The Last Man mr-13

by Vince Flynn

  Kennedy was getting a lot of advice from a wide range of people regarding what she had to do in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan. “We’re debriefing him right now. I want to make sure I know everything he knows and then I’ll make the decision on his employment.” She didn’t want the conversation to stray from the point, so she said, “Back to Rick… we don’t have anything definitive, and I’m not sure we will, but I’ve got three of my best analysts going over everything. If he made a mistake they’ll find it.”

  Rapp shook his head like he wasn’t buying it. “They won’t find anything. He didn’t make mistakes. He always covered his tracks unless he wanted anyone looking to find something.”

  “Like the banker,” Hurley said. He took a gulp of Jack Daniel’s and added, “Is that guy on your approved list, and if he is, what in the fuck is he doing talking to the FBI?”

  Langley had a list of private bankers they used to handle funds for black operations. The banks were spread around between Switzerland, Cyprus, Gibraltar, the Caymans, Singapore, and a few other places. The banks and the bankers were thoroughly vetted before they were approved for business. Kennedy was the only person in the building who had possession of the complete list. She shook her head. “No… he’s not on the list.”

  “What about the bank?” Rapp asked, thinking that maybe Obrecht had spied on one of his colleagues.

  “No. We’ve never done business with this bank or anyone who works there.”

  “And you’ve seen this affidavit?” Hurley asked.

  “Yes… this afternoon. If we can believe Agent Wilson, and I’m not sure we can, Obrecht claims he did business with both Mitch and Rick. Helped them open several accounts and received deposits of several million dollars in cash. There’s also a safety deposit box.”

  “Contents?” Hurley asked.

  Kennedy shook her head. “It doesn’t say.”

  “And, Mitch, you swear you’ve never seen this guy?”

  “Never. I have no idea who he is.”

  Hurley looked at Lewis. “Could it be the head injury?”

  “It’s too soon to say, but his recall seems to be pretty good. We have yet to find an instance where once he’s reminded of something it doesn’t trigger the recall.”

  “I’ve never seen the guy, and besides,” Rapp said looking at Kennedy, “I’ve disclosed all my financials. You’ve seen how well my brother’s done for me. I don’t need to steal money.” Rapp’s brother was a brainiac on Wall Street and had taken Rapp’s savings and turned them into a very nice portfolio.

  “You better not have disclosed all your financials,” Hurley said in his typical gruff tone. “Have you learned nothing from me?”

  “Stan,” Kennedy said in a chiding tone.

  “Stan, nothing,” Hurley shot back. “We’re out there putting our nuts on the chopping block. We don’t get any hazard pay. You know the rule, if we come across some ill-gotten gains along the way they go into our rainy-day fund.”

  This was all old-school. Kennedy hated it when they talked this way around her. On a certain level she understood where they were coming from, but it was something she could never condone. “This is the type of talk that gets a man like Wilson all lathered up.”

  Hurley slapped his hand through the air, rejecting the complaint. “We’re not stupid. The majority of the stuff we come across gets kicked into the various accounts we’re talking about to help fund these ops, but you can’t begrudge my boys’ taking a little commission along the way. It’s the only insurance we have if we need to run.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t need to run.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.” Hurley was getting angry. “Try to tell that to this idiot Wilson and that cock sucker Ferris. Shit.” Hurley set his drink down and grabbed a pack of unfiltered Camels. As he lit the cigarette he caught the look of concern on Kennedy’s face. Hurley exhaled a cloud of smoke into the lights above the table and said, “Listen here, princess. I have cancer. I’m going to die. A couple more of these aren’t going to matter.” Hurley took another drag and then felt bad for the rebuke. Kennedy was like a niece to him. “I’ve had an amazing life. No regrets… at least none that I’m going to tell this group… well, maybe I’ll tell Mitch before I croak, but I don’t want to see any long faces. We’re all dying. The fact that I’ve made it this long is amazing.” Hurley held up his glass. “To a full life.”

