by Vince Flynn
LAKE ANNA, VIRGINIA
ADAMS pleaded, then cried, and in between the sniffles and tears he began mumbling to himself. The door buzzed and Rapp opened it to find Hurley standing on the other side, looking none too pleased that he was going to have to shoot his best friend’s son in the head for the second time.
“I should have never stopped you,” Rapp said in an apologetic tone.
“Damn right you shouldn’t have.” Hurley pushed past him, his cane in one hand and his gun in the other.
Adams snapped out of his mumbling trance and began screaming for Rapp to stop. Upon seeing Hurley and the gun, he tried to stand, and forgetting that his ankles were still tied to the chair, toppled over. He caught the edge of the table and brought it down with him, sending the glass and bottle of vodka crashing to the floor at the same time.
Hurley moved into position over him and took aim.
“Don’t shoot!” Adams screamed. “Mitch, wait! I know things! I can help!”
Rapp shared a quick look with Hurley as he walked back to Adams. He squatted and said, “You get one shot at this, Glen. Tell me something worth knowing, and it better be good.”
Adams was lying on his side, the toppled chair still attached to his legs. He looked at the puddle of urine and then at Rapp. “Help me up first.”
“Fuck you!” Hurley growled as he jabbed the gun into Adams’s face.
Rapp stood and again started for the door. Adams began screaming frantically for him to stop and Hurley let loose a litany of profanity that described in very colorful terms exactly what he thought of Adams. To further punctuate each word he stabbed his gun closer and closer to Adams’s face until he had it pressed into his temple.
Rapp was halfway out the door when he heard a name. It was repeated three times in quick succession. Rapp stopped, his interest finally piqued, and turned. “What did you say?”
“Kathy O’Brien!” Adams said with his face pressed into the floor.
Rapp’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected to get out of Adams, but the name Kathy O’Brien wasn’t anywhere on the horizon. She was the wife of Chuck O’Brien, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “What about her?” Rapp asked cautiously.
“That’s how I knew about the operation you were running.”
One of the keys to a successful interrogation, at least early on, was to keep the subject off balance. No matter how shocking or strange a piece of information might be, you never let it show. “Which operation,” Rapp asked, “would that be?”
“The mosques.”
“Go on,” Rapp ordered.
“The undercover guys you sent into the mosques.”
Rapp walked back and looked down at Adams. “You mean the operation that was leaked to the Post last week.”
“Yeah . . . Yeah . . . that’s the one.”
“The story you leaked, you mean?” Rapp asked.
Adams didn’t answer fast enough, so Hurley gave him a little love tap with the tip of the barrel—just hard enough to draw a drop of blood.
“Yes,” Adams screamed. “Yes . . . I was the one who told Barreiro.”
“The leak,” Rapp said, “that ended up getting one of my agents killed.”
“I . . . I . . . I,” Adams stammered, “wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Rapp glanced at his watch. He might have to be late for the meeting. “And just what does Kathy O’Brien have to do with this?”
“She’s . . . how I found out.”
“You already said that. I want specifics.” Rapp saw Adams’s eyes begin to dart around again, which was a sign that his brain was scrambling to find the right lie. “Don’t do it.”
“Do what?”
“Lie to me.”
“I’m not . . . I mean I wasn’t going to.”
“Anything you say to me I’ll have verified within the hour, and if I find out you’ve lied to me . . . well, let’s just say I’m going keep you alive as long as it takes to make you feel some real pain.”
“She . . .” Adams’s eyes started darting again, until suddenly, a knife tip appeared an inch in front of the left one.
Rapp held the blade perfectly still. “I can tell when a man is lying to me. So one more time, what does Kathy have to do with this?”
Adams closed his eyes and said, “She’s been seeing a therapist.”
“And?”
“We had the office bugged.”
With great effort to conceal his surprise Rapp asked, “The therapist’s office?”
“Yes.”
Rapp’s mind was flooded with a half-dozen questions, but for now he needed to keep Adams focused on the most immediate facts. They could squeeze the rest out of him later. “So if I call my source at Justice, she’ll tell me that you had warrants to wiretap the therapist’s office?”
Adams took a long time to answer, which in itself was an answer.
Rapp cocked his head to the side. “You didn’t have a warrant?”
“Not exactly,” Adams admitted.
Rapp pulled the knife back and shared a quick look with Hurley. Things suddenly began to fall into place for Rapp. Why Adams knew the broad brushstrokes of what they had been up to, but could not pass the threshold needed to refer a case to Justice. “You wiretapped the office of a doctor and recorded the private therapy sessions of the wife of the director of the National Clandestine Service. And you did it illegally.”
“I was only trying to do my job.”
“And you lecture me about breaking the fucking law,” Rapp snapped.
“I was just trying to stop you. You were out of control.”
“Out of control . . . I break those laws to keep people safe. Real people. You break ’em to protect some piece of paper you don’t even understand.”
