by Vince Flynn
“Good.” Rapp far preferred his old anonymity, but if some of the less-than-savory politicians in this town were afraid of him, that wasn’t such a bad thing. “Here’s the bottom line. I’ll do this, but I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to pick the targets of opportunity, and I’ll take suggestions from you and only you. If they have any suggestions of their own they can give them to you and I’ll take them under advisement, but I will hold veto power. If I think something is too risky or not important enough…I’ll pull the plug.”
“I can make them live with that. What else?”
“I’m going to handpick all my people.”
Kennedy nodded. She had assumed he would make both requests.
“And we’re going to do more than just take out known terrorists.”
“How so?” Kennedy asked curiously.
Rapp smiled. “I’ve been working on something, but I’m not ready to show you yet.”
“Would you like to give me a hint?”
“Let’s just say that I’m planning on fighting this war on more than one front, and I don’t plan on playing by anyone’s rules.”
“Like your little operation you just ran north of the border?”
Rapp nodded.
Kennedy knew him better than anyone, and that included his wife. She gave him a concerned look and said, “Let me give you some advice. Be very careful about what you do when it involves our allies. Nothing short of getting caught here in America by the FBI will get you in trouble quicker than raising the ire of one of their foreign intelligence services.”
Rapp grinned. “I don’t plan on getting caught.”
“No one ever does, Mitch.” She shook her head. “No one ever does.”
“I know…I know. But I’ve managed to get by all these years…I don’t plan on screwing up now.”
“Just be careful and move slowly.”
Rapp shook his head. “Time is a luxury we don’t have. Senator Hartsburg is a hack, but he’s right about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We have to hit them before they hit us.”
8
LONDON, ENGLAND
T he identification in his wallet said his name was Harry Smith. It was not his given name, simply a standard precaution. He’d watched the target for the last forty-eight hours, day and night. He slept after the man went to sleep and woke up before the target got out of bed. He was younger, in far better shape, and had the element of surprise on his side. He’d trained himself to last days on end with little or no sleep. He was acutely aware of his physiological needs, and this job wasn’t even close to taxing them. The job, in fact, was beginning to bore him.
The target was a Turkish financier with a penchant for high-risk ventures—especially those involving illegal arms sales. He owned several banks in his native country and held minority interests in another half dozen banks around Europe. Lately the man had been spending a lot of time in London, and the assassin had a pretty good idea why. There was barely a street corner left in the increasingly Orwellian city that wasn’t monitored by a camera. In the world of contract killers, a business where your anonymity was your currency, London was a town that was bad for business.
This particular part of London had an unusually high concentration of surveillance cameras. The Hampshire Hotel was situated on Leicester Square just a short hop from a cluster of government buildings with serious security needs. They included the National Gallery, the Ministry of Defense, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. He reasoned the Turk had picked this hotel for that very reason. The area was saturated with police and other security types. The assassin, however, was not deterred for even a second. The men and women charged with securing these sites were worried about terrorists, not businessmen. All he had to do was look the part, don the urban camouflage, and he could come and go unnoticed.
His partner didn’t quite see things his way. She wanted to turn down the job, but he had been insistent. Virtually every city of note in the world was adding security cameras by the droves. To survive in the industry they had to adapt. She preferred retirement to adaptation, but they were too young for that. Harry was thirty-two and Amanda was just thirty. Amanda was not her real name, but for the sake of operational security it was the only name he’d used for the last week. The key to longevity in their line of work was the details, little things like high-quality forgeries, dummy credit card accounts, and the discipline to stay in character whether you were alone or not.
At the current pace of business it would take another five years before they reached the financial level he deemed appropriate for retirement. They already had several million, but he was not interested in merely getting by. He got into this line of work because he was drawn to it, because he could be his own boss, and because, if he played it smart, he would make a lot of money. He had the talent, but talent alone was never enough. When the stakes were this high, skill had to be accompanied by an ardent drive—a need for perfection.
He was not only drawn to this work, he enjoyed it. Yes, he enjoyed it, and he had never admitted that to anyone, not even her. When talk turned to getting out of the business, he always stressed that they needed to make more money first, but he knew a big part of it was that he wasn’t willing to let go. His greatest fear was not of getting caught. He was too confident in his talents for that. His greatest fear was of losing her because he wouldn’t be able to walk away. Like a gambler drawn to the craps table, he had become a slave to the thrill of the hunt.
Excluding the current job there was normally an exhilaration to stalking a man that was unmatched. The sheer level of training and expertise it took to even enter the arena at this level was mind-boggling. He was an expert marksman with both the short and long barrel. He knew exactly where to stick the blade of a knife to obtain the desired result, which was usually death, but occasionally his contract called for maiming the person and nothing more. He knew how to use his fists, elbows, knees, feet, and even forehead to incapacitate or kill. He could fly both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, and he was a predatory genius when it came to surveillance and countersurveillance.
