by Vince Flynn
“Pathological liars, the both of them,” Baker continued. “The more I sat and thought about this, the more I realized they are absolutely capable of orchestrating some fucking coup like this.”
“That’s great,” McMahon said sarcastically, “your personal opinion and all, but do you have a shred of evidence that the vice president–elect of the United States plotted to have his own motorcade attacked?”
“Evidence…no.” Baker shook his head. “But motive, yes. And trust me, Agent McMahon, I’ve been following your investigation. In fact, I’ve already read the draft you’re going to deliver to the president on Monday. It’s heavy on supposition and light on the facts. Yeah, you have all your standard lab analysis on the bomb. You guys are great at that, but beyond the lab report, it’s all fluff. You guys don’t know where that van came from or how the explosives got into the country. Most importantly, though, you don’t have a suicide bomber, and we all know how the Islamic radical fundamentalists love to martyr themselves.”
“That’s not always the case.”
“Fine. Then where’s the guy in the red Nationals baseball hat?”
McMahon’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”
“Who, not a what, and don’t act so surprised. I told you, I’ve been following your investigation.”
McMahon looked anxiously at Kennedy and then back to Baker. “Who have you been talking to?”
“You know that is something that has always driven me nuts about this town. Everybody gets hung up on who said what to who, and they ignore the fact that the truth is staring them right in the face. You have a thirteen-year veteran of the Secret Service who has an impeccable record, and she reports that just before the blast, she saw a man in a red Nationals baseball hat and sunglasses standing behind a tree and acting suspicious. The man was, and I will quote from your original draft, not the one that you are going to give to the president on Monday. In your first draft you wrote Agent Rivera saw a man holding a device and right before the explosion he suddenly ducked behind the tree.”
“Agent Rivera was under a lot of stress at the time.”
“Don’t start acting like one of those attorneys over at Justice. I can see from your face that you believe that BS about as much as I do.”
“And you’re sounding like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists.”
Baker laughed loudly. “Better than some shill for the government who’d rather bury evidence than face the facts.”
McMahon was up off the couch with surprising quickness for his size. “I’d be careful about questioning people’s motives, Mr. Blackmailer.”
“I did no such thing, and you know it, but I’m glad to see you’re angry. You’re going to need it if you’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“And you’re in denial. You’ve accounted for every person at the scene of the crime that day except the man in the red hat.”
“The man in the red hat doesn’t exist.”
Baker stepped back and smiled. “Oh, really? If he doesn’t exist, then why does the Starbucks on Wisconsin have him on digital surveillance buying a cup of coffee roughly thirty minutes before the explosion?”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Black-and-white surveillance tape. Red doesn’t look red. Your people had it right in front of them and they missed it. Go back and check. You’ll see.”
McMahon was at a complete loss for words. This shark knew more about his own investigation than he did.
“Watch your back, Agent McMahon. These guys don’t play by the rules, and neither should you, if you want to find the truth.” Baker turned to Kennedy. “One last thing. You know that Ross will move to get rid of you right after the inauguration.”
“Yes.”
“And anyone else he deems a threat.”
“Are you thinking of anyone in particular?”
“Mitch.”
“Mitch Rapp,” said McMahon. “What in the hell does Ross have against Rapp?”
“It’s a long story,” said Kennedy, not wanting to answer the question. “Cap, I know you have a plane to catch, so cut to the chase.”
“I think it would be a good idea to bring in a fresh set of eyes on this.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean you’d like to let the bull into the china shop and see what he breaks?”
“Oh, that’s a tempting visual, but it’s not what I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of an assassin’s assassin. Someone who knows the ins and outs of this world.”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
What Baker and McMahon didn’t know, and what Kennedy was not about to tell them, was that she already had Mitch Rapp on the case. She had known about the mystery man in the red hat for almost a month, and Rapp and his team had been working quietly to find out who he was, and more importantly, who had hired him.
3
LIMASSOL, CYPRUS
H e was six inches taller than her and ten years older. “I think you should kiss me,” she said softly.
Mitch Rapp ignored her and watched the door to the café across the street.
“If we were really lovers you wouldn’t be able to take your hands off me.” She slid her chair closer to his and placed a hand on his thigh. She ran her hand through his long black hair. Streaks of gray were coming in on the sides. For three straight weeks she’d studied him. She knew every wrinkle and scar and there were quite a few of the latter. Some visible. Some buried in his psyche. She had no proof the mental scars were there, but they had to be. No body lived the type of hard life he’d lived and came out unscathed.
She lifted her sunglasses off her nose just enough to reveal her hazel eyes. They were more green than brown, which she thought might be part of the problem. His ex-wife—no, that wasn’t right, his deceased wife—had the most stunning green eyes. Cindy Brooks made the mistake of calling her the ex one night and he’d made her sleep on the floor. Brooks had been with the Agency for only five years, and she considered it a huge honor to work side by side with a living legend like Mitch Rapp. At least she had when she was first given the assignment.
“Listen, hard-ass.” Her words were harsh but hushed. The expression on her face was pure feigned adoration. “You handpicked me for this. I’m supposed to be your wife. We’re on our honeymoon. When people are on their honeymoon they kiss a lot, they talk, they hold hands…they act like they love each other.”
