by Vince Flynn
She struggled with it for well over an hour, through fits of tears and pangs of guilt, until finally she surrendered herself to that voice of her youth—the voice of her conscience. It called to her over and over, telling her it would be difficult, but that in the end she would feel better, and it was right. The second she sent the e-mail she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her burdened heart.
Claudia turned off her computer and wiped the tears from her face. She knew nothing could bring Anna Rielly back, but she hoped that she had made it clear that she was deeply sorry for what had happened. She had gone further than she’d wanted to, and revealed far more than she should have. The lengthy final message gave away too much. It flew in the face of everything she had learned—everything that had kept her alive. Part of her didn’t care anymore if she was caught. A massive burden had been lifted, and she was ready for what life would hand her. She would go back to the beginning. To her roots. She would go home to her parents, have her child, and start over.
There was a knock on the door, and Claudia froze. She immediately assumed the worst. She should have changed hotels. They had found someway to track her, some new piece of technology she was unfamiliar with. She was wearing a white tank top and a pair of cutoff jean shorts rolled up several inches at the hem. Her professional instincts kicked in momentarily and she searched the room for a weapon. After a second she thought better of it. If the CIA had found her, there would be no escaping. If Louie had been here, maybe they could fight their way out, but she wasn’t a killer. Claudia imagined them on the other side of the door—men in black with big black guns waiting to bust the door down. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the patio and gravity pool. It was at least a thirty-foot drop to the jagged rocks and the surf.
Claudia collected herself and wiped her nervous palms on the front of her shorts. She stood tall and walked across the room. She would accept the inevitable. She would not run. Claudia didn’t bother with the peephole. She unlocked the door and opened it. She was prepared for anything other than what she found.
“You’re a hard woman to locate,” Louie said. “Do you have any idea how many hotels there are in Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo?”
Claudia was speechless.
“I’m sorry, darling. You were right. I was wrong.” Gould handed her a bouquet of flowers. “We should have never taken the job.”
Claudia took the flowers, a raging storm of conflicting emotions battling within. She had been so ready to move on only a minute ago and now here she was being pulled back. Her mind struggled to find the proper meaning in all of this. She tried to gauge the depth of her feelings and the sincerity of Louie’s words.
“I can’t bear thinking of life without you,” Louie continued. “Will you please forgive me?”
It was his simple plea for forgiveness that got to her. It was something the nuns had drilled into her as a child. To receive forgiveness, one must be willing to grant it.
63
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
Kennedy had had her doubts about the first e-mail. It got her attention, certainly, but the CIA received thousands of e-mails every month from crackpots and conspiracy theorists. Rarely were they sent to her directly, but the nut-jobs were on her mind as she read the message. The second e-mail pulled her in. There had only been minor mention of Mitch’s knee surgery in the press and no mention whatsoever about the killer hiding out in the woods across from the house. As far as the press was concerned, the explosion was still being reported as an accident.
Kennedy received the third message on the way to Camp David. One phone call to Langley confirmed that an Erich Abel had in fact worked for the East German Stasi. The possible Saudi connection fit with the information that had been passed on by the Jordanians. Kennedy called her associate deputy director of Intelligence and ordered a full workup done on Abel. She wanted to know everything the Agency had on the man, and Sunday afternoon or not she expected a briefing the moment she returned from Camp David.
The briefing had been held in her office at 4:15 on Sunday afternoon. Present were the associate deputy director for Intelligence, the head of the Office of Russian and European Analysis, and the deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC. One other person arrived late. He was Marcus Dumond, who was CTC’s resident computer genius. Dumond informed Kennedy that the effort to track down the mysterious e-mailer had run out of gas in the Netherlands. Kennedy had pretty much expected this to be the case.
Kennedy was shown a sixteen-year-old photo of Abel and given twenty-plus minutes of information that, like the photo, was at least fifteen years old. She further learned that Langley’s resident expert on East Germany, and the Stasi, had retired six years ago and was living in Arizona. They had tried to reach him, but he was busy playing golf and wouldn’t be home for another hour. An address for Abel in Vienna had been confirmed and the Agency’s people at the embassy in Austria had been put on standby and told to await instructions from the director.
Kennedy did not like that last bit of news. She wanted a low profile on this thing. If her people got too excited and started beating the bushes, this Abel might get spooked and run for it. She called the Vienna station chief herself and gave him explicit orders. She wanted passive surveillance and only passive surveillance to begin immediately. That meant parabolic mikes and drive-bys. No stakeouts with two guys parked in front of Abel’s apartment waiting for him to show. Under no circumstances was anyone from the Agency to contact Abel directly or take any risk. It was approaching midnight in Austria. Abel should be at home sleeping, and by the time Monday morning arrived, Kennedy planned on having one of the Directorate of Operations’ top surveillance teams in place.
Kennedy handed out some new marching orders. The information was old. She wanted to know what this Erich Abel had been up to for the last ten-plus years, and she wanted all of it on her desk by 6:00 a.m. Before leaving the office, Kennedy sent one last e-mail. She wasn’t sure she’d get a reply, but she knew she had to try and keep the dialogue going. Her question to the mystery e-mailer was straightforward: Why are you doing this?
