by Vince Flynn
Rielly smiled briefly at the president and said, “Chairman Rudin has gone on the record stating that he thinks nominating Dr. Kennedy as the next DCI is a huge mistake.”
“The last time I checked Chairman Rudin was in the House, not the Senate,” said the president flatly. He had a recent history of run-ins with the fellow Democrat, and he was none too fond of him.
Rielly looked a little confused. “Yes, but he is the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.”
“He sure is, but that also means he will have nothing whatsoever to do with the confirmation of Dr. Kennedy.”
“But, he runs the committee that approves the Agency’s budget. Aren’t you the least bit concerned that Chairman Rudin considers Dr. Kennedy a disastrous choice?”
The president forced a smile. “I wouldn’t be alarmed, Anna. Chairman Rudin isn’t truly happy unless he has something to complain about.” Hayes winked at Rielly and then turned to his press secretary. On cue, the press secretary sprang into action and ushered the press pool from the room, leaving the president and his guests to discuss business in private.
4
Rapp showered and took his time getting dressed. He put on a dark gray, three- button suit, a white shirt and a burgundy tie. He left his house a little later than he should have, but he didn’t care. As he worked his way around the Beltway from the east side of town to the west, he kept the radio off and tried to go over the details of his last mission one more time. During Rapp’s affiliation with the Agency he had always felt secure that his identity was kept a very close secret. He moved freely around Washington without fear of being recognized by someone who might know that he did more than run a small international computer consulting business. The only people he really associated with were the handful of other world-class triathletes who lived in the Baltimore-Washington area. They trained with each other from time to time, but even that had stopped several years earlier when Rapp retired from the sport.
As Rapp picked his way through traffic he sifted through the details of what had happened on that last mission in Germany. That was where it had all started to unravel. Just a month earlier Kennedy had called on him to handle a very delicate mission. A German industrialist named Count Heinrich Hagenmiller had been caught selling highly sensitive equipment to the Iraqis, the kind of equipment that was crucial in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Rapp’s job was fairly straightforward, not unlike others that he had done before. He flew to Germany where he met up with a husband and wife team, Tom and Jane Hoffman. They had been in place for a week running surveillance on the count. Posing as agents from Germany’s federal police, the BKA, they gained access to Count Hagenmiller’s estate during a party that the count was throwing. Rapp entered the mansion with Jane Hoffman, while her husband waited outside in the car.
Everything had gone as planned. The count had left his guests and joined them in his study. He was accompanied by his lawyer and a bodyguard. None of this had been a surprise. Rapp killed the count with one well-placed shot from his silenced .22- caliber Ruger pistol and then disabled both the lawyer and the bodyguard without having to kill them. When Rapp turned to ask Jane Hoffman to help him cuff the lawyer, he found himself looking down the barrel of her gun. This was where everything fell apart. She shot him twice in the chest, the bullets sending him back and over. He hit the ground hard, and with a whiplash effect, his head slammed against the bottom rung of the bookcase ladder and everything went black.
What the Hoffmans didn’t know was that Rapp had bulletproof Kevlar sewn into the liner of his leather jacket. When he awoke almost five minutes later the Hoffmans were gone, the bodyguard was dead and a pool of Rapp’s blood covered the floor from the gash on the back of his head. Rapp’s next course of action came instinctively. Create a diversion and run like hell. He set fire to the study, destroying his own blood, and then stole a car that one of the guests had arrived in. Rapp never went into a mission without planning in detail his escape routes if something went wrong. The experience paid off and by afternoon the next day, without any help from the Agency, he was safely out of Germany.
For the first time in Rapp’s career in counterterrorism he was confronted with a very ugly side of his business, the possibility that he had become a liability. And in his world, liabilities had a tendency to be erased from the balance sheet. Rapp could think of nothing worse than being betrayed by either Stansfield or Kennedy. He trusted them more than anyone in the world. Fortunately, upon his return to America he discovered that his handlers had not betrayed him. There was another problem. A leak. Somewhere, somehow, someone had found out about him, and they had set him up. Stansfield and Kennedy discovered that a man named Peter Cameron had hired the Hoffmans to kill him. Rapp was just about to confront Cameron’s neck when he discovered him dead in his office.
