by Vince Flynn
“So, what now?” Coleman said. “Power’s on and the world’s getting back to its normal fucked-up self. We’re tan, rested, and tech savvy. The calls for contracts are rolling in again.”
“You should take them,” Rapp said.
“That’s it? That’s your advice? ‘You should take them’?”
“Look, I have no relationship with the new president and I might never have one. Hell, I’m not even sure I want to.”
“What’s Dr. Kennedy think about him?” McGraw asked.
“Last I talked to her, she didn’t know what to make of him yet.”
“So, what’s your plan?” Coleman asked.
“I’m headed to South Africa. Claudia and Anna are already there.”
“I mean on a more philosophical level. Do you find yourself surfing for country clubs?”
“Not yet.”
“Then join us. Full time. SEAL Demolition and Salvage’s newest recruit.”
“I don’t remember that working out so well last time.”
“No more celebrity protection, I promise. None of us are starving and that gives us the luxury to pick and choose. And we recently went to a fully democratic model. Everyone votes on whether to take a contract and it has to be unanimous. So, only interesting stuff that pays obscene amounts of money.”
Rapp shook his head, still searching for their waitress. “Look, I’ll always back you guys up if you need it. You know that. But right now, I’ve got a chance to back away for a while. And I’m going to take it.” He stood. “Anyone else need another drink?”
A couple of hands went up and he headed for the bar. The people behind it were just as overworked as his waitress, so he found a stool and settled in. For the first time in years, he had time to wait.
ISIS and al-Qaeda were on the ropes and increasingly turning inward. The Russians were still up to no good but had chosen Facebook as their primary battlefield. The Chinese were a significant threat, but despite a little naval posturing, that threat was largely economic. Finally, the world was moving away from oil, causing the Middle East to slowly lose its strategic importance.
And America? It was being taken over by corrupt politicians, a mainstream media bent on whipping up divisions, and an Internet full of crazies.
And while all those threats were very real and as dangerous as anything he’d ever faced, they weren’t the kind he was equipped to resolve.
His phone rang and he looked down at the caller information—or more precisely, lack thereof. Irene Kennedy. Impeccable timing as usual. Sometimes he wondered if she had the ability to read his mind.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up.
“How’s the training going?”
“Good.”
“Find any interesting new toys?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’d be better to leave them for the next generation.”
“You sound a bit dejected.”
Rapp caught the bartender’s eye, tapping his empty beer bottle before holding up three fingers.
“Dejected? Maybe. Or maybe relieved. It’s been a long road and now I may have reached the end of it. Alive.”
“It’s a brave new world. There’s no question of that. But you’ve always kept step.”
“This time I’m not sure I want to.”
“In that case, I have some bad news.”
“What?”
“President Cook wants to meet you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible that it has something to do with what happened in Uganda. Have you been following that?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. More likely he just wants to size you up. See if you’re someone his administration can use.”
“Use,” Rapp repeated, knowing that Kennedy always chose her words carefully. “Can I take it that he hasn’t grown on you?”
“I never said that.”
“Word is that you’re letting Mike handle him.”
Mike Nash was a former operator who had become Kennedy’s right-hand man. A good-looking, endlessly likable Marine, he had a gift for dealing with the assholes on Capitol Hill. Rapp and he had been friends for years and, in fact, lived only a few houses from each other in a private subdivision west of DC.
“Like you, I’m trying to regain a little of my life. The lull we’re coming to the end of has reminded me how much I’ve given up.”
He was a bit jealous. The truth was that he’d never really had much of a life. Getting one back had to be easier than acquiring one for the first time.
“Fine. I’ll be back tomorrow. Then I have a couple days before I leave for Cape Town. If he can fit a meeting into that window, I’ll make it work. If not, he’ll have to wait until I get back.”
“Which will be when?”
“I don’t know,” he said as the bartender returned with his beers. “Maybe never.”
3
SOUTHWESTERN UGANDA
GREEN.
It was the word that had overtaken lucky to describe David Chism’s world.
He knew that his takeaway from all this should be terror. Or despair. Or rage. But it wasn’t. It was the color that surrounded him, pressed against him, closed in around him.
He crouched among the ferns and mossy vines, listening intently for a few moments. Nothing. Just the rustle of leaves and the calls of a few birds. Visibility was no more than ten feet and all he could smell was jungle rot and a hint of smoke from what he assumed were the smoldering remains of his life’s work.
Nature’s sensory deprivation chamber.
Finding no reason not to continue downslope, he stood and did so carefully. He’d never traveled through anything this dense before, but it wasn’t completely foreign. Mukisa Odongo had taught him a great deal about the terrain on their expeditions to find novel insect species and those still-elusive mountain gorillas. And now Odongo was dead. For some reason Chism was absolutely certain of that. He could feel his absence.
What the hell was going on in this world? His friend Vicky Schaefer had recently been murdered in Yemen, where she was trying to control a deadly new coronavirus. And her team—a mirror of his own—hadn’t fared any better. All any of them wanted to do was help people.
Now his research facility was a pile of ashes. His people and patients were either scattered or dead. His active experiments were destroyed.
