by Vince Flynn
Rapp realized what was going on only a second or two before it happened. He twisted the lens as far as it would go and held the trigger down. The high-speed digital camera began clicking away at the rate of six frames per second. In the faint light, he glimpsed the man in the hat reaching into the car and then there was an ever-so-brief flash. Not the white flash of a camera, but the yellow flash of a muzzle. Rapp took his finger off the camera’s trigger and stood completely still. He didn’t want to miss what would happen next. Three seconds went by and then five. Rapp counted to ten and the man in the hat was still at the car window chatting away, moving his hands like he was telling an involved story.
Rapp lowered the camera and said, “You’re talking to a dead man, aren’t you?” He shook his head and said, “You’re going to stand there and act like nothing happened, and then you’ll slowly put your gun back in your pants and walk away.”
Rapp watched all of this unfold with sincere professional admiration. This guy had a set of balls on him. What he had just witnessed verified his suspicions. The terrorists who paid to have Alexander and Ross killed were not happy with the services Alexander Deckas had provided them and now they wanted him dead. It was not unusual in this line of work. In a sense, the business arrangement was a bit like a man leaving his wife for the woman he’s been having an affair with. The fact that the same man decides to then cheat on the woman he originally cheated with should surprise no one, least of all the woman herself.
Rapp watched as the assassin stood up and stepped away from the car. He then waved at the dead man sitting in it and started back down the street. Rapp quickly glanced back toward the café to see if anyone was following him. The big guy he’d spotted earlier in the day was nowhere to be seen. Only the old man appeared to notice what had just happened. Rapp’s eyes glided back to the man in the John Deere hat. He expected him to turn the corner and vanish, maybe lose the jacket and hat and come back around for a shot at the other two should they appear. The urge to follow was strong, but with so many unknowns it was not wise. This was Deckas’s neighborhood. He would know every crack and crevice, and there was no telling who he might have working for him.
The assassin surprised Rapp by entering the last building on the street. It looked like it was probably an apartment building.
“What the fuck?” Rapp muttered to himself.
He scanned the apartment building and noted the windows where lights were on. After thirty seconds not a single light had been turned on or off. Something told Rapp it would be a good idea to move further away from the window. He took two steps back. If this guy had a night vision scope, he could be sitting in one of the dark apartments scanning the hotel to see who was watching. If Rapp were in his shoes, that was exactly what he would be doing. Rapp took another step to the side and looked at the screen on the back of the camera. Using his right thumb he spun the wheel and scrolled through the photos. When he got to the right sequence he tightened the frame. The quality wasn’t great, but he could make out what looked like an arm coming through the window of the car and extending across the front seat. He went back one more photo and the screen went bright with a muzzle flash. Suddenly, everything was much clearer. Rapp could now make out a gun with a silencer attached to the end.
This had to be Alexander Deckas, and if he knew about the guy in the car it was likely he knew about the other two men who were looking for him. That was where his focus would be—either trying to avoid them or coming to kill them. Based on what he had just witnessed, Rapp felt it was the latter. But why the apartment building? Rapp thought back to the big guy who earlier in the day he had spied stuffing money in the shirt pocket of the old man who ran the café. The old man did not appear overjoyed to be talking to the goon. It was likely that they had leaned on him. Probably threatened him in some way. The old guy had several choices at that point: play along, go to the authorities, or tip off his tenant. And if the tenant was in fact Alexander Deckas, or whatever his real name was, and the old man knew what he did for a living, why wouldn’t he go to him? Rapp had just watched him dispatch a hired gun in the middle of a busy commercial district without raising even the slightest suspicion.
Rapp’s thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He assumed it was Coleman or Brooks so he pressed the button on the earpiece and said, “Where are you guys?”
“It’s Marcus, Mitch.”
Marcus Dumond was a computer expert who worked Counterterrorism for Langley.
“What’s up?” asked Rapp.
“I just spoke to a buddy at the DGSE.” Dumond was referring to the Direction Generale de la Securité Exterieure, France’s top external intelligence organization. “They have a line on this Alexander Deckas. They say his real name is Gavrilo Gazich. He’s a Bosnian who cut his teeth during that nasty little thing they had over there.”
Rapp stepped away from the wall and looked out the window. “Lovely. What else did they tell you?”
“He’s wanted in The Hague.”
“For war crimes?” Rapp asked somewhat surprised. “How old is he?”
“Thirty-five.”
“Well he couldn’t have been more than a grunt when they were killing each other back in the mid-nineties.” Rapp checked the windows on the apartment building across the street. “Why in the hell would they mess with someone so far down the chain of command?”
“He was a sniper. I guess he shot over fifty civilians when they laid siege to Sarajevo.”
Rapp’s entire body went rigid for a split second and then he casually walked away from the window. It took him a few seconds before he even took a breath, and then he swore out loud.
“What’s wrong?” asked Dumond.
“Next time you might want to get to that part first.”
“What part?”
“Never mind,” Rapp growled. “What else do you have on him?”
“He’s rumored to have operated in Africa, mostly the east side…Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, but they don’t have anything concrete on him.”
