Order to Kill

by Vince Flynn

  Mitch had offered to quietly dispose of the man on a number of occasions, which was tempting. Unfortunately, the line of succession was full of even worse men. While Abdullah was an anti-American religious hardliner, at least he was a predictable anti-American religious hardliner.

  Finally, she picked up the phone and spoke smoothly into it. “Your Highness. Thank you so much for taking the time to return my call.”

  “I have a full schedule today, Dr. Kennedy. What is it you want that my assistant couldn’t provide?”

  “I recently received a disturbing report about a potential threat to your country.”

  “We live in a dangerous world. There’s no need to become hysterical about every report that comes across your desk.”

  Kennedy smiled at the use of the word “hysterical.” While she understood the importance of keeping Saudi Arabia’s oil flowing, it was hard not to fantasize about leaving its dysfunctional royal family at the mercy of the radicals it had created.

  “Of course you’re right, Your Highness. But this threat seems credible and President Alexander requested that you be informed.”

  Predictably, Abdullah perked up a bit. By bringing up the president, she became just a messenger—something less offensive to his values.

  “What are the president’s concerns?”

  “ISIS has obtained the nuclear fuel from six warheads and it appears that they’re attempting to smuggle it into your country.”

  “What?” he shouted. “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

  “So this is something you’d like to pursue?”

  “Don’t be a—” he started, but then managed to catch himself before another insult escaped. Perhaps the man wasn’t as dim as she thought.

  “Do they have a way to detonate it?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice even.

  “We think it’s unlikely.”

  “A dirty bomb, then.”

  “Our analysts give that scenario the highest probability.”

  “What are they targeting?” he said, his words coming in a panicked jumble. “Riyadh? Jeddah? Where are they entering our country? How many are there? Do you—”

  “Your Highness! Please. Try to be calm.”

  “You’re giving me no information I can act on!” he protested. “You tell me my country is under a catastrophic threat and you don’t have even rudimentary intelligence. How can I be calm in the face of this kind of incompetence?”

  The fact that his organization didn’t know anything at all about it seemed to escape him. And, of course, she did have actionable intelligence. She just had no intention of sharing it with him. The moment she did, he would send patrols into the desert, likely spooking the ISIS teams and scattering them. At that point it would be virtually impossible to track them or to discover their secondary targets. Once Krupin lost control, ISIS would be free to act on its own, potentially striking Israel, Europe, or the United States.

  “Confidentially, we have an informant inside ISIS and he’s working to provide us with details of their plans.”

  “I demand that you contact him immediately so that I can speak with him.”

  “I’m afraid that we don’t currently have that capability, Your Highness.”

  “Who is this man? Where in ISIS territory is he?”

  She ignored his questions. Abdullah wouldn’t hesitate to contact ISIS leadership and expose Rapp if he thought it might be to his benefit.

  “I assure you that we’re doing everything possible to reestablish contact with him and that you’ll be the first to know when we do. In the meantime, may I suggest you put your special forces on alert? When my man resurfaces, it’s likely that we’ll have to move quickly.”

  CHAPTER 47

  AL-SHIRQAT

  IRAQ

  “SHIT!” Rapp said, staring down at the phone’s screen. He’d never reestablished contact with Kennedy and now the signal had disappeared. By his calculation exactly eight hours after it came on.

  “Is everything all right?” Laleh asked, coming out of the kitchen. She had spent the last hours cooking every MRE in Eric Jesem’s collection, sampling each with infuriatingly fatalistic pleasure.

  “The jamming’s started again.”

  “Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “I’ve just made jambalaya. It’s not as good as the chicken and rice, but you should have some.”

  Her expression was impossible to read. The apartment had turned gloomy with the setting of the sun, putting her face in the shadow of her dark hair.

  “I wanted to set up an extraction for you, Laleh. But it’s not going to be possible.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “It’s time for you to get out of here,” he said, holding out the phone. “Go to your brothers and tell them to take you east toward the Iranian border. That’s your best bet for a signal. When you can, dial the last number in the registry and tell the woman who you are. She’ll help you.”

  “My brothers won’t leave. They’re not as strong as you, but they can still fight for their home.”

  “Then go there and stay with them.”

  “I told you, my presence would be too dangerous.”

  “It will be worse if you don’t. They’ll try to rescue you again. And take it from me, they’re not cut out for that kind of work.”

  “I’m twenty-two years old and no longer a virgin. I doubt I’m worth much more than a pack of cigarettes. But even if I was, I don’t think that will be my fate. No. There will be no attempt to rescue me this time.”

  Rapp knew she was right. The auctioneer she’d partially blinded would take her and immediately put her to death by the most painful means possible.

  “Then just leave. Better to die trying to save yourself than waiting for death to walk through the door.”

  She had a beautiful smile, even in the semidarkness. “A woman alone? You know this place as well as I do, Mitch. It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible, Laleh.”

  “And how would you explain my absence?”

  “I’ll come up with something.”