“I am trying to protect the world from animals like you.”
Rapp stuck the tip of the knife into Adams’s left nostril and said, “I should—”
“Mitch,” Dr. Lewis announced from the door, “I’d like to have a word with you and Stan.”
Rapp resisted the urge to slice the traitor’s nose clean off his face. They had a standard policy during interrogations that whenever Lewis asked anyone for a private word, they were to drop everything and leave the room. Rapp stood and left the cell with Hurley. They closed the door and found Lewis pacing nervously. Nash was back from the house, shaved and in a dark blue suit, while Maslick was sitting behind the desk keeping an eye on the monitors.
Lewis held up a couple of fingers and said, “Two things . . . the first
. . . I don’t think you can ever allow him to go free. There is a chance that his illegalities were driven by a lack of judgment precipitated by the onset of alcoholism, but I think the odds of it are small. It’s more likely that in addition to suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, he is also a sociopath.”
“And this changes things . . . how?”
“He uses rules as a weapon. He gets extremely upset when he thinks anyone has acted inappropriately, or has broken the law, yet he sees nothing wrong when he decides to break those very same laws. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it. He’s so narcissistic, so in love with himself, that he thinks he’s privileged. Rules are for the commoner, not someone like him, who is destined to make a difference in the world.”
“I could have told you that,” Hurley said, “and I didn’t even go to med school.”
Lewis ignored Hurley and said, “The narcissistic sociopathic combination is extremely dangerous . . . almost impossible to treat and never in a situation with this much pressure. He will say and do whatever he needs to stay alive and then after you let him go, the first chance he gets he will bolt. He would turn to anyone who he thought had the power to take you down.”
“Your second point?” Rapp asked.
“Normally, I would never admit this, but considering the situation, I think it would be best.” Lewis hesitated, wrestling with how best to word his admission.<
br />
“Doc,” Rapp said, “I don’t have all day. Spit it out.”
Lewis cleared his throat and nervously announced, “I am Kathy O’Brien’s therapist.”
CHAPTER 18
RAPP was out of time. If he and Nash were to have any chance of making the powwow at Langley, they had to be on the road in the next few minutes, and even then they would have to drive at least eighty miles an hour to give themselves a chance. Normally, Rapp didn’t concern himself with getting to meetings on time, but this was not your average run-of-the-mill bureaucratic black hole of a meeting. Kennedy had made it very clear the president had requested the presence of both her senior counterterrorism operatives, and while Rapp really didn’t care much for politicians, he’d dealt with a few presidents over his career, and found them tolerable in the sense that they understood it wasn’t a bad idea to have a man like Rapp around to deal with some of the stickier situations that popped up.
“Mike and I have to go.” Rapp looked at Hurley and said, “I wanna know who he used to bug Doc’s office. I wanna know where the originals are and I wanna know how many copies he made. And I want to move on this ASAP.”
“My money’s on Max Johnson,” Hurley said.
“Yeah,” Rapp replied. He was thinking the same thing. Max Johnson had been the second in charge of Security at Langley until he retired a few years earlier. He now had his own consulting firm, which coincidentally did a lot of work for Langley. Rapp didn’t know him personally, but had heard a few things over the years that would lead him to believe the guy would have no problem stooping this low. “I want a list of everybody Adams has talked to about Kathy O’Brien.”
“I want those tapes handed over to me immediately, so I can destroy them,” Lewis said.
“Doc, I don’t like this any more than you do, but someone is going to have to listen to those tapes.” Rapp thought of Chuck O’Brien. It would kill him to know that Kathy’s private sessions with her therapist had been recorded.
“I think you can trust me, Mitch.”
“It has nothing to do with trust,” Rapp said impatiently. “I need to listen to them so I can assess the damage.”
“I don’t think Kathy would approve.” Lewis shook his head and added, “and I don’t think Chuck will be too pleased either.”
Nash entered the fray. “Well, maybe he should have thought about that before he started sharing classified information with his wife.”
“She worked in Ops for twenty-three years,” Lewis said defensively. “Her record is unassailable.” Looking back to Rapp, he said in a very forceful manner, “I want the tapes. They are private and they belong to me.”
“It ain’t going to happen, Doc,” Hurley said matter-of-factly. “Kathy was read in on a lot of serious shit, but that doesn’t give Charlie the right to start sharing stuff with her, and it sure as hell doesn’t give her the right to spill her guts to you. That’s why we have these rules.”
“But . . . I think we can all agree that you trust me.” Lewis looked around the room. “I mean let’s get real. What we have going on here is far more serious than anything that might be on those tapes.”
Rapp was about to speak, but Hurley beat him to it. “Doc, your office isn’t secure. Fuck . . . the Russkies . . . the Chicoms . . . anyone could have the place bugged. In fact I bet Mossad has had it bugged for years.” Hurley looked at Rapp. “You better send a team in there tonight and have them give it the once-over.”
Rapp was nodding as Hurley spoke. “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll make it a priority.”