Now here he was standing across the square from the Hampshire Hotel, bored out of his mind. A $200,000 contract was on the table that he was an hour or less from fulfilling and he was yawning. He looked at the front entrance of the opulent hotel, stifled yet another yawn, and said, “Come on, fucker. Let’s get this over with.”
He spoke with a British accent, even though he wasn’t a subject. The “fucker” he was referring to traveled extensively, and he appeared to have no problem spending money. He did, however, have a problem paying his bills, which the assassin reasoned was why a price had been placed on his head. For a man who had pissed off the wrong people, he was acting unusually calm. Especially when the people he had offended were Russian Mafiosi. The assassin had been working on his Russian over the last several years, and found the language by far the most difficult of the five he spoke fluently. He did not prefer to operate in the former Soviet Union, but the old communist country and its satellites were the largest growth market in his line of work. They were ruthless bastards willing to kill anyone who screwed them on a deal no matter how illegal or legitimate it may have been. They wanted a guaranteed return on their investments, and when a deal didn’t perform, the paranoid thugs immediately jumped to the conclusion that they’d been double-crossed. He guessed that was what had happened with the Turk. He didn’t know for sure. To find that out would have involved asking a few questions, and as a general rule, he asked only what he absolutely needed to know.
He and his partner had used a medium-range parabolic microphone to listen in on the Turkish man’s phone calls as he went for his midmorning walks. The man had told a friend yesterday that the Russians were simpletons, but that they weren’t crazy enough to try to kill him in London. The comment struck the assassin as pure idiocy, and it caused him to wonder how the Turk had lasted as long as he had. The man was fifty-eight years old
and had been involved in this type of stuff for twenty-plus years. Underestimating one’s enemy was a classic tactical mistake—one that was usually born out of stupidity or arrogance or both.
He leaned against the street lamp and checked his watch, careful to keep his head tilted down. There was a camera pod mounted on the light above him. It was twenty after ten. He was dressed in business attire with a long black trench coat and fedora. His black hair had been lightened to a sandy blond, special contacts made his brown eyes appear hazel and they were further concealed by a pair of black-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. An umbrella dangled from the crook of his left arm that held a twice-folded copy of the Times. The sky was gray and looked as if it might bring rain at any moment.
Two days in a row the Turk had appeared at ten in the morning to take his walk to the park. He donned an earpiece and the entire trip, there and back, he talked on his phone and smoked cigarettes. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched, which, when one looked at his comments, was not surprising. Like the majority of the men the assassin had killed, the Turk was a man of habits. He always stayed at the Hampshire when in London, and, weather permitting, he took daily walks to St. James Park, went back to the hotel for lunch, then to the bank where he kept an office and then afternoon tea at Browns.
Something was throwing him off his normal schedule this morning and the assassin was beginning to worry. Yes, it looked like it could rain at any moment, but the weather was no different than the previous two days. There was a fine line between rushing a job and sitting on it too long. Long surveillance periods could lead to boredom, hesitancy, and sometimes inaction. They also increased the chances that someone would notice you. On the other hand, rushing a job before you had a complete sense of the overall tactical situation could be even more disastrous. Maps had to be memorized, schedules scrutinized, and multiple modes of transportation put into place. And in London one could never forget about the omnipresent security cameras.
The assassin was beginning to doubt that the Turk would show. He would either have to dispatch him when he was coming out of his afternoon tea or wait another day to kill him in the park. As he was weighing his two options the Turk stepped out under the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy of the hotel and the doorman handed him an umbrella. Pleasantries were exchanged, the Turk lit a cigarette, and he was on his way. The assassin had thought about this part very carefully. He was already positioned in front of his subject. If the police ever got around to reviewing the tapes, they would be looking for someone who had followed the Turk to the park and would in all likelihood not bother to see if someone had been in front of him every step of the way.
The assassin had also found a hole in the way the security cameras were set up. He would take a slightly different path to the park and avoid having his movements recorded. The park itself was a bit of a problem. There was usually a bobby or two loitering about, a fair amount of state workers, and one particularly pesky camera pod that was in close proximity to the spot where the hit would take place. He was disguised enough that the cameras would never get a clear shot of his face, but they could begin to build a profile. In addition to that he would prefer the act itself not to be recorded. Such footage had a way of galvanizing those who were in charge of solving violent crimes. The assassin had been struggling with this problem the day before when a solution popped into his mind.
He reached up and touched the side of a tiny wireless Motorola headset affixed to his right ear. A second later he could hear her phone ringing.
“Amanda Poole speaking.” The voice had a crisp British accent.
“Amanda, I’m going to take a walk. Would you swing by and see if our friend is going to join me?”
“I’d love to, Harry.”
