by Vince Flynn
Ahead, Stan Hurley was standing on the porch watching through the same aviator glasses he’d been wearing when Rapp had rolled in as a naïve college kid. The old cuss was probably close to eighty now, but no one seemed to know for certain. He had a bourbon in one hand and, despite advanced lung cancer, a cigarette in the other. No point in turning into a health nut now.
“You’re late,” he said as Rapp stepped out of the vehicle.
There was actually no specific time he was scheduled to arrive, but Rapp let it go. Hurley had a way of getting under his skin like no one else and it had been a long flight from Turkey.
“Good to see you, too, Stan.”
Rapp walked around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. Vadim Yenotin threw his hands up defensively and squinted into the sun.
“Out,” Rapp said.
The man was understandably stiff as he eased his legs over the rear bumper. The Charger didn’t have much of a trunk, and the weapons case Rapp had built into the bottom made it even smaller.
He grabbed the Russian by the collar and marched him toward the house as Hurley looked on with a bored expression. “Put him in a hole and meet me in the bar. Irene touched down an hour ago. Based on my conversation with her, you’re probably going to want something to take the edge off before she gets here.”
Rapp stayed behind the Russian as they cut through an incongruously modern kitchen and entered a pantry lined with canned food and baking supplies. It doubled as an elevator, and a click of the key chain in Rapp’s pocket caused the floor to begin dropping. A moment later, they were in a long cinder-block room lined with doors—all bare steel with a single hatch just big enough to pass a food tray through. Rapp opened the first one and shoved the Russian inside.
“Wait!” he said, stumbling, but catching himself before he fell. “What are you going to do with me? I told you what you wanted to know. You said you’d send me home.”
“What are you complaining about?” Rapp said. “This is the presidential suite.”
There were six cells in total. They ranged in comfort from this one, which boasted a sofa bed and big-screen TV, to a concrete cube with dripping pipes and a bucket for a toilet.
“Stop!” Yenotin said as Rapp began closing the door. “I demand that you let me talk to my embassy.”
“Consider yourself lucky, Vadim. If it weren’t for Irene Kennedy, you’d be spending the week in my trunk.”
The door clanged shut, and Rapp took a step back but made no move to leave. Instead he turned and stared at the door to the left of the one he’d just closed. The cell beyond contained Louis Gould, the professional assassin who had blown up Rapp’s home, killing his family and leaving him in the hospital with multiple broken bones and swelling on the brain.
He was suddenly aware of the weight of the Glock hanging beneath his right shoulder. It could be over in a few seconds. All he had to do was open the door, aim, and pull the trigger. Normally, killing affected him very little, but how would it feel to end Gould’s life? To rip him away from his own wife and daughter? Would it finally put Anna’s ghost to rest? Or would it just leave him with nothing to cling to?
“Vodka’s on the pool table.” Hurley’s voice behind him. He hadn’t even noticed the elevator go up to get the man.
“Yeah,” Rapp said, trance broken.
The door opposite the holding cells led to the bar—another thing that got more elaborate with every iteration of the CIA’s clandestine training facility. Hurley seemed to have plucked this one directly from his memory. With the exception of the contemporary pool table centered in it, the space felt like a mid-seventies Morocco dive. The far wall was exposed stone framing an antique mahogany bar imported from France. Asian-style lamps, a few antique ceiling fans, and Hurley’s collection of framed World War II–era photos completed the illusion. As the old man’s life came to a close, he seemed more and more comfortable in the past.
Rapp picked up the vodka and took a healthy slug before grabbing a cue and slamming the six ball into the side pocket. His thoughts turned to their situation, and once again the anger began to burn in the pit of his stomach. What had Rickman been thinking? Why would a man turn on his country? On his comrades in arms?
It was a question Rapp doubted he’d ever be able to answer. At his core, he was a soldier. A man who located and killed the enemies of his country and who would give his life to protect any member of his team. That was it. Simple.
