Mitch Rapp 14 - The Survivor

by Vince Flynn

  That caused Taj to spin toward him. “I am only one man, Kabir. Sometimes one man is all it takes to change the order of things.”

  “I hardly think it’s a fair comparison,” Gadai said. “Mitch Rapp is a simple enforcer constrained by a dysfunctional and cowardly government. You are a brilliant man who will soon lead one of the most powerful countries in the world.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Kabir. I know what you’re thinking. Qayem.”

  “Not at all,” Gadai lied smoothly. “In light of Rapp’s escape from Switzerland, it’s clear that you were right. The risks of leaving the general alive were too great.”

  Taj’s eyes narrowed, but thankfully he chose not to pursue the subject. “I understand you have Rickman’s files.”

  “Yes, sir. And they’ve been wiped from the law firm’s system.”

  “Including the backups?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The woman?”

  “She and her daughter are both dead. The authorities are treating it as an accident. No criminal investigation has been initiated and none is planned, according to our sources.”

  He nodded and seemed to relax a bit. Rapp’s survival was undoubtedly dangerous, but with the Rickman files in their possession, the assassin could be neutralized. Without the support of the American president and the CIA infrastructure, he would become less than nothing.

  “Have you been able to access the information?” Taj asked, though he almost certainly knew the answer to the question.

  “They’re encrypted.”

  “You didn’t get the key from the law firm?”

  “They didn’t have it. But the instructions for the files’ dissemination weren’t encrypted. In fact, the next release is scheduled for tomorrow. Our people think that this is the path to accessing the information.”

  “Explain.”

  “We believe the man who is decrypting and sending out the files is some kind of computer criminal. The law firm couldn’t be allowed to see the contents of the files because they would have called the authorities. Conversely, a criminal couldn’t be given access to all the files at one time, because he might have sought to use them for his own ends. It’s the combination of the two organizations—one legal and one not—that made Rickman’s system work.”

  “Then you can find this computer criminal?”

  “We believe so. Through his email address.”

  “You believe so?” Taj said, the volume of his voice rising noticeably. “If we can’t access the information in these files, we’ve learned nothing. Accomplished nothing. We have the tools to crush America’s entire intelligence empire in our hands and we can’t use them. Find this man, Kabir. Find him now.”

  “Yes, sir. But I want you to know that doing so will involve some compromises.”

  Taj’s expression turned suspicious. “What kind of compromises?”

  “On the surface, his email address is administered through a server in Singapore, so I think we can be confident that he’s not a resident of that country. It’s simply a gateway. After the email arrives there, it would be forwarded all over the world in the span of only a few seconds, creating a trail that’s very difficult to follow.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “No, sir, not impossible. We’ll get closer with each file release. Eventually, it will lead us to—”

  “Each file release? What are you saying, Kabir?”

  “That we will have to continue sending the files per Rickman’s schedule.”

  Taj stared silently at him for a few seconds. “It’s a dangerous game. We don’t know what is in those files and who the ultimate recipient will be.”

  “I agree, sir, but I think that the risks are acceptable in light of the reward.”

  “How many releases will have to be carried out before we find the man we’re looking for?”

  “It’s impossible to say for certain, but our hope is no more than five. In the end, though, at least we know that each release will damage the CIA. So if it’s more than five—”

  “The route to power isn’t through clumsy attacks on the CIA, Kabir. It’s through subverting the organization. Creating double agents, blackmailing informants and politicians. Turning an intelligence network they spent hundreds of billions to create against them.”

  “Yes, sir. But chipping away at America’s ability to defend itself and the internal chaos that the releases will create is hardly an unattractive secondary strategy.”

  Taj’s frown suggested that he was unwilling to accept anything but complete victory. “Then it’s your recommendation that we go forward with the scheduled release tomorrow and continue until we identify the man carrying them out?”

  “Yes, sir. The death of President Chutani is less than a week away. Even if there were no hope of getting the encryption key, this would be the most prudent course of action. It will keep the CIA—and Mitch Rapp—focused elsewhere.”

  Taj just nodded, unwilling to give his authorization aloud. It was clear that he was making Gadai entirely responsible. There would be no reward for success. It was expected. Failure, on the other hand, would be severely punished.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE FARM

  OUTSIDE HARPERS FERRY

  WEST VIRGINIA

  U.S.A.

  BLACK clouds blanketed the sky, producing heavy drops that roared against Irene Kennedy’s armored SUV. Her driver slowed further on the curving gravel road, leaning over the wheel to better see through the overwhelmed wipers. It seemed fitting somehow.

  Kennedy stared out the window at the deluge but didn’t really register it. The Swiss authorities and Interpol were currently descending on what had been Leo Obrecht’s mansion, cataloging damage, identifying bodies, and collecting evidence. An army of European financial regulators had locked down his bank and were starting the process of unraveling what would likely become the largest and most sophisticated criminal financing operation in history.

  Her people were quietly leaking fabricated evidence that would lead to the conclusion that Obrecht had gotten in over his head and provoked the wrath of Louis Gould. There were no guarantees, though. It was a mess of epic proportions. Just like Joe Rickman intended.