“Your point.” Rapp turned toward her, but kept his eyes on the café. He was wearing a pair of black Persol sunglasses that allowed him to see out, but no one else to see in.
“No one is going to believe our cover because you keep acting like I don’t exist.”
“People fight on their honeymoon all the time.”
“We fought yesterday.”
“We were in Istanbul yesterday. None of these people know we were fighting.”
“I’m sick of dealing with your foul mood.” She took her hand off his leg and leaned back. After a moment the smile on her face disappeared. “Fighting it is then.”
Brooks stood with such quickness that it surprised even Rapp. Her chair tumbled over and she put her hands on her hips. “My mother,” she yelled, “told me I shouldn’t marry you!” She reached out and grabbed her glass of wine from the table.
Rapp looked up at her from behind his sunglasses. His jaw tight with tension, he whispered, “Sit down! You’re making a scene.”
“I know I’m making a scene!” she yelled. “I want to make a scene! You’re an ass.” Then with a great flourish she took her wine, doused Rapp’s blue polo shirt and khaki pants, and stormed off down the street.
Rapp sat there motionless. The people at the surrounding tables all looked on in amusement. It had been a bad year. The worst year of his life. He went to bed every night blaming himself for her death, and woke up every morning hoping it had all been a nightmare. But it wasn’t. The unborn baby she was carrying, the
other children they would have undoubtedly had—a lifetime of dreams and memories gone in an instant and he never saw it coming. That was the other problem. The thing that ate away at him from the inside out. He had let his guard down. He had allowed her to change him, to give him hope that he could be something different. Something other than a killer.
He supposed there was a chance she would have succeeded in changing him, but it was small. His was a vocation that was very difficult to walk away from. Especially with so much on the line. He was unwilling to let go of his past. There was always one more job, one more operation to handle. She’d told him to let someone else man the ramparts for a while. He’d seen the younger guys, though. He’d even helped train a few of them and they had a lot to learn before they were anywhere near as good as he was. At thirty-nine he was at his peak. His knees and back were not what they once were, but he still had no problem keeping up with the rookies, who in some cases were nearly half his age. The years of experience were what really made the difference.
If he could do it all over again, the decision would have been easy. He would have given it all up for one more day with her. The hunt for her killers was the only thing that got him through the first nine months. After that, he’d tried pills for a while. At first they worked. At least they helped him sleep. But after a month they started to make him crazy, so he threw them all away. That was when he dropped out. He flew to Paris, made a stop in Switzerland, and then disappeared for two months. He drank profuse amounts of alcohol and went on an opium binge in Bangkok that lasted for a week. He even slept with a couple of women along the way, but the brief flings only worsened his guilt. Finally, in late October, he woke up one early evening in his hotel room in Calcutta and turned on Sky News. That was how he heard about the attack on the motorcade. He looked at his puffy red face and bloodshot eyes in the mirror and knew he had reached the tipping point. He either went back to the States and got back to work, or he would drink himself to death. Rapp was a lot of things, but nothing more so than a survivor.
Kennedy was happy to see him, but there were questions, and Rapp wasn’t good at answering questions. The CIA got a little skittish when their operatives disappeared. The FBI also took notice. Kennedy covered for him as best she could, and told the inquisitors that Rapp had taken a leave of absence. Most understood. The death of his wife was a very public affair. Rapp had his enemies in the government, however, and they wanted answers. Rapp, in his typical manner, told them to go fuck themselves, which only served to make the situation worse. In the end it was the president who intervened on his behalf. The commander in chief came down extremely hard on those who questioned Rapp’s loyalty. This was not the Cold War. No longer did agents get turned by the enemy. This new war was about terrorism, and the thought of Rapp going over to the other side was simply preposterous.
This all came down the week before the election, and it was Ross’s people at National Intelligence who made the biggest stink. When Alexander and Ross pulled off their come-from-behind victory, both Rapp and Kennedy knew their days were numbered. Almost two years earlier, he had warned Kennedy that he thought al-Qaeda, or one of its offshoots, might try to hire outside help to run some of their operations. They had the cash to do it, and they also had a practical motive. The U.S. and her allies had done a tremendous job of rolling up terrorist cells, which operationally left al-Qaeda ineffective when it came to striking at the heart of America. The motorcade incident changed all of that. Somehow they had managed to stage a spectacular attack inside, and they had left surprisingly few clues. In Rapp’s experience, lack of evidence meant a professional was involved.
Nowhere in any of the early reports did Rapp read a thing about the mystery man in the red hat. He learned that when he sat down to talk to Special Agent Rivera. At first Rapp was shocked that there was no mention of him in the reports, but then it began to make sense. Rivera was the only one to notice the man. He didn’t show up on any surveillance monitors from the surrounding businesses. Paramedics did not treat him after the explosion. He simply disappeared, or as several doctors tried to tell Rivera, he never existed except in her mind. She’d suffered a serious concussion. It was a given that she might be confused about when and where things had occurred. The long and short of it was that the lawyers at the Justice Department didn’t like loose ends. Especially loose ends that would fan the flames of conspiracy theorists for decades to come.