  “You could say I escaped but Mustafa wouldn’t believe you. And if he did, he would begin to question his decision to allow you to go on this mission. Your only other alternative would be to say that you sold me, but I think he would be interested in to whom, no? He might kill you. Then the people you’re trying to save will be lost. And for what? The small chance that I can make it hundreds of miles through ISIS territory and call your friend to be rescued? I don’t want your blood on my hands. Or my brothers’. Or anyone else’s.”

  Rapp was accustomed to being in charge. To solving problems quickly and permanently. Now he found himself standing in front of this girl with no solution to offer.

  “Come,” Laleh said. “The jambalaya is getting cold.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen but Rapp remained motionless, trying to find a way out for her. Finally, he followed and sat at the table, watching her eat. When the inevitable sound of a fist against the door finally started, she didn’t even seem to notice.

  He walked into the outer room and opened it, taking a step back as three men entered. Mustafa had come personally, something Eric Jesem would have seen as a great honor if he hadn’t been rotting in a Pakistani garbage chute.

  “It’s time,” the general said.

  Gaffar hadn’t asked for his gun back and Rapp hadn’t offered. It was now stuffed into his waistband near the small of his back. He could put all three men down in less than a second, get supplies from Laleh’s brothers, and steal a truck. Let Saudi Arabia and the world deal with their own problems.

  “Where’s the girl?” Mustafa asked.

  “I’m here,” Laleh said, appearing from the kitchen. She still had a bit of what Rapp suspected was chili on the side of her mouth.

  Mustafa indicated toward one of his men, who grabbed her by the arm. She didn’t resist when he began dragging her toward the door.

  “I’ve negotiated a very go
od price for you from Zaid Salib—the man she blinded. There was no amount of money he wasn’t willing to part with in order to once again possess—”

  “Pig!” Laleh shouted as she was dragged past the general. Something flashed in her hand and Mustafa suddenly fell silent. An expression of confusion crossed his face as he looked down at the knife hilt protruding from his stomach.

  The man holding Laleh jerked her back with a startled shout, while the other lowered the general to the floor. Despite the considerable width of the chef’s knife and the depth it had penetrated, Mustafa was still capable of speech. His voice was barely a whisper, but Rapp could make out enough to know that he was ordering the man kneeling over him to get someone named Najjar. Likely a doctor they had imprisoned somewhere.

  Rapp looked up and focused on the girl. She met his gaze and fought to keep it as she was wrestled through the door. For the first time in their short relationship, her eyes were full of fear. Rapp pulled the Smith & Wesson from his waistband and when he took aim, that fear turned to tranquility.

  The round struck her directly in the heart and she crumpled to the ground with an arm still gripped in her captor’s hand.

  Expressionless, Rapp looked down at her body for what was probably too long. It had always bothered his late wife that he could sleep so well after everything he’d done. She would be happy to know that those days were likely over.

  The man next to Mustafa leapt to his feet and Rapp shoved him roughly back. Weakness was not an admired trait in this part of the world. Mustafa’s injury at the hands of a woman and his pathetic demands for medical attention were undermining what little authority he had left. That created a power vacuum Rapp could use.

  “The general has been martyred. Leave him. We have God’s work to do.”

  The man still holding Laleh’s arm gave a short nod and translated for his companion. A moment later both were retreating down the stairs. Before Rapp followed, he knelt next to the man now begging for help in breathless English.

  Leaning into the Iraqi’s ear, he spoke quietly.

  “How do you like spirited women now?”

  CHAPTER 48

  AL-HOFUF

  SAUDI ARABIA

  GRISHA Azarov sat in a chair next to the apartment’s dirty windows. It was a small two-bedroom, crammed with brightly colored rugs and a mishmash of peeling furniture. Hardly what he’d grown accustomed to, but unquestionably more anonymous than his normal suite at the Intercontinental. The street below, which had been bustling only an hour ago, was now largely deserted. Night was falling and the wind that was such an integral part of Maxim Krupin’s plan was gaining power again.

  He wiped away some of the grime from the glass and peered out at the world’s most poignant reminder of America’s reach: the golden arches of a McDonald’s. The sign’s lights flickered on, pushing his thoughts from the task at hand to Mitch Rapp.

  Krupin would tell him that he was suffering from paranoia with regard to the man. That even if the CIA had managed to piece together a picture of his plan, it would be impossible for them to drill down to the level of detail necessary to lead Rapp to Saudi Arabia. The Geiger counter in the hands of the U.S. Coast Guard boarding party suggested the Russian president would be wrong, as did the nervousness in the pit of Azarov’s stomach. The closer he got to the oil fields, the more strongly he felt the American’s presence.

  Azarov’s cell phone was docked in a bulky case that gave it satellite and radio transmission capability. The screen depicted a map of Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing region with blue circles glowing at six locations. Each had been selected by using a combination of weather forecast data from the Russian military and oil reserve estimates from his own consulting firm. A single ISIS team would be sent to each of these locations in order to detonate the dirty bombs he would provide. Overnight, Saudi Arabia would go from being the world’s second-largest oil producer to having capacity less than that of Norway. This would generate a violent economic collapse that would open the door for ISIS and radical antiroyal factions inside the country’s own population.