How the fuck could this be happening? It was like a big green nightmare he couldn’t wake up from.
Chism arrived at the stream he was looking for and lay down next to it, using his filthy shirt to filter water into a plastic bottle he’d found. The night of their escape had been hard as hell, but with the rain, drinking water hadn’t been an issue. Cold and the terrain had been their biggest enemies. Last night—their second in the forest—hadn’t been so uncomfortable, but now thirst and hunger were starting to become an issue.
“Doctor Cheesmee!”
He froze at the sound of the shout, trying to pinpoint its direction and distance.
“Daveed Cheesmee! We help you! We Ugandan army!”
He seriously doubted it. There had been no aircraft in the area and based on his lengthy political conversations with Odongo, the Ugandan government was wary of sending troops to this region. Much more likely, the shout was a siren song from one of Gideon Auma’s men.
Chism had tried to convince himself that Auma’s goal was to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and exchange it for narcotics, weapons, and whatever else it was that kept his death cult operating. Now, though, it was impossible to deny that his men were in search of something bigger. If Chism let himself fall into their hands, they could ransom him back to Nick Ward. And that’d be real money.
When the voice called out again it sounded more distant, so Chism began working his way back up the slope. It took well over an hour, but he finally reached a wall of dirt and rock near the top of one of the mountains that stretched endlessly in every direction. To the west he could see what was left of the hospital
—a black smear at the edge of the red dirt road that passed in front of it.
He eased along the steep slope, entering a bank of morning fog that significantly reduced visibility. The ground turned slick, and he tested every foot placement before committing. Just because he could no longer see what was to his left didn’t mean it wasn’t there. One misstep and he’d find himself cartwheeling hundreds of feet before getting hung up in the trees below.
Calling his destination a cave would be an exaggeration. It was more a deep impression covered with woven branches to camouflage the entrance. He rustled them in the coded rhythm that Jing Liu had insisted on and then passed into the gloom.
The space was tight—maybe ten feet square. The sloping dirt walls were still clinging to the moisture from two nights ago, creating a misty humidity that tasted like mold and earth. Fortunately, the heat wasn’t bad. Uganda’s weather could be counted on to hover somewhere between the high seventies during the day and mid-sixties at night.
Liu was sitting near the south wall, knees pulled to her chest, staring through the thick air at nothing. She didn’t seem to notice him crossing her field of vision and kneeling next to Matteo Ricci. While Chism’s luck had held during their unlikely escape from the hospital, the Italian had been less fortunate. His right pants leg had caught fire and had melted to his thigh. The wound was painful, but not as painful as being forced to acknowledge how much polyester had been present in his stylish slacks. The inevitable infection, though, was going to be a serious problem.
“Were you able to call for help?” Ricci said, sounding even weaker than when Chism had left a few hours before.
“I wasn’t able to get signal. But maybe a little later.”
It was a lie, of course. The cell tower that serviced the area had been part of the facility Auma’s people had burned.
“Water?”
“That I managed to get. But you’re going to have to hang on for a few more hours. It’s got to sit in the sun for a while to disinfect. I have no idea what’s in that stream. Maybe—”
“We have to get out of here,” Liu blurted. “We cannot sleep another night in a hole.”
Chism let out a long breath and turned toward her.
“We’ve talked about this, Jing. There are people out there trying to capture us.”
“But they say they from the Ugandan army. They trying to help us.”
“No, they’re not,” Chism said firmly. “They’re Auma’s men. And wherever they want to take us, I guarantee it’s going to be a hell of a lot worse than where we are now.”
“Then what?” Ricci said, pushing himself to his elbows in the thatch he was lying on. “We can’t stay here forever.”
“Look, there are things we can eat in the forest. We have access to water. The weather forecast was for clear skies after the storm we had the night of the attack. We’re okay here for a while. And Nick will send people to help us.”
“He thinks we dead,” Liu said. “No one coming.”
“That’s not true. When Auma doesn’t contact him for ransom and our bodies don’t turn up, Nick will have to start working under the assumption we’re alive. He didn’t make a trillion dollars by just giving up when things turn ugly.”
4
WST OF MANASSAS
VIRGINIA
USA
RAPP walked through his gate and used a remote control to close it behind him. The structure inside was designed to be half house, half bunker but was starting to feel mostly like the latter with Claudia and Anna gone. Surprisingly, a couple of weeks of freezer food and silence was all it had taken to make the concrete walls start to close in.
It was only 10 a.m., but temperatures were already pushing into the mid-eighties as he started up a road scattered with houses and empty lots. He knew the owners of each one—all old friends who could handle a weapon. Some a little long in the tooth, but still loyal and better than nothing if the shit ever hit the fan.
Creating a neighborhood full of shooters had been his brother’s idea and it was he who had provided the incentive—buying up the entire subdivision and selling off the lots for a dollar to the right people. The plan had been to create an oasis where Rapp could let his guard drop a bit. And it had worked. At least for a while.