“How about a photo?”
“Yeah, but it’s not very good.”
“Good enough to give us a match on the surveillance tape?”
“Not a definite, but it doesn’t exclude him either.”
“All right. Send this stuff over to the Africa Division and see what they have on him.”
“Will do.”
“And see if you can get the evidence The Hague has on him. I want to know how good of a shot he is.”
“I’ll get on it.”
“Good work, Marcus.”
Rapp pressed the button on the earpiece and disconnected the call. Very few things rattled him, but snipers were one of them. Sneaky little bastards. The good ones could kill you from nearly a mile away. That was hardly a fair fight. Rapp sat motionless in the dark hotel room and tried to process the new information. Would this guy have any idea Rapp was looking for him? The answer was probably not. Rapp had been very careful, and other than Coleman’s team and a few select people in Washington, no one knew he was on the case.
Rapp wondered if there was a chance these other guys had worked with Gazich in the past. Maybe, but for some reason Rapp doubted it. These assassins were usually loners out of necessity. They couldn’t afford to trust anyone else. Rapp had met the type before: former soldiers and paramilitary types, who always performed better on their own than they did within a unit. Rapp knew because he was one of them. Then there were also what the CIA euphemistically called thugs, drugs, and outlaws. Guys who came out of the ranks of organized crime and the drug cartels. These guys typically didn’t operate alone. They traveled in packs like hyenas.
It was the old man. He was the key. These goons, whoever they were, had leaned on him, and like a good Greek, the old man played along all the while plotting their demise. He alerted his tenant, who just happened to be an assassin, that these guys were looking for him and now the problem was in the process of going away in a very permanent manner. What would Ga
zich’s next move be? If he was in fact a trained sniper, his options were plentiful. The specter of this guy sitting on the rooftop of the apartment building with a high-powered rifle and night scope made the hair on the back of Rapp’s neck stand up.
It occurred to Rapp that the other two guys probably were not as disciplined as he was. It was likely that they were sitting around, with the lights on, watching TV and waiting for their guy on the street to let them know the target had showed up. Rapp moved to the edge of the window and looked down at the car. He could barely make out the silhouette of the dead man sitting in the front seat. Nothing had changed. No one had gone down to investigate. With only his left eye peering out from the edge of the curtain, Rapp scanned the roofline of the apartment building that Gazich had entered a few minutes ago. Everything looked normal. At least as far as he could tell, but a good sniper would have no problem concealing his position. The possibility occurred to Rapp that the other two guys might already be dead. If the angle was right, and they had their window opened like Rapp did, it would be an easy shot.
Rapp was scanning the rooftop again when a flash of movement caught his eye. Someone was on the roof next to the apartment building. Rapp’s room was on the fourth floor of the hotel. All of the buildings across the street were three stories high and their flat roofs pretty much matched up to within a few feet of each other. Rapp saw the movement again. Someone was moving from Rapp’s left to right, toward the café. Rapp leaned out to get a better look and saw a shadowy figure make the short hop from the building onto the roof where Gazich’s business was located.
Rapp smiled as he realized his instincts had been correct. When he’d checked out the building earlier in the day he questioned why their guy would set up shop on the third floor of a building that had no side or back alley. The only way out was through the front door. Not exactly code back in the States, but over here where the streets had been laid out thousands of years ago, they had to make do. It was almost unthinkable for a guy like Gazich to back himself into a corner with no avenue of escape. The answer was that he hadn’t. Gazich’s escape route was the roof. From there his options were plentiful.
Rapp’s eyes searched the darkness for more movement, but there was none. The roof was dotted with air-conditioning units as well as some ventilation pipes and a few other things. He assumed Gazich was hiding behind one of them, or that he had crawled over to the edge where there was a lip. Suddenly, the front left window on the third floor lit up. A few seconds later the silhouette of a man appeared on the cream colored shade. Rapp realized the access hatch must be located behind one of the air-conditioning units.
“Why the hell would you turn on that light?” Rapp asked himself.
The silhouette moved about, disappearing and then coming back into view. It looked like he was gathering something. Even so, Gazich had to know these guys were watching him. This made no sense. He could have easily snuck in, used a small penlight to get what he needed, and go back out through the roof without anyone ever knowing he’d been there.
Rapp was stuck on the stupidity of this when he suddenly realized what was going on. There was almost no time to react. Grabbing his phone off the bed, he stuffed his arms into his jacket and rushed for the door.
10
R ussians,” Gazich growled to himself. “Goddamn Russians.”
He stood, bent at the waist, his forearms draped across the open window-frame of the car, his gun dangling out of site in his right hand.
Gazich hated Russians almost as much as he hated Muslims. The two groups had ruined his ethnic homeland: the Muslims with their all-or-nothing, backward religion and the Russians with their arrogant, clumsy, bullying, pagan ways. Bosnia could have been so much more if only they’d left her alone. But of course they hadn’t. The Muslims had encroached from the southeast and the Russians from the northeast. The Muslims did so slowly over centuries, while the Russians swept in after WWII and took everything by force. While Western Europe flourished, communist Yugoslavia suffered. The Russians were now gone and the Muslims had either been killed or turned into refugees.