  They all touched glasses. Kennedy wiped a single tear from her cheek and laughed. “It is pretty amazing that you’ve lived this long. You’ve been smoking those things for as long as I can remember.”

  “Before you were born,” Hurley added with a wink and a swig of Jack Daniel’s. “Started at fourteen back in Bowling Green.” Hurley got this faraway look on his face as he thought of his childhood, stint in the military, and then the glory years of working for the CIA behind the Iron Curtain. He had lived a blessed life. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and said, “Back to this banker. I assume we’re digging deep.”

  “I have Marcus on it, as well as a few other things. So far nothing to go on but we do have something that… ah, is a little odd.” Kennedy looked almost sheepish as she turned to Rapp. “Something we need to discuss, actually.” She didn’t know exactly how to do this, so she just said it. “Does the name Louie Gould ring a bell?”

  The glass of vodka was half full. Rapp looked into it and for a moment considered throwing the whole thing back. Instead he pushed it toward the center of the table and said, “I remember him.”

  “You remember what he did?”

  Rapp didn’t flinch. “He killed my wife.”

  Kennedy swallowed hard and asked, “Do you remember what happened with him in Kabul?”

  “That part’s a little fuzzy. I remember seeing him right before all hell broke loose and then nothing.”

  Kennedy had been trying to figure out the odds of this strange coincidence. “Would you care to take a guess where Gould does his banking in Switzerland?”

  “Herr Obrecht.”

  “That’s right. He is Mr. Gould’s private banker.”

  “You’re shitting me.” Hurley was out of his chair. “This whole fucking thing is really starting to stink.”

  Kennedy was used to this kinetic behavior. Hurley, like Rapp, was not good at sitting still for very long. She likened it to sharks that never stop moving. “Gould has other bankers that he uses, but Obrecht is one of his main ones.”

  Hurley paced to the refrigerator, exhaled a cloud of smoke, took a drink, and then came back to the table. “You know what this is starting to look like?”

  Kennedy nodded. She’d thought it through.

  “A well-planned, multi pronged attack. Layered like the Russians used to do. Confusing as all shit until you got rid of all the deceptions and the feints and focused on their objective.”

  “And what’s the objective this time?” Kennedy asked.

  “The hell if I know. I mean we know, in a general sense, that this was designed to cripple us, but we don’t know the specifics yet.”

  Rapp frowned and shook his head. A memory was coming back to him. A conversation he’d had with Rickman a long time ago. It was vague because Rickman had been talking so fast and flying off on tangents and then circling back.

  Kennedy noticed the look on Rapp’s face and asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “Something Rick said to me years ago… probably fifteen-plus. I don’t remember all of it, but it was about clandestine operations and how they should be set up and run on multiple levels. It was about recruiting high-placed assets. That it wasn’t enough to just recruit them. To increase our chances for success, secondary and tertiary operations needed to be launched that would distract the watchers.. the guys who would be keeping an eye on our asset to make sure he wasn’t spying for the other side. He was very animated when he made the point that to increase our chances of success we needed to disrupt those people.” Rapp’s face brightened as it started to come back to
him. He snapped his fingers. “His idea was to frame the watchers, for example by making it look like they themselves were spies… set up real accounts in their names and if our asset was uncovered make the information public so the watchers would be distracted defending themselves. He advocated sleeping with the person’s spouse and a slew of things… anything that would trip the watchers up.”

  “So you’re saying that’s what another intelligence agency was doing to us by using Herr Obrecht?”

  “Possibly… they set up this bullshit story with this banker and they spoon-feed the info to the FBI to throw us off our game. And it almost worked. If Wilson had gotten a toehold, you and I and a lot of other people would be spending a shitload of time with the Feds right now, trying to prove our innocence.”

  “If your theory is right,” Kennedy said, “then what’s their endgame? What are they trying to distract us from? And what does a theory Rickman had fifteen years ago have to do with it?”

