by Vince Flynn
Anna lifted her head and looked at O’Rourke. “Michael, I’m begging you, just leave it alone until you can talk to Mitch.”
“I can’t do that,” he said, firmly shaking his head. “Mitch dumped this in our laps, and in the process he has dredged up some stuff that I would really prefer be kept buried. I need to know how he knows about that stuff, and I need to know now.”
“I can’t tell you. I promised.”
O’Rourke took in a deep breath and then let it out in a frustrated moan. He wasn’t getting anywhere. Rielly was every bit as stubborn as his wife. Changing tactics, he asked, “Do you think it’s fair to my family that Mitch has dumped this on us? He’s obviously in some serious shit if he’s worried about your safety.” Leaning closer to Rielly, he said, “I think I know what Mitch does for a living, and this is not some game.” O’Rourke pointed to himself. “I know. I’ve been there. Dark-clad men, in the middle of the night with silenced weapons, making people disappear without a trace. That’s why he got hold of us. There is no other reason. He’s worried about your safety. Now, would you please answer my questions? I need and deserve to know what we’ve been involved in.”
Rielly’s tears fell even harder, and she blew her nose on a tissue. “I can’t. I made a promise.”
O’Rourke was getting really frustrated. Tears be damned, he pushed ahead. “Mitch wanted us to bring you here because he’s afraid someone will try to get their hands on you so they can get to him. I have no problem protecting you. I love you, and Liz loves you, but for Christ sake, we’re now in danger, too. If you won’t answer my questions, I’m going to be forced to start digging.”
Rielly began to cry so hard she shook. Liz pulled her close and held her tight. She looked at her husband with the most disgusted expression he had ever seen. He opened his mouth to speak, but Liz stuck her hand out. “Don’t say another word.”
O’Rourke stood and out of sheer frustration said, “This is a bunch of bullshit.”
A second later, Anna Rielly was up and walking across the room. “I’m sorry…I’m so sorry I got you involved in this.” She continued into the foyer and grabbed her jacket.
Liz O’Rourke was right on her heels. As she passed her six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-fifteen-pound husband, she delivered a forearm shiver that moved him back a step.
“Anna, where do you think you’re going?” shouted Liz.
“I’m leaving. It’s not fair to have gotten you involved in this. I made the choice to fall in love with him, not you. You shouldn’t have to go through this.”
Liz grabbed her best friend by the arm and swung her back toward the stairs. Pushing her up the steps, she said, “You are staying right here until I know you’re safe!” Rielly began to protest, but Liz would have none of it. She continued pushing her old college roommate up the stairs. On the fourth step, Liz stopped and glared at her husband.
Michael started to say, “I was only…”
“Don’t even try to explain yourself!” snapped Liz. “I am so disappointed in you right now, I don’t even want to look at you!” With that, the two women were up the stairs and gone.
Michael watched them go and then smacked himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. On his way into the kitchen, he threw a dozen well-punctuated swear words at himself and then threw in a few more for good measure. Michael yanked the refrigerator door open and grabbed a bottle of beer. He took a big swig and leaned back against the counter. Duke came up and sat in front of him. O’Rourke looked down at the yellow Lab and said, “It’s just you and me, buddy.”
After taking another gulp of beer, O’Rourke shook his head in sheer frustration. It really sucked knowing that even though you were right, you were wrong. Every single thing he had just said in the other room was right, but because they didn’t like the way he said it, he was now wrong and would pay the price. O’Rourke let out a loud moan and thought, Give ’em an hour, and then go upstairs and apologize.
In the meantime, there was one thing he could do. O’Rourke walked over to the phone on the kitchen wall and grabbed it. Opening the cupboard, he glanced down a phone list until he found the right number. A short while later, a woman answered on the other end.
“Capitol Hill Police Department. How may I direct your call?”
“Watch commander, please.”
There were two clicks on the line, and then another female voice came on. “This is Sergeant Hall.”
“Sergeant, this is Congressman O’Rourke. How are you doing tonight?”