When Irene Kennedy finally walked in, she was looking a bit haggard. Most people would have seen only what she wanted them to—the neatly pressed skirt, the impeccable white blouse, and the brown hair carefully pulled back. There was something around her eyes, though. Something that said this wasn’t business as usual.
“Two Russians dead, Mitch. Two.”
Rapp fired the one ball into the corner but didn’t otherwise respond.
“Are you telling me there was absolutely no other way to handle that situation?”
He turned his head and stared at her. They locked eyes for a few seconds before Hurley intervened.
“Come on, Irene. The driver tried to run him down and then another guy jumped out with a 9A-91. What did you want Mitch to use? Harsh language? Those Russian pricks were a day late and a dollar short and they knew it. They should have just crawled back under the rock they came from. It was a tactical mistake on their part and now they’re dead.”
She walked to the bar and poured herself a glass of red wine, using it to wash down two pills. Tylenol, Rapp knew. Ever since the Rickman thing had blown up, she’d been getting headaches.
He put down the cue and leaned back against the table. As much as he despised being second-guessed on operational details, he felt a pang of guilt. She’d become like a sister to him and he was worried about her.
“What Stan left out was that the 9A-91 wasn’t even suppressed. That guy was about to do a spray-and-pray in the middle of a city full of fourteen million people, Irene. He had to be dealt with.”
She drained half the glass and then put it down on the bar. “I know. But I have five messages from the head of the FSB literally screaming into my voice mail.”
Hurley shook his head in disgust. “Mikhail’s just playing the victim so he can work you over for two men he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about.”
She shook her head slowly. “A few years ago, this would be a career-defining crisis. Now it feels like a mild distraction. How sure are you that Yenotin is telling the truth, Mitch? That the Russians got the email after Rick’s death?”
“Ninety-nine percent. He wasn’t in a lying mood.”
“I was afraid of this.”
“What?” Hurley asked.
“Akhtar Durrani has a reputation for killing people who are no longer useful to him. And Rick was terrified of Mitch. If I’d been in his position, I’d have had an insurance policy.”
“What kind of insurance policy?”
“Someone to release the information in the event I died. It would have created an incentive for Durrani to keep him alive and it would have ensured that no matter what, the damage he wanted to do to us would happen.”
“I could see the little pencil dick doing something like that,” Hurley said, lighting a new cigarette off the embers of his old one. “But how?”
“More like who,” Rapp said. “Who did he give his files to and who released the information on Sitting Bull? Some foreign agent who has it in for us? A mercenary who’s just in it for the money?”
Kennedy shook her head. “Too unreliable. If it were me, I’d encrypt the files and hand them over to a lawyer. I’d tell him I was going to check in with him every week and if I didn’t, he should open a set of instructions I’d given him and follow them.”
“What would those instructions say?” Hurley asked.
“They would be a schedule for sending individual files. They’d go to someone less reputable—someone who knows how to send emails and post things to the Internet without being traced. The lawy
er would never know what was in the documents and the person releasing them would be the type who doesn’t care.”
There was a knock at the door, and a moment later a young man with an impressive Afro peeked in. “I found something.”
Marcus Dumond was a thirty-four-year-old computer genius with a bit of a checkered past. The young cyber-wiz had run into some trouble with the feds while he was earning a master’s in computer science at MIT. He was alleged to have hacked into one of New York’s largest banks and then transferred funds into several overseas accounts. The part that interested the CIA was that Dumond wasn’t caught because he left a trail; he was caught because he got drunk one night and bragged about his activities to the wrong person. At the time, Dumond was living with Steven Rapp, Mitch’s younger brother. When the older Rapp heard about Dumond’s problems, he called Irene Kennedy and told her the hacker was worth a look.
“Come in,” Rapp said. “What have you got?”
Dumond entered a bit hesitantly, setting up a laptop on the pool table. Rapp recognized it as being one he’d taken from Durrani’s house. It was still stained with Joe Rickman’s blood.