  Her driver rolled to a stop alongside the farmhouse, getting as close as he could to the steps. The features of the man looking down from the covered porch were obscured by the rain, and for a brief moment Kennedy felt the breath catch in her chest. She allowed the fantasy to play at the edges of her mind for a moment, but she knew it wasn’t Stan Hurley. It never would be again.

  Her door was pulled opened and she ducked beneath the umbrella held by her driver.

  “Where’s Mitch?” she asked Mike Nash as he moved to open the door for her.

  “No one knows.”

  A flash of anger interrupted her grief, but she knew there was no point to it. Rapp would reappear when he wanted to. Not a moment before.

  “What about . . .” Her voice lost its strength for a moment. “What about Stan?”

  “We have him,” Nash said, leading her inside. “No need to worry.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “There’s nothing to see, Irene. He’s dead.”

  “I know he’s dead,” she snapped. “Just take me to him.”

  Nash let out a long breath and led her into the kitchen. There was a walk-in freezer set into the back wall, installed in case they ever needed to feed a large security team. He pointed to it.

  “Seriously, Irene. I don’t see the—”

  “Open it.”

  Nash would never be able to understand what she was feeling. He and Hurley had been close, but she had known the man since she was a little girl. Even after she’d become his boss, he’d always seemed bigger than life to her. Incorruptible. Unwavering. And indestructible. Her intellect told her that he was gone but the child who still lived somewhere inside her couldn’t believe that the man she’d known as Uncle Stan was dead.

  Nash reached for the freez
er’s handle but then hesitated. “There’s something I should probably—”

  “Just open it, Mike!” The intensity of her anger surprised her, but he wasn’t its target. She was angry with herself. Hurley had died trying to clean up her mess, and now she could feel herself losing her nerve. She’d approved his involvement in the Obrecht operation knowing he was old and sick. The least she could do was face him.

  Nash pulled back the heavy steel door and she stepped inside, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the lower light. When they did, she found herself unable to move. She’d prepared herself. But not for this.

  “That’s what I wanted to warn you about, Irene. We laid him out next to the steaks, but for some reason it really bothered Scott. So this is what we figured out.”

  Hurley was sitting in a chair with a drink in one hand and a cigarette frozen between the fingers of the other. Ice had collected on his eyebrows, hanging down over closed eyes. His suit jacket had been pulled closed to the degree practical but the bloodstained shirt beneath was still visible.

  Nash draped a blanket over her shoulders, but she didn’t acknowledge it.

  “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, and she heard his footsteps retreat back into the kitchen. For some reason, she could feel neither the cold nor the weight of the blanket. Other than Hurley sitting in front of her, all she could sense was the buzz of the overhead light and the hum of the refrigeration unit.

  Her father had been a CIA operative and most of her youth was spent in the Middle East. She’d been no older than six when she’d first met Stan Hurley. He’d come through Baghdad for what she now knew was an extraction in Libya. When her father had been killed in Beirut, his old friend Hurley had done his best to step in. He’d called when he could, made sure she had enough money, and convinced her to pursue her PhD. It had been him who had convinced her to apply to the Agency and he had watched over her career until she became director.

  Kennedy approached and put a hand on his arm. “Goodbye, Stan.”

  When she finally walked out of the freezer, Nash was sitting at the kitchen table. He stood, a sincere expression of concern on his face. Despite being a former Recon marine with more combat commendations than she could be bothered to count, there was a certain gentleness about him. It was most visible when he was around his family but it came out at times like this, too. She and Rapp saw it as weakness despite his impeccable ops record, but now she wondered if she’d rushed to judgment. He was a difficult man to dislike and that could be a very powerful weapon in their business. Sometimes more powerful than the gun.

  “Are you all right, Irene?”

  She wasn’t sure. Handling stress was part of the job, but even she had limits. Rickman’s files were still out there, Leo Obrecht was scheduled to be buried later that week, and she was responsible for the death of her oldest friend.

  Nash seemed to read her mind. “It would have destroyed him if you hadn’t sent him, Irene. If you lost confidence in him. Take it from me, this is better.”

  She nodded numbly. “What happened, Mike?”

  “Gould. Obrecht’s people were expecting them.”

  “How? We had Gould. There was no way for him to communicate.”

  Nash slid a newspaper across the table and tapped a want ad circled in highlighter. “This newspaper was the only information he got from the outside while we were holding him. Our guys went over it with a fine-tooth comb and found this. It basically outlines the plan. There are similar messages in periodicals and websites worldwide.”

  “How did Obrecht die? Was it Mitch?”

  Nash shook his head. “Looks like one of his guards.”

  It was what she was afraid of. This went higher than the Swiss banker. Someone had gotten to his security team and given instructions that Obrecht was not to fall into the hands of the CIA.

  It had been a mistake to send Gould. She’d underestimated his mental instability. As she had Rickman’s. Now was not the time to start questioning her own judgment, but she could feel doubt creeping in. How could it not?