“I need to be there,” Hurley said, in a voice that made it clear this point was nonnegotiable.
“Fine,” Rapp said, knowing he was out of time. “As far as the rest of this goes . . . we’ll have to sort it out later. Mike and I have to go. In the meantime, start to peel him open. I want you to wring him dry.”
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” said Lewis, “but I would discourage ever releasing him. He would betray us the first chance he got.”
“I agree,” Hurley said.
Rapp simply shrugged and said, “I don’t give a shit.”
“It might be useful, however, for us to make him think we are trying to turn him. Someone with an ego this fragile needs to have a carrot constantly dangled in front of him. Along those lines I think we should have him write a note to Kennedy and his wife saying that he has checked himself into a rehab clinic. It’s something he needs to do . . . has been thinking about for some time. Only way to do it was to go cold turkey before he lost the courage. The important thing is to give him some hope.”
“Fine,” Rapp said.
“And if he proves uncooperative?” Hurley asked.
Rapp shrugged. “Do whatever it takes.”
“And Chuck?” Lewis asked.
Rapp thought about Chuck O’Brien, the current director of the National Clandestine Service. “What about him?”
“He knows Kathy was seeing me. Who’s going to tell him that our sessions were recorded?”
That was one conversation Rapp did not want to have. He could only imagine what had been discussed in those sessions. They’d been married for over thirty years. If Max Johnson were in fact the guy who had bugged the office, Chuck would want to kill him. And while Rapp wouldn’t raise a hand to stop him, he at least needed to talk to Johnson first. “I don’t want anyone saying anything to Chuck until we know who made the recordings, and I’ve had a chance to talk to them.”
“When the time is right,” Hurley announced, “I’ll do it.”
“Are you sure?” Rapp asked.
“It would kill him to hear it from you young pups. He’s still your boss. I’ll handle it.”
“All right . . . it’s settled.” Looking to Nash, Rapp said, “Let’s go.”
“Mitch?”
Rapp turned and looked at Maslick, who was now standing. “Yeah?”
“I want you to promise me something.”
Rapp got an ominous feeling. “What?”
“When it’s time to punch his ticket,” Maslick nodded toward the cell door, “I’ve got dibs.”
Rapp understood immediately. Chris Johnson, Rapp’s agent who had been killed a week earlier, had been Maslick’s best friend. They’d served in the 101st Airborne Division and had done three combat tours together. “If it comes to that and you still want to do it, I won’t stand in your way.”
CHAPTER 19
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
RAPP blew past the Georgetown Pike exit at eighty-plus miles an hour and continued north on the Beltway. As expected, traffic had been rough. Rapp had hoped to catch a little sleep on the drive up, but had given up on the idea as soon as he’d found out where Adams was getting his information. Rapp would never go as far as to say it didn’t bother him that the CIA’s inspector general was a colossal hypocrite. It surely did, but it was pretty small stuff compared to the other glitch they had just uncovered.
Kathy O’Brien was not the only client of Dr. Lewis who had ties to Langley. Rapp didn’t know specifics, because Lewis never talked about his clients and the CIA wasn’t the kind of place where people ran around talking about their feelings, let alone divulging that they were seeing a shrink, but it was known among the professionals that Lewis was a man you could trust if you needed a little help getting your head screwed back on. Rapp wasn’t sure, but he got the distinct impression CIA Director Kennedy had spent some time on Lewis’s couch trying to sort through some of her personal issues. Rapp knew this because Kennedy herself had tried to get Rapp to sit down and talk with Lewis after his wife had been killed.
Even with the near-crippling pain he was experiencing after Anna’s death, Rapp never considered consulting Lewis. He wasn’t wired that way. Rapp knew he had to work his way through it on his own. He had nothing against therapy. He was sure that there were plenty of good docs out there who could help people get through a rough patch. And while he would never deny that he had a lot of issues, they weren’t exactly
the kind of things he could share. Doctor-patient privilege was a nice legal protection for the average person, who might someday end up in a courtroom, but intelligence agencies were instituted to not play by the rules. Bugging offices and eavesdropping on important conversations were standard operating procedure.
“I can’t believe we’re going to be late,” Nash said in a tired voice.
Rapp looked over at his friend, who was clean-shaven and dressed in a crisp white shirt, blue suit, and yellow tie. Rapp glanced at his own reflection in the mirror. He had thick black stubble on his tan face and was not wearing a tie. If he had had time he probably would have shaved, but not necessarily. This was not his first meeting with this president, or the previous one, but it occurred to him this was probably Nash’s first dance. He glanced at the clock. It was three minutes past nine, and they were still a few miles out. Rapp hit the blinker, cut across two lanes of traffic, and took the George Washington Parkway exit without slowing down. By the time they cleared security and parked, they’d be about ten minutes late, and while Rapp didn’t like to keep the president of the United States waiting, he knew from experience that presidents weren’t exactly the most punctual people.