by Vince Flynn
“You don’t really expect me to fall for this, do you?”
“Oh, I do, Mr. Gould, because if I could find them I’m guessing that your employer can as well.”
“You’re bluffing.”
Kennedy spoke each word in a staccato rhythm. “Nelson, New Zealand
… 4102 Vickerman Street.” She saw the panic in the way his right cheek twitched. At least he cared about them. “Would you like me to describe the house to you?”
The facade melted away at the mention of the city, let alone his address. He shook his head.
“I had Claudia and Anna placed into protective custody last night.” Kennedy turned for the door. “And just so we’re clear on this, I did it because I don’t think they should die because of your greed and stupidity.”
Gould felt the walls closing in around him. He watched Kennedy reach for the buzzer next to the door and he blurted out, “How did you find us?”
Kennedy made a half turn and looked down at Gould. “This is your last chance, Mr. Gould. You either tell me everything I want to know, or I will tell Claudia how you have continued with your little hobby despite promising her you were done. I will tell her about the type of people you’ve been working with and how you have put her and Anna in harm’s way, all for your own selfish gratification. And then you can spend the rest of your life in a cell agonizing over your stupidity and wondering what your daughter looks like with each passing birthday. So what’s it going to be, Mr. Gould, are you ready to talk or do want to continue with these stupid games?”
His head hung in defeat, Gould said, “I’m ready to talk.” “What is my name, and what do I do for a living?”
“You’re Dr. Irene Kennedy. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Kennedy nodded and pressed the buzzer. It opened a second later to reveal Nash. She told him, “I need a pen and a pad of paper. Mr. Gould is about to give us a good deal of information.”
Nash looked more than a little surprised that his boss had been able to accomplish what he couldn’t, and in only a few minutes. He nodded and turned to get what she’d asked for.
“And you can turn everything back on.” Kennedy let the door close and surveyed the strange man sitting across from her. “You might not understand this but I care about what happens to you.”
Gould looked up at her with disbelieving eyes.
“I know that’s hard for someone like you to believe, but it’s true. Mitch spared your life for reasons that I don’t entirely understand, which leaves me to wonder if there isn’t a bigger reason that none of us understood, and still don’t understand.” Kennedy watched for a sign that the man was capable of feeling either guilt or gratitude. She saw neither, but she wasn’t displeased, for his expression was one of fear, and Kennedy knew from personal experience that fear could be a great motivator. “You have a role to play here, Mr. Gould. I don’t know what it is yet, but I think we’re about to find out.”
Chapter 29
Joel Wilson was used to getting his way. So much so that when people didn’t bow to his whims, he became such an insufferable bastard that his opponents’ only option was to surrender. At least that’s the way it usually worked, but every once in a while Wilson ran up against someone who was more than willing to match him toe to toe in his little game of threats, wild conjecture and pure bluster.
It had started off well enough. Wilson had landed at the Kabul International Airport without alerting the CIA, or anyone from the FBI, for that matter, that he and his team had arrived. He then placed a call to the FBI liaison at the embassy and explained to him that they needed to talk. “No,” Wilson explained to the man, “you are not in any trouble-at least none that I know of, so I suggest you follow my orders to the tee.” Wilson went on to explain that no one, including the ambassador, was to know that he and his people were in the country. The liaison went along with Wilson’s requests and within the hour his team was inside the embassy and ready to descend upon the CIA personnel.
That was when things started to get a little bumpy. Wilson, primed for his first confrontation, was extremely disappointed when he discovered that Darren Sickles, the CIA’s station chief, was not in the building. Wilson badgered Sickles’s secretary for a good ten minutes. The only thing he managed to get out of her was that Sickles was at the Ministry of the Interior on important business. When he asked for Sickles’s second in command he was told he was in Jalalabad. When he inquired as to the whereabouts of Mitch Rapp, the woman completely shut down. It didn’t matter how many threats he leveled at her, she refused to answer his questions.