  Again, Nash seemed to be able to hear her thoughts. “Sometimes you just have to roll the dice, Irene. Mitch agreed with you that this was our best shot to get to Obrecht and shut down Rickman’s machine. We all did.”

  She leaned back in her chair and tried to work through what was happening. Obrecht would never talk but at least his death provided confirmation that someone was pulling his strings. Someone very well informed and very well funded.

  Once again she came back to Pakistan and the ISI. The simple answer was that it was one of Durrani’s deputies covering his tracks. But with a new operations director in place, would anyone in the S Wing have sufficient support to pull off something like this? The answer was as clear as it was terrifying: not without Ahmed Taj’s blessing.

  “Has there been any progress on the lawyer angle?” she asked.

  There was no hard evidence that Rickman would use a law firm to release the information he possessed, but the more she considered it, the more the theory made sense. Terrorists and criminals could be useful, but reliability wasn’t one of their more prominent qualities. No, if you needed something done confidentially and efficiently, a lawyer was the most straightforward solution.

  “Nothing yet,” Nash said. “Marcus is working with the NSA on it. Their ability to crunch data is almost unlimited now that they have DaisyChain up and running at their Utah facility. If anything unusual happens at a law firm anywhere in the world and anyone so much as tweets about it, we’ll know.”

  DaisyChain was a quiet—though in this case entirely legal—system that scoured the Internet twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It cataloged every news organization website, online magazine, blog, and government site worldwide. Then it translated the pages into English and used artificial intelligence to analyze the information based on whatever search parameters were put into the system.

  She’d authorized soliciting the NSA’s help but wasn’t particularly happy about their involvement. They had an incredible infrastructure in place for this kind of investigation, but the organization had been too much in the spotlight lately. The kind of technology they used was just coming into its own, and they were a bit like a toddler with a new toy. If that toy was a chain saw.

  “Then it’s a waiting game,” she said. “We sit here until another one of Rick’s videos is released and another one of our operatives is compromised or killed.”

  Nash nodded. “For now, I’m afraid so.”

  CHAPTER 35

  NEAR CHANIA

  GREECE

  THE tiny rental car was struggling with the grade, forcing Rapp to keep one eye on the engine’s temperature gauge. When it finally touched red, he parked at the edge of the empty dirt road.

  There was no wind at all when he stepped out, only the heat of the Greek sun on his back and the vague scent of chemical explosive still clinging to his hair.

  The yellow grass that covered the hill glowed in the light, making the deep green of scattered olive trees seem almost black. Far below, he could see the city and the ocean beyond. Many people considered it paradise and on that particular day, it was hard to argue.

  He continued on foot, retrieving a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. He raised a lighter to it but then noticed an unusual sound in the still air around him. His own breathing.

  Rapp stopped, squinted up at the winding road and then down at the cigarette. The grade was no steeper than fifteen percent and his elevation above sea level was low enough that he could pick out individual sailboats below.

  Two years ago, he’d led a thirty-mile trail-running race through the Colorado mountains, finally turning off a half mile before the finish line in order to avoid the cameras set up to capture the winner. He wouldn’t have to worry about anyone snapping his picture or asking for an interview now. Full gas, he’d be lucky to break the top five in a race like that.

  Rapp looked out over the ocean, his thoughts turning again to Stan Hurley
. In many ways, he’d been a great man. Brave, loyal, patriotic. One of the only people Rapp had ever met who he never even considered worrying about. There was nothing the world could throw at Stan that could knock him off target.

  Having said that, it would be a mistake to romanticize him. He’d left three ex-wives, and only two of his five children would take his calls. He’d lived his life at the very edge of control with little concern for himself or those around him. He was probably the best friend Rapp ever had, but also self-destructive, violent, and, as Anna had pointed out on numerous occasions, a bad influence.

  Rapp’s love-hate relationship with the old man had started out more hate-hate. He could still remember saying that he’d put a gun in his mouth if he ever found himself turning into Stan Hurley.

  Yet there he was, living alone in a crap apartment near D.C., smoking and drinking too much in an effort to mask the rage lurking just below the surface. And breathing audibly walking up a hill that he should have been able to do at a full sprint.

  The old man was dead. Anna was dead. Gould was dead. His past felt like it had been suddenly stripped away. The question was what he was going to do about it. Would he allow himself to become even more disconnected? To lose even more of who he was? Or would he hit the reset button? At forty-four, there could be a lot of years left.

  Rapp wadded up the pack and threw it into the trees before starting up the road again. Strangely, his breathing didn’t sound quite as loud. Even with Hurley’s death, the inevitable blowback from the Obrecht op, and the impending release of the next Rickman file, he felt a little lighter. Might as well enjoy the illusion while it lasted.

  When the farmhouse came into view he slowed, assuming that there was at least one set of crosshairs tracking his head. The building was constructed from stone and white stucco, with blue window frames and a cheerful red roof. It was isolated and easy to protect, but close enough to a tourist town that foreigners went unnoticed. The landscaping was mostly natural and littered with toys—everything from a pink Big Wheel to a dollhouse faded by the sun.