by Vince Flynn
After leaving the warehouse at first light his needs dictated his actions. Shelter, care, and food were at the top of his list, and they all had to be obtained without attracting any attention. That was when the urge to flee was the strongest. To just jump on the closest Metro train and go straight to the Gare de Lyon train station, gather his emergency bag from the locker, and flee the country. He could be across the border into Switzerland in three hours. Run straight into the arms of Greta and there was a good chance Hurley would know within a day. The first order of business was almost always to get out of the country where you had committed the crime, and Rapp had been told specifically on this one that he was to get out of France immediately after killing Tarek.
Getting ambushed and shot had obviously complicated things, but Rapp was disinclined to follow through with those orders for multiple reasons. The police were sure to be on high alert after the shootout at the hotel. They would be monitoring the ports and train stations and the immigration and border control agents would be scrutinizing every detail. While Rapp seriously doubted that they had a description of him, there was enough doubt to make him hesitant. He’d lost blood, and he was in pain. He could chance it, but an alert border agent might have him escorted into a private room for some interrogation and a strip search. Once his shirt was off there would be no denying that he’d been shot.
Fluent in French, Rapp liked the odds of staying put in Paris and blending in with the city’s ten million inhabitants. Greta could collect a few things for him and then she could come to him. He did get on the first Metro train he found, however, and after a transfer he was emerging from several hundred feet underground into the grand Gare de Lyon station. Traffic was light, but as he’d guessed the police were unusually alert. Rapp, with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of the stolen jacket, kept his chin tucked in and his eyes uninterested as if he was just another laborer heading off to work. The lockers were located near the bathrooms. He purchased an espresso and a croissant from a vendor and used his wait to casually determine if any of the police had taken notice of him. They hadn’t, so he proceeded to the lockers, retrieved his backpack, and stepped into one of the stalls in the men’s room.
Four minutes later he emerged in a pair of jeans, hiking boots, blue Roots sweatshirt, and a Montreal Canadiens cap. The Palestinian passport had been torn up and flushed down the toilet and the worker’s clothes stuffed into a trashcan. His backup gun was still strapped around his ankle, but other than that he was just another tourist. He left the terminal and stepped onto the first waiting bus, not caring where it would take him as long as it was quickly away from the station. A few minutes later he found himself rolling through central Paris. When the air brakes hissed at the hideous Pompidou Center, Rapp got off. He knew of a Best Western just around the corner—the type of place that catered to tourists eager to be near Paris’s great museums.
A half block later he found a pay phone. It was brand new, shiny stainless steel; France Telecom’s newest card-operated model to help thwart city degenerates who were fond of breaking into the coin-operated machines. Rapp slid his telecard into the slot, grabbed the receiver, and punched in a number from memory. She answered on the third ring.
“Good morning, Frau Greta,” Rapp said in French. “How are you?”
“I am wonderful. Especially after hearing your voice.” Her relief was obvious.
“Good. I can’t wait to see you, but there has been a change in plans.” The chance that Greta’s phone was tapped was remote, but nonetheless, Rapp kept things as vague as possible and used their prearranged codes. “I can’t leave town. My boss dumped a bunch of work on me. Do you think maybe you could come to me instead?”
“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation, concern creeping into her voice.
“Could you drive?” It would be nice to have a car in case they needed to flee. “Maybe we could take a drive into the country tomorrow?”
“Yes, I can drive. Is everything all right?”
Rapp could tell she was worried. “Everything is fine, darling. Well, not perfect, but I’ll live.” He realized that would not calm her down, so he added, “There’s just a few complications, that’s all. Once you get here everything will be fine. Can you meet me tomorrow morning?”
“Not today?”
Rapp needed some food and a lot of sleep. And he needed some silence to sort things out. “I’m afraid today won’t work. I have to get some things taken care of, but I promise, tomorrow I will have all day to spend with you.”
“And the rest of the week?”
