder he heard the dogs begin to growl. He grabbed the door by the edge and, looking through the glass, came face-to-face with a stunned Dorfman. The growling had turned to barking and Hurley resisted the urge to turn around to see how close they were to taking a bite out of his ass. Instead he pulled the door toward him and then smashed it into Dorfman’s face. There was a scramble of nails and paws on the brick patio and then the welcome sound of compressed air forcing a projectile down a muzzle. One shot and then a second, each followed by short yelps and then some whimpering. Hurley saw the light switches to his left. There were three of them. He raked his silencer down the wall, knocking all three into the off position and relegating them to semidarkness. Quickly, he slid through the door, partially closed it, and stuffed the silencer into the shocked and open mouth of Dorfman.
CHAPTER 32
THE Mercedes was the same color and model as the one Dorfman drove. Rapp cruised the neighborhood listening to Hurley and Richards with one ear and the police scanner with the other. His German was nonexistent, but as Hurley had pointed out, the only thing he needed to listen for was a car being dispatched to Dorfman’s address. No car was dispatched, so Rapp pulled the rented Mercedes into the driveway and turned around in the small car park so it was facing out. Hurley reasoned that if any of the neighbors saw the car they would assume it was Herr Dorfman’s.
Rapp walked around the side of the house to the backyard and helped Richards carry the second poodle down to the basement. A small dart with red fins was still stuck in the animal’s rib cage. It rose and fell with the animal’s heavy breathing. Rapp had been tempted to say something to Hurley two days earlier when he informed them that they were going to use a tranquilizer gun to take out the dogs, but he kept his mouth shut. He kn
ew that Hurley loved his dogs, but still, they were going to kill a man tonight. From a big-picture standpoint, it didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Hurley’s way was going to take a little more effort and would not silence the dogs as quickly. Hurley knew what Rapp was thinking and noted that the surveillance report said that the dogs usually barked when they were let out of the house. Especially at night. It wasn’t as if they were storming a terrorist stronghold. It was just a German couple in their fifties, so Rapp kept his tactical opinion to himself.
Rapp was now looking down at one of the Germans. Frau Dorfman was blindfolded, gagged, hog-tied, and shivering from fright. He glanced at the knots Richards had made. They were well done. Her wrists and ankles were bound and attached with a length of rope. The only reason Rapp knew anything about them was that his little brother had been fascinated by many things as a child, but knots and magic were the two that became his passion. After their father died, Rapp saw it as his duty to take an interest in Steven’s various hobbies, even if they weren’t his.
The basement had been finished as a rec room with a bar and a small pool table. Richards had been nice enough to deposit the big German woman on an area rug. Rapp saw a blanket on the back of the couch. He grabbed it and paused. On the wall behind the couch was a poster-sized photo of Dorfman and his two dogs. He was holding a trophy and the two dogs were licking his face. Rapp covered the woman with the blanket. It was going to be a long night for her, and an even longer morning, but unlike her husband, she would live. Rapp grabbed the phone next to the couch and yanked the cord from the wall. He quickly coiled the cord around the phone as Richards reappeared from the utility room flashing him the all-clear sign. They were not to speak a word in front of the woman. Rapp climbed the stairs to the first floor, turned off the basement lights, and closed the door.
Per the plan, all of the lights had been turned off on the main floor except for the single light over the kitchen sink, as was the Dorfmans’ habit upon going to bed. Rapp walked through the formal living room, past Richards, who was keeping an eye on the front of the house. The French doors that led to the study were cracked an inch. Rapp pulled his black mask down to cover his face, entered, and closed the door behind him. Dorfman was on the floor in his light blue pajamas. His comb-over hair was all askew and his nose was bleeding. A leather reading chair had been tossed to the side and the rug pulled back to reveal a floor safe.