by Vince Flynn
“I can’t calm down as long as that man is above ground.” Rickman started coughing and it wasn’t long before a trickle of blood began to run down the corner of his swollen mouth.
Durrani couldn’t believe the doctor wasn’t here. “Just one minute,” Durrani said, holding up a finger and retreating from the room. He ignored Rickman’s coughing and moved quickly down the hall and into the living room. “Get Dr. Bhutani here immediately. I am extremely disappointed that you ignored my orders.”
Kassar looked up from his magazine and said, “He refused to let me call a doctor and he was doing fine until you got here and upset him.”
“One of these days,” Durrani said, shaking his fist, “you are going to push me too far.”
“You may get rid of me any time you like.”
“Just get Dr. Bhutani and get him fast.”
Kassar set down the magazine and stabbed out his cigarette in the large copper ashtray in the middle of the table. He stood and said, “I will get Dr. Bhutani, but as I said, I like the man. If you decide he is a liability at some point you will have to find someone else to do your dirty work.”
“Fine,” Durrani snapped. “Just get him.”
“And I heard what you two were talking about.”
“What?”
“Rapp.”
Durrani was exasperated. He didn’t want to talk right now, he wanted Kassar to get the doctor. “What about him.”
“Put it out of your mind.”
“Put what out of my mind?”
“Killing him, or at least asking me to kill him.”
“I don’t know when you got the idea that we were equals. I give the orders and you follow them.”
Kassar gave a nod of mutual understanding. “You have made that clear. I am a contract employee. You have me on a retainer and if at any point you are not satisfied with my performance, my contract will be terminated. That goes both ways.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No,” Kassar said tersely. “I’m simply trying to stop you from doing something stupid. Leave Mr. Rapp alone and hope that he never discovers your hand in this.”
“Are you afraid of him?” Durrani asked mockingly.
Kassar pulled out his phone and began searching for Dr. Bhutani’s number. “I respect the man and his abilities and you should as well. If you are foolish enough to try to kill him again, you’re going to have to find someone other than me. Someone who is reckless enough to think he can take him.”
Chapter 44
Langley, Virginia
Kennedy reviewed the final edited version for the eighth time. The assault on her conscience was not quite as bad as it had been on the first or second viewing. The impact had lessened a degree or two, which made her wonder how many times she’d have to watch it before she was completely desensitized to the horror. She knew that would never happen, but there was a part of her brain that wished it could be that simple.
The internal drive from the camcorder provided exactly two hours of footage. Two hours of the most brutal, dehumanizing violence Kennedy had ever witnessed, and she was not unaware that things like this happened. She had in fact seen similar tapes before. Saddam Hussein had tapes like this all over his palaces. Those tapes never required more than a minute or two of viewing as analysts sifted through them to see if there was any actionable intelligence. Kennedy was then brought individual snippets to view.
This time she had forced herself to watch the entire two hours. She’d done it on the flight back from Bagram. The morning after Hayek had shown them the video they received word that Hubbard’s body had been discovered in a warehouse of an industrial park on the outskirts of Jalalabad. The cause of death was a single bullet to the head. Mike Nash had approached her midmorning and told her that she needed to get back to headquarters. Kennedy was reluctant, but Nash was forceful, telling her that with Rickman and Hubbard dead, the worst of the crisis had passed. She was needed back in D.C., where there would be a lot of important people asking questions. They all knew it would get ugly, and Kennedy knew Nash was right. She needed to be in Washington, so she left Nash behind to help Schneeman manage the cleanup.
Kennedy had been trained to accept the more difficult aspects of her job, but she was still human. Watching Rickman beg his captors to stop was one of the most heart-wrenching things she’d ever experienced. The ugly specter of the outcome hung over the entire thing. There was no surprise ending, no hope that SEALs or Delta Force commandos would burst into the room and gun down the two interrogators. She’d seen the ending first, which made watching it all that much harder. All the relief she’d felt knowing that her secrets were now safe with the death of Rickman quickly transformed into a crippling guilt that she’d found solace in the death of someone she was responsible for.