“And the rest of the week, too,” Rapp lied. He would explain things in person and hoped she would understand. “I have to run, darling. Can you meet me at ten tomorrow morning?”
“Yes. Where . . . the apartment?”
“Not the apartment,” Rapp said a little too quickly. Recovering, he said, “I will email you the information.” He felt a wave of pain coming down on him and he grabbed the top of the phone booth with his right hand. “I have to go, darling, but I can’t wait to see you.” Rapp practically bit off his tongue after he spoke the last word.
“I can’t wait to see you. I just wish it was today.”
Rapp closed his eyes and hung on to the case of the pay phone. The pain kept building and Greta kept talking, asking him if something was wrong. He finally managed to say, “I’ll be all right.” His voice was tight and clipped. “I have to go now, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Rapp was pulling the receiver away from his ear when he heard her tell him she loved him. It was a first for the two of them and Rapp wasn’t sure if he was unwilling or unable to respond. He hung up the phone, knowing his nonresponse would be an issue. The throbbing pain slowly receded. Rapp retrieved his card, took several deep breaths, and then steadied himself enough to start down the sidewalk.
It was just past 7:00 a.m. when he crossed the hotel’s small lobby. He spoke English to the man behind the desk, who assured him that while he did not have a room available at this exact moment, he expected one to free up within the hour. Rapp presented a Canadian passport and a Visa card with the name Bill Johnson. On the advice of a wise Swiss banker, he had obtained the passport and charge card on his own without telling his CIA handlers. He devoured a big breakfast, did his best to ignore the pain in his shoulder, and scanned the papers, even though he knew the killings had happened too late to make the morning editions. The man behind the desk was true to his word and within an hour he was standing at Rapp’s table.
“Monsieur Johnson,” the man said, “your room is ready.”
Within minutes Rapp was in his room sitting on the edge of the bed, transfixed by the TV. The hotel murders were the hot topic on every local channel. The BBC had even picked up the story, but the only thing that Rapp learned with any surprise was the death toll. At first he thought they had their facts wrong. He had killed five people—Tarek and the four bodyguards, and he assumed that the prostitute had also been killed. That accounted for six total deaths. Who were the other three?
His shoulder throbbing, Rapp turned off the TV and headed off in search of some supplies. He kept a wide-spectrum antibiotic in his emergency bag, and a few other essentials, but he needed other supplies to clean and dress the wound, as well as some painkillers and other toiletries. It was now close to ten in the morning and the tourists were out in droves. Rapp hit three different pharmacies in a four-block area, wanting to spread out his purchases so as to not draw too much attention.
Every time he passed a pay phone he had to resist the urge to call Kennedy. He was still trying to figure out if he could trust her. On the face of it he thought he could, but the reality of their curious profession was that he didn’t really know any of his coworkers. They were all professional liars. Rapp passed a young couple holding a map and arguing. For some bizarre reason he wondered if he could kill Kennedy. Assuming she had set him up, of course. Hurley would be easy, at least in terms of the decision, but Kennedy was different. He liked her.
>
The pain from the gunshot wound was getting worse, and was interfering with his ability to focus, so he headed back to the hotel and popped some painkillers. He took another shower before cleaning and dressing the wound. With the pain numbed, he drew the curtains and climbed under the covers. Pain was something he was accustomed to, but this was more acute than the average pull or sprain. It went deep, touching nerves that had never before been touched by an outside object. The discomfort was making sleep nearly impossible, but after thirty minutes the drugs kicked in. Rapp lay there staring up at the ceiling, floating away while trying to understand where the other three bodies had come from. He wondered if he had somehow killed the last man in the hallway. Even then, it meant two more bodies that he couldn’t account for.
His dreams were wild and senseless. A jumbled mess of faces known and unknown. When he awoke later in the day, he ordered room service and watched more news on the television. There was little new information other than the announcement that four of the victims were bodyguards for the Libyan oil minister. Rapp scoffed at the information. If the men were bodyguards, why weren’t they with Tarek as he moved about the city? The answer was obvious. They weren’t bodyguards. They were a team sent to ambush him and Tarek was the bait.