“Just fine, and you, sir?”
“Well…I just got a weird phone call. The second one in two days.”
“Did they threaten bodily harm?”
“Yeah, the standard stuff. I wouldn’t bother you, but my wife is pregnant, and she doesn’t need the stress right now.” O’Rourke pinched the bridge of his nose. If the watch commander only knew how true that was.
“Would you like me to have a unit check up on you throughout the night?”
“That would be great. Do you need the address?”
“Nope. I’ve got it right here on the screen. You’re in Georgetown just off Wisconsin.”
“That’s correct.”
“We’ll take care of it, sir. Someone will be by every hour, and if there are any more problems, don’t hesitate to call.”
“I won’t. Thank you, Sergeant.” O’Rourke placed the phone back in the cradle and paused. He was tempted to make another call, but considering the trouble he had already gotten himself in tonight, he decided against it. They would be safe in the house with the new security measures. Beyond that, he would sleep on the couch with Duke and his Remington 12-gauge shotgun. They would be fine for the night, and then, he hoped, tomorrow would bring more answers and less emotion.
The birds were chirping, and the sky was slowly showing signs of morning. A thin bank of clouds obscured the top of Mount Evans due west of where he was sitting. The house was at eight-thousand feet, some six-thousand feet short of the mountain’s summit. Scott Coleman could see why people moved here. The thick pines and aspen-laden hills, towering mountains, icy creeks, and glassy ponds enveloped one with an awesome sense of calmness. Like being in one of the great European cathedrals, you were left with the feeling that you were in the presence of the creator. Coleman was an ocean man. He had always been and always would be, but he could clearly see why others chose the mountains.
Coleman was sitting on the deck of an A-frame cabin located at the top of Prospect Drive. From his perch, he could see the Jansens’ house several hundred feet below and across a large ravine. Hackett had found the cabin on the Internet. It had been a relatively simple task. First, he had legitimately accessed the Pentagon’s computer network and retrieved detailed elevation maps of Evergreen. From there, Hackett located the Jansens’ house and picked four streets that would offer a good position to set up surveillance. Next, he searched the local real estate and property management Web pages. It took about fifteen minutes to find the house at the top of Prospect Drive. It was listed under the Weekend Getaway section of the Evergreen Leasing and Management Company. The company specialized in helping owners rent their mountain retreats when they wouldn’t be using them. Hackett had very little trouble hacking his way past the site’s security measures. Once in, it took less than a minute to find that the cabin was available, and with a little more work he retrieved the combination for the lock box.
Coleman was wrapped in a camouflage sleeping bag and sitting in a deck chair with his blue baseball hat pulled down tight over his blond hair. On the table next to him was a night-vision scope and a pair of binoculars. Unfortunately, they were too far away to use the directional microphone they had brought. Stroble and Hackett were in the living room sleeping on the floor. Around eleven o’clock the previous evening, the Jansens had been dropped off by an airport shuttle van. The three former SEALs had watched them for about an hour and then settled into two-hour shifts. Coleman was in the final minutes of his 4:00-to-6:00
watch. The three men had agreed on a plan of sorts. They would see how the morning went and then phone the Jansens and give them the choice of meeting them in town for a chat or inviting them up to their house. If the latter was the case, Stroble would be positioned in a spot of his choice with his trusted and robust Galil sniper rifle.
Coleman was to bring the Jansens back to Washington, whether they wanted to come or not, and killing them was to be avoided if at all possible. They had talked the night before about jumping the Jansens at dawn. Stroble had pointed out that they’d been traveling for the better part of a day and would be tired and disoriented. His vote was to hit them at first light and get it over with. Nothing cute. Strap on the body armor, tactical vests, and goggles, grab the silenced MP-5s and a few flash-bangs, and bust down the front door. This was classic Stroble. Hit the target hard, and hit it fast.
Hackett saw very little virtue in his friend’s plan. Plus, he was still getting his bad vibe. Coleman, for his part, was intent on returning to Washington with his two men and the Jansens. He wanted everyone alive and no one in Evergreen the wiser that three very lethal individuals had spent a night in their perfect little town.