Kennedy had her suspicions. In her mind this was all about what Coleman had predicted. Tell the media Rapp is dead. The killers will get the rest of their money, and then when it is announced that he is still alive, the person or persons who did the hiring will demand that either the job is finished or that their money is refunded. Kennedy sensed they were turning on each other. This Abel was the middleman. If the e-mailer could be believed, and it was the Saudis who were behind this, Abel would be under great pressure to get their money back. He would in turn be demanding that the assassin finish the job or give the money back. Kennedy wondered if the assassin or assassins were using her to eliminate Abel.
Kennedy went home to check on Tommy and try to get some sleep. Steven Rapp had returned to New York. Her mother was with Tommy along with twelve heavily armed men from Langley’s Office of Security. Tommy was tired, having not slept more than six hours the night before. Even so, he had a lot of questions about Mitch. Kennedy explained, as she always did, that she couldn’t talk about work, but she could tell him that she had talked to Mitch and he was doing fine. Tommy fell asleep in her arms a few minutes past 8:00, and she carried him to bed. After talking to her mother for about thirty minutes she checked her e-mail one last time before heading off to bed herself.
As she began reading the lengthy message any thought of sleep vanished. The rambling two-page letter was beyond surprising, and Kennedy had to force herself to read the entire thing without stopping. Kennedy had a healthy sense of skepticism. In her business, information had to be checked and rechecked before it could be believed. This confession was filled with facts that would be exceedingly difficult to verify, but even so Kennedy already suspected the information was accurate.
She was left with two options. The first involved bringing the State and Justice Departments into the loop, and for several reasons she hated the mere thought of it.
First of all, this was a CIA problem. Someone had tried to kill one of her people, and the CIA would take care of the problem on its own. Langley was more suited to play rough, which was what this would take. If she brought Justice and State in on it, they would spend the next five years in Swiss courts, and the only outcome would be a few forfeited bank accounts. No individual would be brought to justice and punished for Anna’s death. Her second option was to get on a plane, fly to Zurich, and deal with this situation quickly and quietly.
In addition to a six-person security detail she brought Marcus Dumond. They left shortly after ten in the evening and with the time change between DC and Zurich, and the flight time, it was nearly ten in the morning when they arrived. Kennedy did not inform the U.S. ambassador that she was in the country, and she did not inform Ross or the president that she was leaving the country. The president would understand, but Ross would not. At this stage of the game it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Kennedy did, however, inform her Swiss counterpart and ask that he help her skirt customs once she landed. She explained to him that they had important matters to discuss and that it would be better if there was no official record of her visit. Two of the Agency’s people stationed in Zurich were waiting on the tarmac at the airport with August Bartholomew, the head of the Swiss Foreign Intelligence Service. Kennedy rode with Bartholomew and managed to keep the conversation away from the purpose of her visit during the relatively brief ride to her hotel. She had no idea if Bartholomew had the car wired, or if he was wearing one himself, but either way she could not afford to take the risk. When they got to the hotel she would explain to him what was going on. Kennedy was sure he had already guessed that her visit had something to do with one of the two things the Swiss were famous for, and it wasn’t chocolate.
The Swiss took their banking and their neutrality seriously, and for good reason. Anything that could sway Swiss objectivity or damage the reputation of Swiss banks was considered a threat to national identity and long-term security. The war on terror had done just that. Armies of lawyers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and intelligence officers had descended upon Bern and Zurich after 9/11 demanding that the Swiss government hand over any and all records that had anything to do with al-Qaeda and its various members. It was a very uncomfortable experience for the Swiss, due in great part to the fact that they did a massive amount of business with the Saudis and al-Qaeda was almost entirely financed by Saudi dollars. The Saudis liked their privacy and they made it very clear they would take their banking elsewhere if the Swiss broke their vow of secrecy.
Diplomatic talks dragged on. Lawyers for both the U.S. Justice Department and those representing the families who had lost loved ones clogged the Swiss courts with lawsuits and motions. In the end, almost two years later, the sanitized records of Osama bin Laden were handed over and almost nothing else. More than once during the drawn-out legal battle Bartholomew had told Kennedy that there was a better way to handle this. A more delicate way. That in the future she should not hesitate to pick up the phone and call him if there was a problem. She had decided to do just that, and with or without his help, she was not leaving Zurich without the information she’d come for.
The presidential suite at the Hotel Baur Au Lac was secured for one night at a cost of 5,000 Swiss francs. Kennedy did not plan on spending the night. The suite consisted of three bedrooms, two separate living rooms, an office, and a verandah that overlooked Lake Geneva. Bartholomew and Kennedy entered the suite after the CIA security team had swept it for listening devices. Kennedy apologized in advance to Bartholomew and then had one of her security people wand him to make sure he wasn’t wired. An intelligence professional, Bartholomew took it in stride.