Rapp fell asleep once again, his mind wrestling with all of the implications that flowed from what seemed to be the truth. Had Tarek volunteered for this mission or had he been betrayed by his own brotherhood? Had his value to his organization declined so much that they deemed him expendable? How had they known that he would be next on Rapp’s list? That was ultimately the problem that Rapp kept coming back to, for it implied something far more sinister and close to home.
As Rapp looked around the room, he thought of the close circle of people who knew of his existence. The Orion Team was a small clandestine unit, intentionally set up outside Langley with the explicit purpose of hunting terrorists. There was a firewall between the group and Langley for an obvious reason—there were too many bureaucrats in the building, many of them with law degrees, who did not understand the nature of their enemy. Men and women who had never served in the field, men and women who had no grasp of their enemies’ lethal designs, and who sincerely thought that everything must be done in the full light of congressional approval and proper legal channels, as if they were conducting a police action.
Rapp sat up and swung his feet from under the covers and to the floor in one motion. He glanced at the bandage on his shoulder and was pleased to see no sign of blood. Kennedy entered his mind. She was his most direct link. He saw her as someone who was genuinely committed to what they were doing, but then again she wasn’t exactly an open book. There was Rob Ridley, who ran the advance teams and was there to assist Rapp on the back end if he got in trouble. Stan Hurley, the relentless cuss, knew virtually every detail, as did Thomas Stansfield, the deputy director of Operations at Langley. How many others, Rapp had no idea. Kennedy claimed that there were only a handful of people, but it was no stretch to think that others had been brought into the loop without Rapp’s knowledge. A mole in a spy agency was not a novel idea, and the idea caused Rapp’s healthy paranoia to kick in.
Rapp hadn’t spent much time analyzing the motives of someone who would betray their country. Hatred, jealousy, a martyr complex, or some Dudley Do-Right who saw only black and white and the letter of the law—Rapp didn’t really care. He knew as surely as he knew that he had killed Tarek and the others that if he found the person who had set him up, he would strangle that person with his bare hands. The thought that someone back in Washington who was more than likely sitting in a cushy air-conditioned office had sold him out for money or some arrangement enraged him. Who it could be was a big question, and Rapp wondered if he could muster the skills and assets to find out.
He sat there for several minutes, the pain in his shoulder pulsing back to life, analyzing the various paths he could take. Disappearing was still an option and he had the skills to pull it off—at least for a while. Would they bother to look for him? If they knew the whole story, probably not, but the way the press was reporting things they would think he had killed the prostitute and three innocent civilians, and there was no guarantee that they would know anything beyond what the press was reporting. Rapp didn’t like that. Intuitively, he knew spending the rest of his life waiting for them to kick in his door was no way to live. More important, he believed in the mission and had no desire to abandon it. He cracked a smile as he briefly thought of staying with the mission, but doing so on his own. Hurley would flip out and hunt him down.
Slowly, Rapp realized there was really only one good avenue open to him. He would have to initiate contact and see how they reacted. He was the one with a bullet hole in his shoulder. They could bitch all they wanted about their protocols, but he was the one getting shot at. He would call Kennedy. It would be a day and a half late, they would be on edge, and if they believed the press reports there was a chance they’d authorized a kill order for him. That possibility gave Rapp an idea. He was a virtual needle in a haystack right now. If they were looking for him, there was just one logical place to start. Rapp considered the dangers involved in going there. Rubbing his eyes, he tried to work the fog of the painkillers from his mind. He was going to need all his wits about him for what was coming next.
CHAPTER 14
WHEN Rapp stood up, his shoulder immediately let him know that it was not happy. He froze between the bed and the bathroom, not sure if he should push on or lie back down. The pain, though, receded more quickly than it had the day before. He was either getting used to it, or it was getting better. He moved into the small bathroom and checked out his shoulder in the mirror. It didn’t look good. Bright red and purple bruising was spreading beyond the white bandage in every direction. None of it was migrating down his arm, though, which he took as a positive sign. Then he remembered he’d spent a long time on his back.