The former SEAL Team Six commander knew from experience that once you started setting off flash-bangs and breaking down doors, things could get out of hand. Plus, they weren’t dealing with a couple of teenage rag-heads. The Jansens were highly trained army commandos, and they were on their home turf. They would surely have weapons nearby, and this was what really bothered Coleman. He and his men weren’t trained in policing action. They were trained to kill. It had been hammered into them during thousands of hours of close-quarters battle, or CQB as it was known in the counterterrorism trade. If someone had a gun, they were trained to shoot them in the head, not the arm. Three shots to the head, and then move on to the next target. It was not hard for Coleman to envision a scenario where one of the Jansens, or both, reached for a weapon in the middle of the raid. If that happened, the Jansens would be dead, and there was a chance, though a slim one, that one of them would also get shot. Nope, thought Coleman. There was no reason to get anyone killed.
It was getting light now. The sun was still not up, but he could see the Jansens’ house clearly. Coleman looked behind him. Hanging from the wall of the cabin was a circular white thermometer with a mountain lion in the middle. The temperature was a crisp fifty-two degrees. Coleman stretched his arms above his head and looked at his watch. It was 6:02, time to wake up Hackett and let him keep an eye on things for a few hours. As Coleman stood, he looked down for one last check. He was about to head into the cabin when the front door of the Jansens’ house opened, and a man walked out. Coleman snatched the binoculars from the table and brought Jim Jansen into focus just before he entered the detached two-car garage.
This was a little unexpected. In the still mountain air, Coleman could hear the car start even though it was more than a half a mile away. Next came the brake lights, and then the car backed out of the garage. Coleman walked quickly to the sliding glass door and flung it open. “Get your asses up, you two! Jansen’s on the move.” Coleman went back to the railing and watched as the Subaru station wagon turned around in the driveway. Jansen got out, opened the back hatch, and then ran back into the house, leaving the car running. Coleman started for the living room. He didn’t like what he saw.
PETER CAMERON WASN’T the only person who thought of logging onto the Internet to check up on what had happened in Germany. At one in the morning, Jim Jansen had signed onto his AOL account. His wife was sound asleep, but he was restless. They had just made a lot of money, and he wanted to go someplace remote and warm, so he and his wife could relax. Jansen knew Kennedy would want to debrief them. That was all part of the plan. Since Iron Man wasn’t around, there wouldn’t be anybody else to contradict their story. After the debriefing, they would have to go someplace nice and hide out for a few weeks. The work that he and his wife did paid great, but it was absolutely draining. Looking back on it, he could honestly say if they were offered the same amount of money to do this job again, they would turn it down. Iron Man had made him nervous. The man had sensed that something was up, despite all of the planning they had done. His wife had told him in detail about what had happened in the house—the way Iron Man had shot Hagenmiller and disabled the bodyguard. They had been lucky that Beth had killed him so easily.
Jansen started with the London Times. The European press would have had a full day to cover the story, and he figured there was a decent chance that the Times might mention the assassination of Count Hagenmiller in its Sunday edition. When the German authorities figured out that Iron Man was an American, the story would be frontpage news everywhere, but that would take a while.
Jansen was pleasantly surprised to find the headline “Germans Believe Count Was Assassinated” plastered across the front page. He couldn’t help feeling a little excited over the high-profile treatment of the case. By the second paragraph, the excitement was replaced by confusion. There was no fire when they had left the estate. By the fifth paragraph, the confusion had deepened, and by the end of the article, it had been replaced entirely by fear.
He had followed the story right up to the point where it said a man and a woman posing as BKA agents had left the estate in a maroon Audi sedan at approximately 11:15 P.M. and had not been seen since. Then there was the mention of a third individual who left approximately five minutes later in a car that was stolen from one of the guests attending the count’s party. Jansen’s heartbeat picked up as he read on. The stolen car had been tracked to the Hanover airport. From there, the article jumped to a cab driver who was found bound and gagged in a hotel in Freiburg, Germany. Based on the detailed account that the driver had given the police, there could be little doubt that the man who had held him at gunpoint was none other than Iron Man.
