by Vince Flynn
“I’m not willing to go that far on or off the record. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.”
“So who do you blame besides Rapp?”
“His boss, for starters.”
“Irene Kennedy?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to ask for an investigation?”
“I’m going to leave that up to the attorney general and my former colleagues on the Hill.”
“Is it safe to say that your administration will be looking for a new person to run the CIA?”
Ross liked the ring of “your administration.” He could get used to that. He looked at Rich with a very serious expression and said, “Director Kennedy and Mitch Rapp should make sure their résumés are up to date.”
Rich smiled as he wrote down the exact quote. When he was done he pulled out his mobile phone and checked the time. It was 4:51 in the afternoon. Looking at Ross he said, “Excuse me for a second. I need to call my editor and tell her to hold a spot on the front page.”
Ross nodded and kept his delight in check. The article would cause a feeding frenzy. He only wished that he could be there to see the expression on Kennedy’s face when she read it.
39
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Rapp was cruising down Georgetown Pike in a rented white van at five miles an hour over the posted speed. It was almost 7:00 in the evening, which meant he was late for his meeting with Kennedy. He wasn’t crazy about getting together in her office, but she’d insisted. What she had to show him could not leave the building. That bit of information got Rapp’s imagination working overtime. It also helped him make up his mind that he would transfer Milinkavich to Dr. Hornig.
After a long afternoon of Milinkavich changing his story over and over and sobbing like a child, Rapp decided that he didn’t have it in him to interrogate the man properly. Coleman couldn’t stand being in the presence of Hornig, so Rapp rented another van and drove the Belarusian himself. The drive from Baltimore to an off-budget CIA facility in Northern Virginia took longer than expected, and then Hornig wanted to talk. She wanted to know every intricate detail of the subject. Rapp told her what he had discovered and handed over audiotapes of the interrogations he’d already conducted, and left as quickly as he could.
He turned off the Pike and approached the main gate of the CIA. Normally a rental car would cause problems, but the security officers recognized Rapp and after a speedy check of the cargo area, he was waved through. Rapp parked in the visitors’ lot near the main door and hustled up the steps and into the lobby. Straight ahead to the right were the security desk, metal detectors, and turnstiles. Rapp hung his badge around his neck and stayed to his left, walking past the undersized statue of Wild Bill Donovan, who was more or less the patron saint of the CIA. Just past the statue Rapp turned left into a small vestibule and then to his right up a couple steps to a small landing. Directly in front of him was the director’s private elevator. Rapp grabbed his badge and held it in front of the scanner. A moment later the door opened and he was on his way to the seventh floor.
The outer office was empty of all support staff. Even Kennedy’s bodyguards were nowhere to be seen. Rapp knocked on the heavy office door twice and then entered. Kennedy was behind her desk with the phone to her left ear and twirling her reading glasses in her right hand.
Kennedy gave Rapp a slight smile and said to the person on the other end of the line, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. He’s standing right in front of me.”
Rapp mouthed the words, Who is it?
Kennedy let her chair spring forward. “Hold for a moment please.” She hit the hold button on the black phone and looked up at Rapp. “It’s Tom Rich from the Times.”
“Little fucking traitor. What does he want?”
“The Times is running a story on us tomorrow. He’d like to give us a chance to comment.”
Rapp checked his watch. It was 7:04 in the evening. They’d be putting their East Coast Edition to bed pretty quickly. “What’s the story about?”
“Basically that you grabbed the wrong guy on Cyprus. Justice, the FBI, State, the Greek government, they’re all mad at us and you and I are out of a job next week and may be facing formal charges.”
“What did you tell him?”
“No comment.”
“Good.”
“He also said he heard you were AWOL. Possibly had fled the country to avoid prosecution.”
“He’s making shit up.” Rapp pointed at the phone. “Put him on speaker.”
Kennedy hit the blinking button and said, “Tom, I have Mitch Rapp here in my office. Anything you’d like to ask him?”
“So you’ve come in from the cold?” The reporter’s voice sounded amused.
Rapp had met Rich once before at a social function. Rapp’s deceased wife had introduced them. She was NBC’s White House correspondent and the two ran in the same circles from time to time. “What a surprise. I would have never guessed a big lefty like you to be a Le Carré fan.”
“He’s my favorite. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold… it doesn’t get any better than that, and besides you know I’m independent. Like all good reporters, I know how to keep politics out of the story.”
“Yeah, right.” Rapp noted the levity in Rich’s voice. Like all egocentric reporters he was probably already working on his Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech.
“Listen, I’m kind of short on time, but I was wondering if you would like to comment on a story that I’m working on for tomorrow’s paper?”
“I see you’ve given yourself a lot of time to get the other side of the story.”
“Deadlines are a bitch. What can I tell you? So would you like to comment on the fact that you tortured a bogus confession from a Greek national named Alexander Deckas?”
“Are you recording this conversation, Tom?”