“I’ve cracked the encryption protecting all the files on here,” Dumond said.
“Really?” Kennedy replied, sounding surprised. “I thought Rick would make it harder than that.”
Dumond shook his head. “Just the standard stuff that came with the computer. His password was one of his kids’ birth dates.”
“I sense that you’re about to tell me the bad news.”
“Yeah . . . There isn’t really anything in them. Mostly personal stuff—his passwords to Amazon, checkbook registers, bank records. That kind of thing.”
Kennedy picked up her glass again. “That makes more sense to me. Anything we can access that easily is something Rick either didn’t care about or he wanted us to see.”
Dumond started to look uncomfortable again.
“What?” Rapp said.
“I figured I’d connect it to the Internet. You know, download any outstanding emails, see if anything interesting happened.”
“That’s kind of a risk, isn’t it?” Rapp said. “It could have been set to wipe the data.”
Dumond frowned. He liked being questioned about his work even less than Rapp did. “I mirrored the drive first. And like I said, there’s nothing interesting on it anyway.”
“So what happened?” Hurley said.
“It automatically downloaded a video.”
“What kind of video?” Kennedy asked. “Did you watch it?”
Dumond shook his head. “I figured it was stuff I didn’t really want to know.”
Rapp slapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Marcus. Now why don’t you go back to work and see what else you can dig up.”
When he was gone, Hurley and Kennedy came over to the pool table and Rapp clicked on the video file in the middle of the laptop screen. A window opened, showing Joe Rickman sitting in his Jalalabad home office. He was wearing tooled leather boots, which were propped lazily on his desk. The location and the fact that his soft body and face were uninjured suggested that the recording had been made before his faked kidnapping.
“Hello, Mitch. If you’re watching this, me and Akhtar Durrani are dead. And if that’s the case, I figure you did it.”
Kennedy reached out and paused the playback. “Interesting. How many of these videos do you think he made?”
“What do you mean?” Hurley asked.
“What if Durrani was still alive? What if we’d captured and not killed him? How many scenarios did he have covered?”
“About a thousand if I know that little weasel,” Hurley said.
She pressed the play button and Rickman came to life again.
“I have to admit that I thought Gould had a good chance to take you out. I mean, if not him, who? He’s one of the top private contractors in the world and he already blew the crap out of your wife and kid.”
Rickman’s face broke into a wide grin as Rapp’s darkened. He wished the son of a bitch really could come back to life. Because then he could kill him again.
“Look over at him, Irene,” Rickman continued. “Does he look pissed? Well, how do you think I feel? I’m dead. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Mitch. Lord knows you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, but you do have one undeniable talent: not getting killed. When it comes to you surviving and your enemies ending up with a bullet in their skulls, you’re an honest-to-God genius. Or maybe I should say idiot savant.”
He laughed a little too wildly. As though he knew he no longer had to contain it. That he no longer had anyone to fool.
“Afghanistan will drive you nuts. You know that. We’ve talked about it. A thousand years of culture, man. You could kill everyone here except one cute little seven-year-old girl and you know what she’d do? Stab you with a pair of scissors the minute you turned your back. You might as well try to create a democracy in a rattlesnake den. And now the politicians are giving money and jobs to the people who a few years ago were trying to kill us.”
What he was saying was true. Congress had decided that if they just threw enough money around, everyone in Afghanistan would learn to get along. In reality, the politicians just wanted out in the most face-saving way possible. Kick the problem down the road until they were retired and hitting golf balls in Florida.
“This place ruined my life, my family, my health. I have nothing left. A little pension so I can spend my old age sitting alone in a one-bedroom apartment while these bastards sit in their mansions and eat caviar with their kids.”