Rapp went back to the scene of the crime with a map that listed where every pedestrian and vehicle was on that afternoon in October when history was changed. Two of the apartment buildings across the street were now holes in the ground. The adjacent buildings on either side were under construction. Other than that everything looked normal. The huge crater in the road had been filled and repaved, and fresh trees had been planted. Rapp found the tree where Rivera said the man had been standing right before everything faded to black. The large oak was still there, but damaged. Some of the bark that faced the explosion was gone and there were several scars left by debris that had imbedded itself into the trunk.
For Rapp, it came down to the tree and one other thing. If the attack had really been carried out by jihadists, there would have been a body, or more accurately, tiny parts of a body. A true believer willing to martyr himself for the cause. No body parts meant remote detonation. And if Rapp had been the trigger man that day, he would have stood right where Rivera said she saw the man in the red hat. The FBI and the rest of the government could scour the planet for the terrorists who claimed responsibility, but Rapp was going to look elsewhere. The shadowy world of contract killers.
It was a world Rapp knew well. The covert ops business required rubbing shoulders with people who were on par with Swiss bankers when it came to secrecy. In essence it was a loose network of former intelligence, law enforcement, and military types. Many of these people worked for real security firms. The firms handled legitimate work and subcontracted out the black bag stuff on the side. Rapp ruled these companies out from the start of his investigation. Targeting a presidential candidate and setting off car bombs in Washington, DC, was way off the reservation. No big security firm or foreign intelligence service would touch a contract like this. The downside was simply too great. The job would have been taken by someone out of the mainstream. Someone small. A one-, two-, or three-man shop at the most. It would also have to be someone who didn’t mind taking money from terrorists, and that made the list of potential suspects pretty thin.
All of this was going through Rapp’s head when they got the first big break—the Starbucks tape. There had literally been hundreds of tapes to review from local Georgetown businesses. A computer genius at Langley named Marcus Dumond had caught the oversight. Dumond had written a computer program that piggybacked the recognition software they already used. The thousands of hours of surveillance footage was scanned with the new program looking for baseball hats. It came back with over a hundred hits, but it was the Starbucks one that fit the time frame and Rivera’s description of the man she’d seen. It did not provide them with a clear photo of the suspect, but it was a start. The brim of his hat blocked most of his face from the camera, but they knew what his mouth and chin looked like, and they also got a brief glimpse of his nose and the lower portion of his eyes. They also knew his height and approximate weight.
Most important for Rapp, though, was that he now knew how the man moved. How he carried himself. They had him on tape for twenty-seven seconds while he waited in line to order his drink. Thanks to the time stamp on the surveillance footage they were also able to go back and find out exactly what the assassin had ordered—a double espresso. Definitely more European or Middle Eastern than American, and that was where the hunt had led them—to the countries that bordered the Mediterranean.
Rapp started with the CIA’s database and then contacted his colleagues in Britain, France, and Italy. For close to four weeks Rapp and a small team had been hopping all over the Mediterranean running down leads. They’d been
in Tunisia, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and now Cyprus. They had narrowed the search down to three names. Whether those three names represented three separate individuals or one, they couldn’t be sure. The business was funny that way. It was very easy for an operator to take on multiple identities and use different pseudonyms depending on the target, the type of hit, or the region. With each passing day, though, Rapp was beginning to believe it was one man. There were too many similarities. Too many intersecting paths.
Rapp’s contact in Istanbul was dependable: a deputy undersecretary in the Turkish National Intelligence Organization who had been on the CIA payroll for almost three decades. He told Rapp there was a good chance the man he was looking for lived in Cyprus. He did business in Istanbul from time to time, but Limassol, Cyprus, was his home. The Turkish spy gave Rapp an address, an e-mail account, and a low-quality surveillance photograph. Dumond pulled all the information together in less than a day and was still trying to connect the dots. They had real estate records, tax returns, past and present e-mail accounts, and banking records. The guy he was looking for operated a front company out of an office above the café he’d been sitting across from for the past two hours. The owner of the café was his landlord. The tenant went by the name of Alexander Deckas. Rapp thought it a strange irony that the suspected assassin went by the same first name as the last name of the man he had tried to kill.
Rapp stood and dabbed the wine from his pants. A sympathetic waiter handed him a second napkin. He cleaned the wine as best he could while trying to come up with the worst possible overseas posting for Brooks. The waiter gave him a third napkin, and Rapp gave him the two soiled ones. He glanced around the area to see how much attention he had garnered. The café was on a one-way street in front of the hotel so all the parked cars were pointed east. Halfway down the block to his left, something caught his eye. Casually, he threw some cash down on the table and thanked the waiter in Italian. He didn’t know Greek and figured it was the next best option. Rapp then started down the street. He pulled at his wet shirt and continued to act concerned over his soiled clothes. He glanced to his right and confirmed what he had seen. Two men were sitting in a car. One of them was holding a camera with a telephoto lens and it was pointed at the same café Rapp had been watching.