Turning to the side, he craned his stiff neck as far as he could and caught the reflection of his back in the mirror. Instead of bright red, the bruising was purple and almost black in a few spots. Rapp cringed and asked himself if it was possible that the bullet had clipped his lateral thoracic artery. He shook his head at his own question. If that big tube was nicked he would have bled out and died a long time ago. Besides, that main highway ran pretty deep. When he’d bandaged the wound the day before he’d done his best to line up the entry and exit wounds. The bullet had punched through close to the middle of his left shoulder and exited closer to the outside. The angle should have carried it clear of the hub of arteries and veins that carried blood to and from his left arm. It was more likely that a good number of capillaries and plenty of tissue had been damaged. The internal bleeding had probably stopped and the blood had pooled while he’d slept. At least that’s what he hoped.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror. He made no attempt to deceive himself. The dark black eyes that were staring back at him were the eyes of a killer. Somewhere in the distance he heard more church bells. He briefly considered going to mass and then with a heavy sadness told himself that God would not want him in his house. Thou shalt not kill was a pretty big one. Rapp felt himself heading down one of those dark hallways of introspection that led to pity, recrimination, and doubt. After he’d lost his girlfriend and thirty-four fellow Syracuse University students in the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack, there’d been times where he allowed himself to walk down these sunless corridors. After a lot of tears and a lot of time spent feeling sorry for himself, he began to recognize that he could be lost in these hallways for a long time if he didn’t practice some mental discipline. The bleak corridors of his mind were full of pain and weakness and no answers.
Rapp flashed himself a devilish grin as he remembered another popular biblical phrase, the one that had pulled him out of his self-pity—an eye for an eye. The Ten Commandments were bullet points. A quick reference on how to live your life between the lines. The Bible was the more detailed reference,
and it was filled with examples of how the wicked should be punished, especially the Old Testament. Thou shalt not kill, unless it’s a piece of shit terrorist . . . or a traitor or a rapist or a pedophile . . . the list could go on for a long time.
Rapp had bigger and more immediate problems to deal with at the moment. He would have to put off debating his salvation for another day. Right now he was more focused on finding out how Kennedy would react to what he had to say. After that, he would run his colleagues through some tests to see whom he could trust, and if he got the feeling that he was being played he might have to disappear for a few months. Even as he thought it he knew it wasn’t an option. Lying low was not how he worked. He would find out who had betrayed him and then he would kill them.
The knock on the door pulled him from his thoughts of retribution. He moved quickly for the silenced pistol on the nightstand and then remembered Greta was supposed to meet him. He kept the pistol as a precaution and started for the door. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw his reflection in the mirror across the room. He looked like he felt, which was like crap. His dense black hair was shooting out in various directions and he had a thick sheet of stubble, as he had not shaved in two days. That was hardly the worst of it, though. His shoulder was the real problem. He thought about putting on a T-shirt, but it would hurt too much and take too long and Greta was not good at waiting. He knew she’d be mad that he’d put her off for a whole day. He shook his head, sighed, and figured he might as well get it over with. She was going to find out sooner or later.
Rapp stepped softly to the door, stopping a few feet away, and peered through the peephole. There was Greta, all five-foot-six of Nordic perfection. Blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw that tapered to a little apple chin. Her blond hair was pulled back in a high ponytail as it almost always was. Rapp preferred it that way. The minimalist look framed her perfect face. In the year he’d known her, Rapp had seen grown men, complete strangers, become so fixated on Greta that they walked into things. She was literally a head-turner. It had irritated Rapp at first, having to deal with all the gawking men when they were in public. After a while he decided to take it as a compliment. If men wanted to stare, then they could go ahead. He soon learned, also, that Greta was more than capable of defending her honor. She did her best to ignore the stares, but occasionally if some man was too forward or too obvious she could go nuclear.