“Of course,” he said in a patronizing tone.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Come on, Mitch. You know how the game is played.”
“Sure do, Tom.” Rapp smiled at Kennedy and then asked, “Just wondering…you’re Jewish, right?”
Rich didn’t answer right away, and then when he did the levity was gone. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Well, I know how you reporters pride yourselves on being neutral, but I was wondering how proud you’re going to be of that Pulitzer of yours after some crazy Islamic fascist nukes Israel off the face of the map.” Rapp paused to look at Kennedy, who was giving him a wary look. Rapp smiled and hovered over the speakerphone. “At least you’ll be comforted by the fact that you stayed neutral on the issue.”
When Rich spoke again, he was all business. “I take it you’re not going to comment on the accusation that you apprehended the wrong man and tortured him.”
“I’d love to comment on the accusation right after you tell me who your source is.”
“Sources,” Rich stressed the plural. “I have more than one, and you know I can’t reveal them.”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider delaying the story for a day or two?”
“Let me think about that for a second,” Rich paused one second and said, “I don’t think so.”
“Well, fuck you very much and thank you for wasting my time.” Rapp reached down and disconnected the call before plopping down in the winged back chair in front of Kennedy’s desk.
“I don’t think that was very professional.” Kennedy looked disapprovingly at Rapp.
“That guy thinks he’s going to string me up by my balls tomorrow.” Rapp shook his head. “He has no idea how big a mistake he’s about to make.”
Kennedy studied Rapp with suspicion. “Would you mind telling me what you’ve been up to?”
Rapp pulled a memory stick from his jacket and handed it across the desk. “This is going to be fun.”
Kennedy held the stick in front of her and asked, “What’s this for?”
“Your press conference.”
“The one you’re going to hold at the White House tomorrow in response to the grossly inaccurate front page story that the Times is going to run in the morning. I took the liberty of putting everything into a Power Point presentation for you.”
Kennedy smiled. “What’s on here?”
“The video from the Starbucks on the morning of the attack. Agent Rivera’s official statement of what she saw seconds before the explosion. Customs and Immigration surveillance footage of Deckas at JFK the day before the attack. He entered the country using a fake passport, of course.”
“What else?”
“His complete confession.”
“Which the media will say was coerced.”
“Not after they hear it. It was very convincing. He admits to flying into JFK the day before the attack, spending Friday night in Pennsylvania, where he picked up the van, and then driving down to DC Saturday morning. He even admits to standing behind the same tree that Rivera saw him behind. All of it without provocation.”
Kennedy shook her head. “They’ll say you rehearsed the story with him.”
“Let them say what they want, because there’s more. The guy isn’t even Greek.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s Bosnian. His real name is Gavrilo Gazich, and here’s the best part.” Rapp grinned and added, “He’s wanted by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague for atrocities committed against civilians during the civil war.”
“You’re sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
Now it was Kennedy’s turn to smile. “Anything else?”
“A list of people he is suspected of killing. Most of them in Africa over the past five years or so. One U.N. official, a couple of relief workers, and a bunch of politicians, warlords, and generals.”
“All of it’s ironclad?”
“As solid as it gets. The FBI is going to have a field day. The U.N. might even thank us.”
The director of the CIA turned the gray stick over in her fingers and thought of the photos that Cap Baker had given her. “Any idea who hired him to take out the candidates?”
“No, but I know who tried to kill him after he screwed up.”
“Excuse me?”
Rapp folded his hands across his lap and explained to her what had happened on Cyprus. How he had spotted the other team keeping an eye on Gazich’s office. How Rapp watched Gazich casually stroll down the street, shoot the one lookout in the car and then lure the other two up to his office, where he killed one and began torturing the other. Having watched Gazich operate, Rapp explained that he’d decided the man was too dangerous to do anything other than cripple him. Telling a man like that to drop his gun and lie down on the ground would have ended with one or both of them dead.
“Who were these people trying to kill him?” Kennedy asked.
“At first I thought they were Russians. One of them maintained that he was KGB.”
Kennedy gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look and said, “You’re not serious?”
“As it turns out they were Belarusian, and at least one of them was former BKGB. I brought the leader of the group back.”
Kennedy was surprised yet again. “On Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“And why am I hearing about it now for the first time?”
“I needed to check some things out.”
“Where is this man?”
“I handed him over to Dr. Hornig this evening.”
“You were having a hard time getting him to talk?”
“No. He talked all right. We just couldn’t separate the truth from all of his bullshit.”
“So what does the Belarusian mafia have to do with all of this?”
“That’s a good question. The guy we have in custody, his name is Milinkavich. He claims he was sent to Cyprus to kill Gazich for screwing up some contract he’d been hired for. I asked him if they did a lot of work with the Saudis and I got an interesting reaction out of him.”
“What was that?”