In the weeks since Cameron’s death they had learned some interesting things about the former employee of the CIA, but they had run into a dead end when it came to finding out who he had been working for. Kennedy had a special team within the Agency who were still poring over every detail of Cameron’s life in hopes of finding out who had hired him and why, but Rapp knew not to expect much from them. Cameron had been killed by the man who had hired him. Rapp was sure of it.
Rapp wanted out. There would be no more targets, no more assassinations. He wanted to be done with death, and move on to creating some life of his own. He loved Anna more than anyone he had ever known. It was destiny that he’d saved her life and they’d fallen in love. The thought of losing her, of not spending the rest of his life with her, gave him a sickening feeling, and worse, it was affecting his instincts. He was losing his edge. Ironically, now that he was finally ready to walk away from the Orion Team, he couldn’t. Right now, there were just too many unanswered questions.
He had to find out who in the hell had hired Peter Cameron and why. It was one thing to have to look over his shoulder when he traveled in the Middle East, but it was an entirely different matter to do it here in the U.S. It would be no way to raise a family, worrying every time he left the house that someone would harm his loved ones. No, Rapp knew he would have to see this thing through to the end. Most probably a bloody one.
By the time he arrived at the main gate of the CIA he was already five minutes late for his 10:00 A.M. meeting. As he approached the intimidating checkpoint he stayed to the left and got into one of the employee lanes. At the barrier he stopped his car and showed his fake credentials to a black-clad man from the CIA’s Office of Security. The man had an MP-5 submachine gun slung across his chest and a bulky automatic in a nylon holster at his hip. A dozen more of his compatriots were out on post monitoring the gate, and there were even more standing behind the tinted bulletproof glass and brick of the blockhouse that was dressed up to look like a fancy highway weigh station. The unseen men and women inside carried even bigger guns plus a stash of LAW 80 shoulder-launched rockets just in case some heavy vehicle tried to crash its way onto the grounds. The CIA took its security very seriously.
The man studied Rapp’s credentials for a moment and then handed them back to him. “Have a nice day, sir.”
Rapp nodded and drove ahead, passing through the bright yellow spring-loaded crash barricades. The heavy steel devices were designed to pop up at a moment’s notice to bar any unauthorized entry and potential car bombers. He proceeded to the underground parking garage of the Old Headquarters Building where he had to again show his credentials. He parked in a spot reserved for visitors to the director’s suite, and passed through an unmarked door into a small lobby. Another guard was waiting and gestured for him to enter the elevator. Rapp stepped in by himself and the doors closed. The elevator went straight from the underground garage to the director’s suite on the seventh floor. When the door opened two stocky men in suits were waiting for him. The shorter of the two looked Rapp over from head to toe and gestured for him to enter the office of the director’s administrative assistant.
/> Rapp did so without comment and stepped into the spacious office. The woman behind the desk stood and surprised him by saying, “Good morning, Mr. Rapp. Could I get you anything to drink before your meeting?”
“Coffee would be fine.” He wondered how the woman knew his real name.
“Any cream or sugar?”
“No thanks. Just black.”
She pressed a button on one of three phones and said, “Dr. Kennedy, Mr. Rapp is here for your ten o’clock.”
“Thank you, Dottie. Send him in.”
Dottie got up from behind her desk and poured Rapp a mug of coffee in a blue Central Intelligence Agency mug. After handing the mug over to Rapp she showed him into Dr. Kennedy’s office and closed the door.