He pulled his feet off the desk and leaned into the camera. “You destroyed me, Irene. So I’m going to return the favor. The leaks are going to keep coming. When I’m done with you, you’ll be in jail and the CIA will be an embarrassing little entry in a history book. The world is chaos, punctuated by brief outbreaks of civilization. Mitch, you know that better than anyone. Where you go wrong is thinking you can change it.”
He leaned back in his chair again, flashing another insane smile. “See you again soon.”
The screen went black and Kennedy took a hesitant step backward. She’d offered to promote him, to pull him out of Afghanistan. But he’d repeatedly declined. Had the warning signs been there? Had she ignored them out of fear of losing his unique skill set?
Rapp seemed to read her mind. “We’re all crazy, Irene. It’s a prerequisite for the job. No one saw this coming. Not me, not Stan, and not Mike. Even the people who worked with Rick every day were completely blindsided.”
“It wasn’t their responsibility to see it coming. It was mine.”
“Spilt milk,” Hurley said impatiently. “You make things too complicated. All we have to do is find the people who have Rick’s files and kill them. Problem solved.”
“What did he know?” she said. “Sitting Bull was well outside his sphere of influence. How long had he been collecting intelligence on our network? How long had he been planning on using it to inflict maximum damage? And it’s not just what he knew. He could lie, too. He could establish his credibility by handing over some legitimate -assets, then start mixing in disinformation by naming people who aren’t on our payroll.”
“If he was going to release it all at once, he’d have done it by now,” Rapp said. “No, he’s going to dribble it out. Use it to torture us. That gives us time. Stan’s right, we just have to find who has the files and stop them. Then it’s over.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“We follow the only lead we have.”
“Obrecht,” she acknowledged.
Leo Obrecht was a Swiss national who controlled Sparkasse Schaffhausen, a boutique bank based in Zurich. His name and that of his organization had been coming up since Rickman first disappeared. It was he who had accused Rapp and Rickman of depositing illicit personal funds in his bank.
Most interestingly, though, he was Louis Gould’s handler. Vetting offers and accepting payments for an assassin wasn’
t exactly a common side project for a reputable banker.
“If I recall correctly,” Kennedy said, “getting to Obrecht didn’t work out well last time.”
When Rapp had gone to Europe to get answers from the man, he’d run into a carload of ISI agents with the same mission. Three ended up dead and the other, Kassar, had been captured. Later, he’d proved critical to the operation against Rickman and Durrani.
“Obrecht’s personal security is tight as hell,” Rapp agreed. “And it’s gotten even tighter since the incident with the Pakistanis. He doesn’t leave his property at all anymore. But based on the amount of encrypted Internet traffic running between his mansion and the bank, he’s keeping busy.”
“Busy wiping all evidence of his involvement in this thing from his company’s records,” Kennedy said.
“A good bet.”
“Can you two get to him?”
“Not easily,” Hurley said before Rapp could answer. “Our best option would have been to take him while he was on the move.”
“But you’re saying he doesn’t move anymore.”
“He has to eventually.”
Kennedy nodded thoughtfully. “Rickman’s files are going to keep coming. When and how I can’t say for certain, but I guarantee that it will be in the most damaging way possible.”
“Can we absorb the hit?” Hurley asked.
“I honestly don’t know, Stan. I ask myself, why did he do this now? He was still relatively young, he doesn’t appear to have been ill, and I had no plans to pull him out. Rick never guessed, he planned. He analyzed. The only reason I can think of is that he believed he had enough to take us down. And when Rick believed something, it was usually because he was right.”
“So if waiting isn’t an option, we go for Obrecht at his house,” Rapp said.
“With what?” Hurley responded. “A few Abrams tanks and an Apache?”
Rapp pushed himself up onto the edge of the pool table. “We’re running out of time, Stan.”
“Don’t say it,” Hurley pleaded.
“Look, I could probably figure out a way to get in there and kill the man, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about getting him out of his compound alive and transporting him somewhere we can interrogate him. I like it even less than you, Stan, but without Louis Gould’s help, I don’t see a way to make that happen.”