by Vince Flynn
Rapp was a little bit thrown by the intensity with which the man had challenged this. He had repeatedly stated that he would be more comfortable if he were the one who entered the house with Rapp. When pressed for a logical reason, Tom Hoffman couldn’t come up with one. Again, something didn’t seem quite right to Rapp. It was his mission, and he was calling the shots. He told the Hoffmans that he had the authority to pull the plug at any moment, and if they didn’t agree with his plan, he would love nothing more than to call it quits. Rapp knew that the Hoffmans wouldn’t get the second half of their money until they completed the mission, and he wanted to see just how badly they wanted that cash. He got his answer when they dropped the issue as if it had never meant a thing from the start.
Up ahead, a well-lit stone gatehouse came into view, and the sedan began to slow. Rapp checked his watch. It was nine minutes past eleven. The count would be surprised. Hagenmiller was sure to have gone over the timetables in his head. He wouldn’t expect the police to show up in person at the estate this early but, rather, that they would simply call an hour or two after the breakin.
The sedan turned off the road and pulled up to the tall, ornate wrought-iron gate. A large man dressed in a dark suit and carrying a clipboard stepped from the gatehouse to the right side of the car. Rapp had already slid over to the left side to avoid getting his photograph taken from the surveillance camera mounted above the door to the gatehouse. He had also pulled the brim of his fedora down, making it difficult for the guard to get a good look at him. He took an immediate inventory of the man and noted the bulge on his right hip. It could be either a radio or a gun. Rapp decided it was probably a gun.
Jane Hoffman had her window down and was retrieving her forged Federal Office of Criminal Investigation ID. When the guard saw the badge, he stopped and didn’t come any closer. In Germany, the former land of the Gestapo, the BKA commanded people’s attention. Rapp was counting on this to get them in and out without too many questions. Jane Hoffman began to speak to the guard in a firm tone. The guard nodded and said that he would have to call up to the house first. She shook her head and told him that they did not wish to be announced. This had all been anticipated and rehearsed. The guard politely told her that Herr Hagenmiller was entertaining and that he would have to call up to the house before he could let them in.
She consented, but on the condition that he let them in and then make the call. Fortunately, the guard nodded and retreated to the stone building. The huge wrought-iron gate began to slide open, and the sedan sped forward. Rapp kept his eyes on the guard in the gatehouse as they passed. He was already on the phone.
“Step on it. The sooner we get there, the better.”
The Audi accelerated up the winding asphalt driveway. When they came around the second bend, the house was visible, its white stone façade bathed in bright lights. Rapp had both hands on the front seats and was peering out the window. The place reminded him of some of the estates that had been built in Newport, Rhode Island, at the turn of the century.
Tom Hoffman slowed the car as it rounded the drive and came to a stop directly in front of two stone lions and a butler. Rapp got out of the car on the driver’s side and looked at the huge marble fountain of Poseidon, water spewing from his trident. How fitting, he thought. The father of Orion. His eyes scanned an area to the left where a cluster of limousines were parked, the chauffeurs standing around talking. Beyond the limousines were about a dozen sports cars and luxury sedans. Rapp assumed they belonged to the less haughty guests. He filed away the existence of the cars and turned his attention to the house. He listened while Jane Hoffman spoke to the butler and showed him her ID. Rapp worked his way around the rear of the car, his eyes scanning the windows of the mansion. To the right was the ballroom. Through the three large windows, Rapp could see groups of men in tuxedos and women in full-length gowns drinking, talking, and smoking. He faintly heard what he thought must be a string quartet and couldn’t help thinking to himself that this would be a party they would never forget.
Rapp shoved his BKA credentials in the butler’s face and waved for Jane to follow. The butler was protesting vehemently as Rapp started up the steps. He couldn’t understand everything the man was saying, but it was something about using a different entrance. Rapp continued to ignore him. He went up the first three steps and started across a tiled terrace that contained a fountain on the left and the right. Jane Hoffman appeared at his side, and the butler raced ahead of them. When they reached the large two wooden doors of the main entrance, the butler stopped and put his hands out like a traffic cop. Rapp had already sized the man up and checked him for weapons. There was no need to kill him; he had done nothing wrong. If needed, a quick jab to the chin would easily put the servant out of commission.