Kennedy was at the far end of the long office amid a bevy of file boxes that were stacked on the conference table. Rapp had been in the office on only two previous occasions and glanced around to see what had changed since Stansfield’s death. It appeared not much. The old spook’s photos and awards were still hanging on the walls. He wondered if this was an oversight, or a sign that Kennedy was having trouble letting go of her old boss and mentor.
Kennedy grabbed her jacket from the back of one of the conference table chairs and put it on. She was wearing a stylish gray European suit with flared notched lapels. The color was very similar to Rapp’s suit. The uniform color scheme would have made a student of George Orwell smile knowingly.
“Sorry about the mess. They moved everything from my old office while I was at the funeral.” Kennedy smiled sadly. “Orders from Thomas. Even from the grave he’s still running the show.” Kennedy held her arms out and offered her cheek to Rapp.
He held the coffee mug clear and wrapped his free hand around her waist. After kissing her cheek he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral, but things are a little—”
“No need to explain.” Kennedy squeezed him tightly. “You’re still not used to showing your face in public. Thomas more than anyone would have understood.”
“Well, you know I always had a lot of respect for the old codger.”
Kennedy released him, stepping back and motioning for Rapp to take a seat on the couch. “He had an immense amount of respect for you, Mitch.” She sat in an overstuffed leather chair. “You know that, don’t you?”
Rapp shrugged off the words, uncomfortable, as always, with praise.
“Well, he did. He told me once that in all the years he had been in this business he thought you might be the best.” Kennedy sat back in the chair and watched Rapp struggle with the compliment for a moment. She desperately wanted him to come inside and work in the Counterterrorism Center. Rapp’s understanding of the Middle East, its different terrorist cells and how they operated would be invaluable to the Center. She could not begrudge him his wish to cease field operations. No one stayed in his line of work forever. It was just too taxing, both physically and mentally. In fact, she had actually begun training Rapp’s replacement four years earlier and the young man was coming along just fine. Now, however, with her new duties as director there was no way she could continue to run the Orion Team. She wasn’t sure she could trust the team’s delicate missions with anyone other than Rapp.
Beyond all of that, she needed someone inside the Agency to watch her back. The blown operation in Germany still loomed large. Someone out there knew things they were not supposed to. They either worked at the Agency or they had someone who did. Kennedy thought it was the latter, and so did Stansfield. Before his death, he had warned that Rapp was not the ultimate target in Germany. Yes, someone wanted him dead, but not for the common motive of revenge. Rapp was meant to be found dead next to Count Heinrich Hagenmiller. The scandal was meant to embarrass the Agency, and in Stansfield’s keen analysis, ultimately finish Irene Kennedy’s career and maybe the president’s. The prize, as Stansfield had put it, was the directorship of the CIA. Someone, for reasons unknown, didn’t want Kennedy to take over as the head of the world’s premier intelligence agency.
“How’s Tommy?” asked Rapp of Kennedy’s six-year-old son.
“He’s fine. Still growing like a weed. He asked about you the other day. You should come by and see him.”
“I know.” Rapp grimaced. “Things have just been a little difficult lately. The last thing I’d want would be for some of my problems to become his.”
Kennedy appreciated his thoughtfulness and told him so. They would get around to discussing their mutual problem later. “How is Anna?”
“She’s great.”
“Have you talked to her about the job offer?”
“Yes.”
“And . . . what does she think?”
“Well, anything is better than what I’m doing right now, but I’m not so sure she thinks it’s such a good idea for the long run.”
“Working for the CIA?” Kennedy asked.
“Yeah, I suppose. You know she’s a reporter. She’d never admit it to me, but they think we’re a bunch of fascists.”
Kennedy nodded knowingly, tucked a stray lock of her shoulder length brown hair behind her ear and with a smile said, “And they’re all a bunch of communists.”
“Pretty much, except now they prefer to think of themselves as socialists since the whole communism thing didn’t turn out too well.” Rapp laughed at his little cheap shot and Kennedy joined in.