In the end it was the liaison that came through, a pasty little man with too much hair. Wilson thought he looked like a foreigner. Apparently there had been a gunfight with the local police and Rapp. It was causing an uproar in the capital. Early reports had it that Rapp and his men had killed more than twenty police officers and Rapp had been injured in the battle. The liaison discovered that Rapp had been taken to the Cure International Hospital, so Wilson loaded up his team went to see what they could find out.
The decision proved to be a colossal mistake. Angry relatives and locals had congregated at the hospital, where many of the dead and wounded police officers had been taken. Wilson and his people were pelted with rocks and garbage as they entered the hospital, only to find out that Rapp wasn’t there. They wasted two additional hours at the hospital waiting for a military escort to take them back to the embassy. By then Wilson had heard bits and pieces of what had happened to Rapp and his men. Apparently a corrupt police commander had ordered the attack. Wilson had his own priorities to deal with but this also sounded like an area he might have to look into.
After returning to the embassy, Wilson learned that Director Kennedy was in the country. Wilson became irate over their squandered opportunity. Kennedy could easily insert herself between Wilson and her people, making his investigation nearly impossible. The liaison came to Wilson for a second time claiming to know where Rapp was. Wilson told him if was wrong this time, he would find the worst posting the FBI had and he would make sure he was sent there. The team went back to the Kabul airport, and was ferried by helicopter up to the Bagram Air Base.
Landing at the base was uneventful as they were met by another contingent of FBI special agents who were assigned to the base. Wilson was pleased to see the stress that his visit had induced. He’d learned from the past that transported to the base hospital. And that was where the real problems started. The nearly insurmountable obstacle came in the form of a little five-foot-tall Latino Air Force sergeant, who for reasons that Wilson could not grasp, had decided to become his archenemy.
It started out simple enough, the fuzzy liaison from the embassy inquiring at the main desk about a patient named Mitch Rapp. The young man sitting behind the desk had two chevrons and a star. Wilson had no idea what rank that was but he assumed it was very low because the enlisted person in question had bad acne. The airman first class was a law-abiding, extremely patriotic twenty-one-year-old from Kansas who didn’t have it in him to challenge authority, so he simply gave them directions to the ward where Rapp could be found.
It was at that second desk where Wilson ran into immovable Air Force Command Master Sergeant Sheila Sanchez-all four feet eleven inches of her. In hindsight, Wilson realized that his tactics had been wrong, something not easy for him to admit. His five-person entourage had grown to nine special agents by the time they’d arrived at the hospital. These wards were filled with young men and women who’d had their bodies mangled in the most awful ways, typically from explosions. That meant that the people who cared for them conducted themselves almost as if they were cloistered nuns who had taken a vow of silence.
So the mob of agents stumbled upon the ward that among other things handled head trauma. The badges came out and Wilson was both too loud and too firm about what he wanted. The women behind the desk grew horrified as the male agents began looking in open doors to see if they could identify Rapp. Upon he
aring the disturbance, Sheila Sanchez quickly removed her reading glasses, spun her chair away from her computer and waddled at double pace out of her office and into the hallway.
Sanchez ran her ward with an iron fist. The patients came first and the patients on this particular floor needed a great deal of rest, which required peace and quiet. As she was the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer on the floor, even the doctors gave her a wide swath. It wasn’t that they feared Sanchez so much as that the woman knew what she was doing, so the officers let her call the shots, everywhere except the operating room.
Sanchez had seen it all in her time on the base. Presidents, vice presidents, cabinet members, generals from every service, admirals, rock stars, movie stars, and comedians. They all came with their entourages and even though they meant well, they were all a pain in the ass. Sanchez had made it very clear to the people down at the front desk that when these groups came through; they were not to be sent to her floor. Send them to see the patients with broken bones and bullet holes, but leave her head trauma patients the hell alone.