The assassin rounded the corner, careful to keep his chin down. There was a tendency in his line of work to overthink things. Much of this stemmed from the fact that most of the people were either former intelligence operatives or military. In Harry’s case it was the latter. When you worked for a big government the resources were vast. Field equipment was tested and retested under every conceivable condition, billions of dollars worldwide was put into the development of new ways to communicate and better ways to encrypt. The problem as Harry saw it, though, was that as much—or more—money, was spent on new eavesdropping technology and vastly powerful and complex decryption systems. The National Security Agency of America alone had dozens of satellites circling the planet that were designed to do one thing—record people’s conversations. They had the world’s most powerful computers ensconced in football-field-size subterranean chambers under their headquarters in Maryland.
These Cray supercomputers churned away day after day, night after night, sifting through e-mails, radio transmissions, and phone intercepts. Highly specialized programs were written so the computers could home in on the key words bomb, gun, kill, and assassinate in every foreign language of interest. Certain types of transmissions were prioritized. For America, anything coming out of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, for example, was kicked to the top of the queue. Anything intercepted in those countries via secure and encrypted modes was further kicked up the queue. And so it went, with the programs designed to focus on the methods used by people who were trying to keep secrets.
All of this left Harry with a simple question. If superpowers, with nearly unlimited financial resources and brainpower, could not keep secrets from each other, what hopes did a two-person operation have to stay up on the technology and out in front of those spending billions? The answer was easy. He couldn’t, so the only solution was to go in the opposite direction. The spy agencies around the world didn’t care about inane conversations by business associates or lovers. The trick was to stay with the herd. Use the same mode of communication everyone else used and stay away from any discussion of the real business at hand. Consequently, upon arriving in London, they had purchased new phones. They signed a yearlong contract even though the phones would be used for a week at the most.
He walked quickly but calmly down St. Martin’s Street and then cut over to Whitcomb. A few minutes later he was walking along the north end of the park. The Turk would be a few blocks behind him at this point. They would enter the park from different spots and meet where the older man liked to stop and feed the ducks while chattering on his phone. At Marlborough Road he came upon a small black delivery van, which his partner was driving. He stuffed his folded copy of the Times under his armpit and popped the back cargo doors. Reaching in with a gloved hand he grabbed a sash of balloons and closed the door. The delivery van drove off without a word while he crossed the street to the park.
This part made him a bit nervous. A man dressed in business attire with a long black coat and hat carrying a cluster of balloons was not your everyday sight. He was sure to catch a few stray glances, but like most things in life it was a trade-off. He kept the collar of his coat turned up, his chin tucked against his chest, and his shoulders hunched. All he had to do was make it one block with the balloons.
His eyes swept the surrounding landscape, looking out from under the brim of his hat for the bulbous cap of a bobby or any other patrolmen that might be about. The light post he was interested in was situated just past a park bench. It offered a commanding view of the park and it was easy to see why the authorities had decided to mount cameras on it. As he neared the device he slowed a bit and then extended his left hand far above his head while letting the helium-filled balloons rise into the air. They were tied off in a concave shape so that the middle balloon was shorter than the other six. They formed a perfect basket, and settled in gently around the tinted shield of the camera pod.
The assassin never broke stride. Never looked back. The Turk was already in sight coming toward him from a little more than two hundred meters away. Harry reached the main path that ran east-west and turned to the left. The Turk was now less than two hundred meters away and he was stopping to buy some warm pistachios from a street ven
dor. Harry watched him take a stale bag of crackers to feed the ducks just like he’d done the two previous mornings. Good, he thought to himself. Keep your routine and everything will turn out just fine. Sure enough, the Turk continued on for a bit and then left the path for the lake. He stood near a willow tree and began spreading the stale crackers about, popping pistachios into his mouth and talking on his phone.
Harry reached up and tapped his Motorola earpiece once, which re-dialed the last call he’d made. A second later his partner answered.
“Amanda Poole speaking.”
“Amanda, it’s Harry. How is everything?”
“Everything is just fine. Your party favors came in and they work perfectly.”
That meant the balloons had stayed in position. “Good.” He stole a peek over his left shoulder. “Is anyone else coming to our gathering?”
“Everyone who was invited has replied.”
The distance was now just under a hundred meters. He turned off the path and started walking toward the lake. “What about crashers?”
“Not a one on the horizon, but if I hear anything I’ll let you know immediately.”
“Good.” As he ducked around a hedgerow his left hand slid between the folds of his coat and retrieved a silenced Walther PPK 9mm pistol. The weapon was quickly placed inside the folded newspaper. He clutched the paper and covered gun to his chest and with his right hand slid one rubber band and then another over the outside of the paper. The assassin started his turn before he reached the water’s edge and brought the newspaper up as if he were reading it. “Any other calls this morning?”