Gazich looked at the dead man and resisted the urge to spit on him. Leaving DNA at the scene of a crime was not a wise move. He had shot the man once in the heart and then a second time because he was so pissed. He’d wanted to shoot him in the head, but given the relatively public environment he was in it was ill-advised. The man even smelled Russian. He reeked of cheap cologne and unfiltered cigarettes.
“What are you…KGB or Russian mob? Not that there’s a big difference anymore. I should shoot you again,” Gazich muttered.
He honestly didn’t know what upset him more; the man’s nationality or that the people who had hired him to do the job in the States thought so little of him that they had sent a Russian to kill him. Gazich casually took a drag of his cigarette and slipped the tip of the silencer into the waistband of his pants. With his right hand he pulled the bottom of his jacket over the gun. He spotted a small two-way radio on the seat and decided it might come in handy. After stuffing it in his pocket, he stood and took a step back. As he waved good-bye to the dead man, he pushed the gun further into his pants and looked up at the hotel across the street and to his left. About half the rooms were lit up.
Gazich had surreptitiously stopped by the café owner’s house earlier in the day. He had come in through the garden even though he doubted the Russians had enough men to watch both his office and the old man’s house. Gazich told Andreas that he was sorry he’d been caught up in the middle of this. Andreas accepted the apology and then eagerly agreed to do whatever he could to rid himself of these Russians. He told Gazich everything he knew about them including the fact that they had two rooms on the third floor of the hotel directly across the street.
A quick survey of the windows told Gazich they were every bit as lazy as he expected them to be. No one was keeping an eye on the street. Who knew with Russians, there was a very good chance they were already drunk. The Bosnian stuffed his hands in his pockets and started down the street with renewed anger. Part of him wanted to march over to the hotel, kick in their door, and shoot them in the head, but as tempted as he was, he needed to talk to them. He needed to find out who had sent them.
Two doors down, Gazich entered an apartment building and proceeded to the top floor. At the back of the building, in a maintenance closet, there was a metal ladder screwed into the wall. Gazich climbed it and popped the hatch that led to the roof. He pulled himself up, lowered the hatch, and started working his way toward his building. He stayed in a crouch, not because he was worried that someone would see him, but because he was afraid he’d walk into a clothesline. A minute later he knelt next to the hatch that accessed his building. Gazich lifted it up and descended into the darkness, closing the hatch behind him. He was now in the center hall at the rear of the building. He walked toward the front and pulled out his cell phone. He punched in the number for the café and after a few rings one of the daughters answered. A half a minute after that the patriarch was on the phone.
“Hello?” the old man answered.
Andreas had told him the phones were tapped, but at this point Gazich didn’t care. “Andreas, it is me, Alexander. How are you?” Gazich slid his key into his office door and turned the lock.
“Fine, my friend. Are you coming to see me?”
“Yes. In fact I’m up in my office.” Gazich hit the light switch. “I have a little work to do and then I’ll be down for a drink.”
“Good. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Gazich put his phone away and looked around his office. Everything was not as he had left it. They had tried to put things back, but they were too sloppy to do it right. In addition to the slight disorder he could smell their cigarettes. They had been so arrogant they actually smoked while pilfering his stuff. Gazich continued surveying the room. There was a large wood desk with the usual stuff on top: a lamp, an old Rolodex, computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, and phone. The walls were lined
with bookcases. Gazich turned to look back at the door. That was when he noticed something. It was a motion sensor placed just above the trim board by the floor.
“Good,” he said aloud. “We can get this over with sooner rather than later.”
Gazich grabbed the two-way radio and clipped it to his belt. Next, he moved the coat rack next to the desk and draped his jacket around the top pegs. To finish it off he set his baseball hat on top and turned on the desk lamp. The radio on his hip crackled to life and a male voice began speaking in Russian. Gazich didn’t know Russian, but he didn’t need to. He knew what they were asking. Two similar radios sat in a charger on the bookcase across from the desk. Gazich grabbed one, turned it on, and set it to the same channel as the one he’d take from the dead Russian. Next, he held them within inches of each other and pressed the transmit buttons. High-pitched feedback squawked from each box, creating an extremely irritating noise.
Gazich released the transmit buttons and walked back out into the hallway. He closed the frosted glass door and inspected his work. The silhouette of the jacket and hat on the coat rack wasn’t perfect, but it would be enough to confuse them. The two-way erupted again, with an angry Russian voice yelling what Gazich guessed were curses. The Bosnian held the devices next to each other one more time and let loose a blast of feedback. As he walked to the window, he pressed the button one more time and then turned his attention to the entrance of the hotel across the street. Five seconds later two large men came tearing out the front door shoving a pedestrian out of their way. One of them was still struggling with his jacket, a shoulder holstered pistol clearly visible against his off-white shirt.
With pure professional disdain, Gazich shook his head and positioned himself for the ambush.