by Vince Flynn
“Kristen, It’s Mitch. Is she around?”
“She’s on the phone.”
“Can you interrupt her?”
“Let me see.”
There was a click as he was put on hold and then a few moments later Kennedy was on the line. Rapp said, “You know that meeting we had this morning?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on board.”
“You sure you’re up for all the attention?”
“No . . .” Rapp said, making no attempt to hide his lack of patience. “I’m talking about Mike.”
“I know,” she said. “I was just jerking your chain.”
“Can you get it done?”
“Do you care what your boss thinks, or are you calling the shots now?”
Rapp groaned. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Torturing me. You told me this morning that you thought it was a good idea.”
“That was when I thought you would accept the medal as well. I’ve had the visual in my head all day of you sitting on Oprah’s couch talking about skin-care products.”
Rapp pulled the phone away from his head and looked at it as if he might snap it in half. “Are you done?”
“Yes, but I want you to at least recognize the fact that you are giving Mike no say in the matter while you have threatened me or anyone else with extreme violence if we dare recognize your achievements, which were even more remarkable than Mike’s.”
“We’ve been through this so many times . . . Do we have to go over it again?”
“No, we don’t have to go over it again,” Kennedy said in slightly playful tone. “I just want you to recognize that you’re not being entirely fair.”
“Fine . . . I’m happy to admit it. Life isn’t fair. Mike has four kids and a wife who need him. My wife and unborn child are dead, because of what I do for a living. Maybe I don’t want to see that happen to him. Maybe I don’t want to have to knock on Maggie’s door some night and explain to her and the kids that their dad is dead. We’re different people. I’m damaged goods. He still has a shot at a seminormal life, and that’s why he’s going to be the face of this thing. Not me.”
Kennedy didn’t answer for a long time. Rapp rarely talked about his deceased wife and it had caught her off guard. “I think I understand.”
Rapp felt like an ass for coming down so hard on her. “Sorry, boss.”
“For what?”
“For snapping at you like that. You know I’m no good at this stuff. I just . . . he’s not doing well,” Rapp said, changing gears. “I’ve seen it before. The lie is tearing him up.”
“I don’t think seeing his assistant and another dozen and a half coworkers killed did him any favors.”
“No, it didn’t.” Rapp thought about Nash’s fragile state. “Just please do this for me, and do it quick. Before he does something stupid.”
“What do you mean something stupid?” Kennedy asked with trepidation.
“Nothing,” Rapp lied. “It’s just a feeling. Tell Dickerson it’s a go. Get it set up for tomorrow if you can.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“Mike. You know he’ll never go for this.”
“Don’t worry about him. You tell me what time you need him at the White House, and I’ll have him there. Just make sure everyone keeps their mouth shut.”
CHAPTER 30
SANTA MARIA ISLAND, AZORES
THE landing gear thudded into the down position and the plane banked to port. Out of the nearest window Rapp caught a glimpse of the western edge of Santa Maria Island and her big ten-thousand-foot runway, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. The place had been a busy hub during World War II and in the decade after but was now nothing more than a tourist destination and convenient meeting place for three spooks who didn’t want to be noticed.
The plane landed so softly Rapp wasn’t sure they were down until the pilots began to brake, but with ten thousand feet of concrete there was no rush. He looked out the window and saw the other two private jets parked in the distance at the refueling station. That was the other thing Santa Maria Island was known for—fuel. Roughly a thousand miles from the European mainland, the big airstrip offered a convenient place to stop for fuel or repairs on transatlantic flights.
The other beauty of the island was that it only had five thousand residents, who were more or less uninterested in the tail numbers on the planes that came and went. Even so, Rapp grabbed a pair of sunglasses and a newspaper as he prepared to exit. When the plane stopped he disengaged the safety lock and lowered the steps. He moved stiffly down the stairs and pretended to read the newspaper as he proceeded around the nose of a Bombardier Global Express. He hesitated for a moment at the base of the Bombardier’s stairs and looked around. Not a person in sight. Rapp bounded up the steps two at a time. Once inside, he glanced to his left. The door to the flight deck was closed. Rapp hit the close button on the hatch and the stairs began to fold back into the closed position. He then walked through the well-appointed galley to the rear of the long-haul private jet. All of the shades were down on the windows, and there, sitting side by side at a table near the back of the plane, were two familiar people.
They were both facing the front, but only one of them stood. At six foot four, George Butler had to tilt his head a few inches to the right to avoid hitting the ceiling. The forty-eight-year-old Brit offered his hand and said, “Hello, Mitch. Good of you to come.”
