by Vince Flynn
At the forefront was Stan Hurley—a man he’d once despised and who had undoubtedly wanted to quietly do away with the Orion Team’s newest recruit after the Sharif job. Rapp had never asked, but he could imagine the knock-down, drag-out Hurley and Kennedy had over that. The old man screaming that Rapp was already out of control and Kennedy calmly extolling their young recruit’s potential. It would have been interesting if she’d lost that particular argument. Who would have come out on top? Him or Hurley?
It was a question that would never be answered. His old friend would be gone soon. Rapp could smell death a mile away and Hurley stunk of it. Just like everyone did eventually. Just like he would one day.
Rapp opened his eyes, but didn’t bother looking out the window again. Dwelling on Hurley’s cancer was a waste of time. It was beyond his control and he had bigger fires to put out.
Scott Coleman’s update two hours ago suggested that the Russian surveillance on Sitting Bull was getting more intense. As problems went, that was only the tip of the iceberg. What worried him was why the man was suddenly being tailed. Certainly not solely because of the brief mention of a code name on the Rickman video. Russia’s internal security agency, the FSB, would have no way to connect it to Vasily Zhutov. No, the only answer was that Rickman had leaked additional classified information before Rapp had put a bullet in his head. But how much more?
The hum of the landing gear lowering filled the cabin. Rapp cleared his mind of the thousand disaster scenarios fighting for his attention and focused on the problem at hand. The FSB had undoubtedly been following Zhutov to see if he would lead them to anyone interesting, but now Coleman’s team was seeing activity that suggested the Russians were setting up for a rendition.
The question was what to do about it. Zhutov didn’t know anything particularly useful about the CIA’s network, and his cover appeared to have already been blown. That made sitting back and letting the FSB snatch him the option that most of the desk jockeys at Langley would go for. Just another casualty in the game they’d been playing with the Russians for nearly three-quarters of a century.
In Rapp’s mind—and to a slightly lesser degree in Kennedy’s—that was an unacceptable sacrifice. Sitting Bull had put himself in harm’s way to help the CIA contain Russia’s unpredictable and often self-destructive impulses. Rapp had worked with many moles over the years—traitors who betrayed their homelands for money, or sex, or revenge. They could be useful but were never to be trusted or regarded with anything but contempt.
Zhutov was different. He was a patriot who loved his country and believed in its potential to be a positive force in the world. He’d made it clear from the beginning that he would never give up military secrets and he refused any kind of compensation. Rapp admired him, and there was no way he was going to leave the man twisting in the wind.
How many more Sitting Bulls were out there? All the assets Rickman had given up in his phony torture video were accounted for in one way or another—either vanished, dead, squirreled away in a U.S. embassy, or covered by a team like Coleman’s. What else had Rick known? Who else had he given up before Rapp had killed him?
The rain started as they touched down on the private airport’s only runway. Rapp walked forward as they taxied, grabbing a duffel from the closet and waiting for the plane to roll to a stop next to a parking lot scattered with cars. The cockpit door remained closed, as was his preference, so he opened the hatch himself and jumped down.
A quick scan of the area turned up no movement. The cars all appeared to be empty and, as promised, no one from the airport was there to greet him. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket to obscure his face not only from anyone looking down from the tower, but also from his own pilots.
The weathered Ford was right where Coleman said it would be, isolated on the east corner of the lot. Rapp tossed his bag in the back and slid behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition, and a well-used passport identifying him as Mitch Kruse was in the glove box with all the proper entry stamps.
He started the engine and pulled out onto the road, staying well within the speed limit as he dialed his phone. It was picked up on the first ring.
“How’s the car?” Scott Coleman said.
“Fine. What’s the situation? Are our competitors looking to make a move?” The phone was encrypted but neither of them trusted the technology. In light of the NSA’s obsession with vacuuming up every cell signal on the planet, it was best to keep the conversation in line with his cover as a sales executive.
“An hour ago I would have said the situation wasn’t pressing. Now, though, things are starting to look more urgent. I’m glad you’re here to help close the deal.”
• • •
Rapp managed to cover the fifteen miles to the center of town relatively quickly. Coleman had sent his coordinates to Rapp’s phone, and the turn-by-turn instructions were being fed to an earpiece camouflaged by the intersection of his beard and shaggy hair. Parking tended to be opportunistic in Istanbul, so he pulled in behind some disused scaffolding and stepped out into the cool drizzle.
The sidewalk was typically crowded with pedestrians, but no one gave him a second glance as he lit a cigarette and started up a side street. The leather jacket and dark jeans were right down the center of Istanbul fashion. Combined with his black hair and dark complexion, he became just another local hurrying to get out of the rain.
The clouds were too thick to get a precise bead on the sun, but Rapp guessed it had sunk below the horizon about five minutes ago. Headlights were coming on around him, glaring off wet stone and prompting him to pick up his pace. This is when it would happen—the short period of disorientation when the primitive part of the human mind adjusted from day to night.