Rapp listened as the butler pleaded with Jane Hoffman. As expected, he was recommending that they wait in the study for Herr Hagenmiller. She conceded to the request but told the butler that they would wait no more than one minute, not a second longer. If Herr Hagenmiller did not come to them, they would go question him in front of his guests. The butler nodded over and over in an attempt to make it crystal clear that he knew exactly what they wanted. They knew that the man would prefer anything to having two BKA agents burst into his employer’s private party.
The doors were opened, and they stepped into the huge foyer of the nineteen-thousand-square-foot mansion. Straight ahead a heartshaped marble staircase led to the second story, and to the right a massive pair of ten-foot oak French doors led to the ballroom. Standing in front of the doors was an equally massive man. Rapp eyed the bodyguard from head to toe. It would take more than a jab to put this one out of commission. Rapp had seen the slab of beef in the surveillance photos. Hagenmiller wasn’t the smartest man in town, but he also wasn’t an outright idiot. He knew enough to have some protection when dealing with someone as unstable as Saddam Hussein.
The butler gestured to the left, to another set of large French doors. Rapp knew from the floor plans that they led to the study. When Rapp and Hoffman started for the door, the butler moved ahead and showed them the way. Once they were inside, he told them to wait and closed the doors. Rapp looked at Hoffman briefly and then checked out the room. It was more like a library than a study. There was a spiral staircase in the opposite corner that led to a balcony which ran along the three interior walls. Old leather-bound books filled the shelves up top, and down below were quite a few more. Elaborately framed oil paintings, some as tall as Rapp and others no bigger than his hand, adorned every square inch of the walls that weren’t occupied by the bookshelves. On the far wall a roaring fire burned in the room’s ornate fireplace. Rapp was not an art expert, but the collection of paintings had to be worth millions. Rapp turned his attention to the furniture and then the rugs. Everything in the room, with the exception of a few lamps, looked to be at least a hundred years old.
That’s great, Rapp thought to himself. The guy is born into the lucky sperm club, pisses away his inheritance, and then, rather than auction off some of his expensive possessions, he decides to sell highly sensitive technology to a sadistically crazed psychopath who would love nothing more than to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City. This prick deserves to die.
Rapp checked his watch. Two minutes and three seconds had elapsed since they had come through the gate. Rapp glanced out one of the room’s two large windows that looked down onto the main driveway. Tom Hoffman was standing beside the Audi, the engine still running. Hoffman gave Rapp a quick wave, and Rapp returned the gesture. Rapp looked at his watch again. They had been in the den for thirty-eight seconds. Rapp had set the limit at two minutes. After that, he would go find the count. There was no sense in letting him get on the phone and try to find out what was going on. Rapp walked across the room and put one eye up to the small gap in the middle of the French doors. At first he couldn’t see much, and then he realized why. The beefy bodyguard had taken up his post outside the study and was blocking his view.
Rapp stepped back and frowned, trying to think of ways to take the bodyguard out without having to kill him. To knock him out, he’d have to get close, and with a neck as thick as the bodyguard’s, Rapp’s best shot might serve only to enrage the man. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a wrestling match. Rapp decided he would keep his distance and play it by ear.
It was nearing the three-minute mark when the study doors opened and Heinrich Hagenmiller V entered the room. He was holding a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Obviously, no one had bothered to tell the count that smoking had become impolitic. Take away the man’s hand-tailored tuxedo, his Rolex, his slicked-back hair, and his chin tuck, and he was no different from any other terrorist.
To Rapp’s dismay, a second man followed the count into the room. He was about the same age and size as Hagenmiller and was also wearing a tuxedo. The walking mountain of a bodyguard also entered, and then the butler left, closing the doors for privacy.
