by Vince Flynn
31
WASHINGTON, DC
T he day was drawing to an end, and they were getting ready to pull out. Gould had returned the rental car he’d picked up in Montreal and grabbed a new one from a different company using yet another identity. The vehicle, a black Ford Explorer, was packed and parked on a ramp less than a block away. The transponder Gould had placed in Rapp’s wife’s car contained miniaturized GPS technology. Gould had checked every thirty minutes or so to see if the car had moved. It hadn’t. Even if it had, he would have only been mildly interested. He doubted she was going to go home in the middle of the work-day, and home was what he wanted. That was where Rapp would be most comfortable.
Claudia was feeling much better. She’d even managed to keep down a late lunch. While Gould was out switching cars she had gone online and checked out NBC’s Web site. In addition to reporting up-to-the-
minute news, the Web site promoted the evening news. It mentioned three key stories they would be covering, and one of them was a controversy brewing over the president’s nominee for Secretary of Education. It was the same thing they’d watched Anna Rielly report on that morning. They were running on the assumption that she would do the evening news and then head home.
While online Claudia took care of some banking and checked their various e-mail accounts. There were really only two messages of any concern. The first was an offer for a job. She was tempted to reply that they were getting out of the business, but Claudia realized that might attract undue attention. People would wonder why they had so suddenly decided to drop out. When the news broke of the great Mitch Rapp’s death, people would begin to speculate. It was better to tell former clients that they were too busy to accept new contracts at the moment. The second e-mail of consequence was from the German. Abel was offering them an additional million dollars if they could fulfill the contract in such a way as to make it look natural. Like it was an accident. He didn’t want this to compromise the job, however. The priority was to make sure they succeeded on the first order of business. If a readily available solution presented itself, however, it would be preferred. It did not have to be overly convincing. Just leave the door open for interpretation.
Claudia had stared at the message for a long time. She wasn’t sure she should show it to Louie, but in the end she did. When he got back she let him read the e-mail and then she asked him what he thought. Louie simply said, “We’ll see.” Later he surprised her by saying that he was already considering doing just what the German had suggested. He reasoned that the CIA would make it a top priority to catch the people responsible for Rapp’s murder. If they could make it look like an accident, they could retire without having to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. The idea sounded great, but implementing it would be difficult. Gone were the days of running people off the road at night, or hitting them in a head-on collision. They were in America, where airbags were common. Gould told her to remain flexible. If an opportunity presented itself they would discuss it. Otherwise, he would take him out at a safe distance with the silenced rifle.
They ordered room service at 5:00. It arrived at 5:34. Louie devoured a California burger with french fries. Claudia ate a light salad and bread. She felt good but didn’t want to push it. She drank water and he drank water and coffee. He was worried about her but didn’t say anything. He hoped this morning sickness thing was a onetime occurrence, but he doubted it. At 6:00 they watched the local news and sanitized the room, wiping down common surfaces where they may have left prints. They had absolutely no reason to think they were being followed, or that they would be discovered once the job was complete, but that didn’t matter. They were professionals, and professionals were thorough. The room service cart was pushed out into the hallway and Claudia called for it to be picked up. At 6:30 they sat on the edge of the bed and watched the start of the NBC Nightly News.
Rapp’s wife came on in the first five minutes. She was standing in the same spot she had been in the morning and wearing the same outfit. She spoke for maybe ten seconds and then they rolled some footage. When the footage was done, the anchor asked her a question, she answered it, and they went to a commercial. Gould stood and turned off the TV. They each grabbed a bag. All of the other stuff was already loaded in the new rental car. They were paid for one more night and depending on how things went they might need to come back here and sleep.
It took six minutes to leave the hotel and reach the car. By the time they pulled out of the ramp Claudia had the GPS device hooked up to her laptop. She waited a few seconds for the software to load and give her an overlay of the streets. Right now it was set for a two-square-mile overview, but she could narrow it down to a block-by-block look or bring it all the way back to an overview of North America. They had no idea where Rapp and his wife lived. The credit report listed a P.O. box in DC, and Rielly’s last known address was an apartment in Georgetown.
Gould drove the Explorer over to 19th and H and waited. The parking ramp where he’d found her car was two blocks away. They didn’t have to wait long. Claudia announced that the target was moving. Louie waited patiently while she relayed the direction the BMW was headed. Louie didn’t need to look at the map on the computer screen. He had the map of downtown memorized. H was a one-way street heading east.
“The car is heading north on Seventeenth Street.” Claudia stared intently at the screen. “She crossed H…no, forget that. She just turned east on H.”