Privately, Kennedy wondered how Mitch and Anna would deal with the difficulties of two careers that were so diametrically opposed. Kennedy could see Anna’s friends poking fun at her boyfriend who worked for the CIA. She had repeatedly envisioned a horrible scene where some smart-ass reporter, who’d had one too many glasses of Chardonnay, decided to prove his intellectual superiority by making light of Mitch’s career. The dream always turned out the same way. The smarmy man ended up on the floor in a pool of blood with his nose no longer in the center of his face.
Kennedy pushed the picture from her mind and got back to the subject at hand. “Look, I’m not going to hold you to what you told Thomas before he passed away. I don’t think it was fair of him to pressure you at that time. I know you have some reservations about coming to work here at Langley, but I want you to know that you would be invaluable to the Counterterrorism Center.” Looking down for a second she added, “And, Mitch, I could really use your help.”
It was the last part that got to him. Rapp had an overwhelming sense of loyalty when it came to Kennedy. He knew he couldn’t say no to her when she made it personal, but he had to at least try. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Hear me out for a second.” He shifted and crossed his legs. “I’ve worked outside the Agency for years and have been very effective. I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be better for me to remain out of sight and continue to help in a more subtle way.”
Kennedy had thought of this and so had Stansfield. Neither of them liked the idea because of the logistical issues it created. Kennedy and Rapp needed an official cover so they could converse in the privacy of her office on a moment’s notice. “We haven’t filled you in on all of your new job requirements. You’d be far more than just an analyst in the CTC.” Kennedy paused. “I want you to run the Orion Team for me.”
Rapp looked surprised. “Really.” What he hadn’t come out and said, what he was slightly embarrassed to admit, was that his reluctance to come in from the cold was grounded in a fear of being trapped in an office environment five days a week. He’d never done it before and he wasn’t so sure he wanted to start now. Rapp knew himself better than anyone with the exception of maybe Kennedy. He was a lone wolf, used to operating with minimal interference from the outside. He was not a team player, but the chance to run the Orion Team was extremely appealing.
“I would need you very close to me,” Kennedy said. “As you know from your own experience, most of our decisions must be made on very short notice.”
“I would love to run the Orion Team, but I’m not so sure I like the idea of working in the CTC.”
“Why?”
&
nbsp; Rapp shrugged. “I’m just not all that excited about punching the clock. I know enough about this place to know that I’d end up . . .” He struggled to find the right phrase. “I’d be stuck in meetings all day. It would drive me crazy. I’d end up telling some desk jockey to shove it up his ass.”
Kennedy smiled at the delicious thought. They could probably use a little of that around here, but she knew it wouldn’t go over real well. “I’m not worried about that. Yes, you might have to keep your temper in check and watch what you say, but Mitchell, you’re used to doing that. When you were undercover you couldn’t just speak your mind. You had to practice restraint.”
“Oh, so I should act like I’m being inserted behind enemy lines.” Rapp cracked a smile. “Do you have any idea how stressful it is when I do that? I can’t let my guard down for a second.”
“My point is that you are surely capable of practicing a little restraint.”
“I’m fully capable, but my point,” Rapp stabbed himself in the chest with his forefinger, “is that I’m not so sure I want to.” Turning away, he looked out the window at the gray morning sky. “I’m not sure what I want to do, period.”
Kennedy studied him for a long moment and then asked in a knowing tone, “Mitch, what else are you going to do with your life?”
“I don’t know.” Almost as an afterthought he hearkened back to his conversation with Anna. “Maybe I’ll stay at home and raise the kids.”
“What kids?” asked an amused Kennedy.
“The kids I plan on having someday.”
“Isn’t there something else you have to take care of first?”
“Like what?”
Grinning, Kennedy answered, “Like getting married.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m working on that.” Rapp smiled at the thought of his plan to get engaged.
Kennedy couldn’t hide her joy. Mitch deserved some happiness. “Any details you’d like to share with me?”