With a look of complete shock, the count asked why in the world the BKA would be paying him a house call. Jane Hoffman began answering Hagenmiller in his native tongue, going along with the cover story they had rehearsed. Not more than two lines into it, the second man stepped forward and announced forcefully that he was the count’s attorney and that he would like to see some ID.
Rapp was following the conversation closely, but he had kept most of his attention on the bodyguard. The man stood like a sphinx off to the side, his arms folded across his chest. Hoffman was between Rapp and the door. Directly across from Rapp was the count, and on his right were the lawyer and the bodyguard. When the lawyer stepped forward and asked to see credentials, Rapp made up his mind. Every second they hung around was a chance for something to go wrong.
As he started to slide his left hand into his jacket, Rapp glanced to his right to see Jane Hoffman pulling out her fake BKA identification. His hand eased into the hidden pocket and grasped the Ruger Mk II. Turning his body to the left, he extracted the silenced .22-caliber and extended his arm.
The count was no more than four feet away from the tip of the extended weapon. Rapp squeezed the trigger once, and a bullet spat from the end of the long black barrel. Instantly, a red dot appeared between the count’s neatly trimmed eyebrows. Rapp did not pause to watch the man fall—he knew he was already dead. He switched the Ruger from his left hand to his right, took one step forward, and delivered a vicious left hook to the attorney’s jaw. The man tumbled to the side and back, almost taking out the bodyguard as his unconscious body rolled across the floor. With the Ruger still in his right hand, Rapp took a step back, gaining some distance between himself and the bodyguard. The man was already taking his first step toward him, reaching for his gun.
Rapp yelled, “Halt!” but the bodyguard kept reaching.
He had only a split second to think. He fired a second shot—this one hit the bodyguard in the wrist, and his heavy semiautomatic pistol thudded to the floor. The man instantly bent over in pain, grabbing his wrist with his other hand. Rapp took two big steps and kicked at the man’s face as if he were punting a football. The blow sent the three hundred-pound bodyguard reeling back, landing him on top of a small wooden end table with a porcelain lamp delicately perched atop its polished wood surface. The lamp shattered as it hit the wood floor, and the table splintered into a dozen pieces under the weight of the heavy man.
Rapp pushed Hoffman out of the way and bounded for the door. Just as he got there, it opened, and the small head of the butler appeared. Rapp grabbed the man by the tie and yanked him into the room. Taking the butt end of the Ruger, he smashed it down on the butler’s temple with far less force than he normally would have. The butler’s eyes rolled back into his head, and his knees went limp. Rapp released his grip from the man’s throat and let him slump to the floor. Next, he stuck his head into the hallway to see if anybody was watching and then closed and locked the door.
He moved across the room like a machine. His first priority was the bodyguard. After grabbing three pairs of plastic flex cuffs from his pocket, he turned to hand one of them to Jane Hoffman and froze in his tracks.
In that one fleeting moment, Rapp couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The words fell from his lips in slow motion. “What in the hell are you doing?”
Rapp barely got the words out of his mouth before Jane Hoffman fired the first shot from the end of the suppressed Heckler & Koch P7. The 9-mm parabellum round hit Rapp square in the chest and put him back on his heels. The second shot propelled him back over the legs of the bodyguard. The air was gone from his lungs as his ass hit the floor, and his upper body fell back, sending his head with a whiplash effect toward the bottom rung of a wooden library ladder. Rapp’s head hit with tremendous force, his eyes rolled back into his head, and his entire body went limp.
Jane Hoffman’s heart was racing, and her hands were shaking. It was her husband who was supposed to be in here, and she was supposed to be out in the car. With her gloved hand, she picked up Rapp’s Ruger from the floor and shot the bodyguard twice in the chest. She tossed the Ruger over by Rapp’s body and then detached the silencer from the end of her pistol. When she was done, she placed her own gun in the bodyguard’s hand. Grabbing a small canister from her pocket, she sprayed a fine mist of gunpowder residue onto the bodyguard’s hand so it would appear that he had fired the weapon. She stood and backed up. She was looking for something. On the floor by her right foot, she found it: the bodyguard’s Heckler & Koch pistol. She picked it up and put it in her holster.