Louie pulled the gear lever out of park and took his foot off the brake. He hit the turn signal and eased out into traffic. They continued east on H until they hit New York Avenue. They missed the light and had to wait almost a minute. Claudia gave him constant updates. The car was on New York Avenue heading northeast. Louie was nowhere near panicking, but he did want to at least get a visual to make sure it was Rapp’s wife who was in the car. Due to the lights, she maintained a one-mile lead until they were out of the District. Then New York Avenue opened up to a three-lane highway. Gould stepped on the gas and started passing cars. Nothing too crazy, but he was steadily gaining. At some point the road changed from New York Avenue to John Hansen Highway and U.S. Route 50. By the time they reached the Beltway they had a visual on the car. In the failing light they could barely make it out a hundred yards ahead. They passed under Interstate 495 and Gould closed the distance. At Lottsford Vista Road he eased up beside her. It was now past seven and the traffic was moderate. Both he and Claudia agreed it was her. She was talking on her cell phone so her face was partially obscured, but she gave them a glance like she was thinking about changing lanes.
Gould eased off the gas and fell back several cars. He retrieved an earpiece from his pocket and stuck it in his right ear. It was plugged into a small receiver that was tuned to the frequency of the miniature listening device he’d placed under the dashboard of the BMW. A voice came over the small speaker. There was a fair amount of background noise, but even so it was unmistakably her voice. Gould listened to the one-sided conversation with a critical ear, hoping to gain any information that might involve their schedule. They continued on U.S. Route 50 for another five minutes, then took U.S. Route 301 south for approximately six minutes and then started turning down a series of county roads. They were a decent ways from the city. Gould did not know what to think. Did they live way out here? Was she going to visit someone? Was she working on a story?
“How far are we from the Chesapeake Bay?” Gould asked.
Claudia pecked a few keys on the computer. “About four miles.”
Gould nodded and watched his distance. He did not want her to notice she was being followed, but it was getting harder. Sooner rather than later they were going to run out of land. He was right. They ran out of land. Claudia told Gould that the car had just turned onto a dead end road. He pulled over and watched on the computer screen as the BMW inched closer and closer to the Chesapeake Bay. It finally stopped as if it had pulled right up to the water’s edge. They waited several minutes to make sure
the car didn’t start moving again and then Gould continued on. He turned down the dead end road and set his speed five miles an hour above the posted speed. On the right were farm fields and woods and a few scattered houses. On the left were houses every couple of hundred feet. In the failing light he could glimpse the water of the big bay as they passed between houses.
“We’re close,” Claudia announced. “Less than a hundred meters.”
Gould was already scanning ahead, looking for the car.
“Fifty meters.”
He approached a white house and saw the car. There was a second car parked next to it. Gould tensed ever so slightly. “I see it.”
“Try to get an address off the mailbox if you can.”
Gould took his foot off the gas but did not hit the brakes. They were on a straight, narrow road. As they passed the house he read off the numbers on the mailbox. She checked the map to make sure they were still in Anne Arundel County. They were. She accessed the county’s Web site and clicked on the property information tab. She punched in the address and five seconds later the corresponding information came up on the screen.
“The house was purchased in 1997 for two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars by Bay View Shores LLC. No officer listed under the company.”
“It’s him.” Gould looked back over his shoulder.
“How can you be so sure?”
“He would never put it under his own name.”
“What if she is merely stopping by to visit a friend?”
“It’s him.” Gould gripped the steering wheel and then flexed his fingers. “I can feel it. He’s in there right now.”
32
ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, MARYLAND
M itch Rapp ran along the gravel shoulder, pounding out each step. His mood was anything but upbeat. There was a day not long ago when he flew down this road at a clip that would have left all but a few of the world’s best athletes gasping for breath and falling to their knees. Even so, Rapp was a realist. He knew it was impossible to maintain the peak performance he’d had in his twenties and early thirties, but that didn’t mean he had to like the aging process. He’d dealt with pain his entire life. He knew how to taunt it, suppress it, or just laugh it off. In fact, pain was something he’d actually learned to embrace. It was a welcome ally that propelled him to the finish line while it forced others to quit. The mind controlled the body. It could tell muscles and joints to ignore all kinds of warning signals. The problem, though, was that those warning signs were there for a reason. If they were ignored for too long, the body eventually broke down.
On this warm fall morning, as Rapp took each lengthy stride, he began to wonder if there was something different about this pain. It was his damn left knee again. He’d been trying to work through it for the better part of a month, and he was finally coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t going away. No matter how hard he tried to block it out or get past it, no matter how much ice or Advil he used, the pain only worsened. His body was telling him something. It was telling him to stop running.
Only thirty-seven and he was falling apart. It should not have come as a surprise to him, knowing the way he’d pushed and abused his body over the years, but Rapp was the type of man who thought any obstacle surmountable with enough will, determination, and talent. There were the broken bones and cuts from sports as a kid and then in college, there was the inevitable wear and tear that came with competing as a world-class triathlete, and then there were the scars, both mental and physical, of his trade. On the outside were four pucker marks left by bullets that were meant to kill him and two decent-sized scars left by knife blades. On the inside, most of the physical damage done by the bullets had been repaired, but the mental toll his work had left on him was something he simply tried not to think about. His wife liked to tell him his brain was like a basement filling up with years of junk. If you didn’t clean it out every year, you were one day sure to be left with one hell of a mess to take care of.