Rapp, as always, had been able to look right through her and know what she was thinking. Somewhere over Europe, in the middle of the night, Kennedy looked down the fuselage of the G550 and decided that everyone was either sleeping or trying to sleep. She decided it was time to watch the interrogation in its entirety. She opened her laptop and began watching Rickman’s final two hours of life. She cried for most of it. Somewhere near the end Rapp came up on her left shoulder and closed her laptop. She took off her headphones.
He sat down across from her, leaned forward, and said, “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
Kennedy tried to compose herself, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. “I had to watch it. I need to know what he gave up.”
Rapp shook his head in a slow, disapproving way. “That’s not true and you know it. You can’t make out half of what he says in a quiet room . . . up here forty thousand feet you might be able decipher 20 percent. The audio needs to be cleaned up, and that’s what they’re doing at Langley right now. By the time we land you’ll have a detailed transcript of everything he said. Twenty-four hours after that you’ll have a damage assessment from your top people, and we’ll deal with it, but there is no reason to watch that other than to beat yourself up.”
“Thomas always told me I needed to understand just how rough things could get in the field.”
Thomas was Thomas Stansfield, Kennedy’s mentor and her predecessor. Rapp thought highly of the man, but there were times where he wondered if Kennedy didn’t try a little too hard to live up to Stansfield and his legend. “Being detached has never been a problem of yours. Don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just part of the job.”
“It’s a part I don’t like.”
“It’s a part none of us like, but we move on.” Rapp grabbed her hand and said, “Someone I respect told me once to take a little time to grieve and then get my shit together and get back in the game.”
“Stan?”
Rapp nodded. The tough, no-nonsense Stan Hurley was famous for telling people to suck it up.
“And if I can’t?”
“Then you go see our favorite shrink.”
Kennedy spun her chair and looked out across the tree-laden landscape of the Potomac River Valley. She hadn’t made an appointment with Dr. Lewis yet, but she would have to. She was going to need some help sorting through all of this guilt and relief. The problem would be finding the time. Her schedule was booked solid with meetings that had been rescheduled because of the emergency trip to Afghanistan and fresh meetings with allies who wanted to discuss the fallout from Rickman. And then there was Congress. They wanted a briefing this afternoon and Kennedy had a little surprise for them. Hayek’s DNA samples from the torture room had brought in a match. One of the men in the video was Wafa Zadran, who had spent three years in Guantanamo. Several members of the Joint Intelligence Committee were harsh critics of the detention center in Cuba and had made a platform out of lecturing the CIA and the Pentagon that Gitmo was a recruiting tool for terrorists. This particular group of politicians fell into the dangerous mindset that Islamic radicals thought, acted and behaved like anyone else,
and if you were simply nice to them they would be nice to you in return. In its mildest form, this type of this was naïve, and in its harshest form it was extremely narcissistic. Either way, it was wrong and did nothing to help fight Islamic terrorism. Zadran was yet another example of their failed and shortsighted policy, but Kennedy knew these politicians all too well. They would never accept responsibility for what they’d done.
There was a soft knock on the door and then a woman in her mid-fifties entered. It was Betty Walner, the CIA’s director of the Office of Public Affairs. “Everything is ready. Do I have your authorization to release the clip?”
The clip was their solution to the stampede of panicked agents and assets. Chuck O’Brien, the director of the National Clandestine Service, had advocated the idea. As O’Brien put it, “Dead men don’t tell secrets. This will put an end to it.”
Kennedy was averse to the idea at first. The CIA didn’t like making sensitive things public, and this was about as sensitive as it could get. Her mind had been pretty much made up for her when the terrorists decided to release a second edited clip of Rickman’s beating. It became obvious that they were going to try to milk Rickman’s interrogation to make it seem as if he was still alive. O’Brien’s idea became the toaster in the bathwater. Release the clip of Rickman’s death and short-circuit the entire game. There was also a serious opportunity to embarrass the Taliban by showing the execution of the two interrogators by one of their own. It would make them look like rank amateurs.