The first thing she did was draw the index finger of her left hand up in front of her mouth and shush the entire group of men. Having silenced the crowd, she headed for a man who had made it around the desk and had pushed his head into one of the rooms. The agent, caught in no-man’s-land, didn’t know what to do, so he stood there frozen in the doorway. Sanchez swatted him in the ass as if he were a three-yearold boy who had just run out in the street. When the agent turned to protest, Sanchez grabbed him by the tie and yanked him down the hall and back to the area on the other side of the desk.
Keeping her voice down but her intensity extremely high, Sanchez hissed, “Do you people think you’re at the zoo? My patients are just animals… you can just walk in here, loud as hell, and start poking around?”
Wilson stepped forward with a scowl on his face and his credentials in his left hand. “Listen here, lady. We’re here on official FBI business. I need to speak to one of your patients, and I need to speak to him right now.”
“Lady?” the word flew out of Sanchez’s round little mouth like a counter punch. “You see this here?” She swung her left shoulder around so Wilson had a clear view. “It’s not ‘lady,’ it’s Command Master Sergeant Sanchez.”
Wilson still didn’t get it. He rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t have time for this. I am running a very important investigation. Get out of my way or-”
“Or you’ll what?” Sanchez stepped forward and poked Wilson at the base of his sternum, right above his solar plexus.
Wilson retreated two quick steps and brought his hand up in case she tried again. “You just assaulted a federal agent.”
“Then arrest me, you big pussy.”
“I’m not going to warn you again.”
Without turning, Sanchez called to one of the nurses, “Amanda, get base security up here right now.”
“Listen, la-” Wilson almost said “lady,” but stopped himself and then noticed the name tag on this crazy woman’s ample breast. “Ms. Sanchez, this is a federal facility. We work for the FBI. We have jurisdiction over this base.”
“The hell you do,” Sanchez laughed in his face, “and it’s Command Master Sergeant Sanchez, Special Agent Dumb ass, or whatever your name is. I have been in this man’s United States Air Force for thirty years and I know every regulation from top to bottom. Did you check in with USAF Security Forces when you came on base?” She paused a beat to see if he could muster an answer, which he couldn’t. “Of course you didn’t. Are you working with the USAF Office of Special Investigations?”
Wilson knew he was in trouble and managed to look at one of the special agents who was assigned to the base to see if he could offer a little assistance. The man shrugged and shook his head. “Command Master Sergeant Sanchez, I run the Counterintelligence Division at the FBI. This is a national security issue and if you don’t step aside, I’m going to have to have you arrested.”
Sanchez raised her fist again as if she might strike him. “I can’t seem to get it through your thick head-you are not in charge here. I am.”
“I am a federal-”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are. You are not authorized to be on my floor.”
“But-”
“But nothing. You’ve got two strikes and that means you only have one more chance. Here comes the third pitch, and my guess is you’re gonna whiff on this one just like the first two.” Sanchez held up the stubby index finger on her right hand, started with the first man on her left and then continued around to her right, saying, “Do any of you have a warrant issued from a federal judge that specifically states that you can bully your way into an intensive care unit on this particular United States air base?” She continued her sweep, looking each man in the eye for a second time. When she made it back to Wilson, she said, “I didn’t think so.” She stepped forward, shooing the herd of men toward the staircase. “So get the hell off my floor right now, and don’t you dare come back until you have that warrant.”
Chapter 30
Jalalabad, Afghanistan
Kassar attempted to remain calm as he studied the twentythree-inch color monitor. The hostage was limp, his arms stretched above his head, his knees buckled, the two dimwitted interrogators trying to figure out what to do. Kassar looked calm, but inside his stomach was turning flips. If he botched this in any way he might as well put a bullet in his own head and save himself from the misguided hope that they might let him live. After calming himself with a few deep breaths, he pushed himself away from the table and grabbed his mask. Before entering the room he pulled it down to make sure none of his face was showing.