Rapp grabbed the hand of MI-6’s counterterrorism chief. “Good to see you, too.” Rapp turned to look at the woman who had remained seated. She was petite, just under five and a half feet tall and weighing no more than 120 pounds. Rapp had known her for nearly fifteen years. Her name was Catherine Cheval and she worked for France’s Directorate General for Security External, or DGSE. She gave Rapp a faint smile and offered her cheek. Rapp leaned over the desk and kissed her first on her right cheek and then the left. “Always good to see you, Catherine.”
“The feeling is mutual,” she said in perfect English. Cheval sat back and brushed a strand of her raven black hair behind her right ear. She looked a decade younger than her fifty years.
Rapp took one of the two seats across from them. Cheval leaned forward and gestured toward the coffee cup sitting in front of Rapp. “Please.” As Cheval poured Rapp a fresh cup, he apologized for being late.
Butler nodded and said, “Frankly, I’m surprised you could make it on such short notice.”
“Irene didn’t give me an option. She said it was important.”
Butler and Cheval shared a look and then nodded in unison. Cheval said, “We have discovered some information that you might find useful.”
“But before we begin,” Butler added cautiously, “we would like to revisit the ground rules.”
Rapp could have been offended by the comment, but wasn’t. In many ways, these two, and the people who worked for them, were better allies than the people in his own government. The fact that Butler had brought it up, though, told Rapp two things: first, that they had some good intel, and second, that they had come by it through means that the Department of Justice and U.S. Congress would not approve of. “If you need to modify the rules I completely understand, but remember when it comes to certain elements of my government, few have more motivation than I do to lie to them.”
“True,” Cheval said, “and we trust you. It is just that certain nosy people in your country will begin to walk the dog back. They will want to know how this information fell into your possession.”
“They might even make assumptions,” Butler added. “If they begin to stir the bleeding hearts in our own governments it could create a rather unhealthy environment for us.”
“Understood. As far as I’m concerned, none of what I hear today has to be shared.”
“That would be nice,” Cheval said, “but not realistic. What we have to tell you, you will most certainly want to share.”
Cheval reached under the table and grabbed a manila file. It was simple enough looking, and intentionally so. She placed it in the center of the table and hesitated for a long moment. Her light brown eyes slowly drifted away from the file and settled on Rapp. She looked as if she still hadn’t figured out precisely how she was going to handle the exchange of intel.
Rapp had seen the file before, and it had always carried information that was far more valuable than its worn, simple appearance would lead one to believe. Ingenious on Cheval’s part, Rapp had always thought. The files at Langley were made of sturdy, heavy stock. The important ones were red, although Rapp had known a few people over the years who had used Cheval’s method of misdirection. Typically, though, the really important stuff was in red files with letters strewn across the label. Some designations were easy enough to figure out, like Top Secret, but most were covered with phrases like Eyes Only and a string of letters that were nonsensical to the uninitiated. All of it was Compartmentalized Intel. Some had locks and most had twine clasps—the kind you had to twirl around a little disk to secure and unwind to open. The twine wasn’t there to defeat prying eyes. It was there to give a person pause, one more step to go through to get the thing open, and hence an extra few seconds to consider just what the hell you were doing.
The CIA was funny about that. They liked their people to keep their attention focused on their particular area of expertise. During Rapp’s tenure he’d seen two complete overhauls of the system and a bunch of little modifications. At the end of the day, one of the quickest ways to land yourself in serious trouble was to get caught opening a file that was none of your business. The French and the Brits operated with similar constraints, so Rapp had guessed long ago that Cheval’s worn file had likely never been carried through the security checkpoints at the DGSE headquarters in Paris.
Cheval asked, “Have your services made any headway on the identity of the men who carried out the attacks?”
“Very little.” Talking to two colleagues like this, Rapp was slightly embarrassed to admit that they had made zero progress. The race to find out what had happened had been going on for a week, and they were still wandering around the starting line looking for clues.
“Nothing?” Butler asked, looking surprised.
“As far as the six guys who raided the CTC are concerned . . . there isn’t really anything left to identify. The surveillance footage doesn’t give us anything useful. They were dressed in full SWAT gear, complete with balaclavas, goggles, helmets, gloves, heavy vests . . .” Rapp shrugged, “There’s nothing to see.”
“Physical evidence?” Cheval asked.
Rapp thought about the stew of body parts that had been created when all six suicide vests were detonated at the same time. They were still finding bits and pieces in the woods a couple of hundred yards away. The men had ended up at the base of the twenty-foot-wide parking ramp. The smooth, poured-concrete walls looked like an old subway car that had accumulated five years of graffiti, but instead of spray paint it was chunks of bone and flesh and lots of blood, and instead of a half decade, it had happened in the blink of an eye. “They’ve been able to identify six separate sets of DNA, but that’s about it.”