“Yes, the White House signed off on it,” Kennedy said, reaching for her cup of tea.
“I’ve already received more than a few requests for interviews with you.”
“I’m too busy right now.”
“I know you are, but you’re going to need to make some statements. First about Rickman and Hubbard and their service to our country. You have to do that.”
Kennedy nodded. “I will at some point.”
“It needs to be today.”
Kennedy didn’t take it personally. Walner was just trying to do her job. “I’ll have something prepared by the end of the day.”
“And it would really help if you’d do a sit-down with a half dozen or so reporters.”
“Off the record?”
Walner shook her head. “Not on this one, Irene. It’s too big. Have you had time to read the papers today?”
“No.”
“The hawks on the Hill are screaming bloody murder over the reintegration program in Afghanistan and all the green-on-blue violence. They’re laying all the blame on the White House, and you’re stuck in the middle. Five at the most and they’ll have you in a committee room with cameras and they’ll be asking anything they want. Your best chance is to start shaping your message right now.”
Kennedy looked down the length of her office at the small hallway that connected her office to the deputy director’s office. Stofer was leading a group of her top advisors her way. She didn’t have the energy to deal with the media right now and she wanted to hear what her advisors had to say. “Stop back in a few hours with a plan and we’ll review it,” she said to Walner.
Walner left and Kennedy got up with her cup of tea and moved over to the seating area, which was composed of one long couch with its back to the window, a rectangular, glass coffee table, and four chairs, two across from the couch and one at each end of the coffee table. Kennedy took her normal seat and set her cup of tea on the table. “So where do we stand?” she asked her advisers.
The director of the Clandestine Service looked at Stofer and then Rapp and cleared his throat. “Irene, none of us are taking this well. It sucks, but all things considered, Rick dying is not a bad outcome. I know it sounds harsh, but it’s the reality of our business.”
“So this is your glass-is-half-full pep talk?”
O’Brien looked a bit sheepish. “I’m not proud of, it but if that’s the way you want to look at, that’s fine with me.” He nervously twisted the gold band on his wedding-ring finger and added, “It could have been a hundred times worse.”
Kennedy took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Remember Buckley?” O’Brien said in an ominous tone. Bill Buckley was the CIA’s station chief in Beirut who was kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1984.
Kennedy remembered Buckley. He was a friend of her parents. After his kidnapping and subsequent torture his interrogators beat information out of him until they’d discovered his entire network of spies and assets. One by one those people simply disappeared or were found dead. The disaster crippled the CIA for more than a decade in the region. “I imagine we’ve all spent a good deal of time thinking about Bill this week.” She looked at her tea for a moment and admitted, “You’re right, it could have been a lot worse, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel very good right now.”
“I hate to sound harsh,” O’Brien said in his deep voice, “but Rick probably welcomed this. After what he went through . . .” O’Brien shook his head, “I wouldn’t want to see my worst enemy have to endure that.”
Rapp didn’t know if it was his head injury or if he’d always thought like this, but he was not comfortable with all of the emotions that everyone was wearing on their sleeves. This was CIA, and more precisely, the Clandestine Service. The department were filled with bad asses from every branch of the military. They were the risk takers, the ones who were sent in to do the dirty work. You could try to soften torture and call it enhanced interrogation measures, but Rapp had used more than enhanced interrogation measures and so had Rickman. It was the world they lived in. It sucked that Rickman had to endure that kind of abuse, but they were professionals. There was also something else bothering him that he couldn’t put his finger on. It was a feeling that something wasn’t right, that things didn’t add up.
“How’s your head?”
Rapp looked up to see Kennedy studying him. He felt fine, just a little tired. “Not bad.”