“He says his boss, Aleksandr Gordievsky, who runs the Belarusian mafia, hates Muslims. Says the man is Eastern Orthodox and, I quote, ‘thinks Islam is the creation of Satan.’ He claims they would never work for the Saudis.”
Kennedy’s thoughts returned to the photos. “Anything else?”
“There’s some stuff that’s not adding up.”
“Such as?”
“Gazich, not that you can trust the guy, claims that he did exactly as he was told. That he didn’t screw anything up. It was the people on the other end of the operation who gave him bad intel.”
“How so?”
“Gazich says a half a minute or so before the explosion he received a phone call that told him the target was the second limo. So I figure that the Secret Service must have shuffled the limos after they left the conference. Someone is standing on the street, they watch the candidates get in the second limo and they make the call to Gazich. Then the motorcade starts to roll, and a block later the Secret Service has the second limo move up to the lead position. They do that stuff all the time. You can easily see where the terrorists screwed up.”
“It sounds like it all adds up, though.”
Rapp shook his head. “I talked to Rivera. She says they didn’t shuffle the limos.”
“They didn’t shuffle the limos?” Kennedy repeated, her surprise obvious.
“Nope, which leads me to believe that Gazich is lying.”
The sick feeling in Kennedy’s stomach grew. After a moment she said, “Or he’s telling the truth.”
“Why would you say that?”
Kennedy looked across the room, out the window and into the darkness, and sighed. “I think it’s time I showed you something.”
40
Kennedy opened her safe, retrieved the oversized envelope, and walked over to the sitting area across from her desk. Rapp followed and came to a stop at her left as she laid out the photos in a slow, deliberate manner. At first Rapp had no idea what he was looking at, other than the fact that they were surveillance photographs of two people, who if he had to guess probably weren’t married. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman. Rapp ignored her naked body and focused on the face. She was rather animated in the first six shots but in the seventh, the camera had caught her with her mouth closed, her face relaxed, and her eyes looking off in the distance. She had a detached vacant look on her face that was definitely familiar. Rapp finished looking at all the photos and then went back to the seventh one. He almost picked it up for closer examination, but his professional instincts stopped him. No sense leaving his fingerprints on something that obviously had Kennedy spooked.
Again, Rapp focused on the face, and ignored the beautiful body. The high cheekbones, the thin nose, the long, wavy, chestnut hair tangled and partially obscuring the right side of her face. There was something definitely familiar about the woman. Rapp blocked out every feature except the eyes, nose, and mouth. Suddenly everything clicked. He pictured the woman with her hair up in a kind of loose ponytail, dressed stylishly yet conservative, playing the role of a candidate’s wife. It was Jillian Rautbort. The president-elect’s wife. Rapp’s focus intensified as he remembered the sorrow he’d felt for the political couple after the attack. Jillian Rautbort wasn’t much older than Anna had been when an explosion had taken her life. Rapp felt Alexander’s pain. He’d seen some of the footage of the funeral and the public statements Alexander had made in the immediate aftermath. He’d watched the man on election night when his opponent had conceded the race. Even in victory the man seemed irreparably wounded. It appeared that the greatest achievement of his career was tempered by a loss that could never be repaired.
These photos now forced Rapp to call those painful memories into question. Was it an act? Rapp had a hard time believing it. His job depended on being able to judge people in a split second. Picking friend from foe in a foreign land where the wrong decision could mean his lif
e. Alexander’s pain seemed so genuine. If he’d been faking it, the man was an absolute monster.
Rapp’s eye settled on the man in the photos for the first time. The collage started with the two standing and then with Jillian riding the man on a lounge chair next to the pool. The guy was big. Jillian Rautbort looked tiny on top of him. Where Jillian was completely naked, the man still had on most of his clothes. His pants were pulled down to mid-thigh. There was something oddly familiar about him as well. Rapp noticed something coiling from the man’s left ear. His eyes opened a bit wider and he began searching the other photos for the same coil. He found it in two other photos.
“Jesus Christ,” Rapp said softly.
He looked at the photos where the man was on his back. Specifically the right side of his belt line. He expected to find either a radio or a gun. The photo wasn’t clear enough, but something was there.
Without taking his eyes off the photo Rapp said, “Please tell me this guy is not a United States Secret Service agent.”
“Unfortunately he is.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“I wish I was.”
“Who is it?”
“Special Agent Matt Cash.”
Rapp looked at the photos again, from left to right. “When were these taken?”
“Labor Day weekend at her parents’ Palm Beach estate.”
“How did they come into your possession?”
“Cap Baker. He bought them from an unknown individual for what was probably a large sum of money.”
“Can you believe him?”
“I think so. He claims he had no intention of using them. His candidates were ahead in the polls.”
“Then why did he buy them?” Rapp asked a bit skeptically.
“He says the campaign was flush with cash and he thought the best move would be to take them out of circulation. He thought there was a slight chance they could be released and might cause sympathy for Alexander.”
Rapp laughed. “Yeah, right. When did he buy them?”