  Rapp grabbed his glass of vodka and took a drink. He thought about the last week and its roller-coaster of emotions. The “oh shit” fear when they’d found out Rick was gone, the horror and panic over the release of the interrogation clip, and the absolute relief many of them had felt when they’d found the camera and learned that Rickman was dead and his secrets were safe. That was the feint, Rapp realized. “You’re not going to want to hear this,” Rapp finally said, looking at Kennedy. “Rick’s not dead. They just wanted us to think he was dead.”

  “You have no proof… it’s just your gut!”

  “I told you already. I didn’t buy the idea that the same people who hit the safe house could have accidentally killed Rick and then conveniently left behind that camera for us to find.”

  For Kennedy it was a frightening proposition. “This is all conjecture.”

  “You feel comfortable not acting on it?”

  She thought about that for a long time. “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I’d better get my butt to Zurich ASAP.”

  “Are you up to it?”

  “I feel fine.”

  Kennedy looked at Lewis for his opinion. “Just don’t hit your head,” the doctor warned Rapp.

  “Zurich’s a safe city. I’ll be fine.” Looking back to Kennedy he asked, “Surveillance?”

  “I have a team in place.”

  “How aggressive?”

  “Not… I don’t want to spook him.”

  “Good.”

  Kennedy glanced at Hurley. “You up for the trip?”

  “Let me see. I can either stay here and listen to my oncologist try to talk me into taking rat poison or I can go to Switzerland and beat the shit out of some banker. Tough call.”

  “Stan,” Kennedy said in a tone that showed she was not amused.

  “Of course I’ll go.”

  “Good.” Turning her attention back to Rapp she said, “One more thing. I want you to talk to Gould before you leave.”

  Rapp was caught off guard. “Why?”

  “He knows something about Obrecht and I think he’s holding back.”

  “And you think he’s going to open up to me?” Rapp suddenly looked agitated. “I don’t have time for this. I need to get my team in the air ASAP.”

  “Your team is already assembled… well, mostly assembled. Scott is handling something for me, but he’ll be there by the time you’re ready to take off.”

  Rapp frowned. “You spun up my team without talking to me?”

  “I know this hard for you to grasp at times, but I’m in charge.”

  Rapp didn’t want to be in the same room with Gould. “So you’re ordering me to talk to him?”

  “That’s right.” Kennedy slid a file across the table. “Read through this quickly and then go down stairs and find out what he knows about Obrecht. There’s also a USB stick in there. It has some surveillance footage Gould took of the area by the veterinary clinic right before the assault. I think you will find it interesting. You and Stan should watch it together.”

  Rapp didn’t care about the file or the footage. “How rough can I get?”

  Kennedy inhaled sharply and thought about it. “Use your judgment.”

  “And if I decide to kill him?”

  Rapp’s dark eyes gave Kennedy an unsettling feeling. He was her friend and at times it was easy to forget that at his core he was a killer. She cleared her throat and said, “I don’t want you to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “For reasons that I can’t explain right now. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “Reasons you won’t explain, you mean.”

  “However you’d like to take it, but it is worth reminding you two,” Kennedy said, pointing at Rapp and then Hurley, “that you’re not in charge. I’m calling the shots, and for now I say he lives. Are we clear?”

  Rapp wasn’t even sure he wanted to kill the man. His emotions were all over the board when it came to Gould and his wife and child. There’d been only a handful of times where he’d castigated himself for not killing Gould when he had the chance. It was Anna’s memory that had kept him from doing it and he had come to terms with that strange twist of fate. That decision had been made with the naive assumption that Gould would retire and take care of his family. Learning that the reckless idiot had squandered his chance at a second life had Rapp second-guessing his decision. Kennedy might be his boss, but Gould owed Rapp his life. When the time is right, Rapp thought, I’ll be the one to decide if he lives or dies.