The foot traffic thinned as he entered an area lined with closed stores devoted to electronics and construction materials. Sitting Bull would certainly be aware of the Rickman video, but he didn’t know his own code name and would have no reason to believe that a man working in Jalalabad would have any knowledge of his existence. Because of that, he was still comfortable routing through this relatively quiet part of Istanbul to get home from his job. Sharif had been cursed with a similarly careless habit of walking his dog in the same park at the same time every morning. And look what happened to him.
The mechanical voice was still giving him directions through his earpiece. Another three minutes and he spotted the hazy but unmistakable outline of Joe Maslick crammed behind the wheel of a white panel van.
Rapp slowed and casually dialed Coleman, looking around as though he were lost.
“Have you arrived?” Coleman said by way of a greeting. “The meeting is about to start.”
“Thirty seconds out.”
“Why don’t you come in through the back?”
Rapp disconnected the call and skirted around the rear of the van, opening the door and slipping into the cramped space. Maslick didn’t look back, instead continuing to watch the street through the rain-soaked windshield. Coleman pulled his earphones partially off and pointed toward a shaky image on one of the monitors.
“Bebe’s still following Zhutov. Based on what we’ve seen over the last few days, he’ll cross another two streets and then go diagonal into a small square. There’s a van parked at the north end with two men in the front seats. No way to know if anyone’s in the back. They’ve been there for a half an hour, which is about the variation in Zhutov’s schedule depending on if he stops for coffee. Luckily, he did today.”
Rapp nodded. “Tie me into Bebe.”
Coleman flipped a switch on the console in front of him and held out the microphone that had been clipped to his collar. The heavily encrypted radio signal didn’t travel very far, so Rapp felt comfortable being more direct than he would be on the phone.
“Bebe. Slow down when you start to approach the square. I don’t want you anywhere near this when it goes down.”
“Thanks, Mitch.” The relief in her voice was obvious even over t
he static. “I’ll keep eyes on the subject as long as possible and let you know if anything changes.”
Rapp handed the microphone back to Coleman and went forward, slipping into the passenger seat. “All right, Joe. Let’s roll.”
CHAPTER 3
ISLAMABAD
PAKISTAN
DR. Irene Kennedy scrolled through an email on the tablet in her lap, skimming over the details of the Istanbul situation. Sitting Bull’s life or death, once one of the CIA’s top priorities, was now largely irrelevant. What mattered was that his situation was more evidence that her worst-case scenario was playing out. More and more it seemed to be the way the world worked. What could go wrong, inevitably did. Horribly, catastrophically wrong.
She shut down the tablet and set it on the seat next to her, staring straight ahead at her own hazy reflection. The limousine’s bulletproof glass was heavily tinted, cutting her off from the driver and turning the sunny streets of Islamabad to a dim blur. She knew that there were two cars in front and no fewer than three behind, all filled with well-armed and well-trained men. The streets had been partially cleared for her motorcade and a Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter was flying close enough overhead that the thump of the rotors vibrated the vehicle around her.
The modern state of Pakistan had been established in 1947, carved from the Muslim regions of British India. In the decades since, it had become the sixth most populous nation in the world, with more than 180 million citizens. But while India had worked to modernize and democratize, its neighbor had toiled for much of its history under the rule of dictators and religious extremists.
Now the massive country was on the verge of being a failed state. Powerful fundamentalist currents were undermining the government, countless terrorist organizations had moved in, and control of the north had been almost completely lost.
With the economy in shambles, terrorists growing increasingly violent, and paranoia about India reaching a fevered pitch, it was hard to blame the Pakistani people for seeking order and stability from any organizations willing to peddle such hollow promises.
Unfortunately, those organizations were the army and the Pakistani intelligence apparatus. Both had grown in influence to the point that it was nearly impossible for the civilian government—and indeed the United States—to keep them in check. The chaos in Pakistan was becoming an impossible situation. A looming disaster that Kennedy no longer believed could be averted.
Normally, the circumstances would cause her to push Washington toward a policy of containment. For a number of reasons, that was impossible in the case of Pakistan. Movement of American men and matériel through the territory was critical to the war on terror. The country had one of the largest and most poorly controlled armies in the world. But both those issues paled when compared to the fact that the Pakistani government possessed more than a hundred nuclear warheads.
In many ways, it was a textbook example of the unintended consequences of America’s foreign policy. The United States had funneled billions of dollars into the country to fight the Soviets during their invasion of Afghanistan, but in its anticommunist fervor, it hadn’t paid attention when much of that money was diverted to Pakistan’s WMD program.
It was a self-destructive behavior that persisted to this day. America continued to pump money into the country that had created—and still quietly supported—the Taliban. A country that had sold nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. A country that had hidden Osama bin Laden and now hosted the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world.
The simple truth was that the increasingly dysfunctional men and women in Washington weren’t interested in making the difficult choices necessary to win the war against extremism. Pakistan would continue to demand U.S. dollars under the auspices of keeping its -nuclear arsenal secure, and the American politicians would continue to blindly hand it over, hoping that it would be enough to keep the lid on the pot long enough to get them through the next election cycle.