  With no economic motivation, it was unlikely that America would expend much energy protecting a fundamentalist monarchy fond of funding terrorists. More likely, they would move to stabilize the surrounding energy-producing states. But would it be possible? ISIS wasn’t just an external threat in the region. Its growing popularity and deft use of social media made it a cancer that grew in neighborhoods and mosques throughout the Middle East.

  The U.S. would struggle to contain the chaos and to shore up the world’s economy, while Maxim Krupin fanned the flames of collapse. Russia would rise from its grave like the bloodsucking ghoul of its folklore.

  Azarov focused on the most central of the blue circles on the map and switched to satellite view, zooming in on an abandoned tangle of pipes and tanks more than three hundred meters square. It was the destination of the team he was being forced to lead personally. According to Krupin, it was an optimal position from which to coordinate the operation and deal with any problems that arose.

  Much of the steel was still bright silver despite the facility’s having been abandoned almost five years ago. He’d commissioned a 3-D computer model of the structure and had spent endless hours memorizing every staircase, enclosure, and blind corner. In the end, it would likely prove to be a pointless precaution, but he hadn’t survived this long by being careless.

  There was a quiet knock on the door and he walked to it, keeping a hand near a holster strapped over his shirt. The two Saudi men on the other side matched the photos he’d been given and he let them in, pointing to a large toolbox in the corner. One of them apparently spoke English, but there was no need for conversation. They had been fully briefed on the operation’s protocols and already possessed the GPS that would lead them to the place where they were to detonate the bomb—in their case, a nondescript and uninhabited swath of desert more than six hundred kilometers to the southwest.

  In the unlikely event that they were stopped by authorities, they would be indistinguishable from the myriad Aramco geologists exploring the area for new drill sites. Authorities would never think to examine the toolbox thoroughly enough to find its false bottom. If they did, though, they would find a powerful C-4 charge next to a container full of Pakistani fissile material. And be rewarded with a bullet in the back of the head.

  “May Allah smile on you,” Azarov said as they hefted the toolbox and started back to the door. One nodded his understanding and Azarov closed the door behind them.

  Both men would happily die for the bizarre illusion that God cared about their brutal and pointless enterprise. That the creator of biology and the laws of physics was reliant on humans to enforce His archaic laws. If God did exist, Azarov was confident that mankind lived and died outside His gaze.

  Reminding himself that philosophizing about the Almighty had little bearing on his survival over the next twenty-four hours, Azarov unwrapped a medium-size package that had been delivered just over an hour ago. The detonator inside was designed to his specifications by an eminently reliable Spaniard with whom he had worked in the past.

  Kneeling next to another of the toolboxes lined up along the wall, he removed the false bottom and looked down at the explosive charge inside. The detonator connected to it didn’t look substantially different than the one in his hands, and maybe it wasn’t.

  It was possible that Krupin was telling the truth; that the men Azarov was to lead into the desert would activate the bomb only after he reached a safe distance. It was a longer leap of faith than he was willing to take, though.

  After replacing the existing detonator with his own, he went to his phone and replaced the software Krupin’s people had installed with an application created by his Spanish associate.

  Azarov watched it go through its diagnostic cycle, locating the detonator and confirming that all systems were functional. When he had green lights in all categories, he shut down the app and replaced the box’s false bot
tom.

  He had considered sending the Russian-made detonator to Madrid for examination, but then decided there would be no profit in it. Whether Krupin intended for him to die in this operation or not was of no importance. He had no intention of doing so. Should the Russian president attempt to press the matter, Azarov would deal with him in the same way he had dealt with so many others.

  CHAPTER 49

  NORTHEAST OF RIYADH

  SAUDI ARABIA

  THE sun was up, but visibility was only about a hundred yards due to the swirling sand. The SUV Rapp was driving had been modified to handle the terrain but was still struggling where the unpaved roadbed had softened or drifted over.

  They’d crossed into Saudi Arabia about five hours ago at a checkpoint manned by guards sympathetic to ISIS’s mission. Rapp’s best guess was that they were now somewhere east of Hafar Al-Batin, headed south.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror at the four men crammed into the backseat and then at the man next to him—Mihran. Rapp hadn’t caught the names of the others and it was hard to ask because he assumed that Eric Jesem had trained with them at the girls’ school. In fact, he was fairly certain that the one sitting directly behind him had been there the night he’d attacked the facility.

  “I’m losing the road,” Rapp said in English.

  “Shut up and keep going straight,” Mihran responded. He was staring at the screen of a Toughbook attached to a satellite link.

  “It would help if I had a sense of where I’m going,” Rapp probed.

  “You’re going south, idiot! Now find the road again and drive on it.”

  It was clear that he and Mihran were never going to be friends. The man had been clear from the beginning that he despised Americans—even radicalized ones. And while he spoke English quite well, he seemed embarrassed by the fact. His education at the hands of a “godless British female” had been forced on him by moderate Muslim parents and he was determined to make the world pay.