Kennedy ordered coffee service and then sat down to explain to her counterpart what she was about to do. There were a few details that she left out, but for the most part she was truthful with him. When she was finished explaining her plan she handed Bartholomew a list of men whom her office had already contacted. Appointments had been set up in thirty-minute intervals. The first man was due to arrive shortly. The five men were the presidents of some of Switzerland’s most reputable and powerful banks. Kennedy asked Bartholomew if he would like to stay. It took him all of two seconds to decide. He thanked Kennedy for her courtesy and then excused himself.
Getting the men to take the meeting was easy. These banks hated bad publicity, and when the office of the director of the CIA called and told you it was in your best interest to take a private meeting with the head of the world’s most well known spy agency, you shuffled your schedule and took the meeting. Kennedy did not underestimate these men. They were very smart, very cool customers. Her arsenal of threats varied greatly, and she would have to be very careful how she used them. These men were bankers. Some of the world’s best. They had their reputations to consider, and the reputations of their banks to consider, but in the end, there was one thing that would trump all.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is so simple it is easy to overlook. Kennedy had considered telling these men that Mitch Rapp was uncontrollable and if they didn’t give her the information she needed, he was likely to pay them a visit they would not enjoy. Another option was to threaten a massive campaign against them using the press, and the full force of the United States government. The problem with this was that they knew Kennedy didn’t want the press covering this any more than they did. The third option which she was prepared to use against some of them, if things got ugly, was to wage a full-scale cyberattack against their banks and watch their business transactions come to a screeching halt. This tactic she would keep in reserve to use against anyone who was unusually stubborn.
What she had finally decided to do was state the case as she knew it, and ask them to voluntarily turn over all information associated with the account numbers she had been given by her mystery e-mailer. If they balked, she was prepared to drop the bomb. She would show them a list of their largest U.S. depositors. The mere fact that she had such a list would unnerve them. For Swiss banks nothing was more sacrosanct than their client lists. For more than a decade the CIA had been carefully gathering information on the Swiss banking industry by hacking into their networks. They had amassed a giant database. It was a myth that all Swiss bank accounts were numbered. Many were, but there were also plenty of accounts where the person’s name was listed. With Dumond’s help Kennedy had gone over the list on the flight over and identified over seven billion dollars in U.S. corporate and individual deposits in the five banks. Kennedy’s ploy was relatively simple: give her the information she was looking for, or the list of depositors would be called by the president himself and told to dump their Swiss banks.
The first two meetings went fine. The men were actually appreciative that Kennedy had chosen this route rather than dragging them into court. The third meeting went very poorly. Even Kennedy’s threat to scare off the bank’s U.S. depositors did not work, so she excused herself, walked into the other room, and ordered Dumond to crash the bank’s network. Kennedy waited a few minutes and then returned to her guest. Within a minute the man received a call from his bank telling him their entire computer system was down, and they had no idea how long it would take to get the system up and running. Kennedy told the man, who she had taken an extreme disliking to, that she had ordered the cyberassault and would continue to bombard his network every day until he handed over the information or she ran him out of business. The man relented.
The fourth banker handed over the information so readily that Kennedy assumed he had already spoken with one of the other bankers who she’d met with. The fifth and final banker put up a bit of a fight, lecturing Kennedy that confidentiality was his sworn duty to his clients. It was no different from the doctor–patient relationship or the attorney–client relationship, he claimed. Kennedy listened politely, and then handed the man a piece of paper. On it was a wire transfer between his bank and a bank in the Bahamas for one million dollars. The
man held his ground and said that on principle alone, he could never reveal who was behind the transfer.
Kennedy nodded and then pointed out that the bank’s largest depositor, to the tune of nearly a half billion dollars, also happened to be a close personal friend of President Hayes. The banker wanted to know how she had obtained such information. Kennedy didn’t bother to answer the question. She told the banker if he didn’t hand over the name of the account holder involved in the transaction and every scrap of information that pertained to the account, the president would get on the phone this very day and tell his close and very patriotic friend that his bank was protecting terrorists. He would go on to tell his friend that both he and the country would consider it a favor if he would find a new bank. Kennedy then rattled off another half dozen names and told the banker that they would also be receiving calls from the president. The banker jumped off his ethical high horse in near record speed. Five minutes later Kennedy was reading a fax that contained everything she needed to know.
64
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
The blue digital display on the rearview mirror said the outside temperature was 102 degrees. The white van had no windows on the side; just two small, dark-tinted portals on the back cargo doors. The vehicle was very inconspicuous, which was exactly what Rapp wanted. Waheed Ahmed Abdullah lay on the back floor bound, gagged, and blindfolded. So far Rapp had treated Abdullah with respect and care, which was no easy thing considering the man’s past crimes and his father’s suspected role in the death of Anna Rielly. “Suspected” had been Kennedy’s choice of words. She wanted time to verify that Saeed Ahmed Abdullah was in fact involved in the attack and not just shooting his mouth off. Rapp needed no further proof. He was at war, and he should have never let his guard down. The second he had heard about this bounty placed on his head he should have flown to Saudi Arabia and killed Saeed Ahmed Abdullah, but he had instead mistaken the information for loudmouthed Arab bravado.