Instinctively, he knew she was right, but the only person who could ever understand what he’d done was someone who had walked in his shoes. And Rapp doubted there was a therapist on the planet who had any practical experience as an assassin. One of Rapp’s forms of self-therapy was to never deceive himself. He didn’t sugarcoat what he was, even though other people did. In national security circles he was referred to as a counterterrorism operative. He knew it was a nice way of saying he was an assassin. This had never bothered him, but now that Anna was pregnant, it gave him cause to rethink his profession. His days of being self-sufficient, of thinking first and foremost of himself, were receding with each heartbeat of the little baby in his wife’s womb. Rapp was not afraid of fatherhood in the least. He was surprised, though, by the feeling of melancholy that accompanied the news. At first he didn’t know the source but it came to him soon enough. It was his own unfulfilled relationship with his father. Rapp did not want his child to go through the same agonizing pain of losing a parent that he had. He was suddenly looking at the risks he took on the job in a whole new light. He’d been fighting it since the day he’d fallen in love with Anna, but now there was no more putting it off. He owed it to both her and their unborn child. He would have to step out of the line. Let someone else take the risks.
Half a mile short of the end of his run, it happened. Rapp felt a spike of pain and shifted his weight to his good leg just as his left knee locked up like an engine throwing a rod—metal on metal, no more oil to aid the simple mechanical movement. Bone on bone, no more cartilage to reduce the friction. As he hopped to a stop he muttered a series of curses under his breath. He was the only person out on the road at this early hour, but even so, swearing at the top of his lungs wasn’t his style. After a few excruciating steps, he realized how serious the injury was and blurted out a single four-letter curse.
Slowly and carefully, he began hobbling his way back to his house on the Chesapeake Bay. The birds were chirping, and the early morning sun cast long shadows across the dewy grass and bathed his face in warmth. All things considered it should have been a glorious morning, but it wasn’t. He rounded a slight bend in the road and was surprised to find two people standing on the side of the gravel shoulder another fifty or so yards ahead. The man had his hand on the woman’s back and she was bent over. Two mountain bikes lay on the ground next to them. It was not uncommon to encounter someone on this road, but it was almost always someone he knew. There was Mr. and Mrs. Grant, retirees who rose early and walked with their two chocolate Labs. There was Mrs. Randal, the Energizer Bunny, who did her shuffle jog for hours on end, and there were a handful of others who Rapp vaguely knew. He was always polite, but never stopped to talk.
He immediately crossed to the other side of the road placing as little weight as possible on his left leg. His hand reached for his fanny pack. Inside was a FN Five Seven pistol. The weapon carried twenty 5.7 x 28mm armor-piercing rounds. Rapp unzipped the fanny pack and kept his left hand near the opening. Every move was second nature, done almost completely without thought. He checked the couple again. She appeared to be sick, which could either be genuine, or a classic diversionary tactic. He looked at everything he encountered through this prism of primal pessimism.
Ambushes were typically set up in one of three ways. The first, and most common, was to lie in wait and spring the trap on the unsuspecting quarry. The second way was to lure the target in, as could be the case with this couple. Act like you need help and then when that target steps in to offer assistance you have them right where you want them. The third and final way is to distract the target. Get them focused on one thing, and then hit them from somewhere else. At the moment this was what Rapp was most worried about.
In all likelihood the couple was nothing more than a harmless husband and wife out for a bike ride, but Rapp couldn’t risk that. He checked over his shoulder and then began looking further afield to his left and right. He knew every inch of this road. He drove on it, ran along its shoulder, and biked on it. His
mind was trained to catch anything that was different. He finished his sweep. Everything looked normal. Rapp turned his attention back to the couple. He was close enough now to hear the woman gagging. If this was a trap she was doing a pretty convincing job.
The man glanced over his shoulder. He was wearing a bike helmet and a pair of Oakley sunglasses.
“Everything all right?” asked Rapp. He kept moving, doing his best to mask the fact that his knee was killing him. His left hand stayed poised right above the fold of his fanny pack. Rapp could instantly tell the man was in good shape.
“She’s pregnant,” the man offered. “Morning sickness.”
Rapp gave a slight nod, but didn’t respond. He wasn’t out to make polite conversation. His eyes scanned the man from head to toe as well as the woman. The man was also wearing a fanny pack, but his was spun around so it sat at the small of his back. There was something about him. A certain lean athletic quality. Broad shoulders, thin waist, developed legs, all three parts in balance. Rapp had worked with guys like him before. His thoughts turned almost immediately to the warning that had been passed along by the Jordanians that there was a price on his head, but they then turned almost as quickly to the new director of National Intelligence, Mark Ross. Could the man be so foolish as to send a couple of his people out here to collect intel on him?
The thought of Ross deciding not to back down got his blood going. Rapp stopped almost directly across the street from the two. His left hand remained poised only an inch from his gun. The weapon was chambered and hot.