Jansen had raced into the bedroom in a panic and got his wife up. He asked her again exactly where she had shot the operative they knew only as Iron Man. It didn’t take long for the two of them to figure out that he must have been wearing a bulletproof vest and had not told them. It was a stupid mistake. Jim Jansen wanted to strangle his wife for not putting a third bullet in the man’s head. This was the exact reason he was supposed to be the trigger man.
What they had to do was glaringly obvious. They had to run, and they had to run fast and far. When the man they had ambushed in Germany made his way back to the United States, he would tell Irene Kennedy everything, and she would understandably give him all the information he needed to track them down. Jim Jansen had very little doubt about the outcome of that confrontation. The Jansens would last right up until they gave up who had hired them, and then they would be killed the proper way—a bullet to the head.
WHILE JIM AND Beth Jansen raced around their house gathering the things they would need for quite possibly the rest of their lives, they didn’t realize that there was a far more imminent threat sitting in room ten of the Buffalo Bill Motel. Peter Cameron had listened to every word the Jansens uttered, and it had given him ample time to plan and get things into place. With a little luck and cooperation from the Jansens, he would be back in Washington by noon.
Cameron was extremely efficient with virtually every firearm there was. It didn’t matter if it was a pistol, a shotgun, or a rifle. In his early twenties, he had gone to a gun club in rural Virginia with another employee of the CIA and was exposed to competition shooting for the first time. Over a period of years, this had turned from a passion into an obsession. Cameron was the top pistol shooter in his club and one of the best on the East Coast. He was very proficient at skeet shooting and was deadly accurate with a rifle. All of this shooting, however, was done under controlled conditions.
Cameron’s pride and joy was his gun collection. Over the years, he had steadily built it up to the point where it now totaled more than a hundred pieces. Since he had bought them wisely and they had appreciated greatly over the last two decades, the collection was now worth a sm
all fortune.
Despite all of this, Cameron was deeply embarrassed by one fact. He had never killed another human. Villaume was right—Cameron had always sent someone else to do the dirty work. Now that Cameron had officially broken with the CIA, and he was dealing with hired killers like Villaume and Duser, he felt it was time to make a statement. This was how he had rationalized his decision to be the one to pull the trigger on the Jansens. He was in a dangerous line of work where a peer’s respect for one’s talents could someday mean the difference between life and death. Deep down inside, however, Cameron knew the real reason. He had wondered for years what it would be like. He had spent thousands of hours shooting at inanimate targets with weapons that were designed to kill living things. Many of them designed specifically to kill human beings. The competitions had always taken place under closely controlled and regulated circumstances. The only variables were often the wind and the humidity. His passion had never been taken to that final level, and now it was time.
Cameron, it turned out, was beginning to realize it was a good idea he had brought Villaume along for the job instead of Duser. The man was a meticulous planner, like himself, and in the end someone with far more practical field experience. Cameron had brought two handguns, a sniping rifle, an assault rifle, and a submachine gun. He had had it in his head that he would take the Jansens from a safe distance of five-hundred to six-hundred meters with his Walther WA 2000 sniping rifle. Villaume didn’t like this idea. The Walther fired a .300 Winchester Magnum cartridge, and the shot would sound like a cannon up in the mountains. They wanted to get in and out of Evergreen without attracting any attention. Villaume, used to trying to make things easier rather than more difficult, had pointed out to Cameron that they could take up a position two-hundred meters from the Jansens’ front door.
At 4:45, the van stopped half a mile down the road from the Jansens’ house. Villaume and Cameron got out and started their trek up the mountain. Lukas and Juarez pulled the van off the road and onto a small trail, where they monitored the surveillance devices and waited. If Cameron failed, and the Jansens’ got past, they were to block the road with the van and hose down the Jansens’ vehicle with their silenced MP-5s.