“Surely, there’s a fingertip or two to be found,” Butler said.
“I’ve seen a lot of nasty shit over the years, George, but this one was disgusting.” Rapp thought about it for a second and then corrected himself, saying, “I take that back. It wasn’t disgusting . . . it was bizarre. There was nothing left, except chunks of indistinguishable goo.”
“But you did manage to get six separate sets of DNA?” Cheval asked.
“That’s what I was told.”
She asked, “FBI?”
“Yes.”
“We might,” Cheval said guardedly, “have a relative in our possession.”
“Can you get me a DNA sample?” Rapp asked.
Cheval and Butler glanced at each other.
Rapp picked up on it and asked, “What?”
“It would be best if you gave me what you have. I will see if I can get a match.”
Rapp gestured with his hands as if to say, no big deal. “I think I can take care of that. This relative,” he continued, “sister, mother, father?”
“Brother,” Cheval answered.
“Where’d you find him?”
“This stays here.”
“Of course,” Rapp said.
“One of my teams picked him up in Casablanca.”
“Moroccan?”
“Yes.”
“Active investigation?”
Cheval shrugged her slender shoulders as if to say, “who knows?”
Rapp gave her a disbelieving frown. Cheval ran the DGSE’s Directorate of Intelligence. Anything on the covert side of the business fell into her purview. “How can that be?”
“My operative who brought this to my attention,” she paused, “how do I say this?” After a moment of searching for the right description, she smiled at Rapp and said, “He reminds me a lot of you.”
Rapp grinned. “Tall, dark, and handsome . . . highly intelligent. Women hanging on his every move.”
“Don’t forget delusional,” Butler added with a wry smile.
Rapp chuckled.
Cheval smiled and said, “He does not follow directions well.”
“Ahhh,” Butler said while nodding at Rapp. “He has authority issues. I think I know the type.”
“Yes, that is the phrase. He has authority issues. Very difficult to manage. Unnerving at times.” Cheval smiled at Butler and he nodded as if to say, “I share your pain.”
Rapp laughed at both of them. “Well, if he’s so difficult, why do you put up with him?”
The question had a solemn effect on Cheval. “You know why I put up with him?”
“Because he gets things done,” Rapp said with a bit of pride in his voice.
“That is correct. He is extremely effective, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“What?”
“Let’s just say I know how Irene feels.”
Rapp was well aware that Kennedy and Cheval shared a history that went all the way back to Beirut nearly thirty years ago. “You’re afraid he’s going to land you in jail one day.”
“No.” Cheval shook her head.
“Then what?”
“Every time he leaves the country, I wonder if he will return.”
Rapp lowered his eyes and felt like a bit of a moron. “Sorry.” He’d been through this with Kennedy on many occasions. He didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about his fate, but apparently she did.
“No need to apologize. It is the business we are in. This man spends a fair amount of time in Algeria and Morocco, and he has very good contacts. He picked up a rumor that some of the men involved in the attack were Moroccan. After some diligent work he found a man who was bragging that his brother had participated in the attacks on America.”
Rapp frowned. “There are probably a million young Muslim men who are claiming that they had a relative involved in the attacks.” Rapp knew he sounded slightly ungrateful, but it was the truth.
“Trust me when I say my man verified the information.”
Rapp looked at Butler for confirmation.
The Brit nodded and said, “I think you will want to hear the rest of the story.”
It was Rapp’s nature to be skeptical. The craft of espionage was filled with half truths and guesswork, lies and deception, so much so that it was often impossible to unravel all the layers of misdirection, but this was not Cheval’s or Butler’s first dance. They were every bit as suspicious as Rapp, and maybe more. And both had a look that said they had solved a very important piece of a complex puzzle. Rapp had seen this same look on their faces a few weeks earlier sitting at this very table on this same little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was when they had informed Rapp that a third terrorist cell was at large and headed to America. Rapp reached for his cup of coffee and settled into the plush leathe
r seat. He braced himself for what was to come and said, “Let’s hear it.”
CHAPTER 31
THE original plan had called for three cells to hit America. In typical al Qaeda fashion they had picked New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Ninety percent of the intel they collected pointed toward attacks on those three cities. Occasionally Chicago or another major city popped up, but al Qaeda was especially obsessed with New York and Washington, D.C., for obvious reasons. Al Qaeda was acutely aware of the role media could play in amplifying their message. Infidels were infidels, but killing a couple of hundred people in Toledo, Ohio, simply wasn’t as good a story in the media’s eyes as hitting a big, glitzy city.