The door opened to reveal the two fools checking Rickman for a pulse. They had pulled their masks up so they fit like winter caps. They looked like a couple of common criminals in a Hollywood movie. Kassar filed past the camera and went straight to the extremely valuable
Rickman. He shooed the other two men away and checked Rickman’s neck. He spent almost a minute searching for a pulse. Two separate times he thought he felt a weak pulse but then he lost it. Next he tried the wrist and there was nothing.
His anxiety growing with each passing second, Kassar finally placed his ear over Rickman’s heart. Again there was nothing. Kassar stepped away from the lifeless Rickman and looked at his men. The two simpletons couldn’t have looked more ashamed. “He was doing fine. The doctor said he could take more.”
“We didn’t hit him that hard,” the shorter one said.
Kassar was more nervous than angry. “I forbade you two from killing him, yet that’s exactly what you did.”
“We are sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am.” Kassar turned to leave and while facing the camera he drew his pistol from under his tunic. A long silencer was attached to the end. Kassar stepped to the side and spun around, facing the men. “I told you I would kill you if anything happened to him.” “I’m sorry,” the bigger one said in a pleading tone.
Kassar squeezed the trigger five times in quick succession and then turned the weapon on the other man, who was cowering with his hands over his face. Kassar was amused that this idiot thought covering his face could somehow stop a bullet. Kassar placed the tip of the silencer against the man’s palms and started pulling the trigger. He didn’t bother to count this time. He let his rage flow.
When the pistol was empty, Kassar turned to face the camera. They could still make it look as if Rickman was alive, at least for a while. All they had to do was release some propaganda on the Internet showing Rickman when he started to break. The Americans would fear the worst. Kassar kept telling himself that it would work. He’d been telling himself the same thing for days, even though he had his doubts.
He would have to move quickly, though, or all would be lost. Kassar swung his empty pistol at the camera, knocking it to the floor. The camera broke into several pieces, the red light blinking several times and then going out. Kassar stuffed his pistol bac
k in his waistband and yanked off the stifling black hood. He walked from one wall to The LasT Man 201 the other and back, going over what had to be done. With his nerves calmed just enough to carry on, he approached Rickman and with a knife cut the rope that was holding him up.
Kassar caught the body over his left shoulder, and after moving him around a bit he had him balanced just right. The stench of urine and feces was awful. Kassar almost retched twice before he even got him out of the room. He stopped in the next room and closed and unhooked the laptop that had recorded all the sessions. He then started up the stairs and again almost vomited.
Kassar was about to lay Rickman on the floor and then he thought of the long drive ahead. There was no way he could stand the smell, and if he was stopped by the police or border agents the smell alone might cause them to search the vehicle. So, instead of tossing him on the floor, Kassar carried him down the hall to the back of the house and laid the body in the bathtub.
He checked his watch and wondered how much time he could spare. He decided ten minutes wouldn’t make a difference. Kassar turned on the water and used his knife to cut Rickman’s foulsmelling boxers from his body. Once the underwear was disposed of it was relatively easy. A little bit of soap and a washcloth and the body was clean enough for the journey. Kassar dried Rickman as best he could and then carried him to the bedroom, where he dressed him in some loose-fitting clothes. The only problem they had now was the bloody and battered face. Kassar would lay him in the backseat and cover him with a blanket. If he were stopped he would tell them that he was bringing his brother home to be buried. In the West it might have seemed strange, but here in Afghanistan, morticians were not so common.
Kassar had to take care of one more thing. He sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop. His fingers glided over the track pad until he had what he wanted. He had edited the video earlier in the day. Rickman had spoken a few lies, but he had also given up some valuable secrets. The Americans would lose their minds when they saw this. Kassar was smiling as he posted the video on a popular jihadist website. Like a pebble in a lake, the video would ripple across the World Wide Web. There was no way the Americans could hope to contain it.