But was it enough? The danger posed by Pakistan’s nuclear program now came from every angle: an accident that India could mistake for an attack, one of the many local terrorist organizations acquiring a warhead, or even a coup that put the entire arsenal in the hands of a fundamentalist government.
And at the center of it all was the organization headquartered behind the nondescript gate her motorcade was approaching. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
Her driver didn’t slow as they headed for a group of men with dogs and low, mirrored carts meant to check for explosives. Instead of being alarmed by the vehicles barreling toward them, they moved back and offered a sharp salute as Kennedy passed. Undoubtedly, this would be portrayed as a courtesy—an acknowledgment that an American of her stature was above normal procedures. In actuality, it was an admission that slowing could make her vehicle vulnerable to a rocket attack.
Once inside the walls, Kennedy rolled down her window and looked out over the manicured lawns, fountains, and carefully maintained adobe buildings. It always struck her that the facility looked more like a university campus than the headquarters of one of the most dangerous and secretive intelligence agencies the world had ever known. Maybe someday one of her successors would come here to find it inhabited by young people with backpacks full of textbooks. She hoped so. But right now that idyllic world seemed a thousand years away.
Her lead cars broke off and the limousine pulled up in front of a large, modern building with a lone man standing in front of it. He hurried to open her door, nodding respectfully as she stepped out.
“Dr. Kennedy. Welcome. I’m General Taj’s assistant, Kabir Gadai.” He held out a hand and she took it. His grip had a practiced feel to it, as did the warmth of his smile. According to his CIA file, Gadai was an extremely well-educated moderate Muslim who had just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday. A top college cricket player, he’d spent five years in the military after graduation, two with the special forces. To top it off, his wife was stunning and his children earned perfect marks. An overachiever in every sense of the word.
With the exception of his still-solid physique, Gadai’s military background was no longer evident. His suit looked like Brooks -Brothers, his stylishly cut hair was just a bit over the ear, and his admittedly handsome face was devoid of the mustache favored by many of his colleagues.
“If you could please follow me,” he said, leading her into a massive circular lobby with a single security guard who seemed unwilling to even look in their direction. Gadai’s voice echoed slightly as he spoke about the building’s architecture, the founding of the ISI by a British army officer in the late 1940s, and the organization’s importance to what he optimistically described as Pakistan’s continued success.
Of course, he was careful to keep the history lesson non-controversial, a light entertainment for his guest as the elevator rose toward the top floor. He didn’t mention that the massive expansion of the organization had been funded with dollars that were supposed to have gone to supply the mujahideen’s resistance to the Soviets. Or the S Wing, a loose confederation of largely retired ISI operatives in charge of liaising with terrorist groups. And he certainly didn’t touch on the fact that the power of the ISI had grown to such proportions that a former Pakistani president had once referred to it as a state within a state.
The elevator doors opened and Gadai led her through a richly appointed hallway that had been cleared for her arrival. Ahmed Taj’s suite was at the far end and Gadai led her through the outer office.
“It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” he said, before opening the ISI director’s door for her. “I hope to see you again soon.”
Kennedy smiled politely before stepping across the threshold. Ahmed Taj immediately rose from his desk and strode toward her with a hand outstretched.
“It’s wonderful as always to see you, Irene. I thank you for making the journey. I trust it wasn’t too tiring.”
“It was nice to get away from the office, Ahmed.
I imagine you’re one of the few people who can understand.”
“Indeed,” he said sympathetically and then motioned toward a group of couches set up in front of one of three stone fireplaces. The office was an opulent affair entirely at odds with the modern architecture of the building. At least four times the size of her own, its walls were covered in rich wood paneling. Numerous bookcases were arranged with photos and other memorabilia, but few actual volumes.
“Tea?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Kennedy examined Taj as he poured. The man was a stark contrast to the imposing surroundings, which she knew to be the work of his predecessor. At the Pakistani president’s urging, Parliament had chosen the ISI’s new director not for his ruthlessness or cunning but for his spectacular mediocrity.
Taj’s gift for military supply logistics, as well as his ability to navigate the egos and agendas of his superiors, had allowed him to rise to the rank of air force general. When compared to even his own young assistant, though, Taj came up wanting. His suit was of average quality, he stood barely five six, and his stomach seemed to expand a little more every time she saw him. He had never been an athlete, and his grades had been good, but far from spectacular. Most notable, though, was the fact that whereas Gadai met her eye and spoke in a clear, confident tone, Taj had a tendency to mumble and look at the floor.
At first, she had been surprised when he’d been named and thought that it was perhaps meant as a tacit apology for the Osama bin Laden fiasco. What she’d come to learn, though, was that Taj possessed the one quality that the country’s president needed. He was controllable.
Whether this was a good thing or not was, like everything related to Pakistan, a complicated matter. The ISI was heavily factioned. It wasn’t unusual for one branch to be hunting a particular terrorist group while another funded it. That incohesiveness weakened the organization and benefited the civilian government, but it also contributed to the dangerous chaos Pakistan was descending into.