Relieved to be done, she ran to the door, unlocked it, and stepped out into the foyer. She walked quickly to the front door, the joyous sounds of the party spilling forth from the ballroom, no one the wiser to what had just happened. Jane Hoffman was outside and down the steps in seconds. Her husband was nervously waiting for her behind the wheel of the sedan, and the second she was in the car, he sped down the driveway.
The man stood near the edge of the forest not more than a hundred yards from where Rapp had been the night before. From his elevated position, he could clearly see the front of the mansion. He had one hand against his left ear and was holding a small pair of binoculars in his right hand. A coil ran from his earpiece down under the collar of his dark brown jacket and was attached to a Motorola Saber encrypted radio. He listened with great interest to what was going on inside the house. It had already started. He had heard the surprise in Rapp’s voice at the sudden of turn of events. Now he was waiting for the woman to exit the mansion. If she didn’t make it out alive, that was fine, but if she was merely wounded, that was not acceptable. No one could be left alive to talk. He was under strict orders.
It had to look as if Rapp had been killed by the bodyguard. Hagenmiller must die first and then Rapp. If the Jansens could pull it off and make things look convincing, they would live. If they screwed up in the slightest way, they would be eliminated. That was why he was there—to manage the situation closely.
The bearded man standing in the woods was a former employee of the CIA. He was known by a few close friends as the Professor. His real name was Peter Cameron. At first glance, he was not the type of person you would expect to find in this line of work. In his late forties and a good thirty pounds overweight, he was not about to get physical with an adversary. But that had never been his style. Cameron managed situations from a discreet distance, and if he needed to intercede, it was always done with his right index finger, not his fists. He was an expert marksman and believed fervently that the easiest way to kill a man was with a bullet. More often than not, though, he was a voyeur—a man who worked behind the scenes and watched from the shadows. Cameron dispatched the assassins, and more and more, he had enjoyed the thrill of going into the field and watching things develop. It was far more interesting than sitting behind a desk at Langley and getting briefed via satellite uplink. Cameron needed to be on top of every detail, and he couldn’t do that from the other side of the Atlantic. A lot was riding on this mi
ssion. An incredible amount, really.
Cameron had heard murmurs about the man they called Iron Man, and if the stories were only half true, Mitch Rapp was amazing. Cameron admired him for his skill and determination. In a raw egotistical way, he was excited about being the person responsible for taking down someone as strong as Rapp. Yes, there was a little bit of guilt involved in killing an asset who had served the Agency so well, but like many others, Rapp was just another pawn, another foot soldier, who in the end was expendable. History was full of them, and in truth, that was why Cameron had left Langley. He had been shown the path by someone who truly valued his talents, someone who was willing to reward him for his years of hard work.
Cameron tensed as he saw the front door of the mansion open. He brought the binoculars up to his eyes and zeroed in on the area. He breathed a slight sigh of relief as he saw Beth Jansen race down the steps and into the waiting car. As the Audi sped away, Cameron checked the front door to make sure no one was following, and then he watched the car go down the winding driveway. As it neared the gate, Cameron could hear the horn honk and see the headlights flash. Before the car had come to a complete stop, the gate opened. When the car pulled onto the road, Cameron nodded his approval and turned his attention back to the mansion. He watched it for several minutes, looking for a sign that the murders had been discovered. There was nothing.
Pleased with the results, Cameron placed the binoculars in his pocket and began to pick his way through the branches and undergrowth. A few seconds later, he found one of the walking paths and started for the dirt road. Unlike the previous evening, he was the only one in the forest tonight. That had been close. He had almost blown it. His ego had gotten the best of him, and he had decided to try to stalk Rapp. His skills in the forest were amateurish compared with Rapp’s. He didn’t even get close. Cameron had followed him with night-vision goggles, and when he was barely close enough to see Rapp, the man had stopped and disappeared into the forest. Cameron had stood frozen for more than twenty minutes, afraid that Rapp was doubling back on him. It was the first time he had felt true fear in many years.