Rapp was unaccustomed to wearing a suit and was already starting to sweat through it when he approached a barn on the right. It had originally been designated as a shooting range and gym but had been commandeered by the burgeoning agricultural operation dreamed up by Scott Coleman and his seven-year-old accomplice, Anna Gould. A sizable plot had been fenced off that spring and was now alive with various experimental crops. A group of sheep, led by the formidable Snowball, was testing the barrier for weakness and eyeing up the new grazing potential.
Rapp had resisted the shift to farming but was now glad he’d lost that particular battle. Coleman was at his happiest when he was screwing with plants and livestock. Except maybe for when he was perched on top of the tractor he’d had airbrushed with ghost flames and skulls.
Even better, it gave some of Rapp’s retired neighbors a reason to get out of bed in the morning—particularly when Coleman was out on an op. And, selfishly, it made the subdivision even more self-sufficient. Something that would have come in handy if he hadn’t been able to get America’s lights back on.
Rapp finally turned into a yard strewn with toys and sports equipment. Mike Nash appeared in the front door of the house a moment later holding a couple of go-cups and a file folder.
“That’s an upgrade!” he said, nodding in Rapp’s direction. “Claudia finally shit-canned that suit you got at Kmart, huh?”
It hadn’t actually been Kmart, but there was no point in splitting hairs. And that was exactly what she’d done—with an appropriate ceremony and exaggerated expression of disgust. He tended to own precisely two suits: one winter, one summer. And while that number hadn’t changed, the quality of the merchandise definitely had.
“Maggie told me we have to take the kidmobile,” Nash said, offering Rapp one of the cups before heading toward a minivan parked in front of the garage. Rapp climbed in the other side, sweeping a baseball mitt from the seat before settling in.
“You ready for this, Mitch?”
Rapp looked out the window, catching his reflection in it. His beard had grown back in and his shoulder-length hair was neatly combed for the occasion. Most striking, though, was the strange pallor to his skin. The lack of Middle Eastern operations over the last six months had kept him out of the desert sun and Claudia was quite the sunscreen Nazi. She’d become convinced that it wouldn’t be a bullet that killed him. It’d be skin cancer.
“I guess.”
“Don’t sound so excited. How are Claudia and Anna doing in Cape Town?”
“Good.”
“Are you going to go see them?”
“Yeah. Tonight.”
“Gonna stay for a while?”
“Don’t know.” A lie, but for now a convenient one.
“Man. You are a riveting conversationalist this morning.”
Rapp leaned back in the seat and glanced over at his old friend. “Tell me about him.”
“The president? Not that much to say that hasn’t been said before. He’s smart and focused as hell. After six months in office, though, he’s frustrated with the process. As a former governor who had a lot of support from local government, he’s finding it hard to wrap his arms around Washington. He wants to get things done but you know how it is. Ten roadblocks for every three feet of asphalt.”
“What about his wife?”
“Ah, you’re not as out of the loop as you pretend to be,” Nash said. “Excellent question. She’s even smarter than he is but doesn’t have his touch with the common man. Her element is more a private jet full of Harvard PhDs. It’s a weakness she’s conscious of and working on, though. We’ll see how it goes. What I can tell you is that she’s a full fifty percent of that team. To the point that it’s a mistake to think of the pres
ident as one person. It’s more like Anthony Cook is the right brain and Catherine’s the left.”
Rapp nodded but didn’t otherwise respond.
“Irene doesn’t like them. Did she tell you that? She thinks they come off as a little ambitious,” Nash said.
“Ambitious with their agenda for the country or with accumulating power?”
“That’s a hard question to answer. You know better than I do that there’s a fair amount of overlap between those two things.”
“Try.”
“This I can tell you: Anthony Cook feels like he’s the first president of the new era. He understands the shifts in the geopolitical landscape, in technology, and in culture. And while he’s informed by history, he tends not to look back too much. His eyes are locked on what’s next. He wants to knock two hundred and fifty years of dust off the country and put us firmly back into a leadership position.”
“They all do at first,” Rapp said. “But he’ll end up like the rest. Flailing around, putting out fires, and collecting donations. Then he’ll be gone.”
“Always the cynic. But yeah. Probably. I hope not, though. The way I see it, this country’s in worse shape than it’s been in since the Civil War. We’re bankrupting ourselves. We’re turning on each other. We’re choosing leaders who are only interested in staying in office and don’t even pretend to govern anymore. We’re losing our focus on terrorism while Islamic radicals still have the ability to bloody us. The Chinese are on their way to dominating us economically and the Russians are getting way further than they should trolling us on the Internet…” His voice faded for a moment. “Take it from a guy who spends half his life inside the beltway, man. We need some real leadership in this country. And we need it now.”
* * *
“Mitch!” Anthony Cook said, striding across the disorientingly modern Oval Office. “It’s a real honor to meet you.”
His overbearing grip caused his biceps to strain against a shirt that seemed to have been tailored for that exact purpose. Every time Rapp saw a picture of Cook, he seemed to have swollen a little more. Unlike the previous president, though, he wasn’t a former athlete. If Rapp had to guess, his impressive physique came as much from a syringe as from a gym.