  Rapp leaned back and crossed his legs. “For now, I’ll do it your way.”

  “Good. Something that’s not in the file… I placed Claudia and Anna in protective custody.”

  Rapp got that faraway look in his eyes. “Where were they?”

  “New Zealand.”

  “How’d you find them?”

  “She and I have stayed in touch.”

  Rapp was surprised and then he realized he shouldn’t have been. Kennedy was thorough. “How old is the girl?”

  “Anna is three.”

  The fact that the mother had named her after Rapp’s deceased wife had screwed up Rapp’s thinking in ways he could have never predicted. He had spent months tracking Gould and his wife down, with the absolute conviction that when he found them he would kill both of them without hesitation, and then when the moment finally came, and he confronted the mother and the baby girl, it all fell apart. It was as if his wife’s soul had seized him and told him killing them would serve no purpose other than to orphan the baby girl. For a man who had spent more than fifteen years killing people it was the most foreign sensation imaginable.

  “Gould had been hiding from Claudia the fact that he was still in the game,” Kennedy said. “He’s trying to act like he doesn’t care, but deep down he’s scared to death that she’s going to leave him once she finds out. It will be your best source of leverage with him.”

  Rapp nodded but was thinking of his own ways to exert leverage. A gun to the fool’s head just might be the simplest course of action. The only problem with that tactic, Rapp knew, was that once he got started he might not be able to control himself.

  Chapter 49

  Aurora Highlands, Virginia

  Wilson wasn’t wondering if he was depressed; he knew he was depressed beyond any reasonable doubt. For the first time in his career he actually thought about sticking his service pistol in his mouth and ending his misery. It was a short-lived thought, as Wilson couldn’t bear to think of the mess it would leave behind. And if he somehow screwed it up, which based on his current run of bad luck, he would, there was a better than ever chance that he’d end up crippled in an institution for the rest of his life watching the world go by and not be able to communicate a single thought. No, Wilson decided, if he was going to commit suicide, he would take pills.

  Ferris must have sensed his desperation because he had one of his aides call tell him that he’d meet him on their street corner at 10:00 p.m. sharp. Now Wilson found himself in the front hall of his house for the
second night in a row, getting ready to do something he didn’t like with a dog he didn’t particularly care for. He poked his head into the office and said, “I’m going to take Rose out for a walk.”

  Sally turned away from the computer screen. “Are you sure? I’d be more than happy to do it.”

  Wilson hadn’t told her about his monumentally horseshit day. He couldn’t bear the thought of her judging him. There would be so many questions. She had told him once not long ago that she loved him very much, but that he couldn’t be right all the time. Any conversation about today’s events would eventually lead to that place and she would look right through him and ask how it was that Director Miller, who had a reputation as a fair and honest person, could be so wrong. And then she would dig deeper and he’d have to tell her that not a single person had stood up for him. She would seize on that as proof that the majority had ruled and he was wrong. Wilson could not take having that conversation, not tonight and probably never.

  “No,” he told her, “I need to clear my head.”

  “You’ve been awfully quiet. You don’t want to talk about the meeting?”

  “No… I need to sort a few things out.”

  “I’m always here if you want to talk.” She stood, walked over, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Joel.”

  “Thank you. I’m lucky to have you.”

  “Yes, you are.” She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand and then walked him to the door.

  Moving down the front walk took great effort. It was if his feet were carrying him to a place he did not want to go. As they turned up the block, a gust of wind hit him the face and Wilson shivered, clutching at his jacket and turning his collar up. He felt cold and vulnerable, and he didn’t like it. Rose led the way and Wilson followed at a sluggish pace. When he reached his corner he didn’t even notice the Lincoln Town Car until the driver flashed his lights. Lewis sighed and braced himself for what he assumed was going to be a lame pep talk from the blowhard senior senator from Connecticut. After opening the rear door, he picked up Rose under her belly and tossed her into the backseat. She and Ferris were welcome to have their little love affair.