Her gaze narrowed and she said, “You looked like you were in pain.”
“No . . . just thinking about something.” Rapp leaned forward and brought his hands together, and then, deflecting Kennedy, asked, “So where are we with this idiot from the FBI?”
“You’ll be interested to know that Scott saw him take a little ride with our old friend Senator Ferris last night.”
“Do we have audio?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Do I need to worry about this guy?”
Kennedy shook her head. “He has a meeting this morning with Director Miller. We’ve already discussed the matter and Miller assures me Agent Wilson will no longer be a problem.”
“Good,” Rapp said, and then, changing gears, asked, “And the transcript? I heard Rick threw them a curveball or two.”
Stofer opened a black leather briefing folder. “That’s right. He tossed out a few names . . . the names of people who as far as I know do not work for us.”
“Who?” Kennedy asked.
Stofer adjusted his reading glasses and said, “Aleksei Garin, SVR Directorate S.” Stofer whistled. “That’s going to be a tough one to swallow.”
“I’m not sure anyone over there has the balls to confront Aleksei. He’s not afraid to put bullets in people’s heads.”
Everyone agreed and then Stofer said, “Shahram Jafari, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Another tough one to swallow, but they’re so damn paranoid they might make Jafari’s life miserable— at least for a while. They’ll be turning themselves inside out trying to find out if Jafari is a traitor. The last one isn’t so clean. He identified Nadeem Ashan with the ISI. He doesn’t work for us per se, but we consider him a valuable ally.”
“Why would Rick throw Ashan’s name in the mix?” Rapp asked.
O’Brien poured himself a cup of coffee and said, “It could have been the first name that popped into his head. Anything to stop the pain. You know how it goes.”
Rapp did, but Rickman was smarter than that. H
e would have had a prearranged list in his head. “We should to look into Rick’s relationship with Ashan. See if there’s anything there.”
“We’re already on it,” Stofer said.
The main door to the office opened and Stan Hurley entered. “Sorry I’m late. What did I miss?”
Rapp looked at his mentor as he moved across the large office with his smooth amble. For a seventy-plus-year old with terminal cancer he sure didn’t act like it. Hurley’s gait was the only thing about him that was smooth. He was a hard man, with hard edges, a hard personality, and a craggy disposition. This was the first time Rapp had seen him since learning he had cancer. For a split second he was about to stand to greet Hurley, maybe even give him a hug, but the reaction lost steam as quickly as it had come on. Hurley wasn’t a hugger. He didn’t like people touching him. He called it an institutional hazard. So instead Rapp gave him a short nod of recognition.
Kennedy and Stofer quickly filled Hurley in on what he’d missed. When they were done O’Brien filled the dead air by saying, “Irene, Betty wants me to say some things to the press. A few comments about Rick and Hub and their sacrifice.”
Kennedy nodded slowly. “That’d be nice. Thank you.”
No one spoke for a long moment and eventually all eyes turned to Rapp, who was clutching and unclutching his hands as if he were doing some new-age stress reduction exercise. Stofer spoke first, “Mitch, what’s wrong?”
Rapp wasn’t sure this was the time, but he knew it was better to speak his mind now. “I’m sorry to spoil the party here, but something’s not right.”
“What’s not right?” Kennedy asked.
“We’re all breathing a big sigh of relief when I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being set up.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” O’Brien said. “Rick’s dead.”
Rapp wasn’t prepared to refute that point, but neither was he convinced that Rickman was no longer of this world. “I was at the safe house,” Rapp said, remembering the four dead bodyguards. “It was an extremely precise takedown. The kind of op we’d be proud of,” he said, looking at Hurley. “A state-of-the-art security system taken offline without our watchers at Langley having any idea, four bullets, four dead bodyguards, and not a shot more . . . all suppressed. The safe is opened, not cracked, and Rick’s laptop, files, cash, and God only knows what else goes missing. And not a witness to any of it.”