"Who, not a what, and don't act so surprised. I told you, I've been following your investigation."
McMahon looked anxiously at Kennedy and then back to Baker. "Who have you been talking to?"
"You know that is something that has always driven me nuts about this town. Everybody gets hung up on who said what to who, and they ignore the fact that the truth is staring them right in the face. You have a thirteen-year veteran of the Secret Service who has an impeccable record, and she reports that just before the blast, she saw a man in a red Nationals baseball hat and sunglasses standing behind a tree and acting suspicious. The man was, and I will quote from your original draft, not the one that you are going to give to the president on Monday. In your first draft you wrote Agent Rivera saw a man holding a device and right before the explosion he suddenly ducked behind the tree."
"Agent Rivera was under a lot of stress at the time."
"Don't start acting like one of those attorneys over at Justice. I can see from your face that you believe that BS about as much as I do."
"And you're sounding like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists."
Baker laughed loudly. "Better than some shill for the government who'd rather bury evidence than face the facts."
McMahon was up off the couch with surprising quickness for his size. "I'd be careful about questioning people's motives, Mr. Blackmailer."
"I did no such thing, and you know it, but I'm glad to see you're angry. You're going to need it if you're going to get to the bottom of this."
"You're out of your mind."
"And you're in denial. You've accounted for every person at the scene of the crime that day except the man in the red hat."
"The man in the red hat doesn't exist."
Baker stepped back and smiled. "Oh, really? If he doesn't exist, then why does the Starbucks on Wisconsin have him on digital surveillance buying a cup of coffee roughly thirty minutes before the explosion?"
"What in the hell are you talking about?"
"Black-and-white surveillance tape. Red doesn't look red. Your people had it right in front of them and they missed it. Go back and check. You'll see."
McMahon was at a complete loss for words. This shark knew more about his own investigation than he did.
"Watch your back, Agent McMahon. These guys don't play by the rules, and neither should you, if you want to find the truth." Baker turned to Kennedy. "One last thing. You know that Ross will move to get rid of you right after the inauguration."
"Yes."
"And anyone else he deems a threat."
"Are you thinking of anyone in particular?"
"Mitch."
"Mitch Rapp," said McMahon. "What in the hell does Ross have against Rapp?"
"It's a long story," said Kennedy, not wanting to answer the question. "Cap, I know you have a plane to catch, so cut to the chase."
"I think it would be a good idea to bring in a fresh set of eyes on this."
"Are you sure you don't mean you'd like to let the bull into the china shop and see what he breaks?"
"Oh, that's a tempting visual, but it's not what I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of an assassin's assassin. Someone who knows the ins and outs of this world."
"It's not a bad idea."
What Baker and McMahon didn't know, and what Kennedy was not about to tell them, was that she already had Mitch Rapp on the case. She had known about the mystery man in the red hat for almost a month, and Rapp and his team had been working quietly to find out who he was, and more importantly, who had hired him.
3.
LIMASSOL, CYPRUS.
H e was six inches taller than her and ten years older. "I think you should kiss me," she said softly. e was six inches taller than her and ten years older. "I think you should kiss me," she said softly.
Mitch Rapp ignored her and watched the door to the cafe across the street.
"If we were really lovers you wouldn't be able to take your hands off me." She slid her chair closer to his and placed a hand on his thigh. She ran her hand through his long black hair. Streaks of gray were coming in on the sides. For three straight weeks she'd studied him. She knew every wrinkle and scar and there were quite a few of the latter. Some visible. Some buried in his psyche. She had no proof the mental scars were there, but they had to be. No body lived the type of hard life he'd lived and came out unscathed.
She lifted her sunglasses off her nose just enough to reveal her hazel eyes. They were more green than brown, which she thought might be part of the problem. His ex-wife-no, that wasn't right, his deceased wife-had the most stunning green eyes. Cindy Brooks made the mistake of calling her the ex one night and he'd made her sleep on the floor. Brooks had been with the Agency for only five years, and she considered it a huge honor to work side by side with a living legend like Mitch Rapp. At least she had when she was first given the assignment.
"Listen, hard-ass." Her words were harsh but hushed. The expression on her face was pure feigned adoration. "You handpicked me for this. I'm supposed to be your wife. We're on our honeymoon. When people are on their honeymoon they kiss a lot, they talk, they hold hands...they act like they love each other."
"Your point." Rapp turned toward her, but kept his eyes on the cafe. He was wearing a pair of black Persol sunglasses that allowed him to see out, but no one else to see in.
"No one is going to believe our cover because you keep acting like I don't exist."
"People fight on their honeymoon all the time."
"We fought yesterday."
"We were in Istanbul yesterday. None of these people know we were fighting."
"I'm sick of dealing with your foul mood." She took her hand off his leg and leaned back. After a moment the smile on her face disappeared. "Fighting it is then."
Brooks stood with such quickness that it surprised even Rapp. Her chair tumbled over and she put her hands on her hips. "My mother," she yelled, "told me I shouldn't marry you!" She reached out and grabbed her glass of wine from the table.
Rapp looked up at her from behind his sunglasses. His jaw tight with tension, he whispered, "Sit down! You're making a scene."
"I know I'm making a scene!" she yelled. "I want to make a scene! You're an ass." Then with a great flourish she took her wine, doused Rapp's blue polo shirt and khaki pants, and stormed off down the street.
Rapp sat there motionless. The people at the surrounding tables all looked on in amusement. It had been a bad year. The worst year of his life. He went to bed every night blaming himself for her death, and woke up every morning hoping it had all been a nightmare. But it wasn't. The unborn baby she was carrying, the other children they would have undoubtedly had-a lifetime of dreams and memories gone in an instant and he never saw it coming. That was the other problem. The thing that ate away at him from the inside out. He had let his guard down. He had allowed her to change him, to give him hope that he could be something different. Something other than a killer.
He supposed there was a chance she would have succeeded in changing him, but it was small. His was a vocation that was very difficult to walk away from. Especially with so much on the line. He was unwilling to let go of his past. There was always one more job, one more operation to handle. She'd told him to let someone else man the ramparts for a while. He'd seen the younger guys, though. He'd even helped train a few of them and they had a lot to learn before they were anywhere near as good as he was. At thirty-nine he was at his peak. His knees and back were not what they once were, but he still had no problem keeping up with the rookies, who in some cases were nearly half his age. The years of experience were what really made the difference.
If he could do it all over again, the decision would have been easy. He would have given it all up for one more day with her. The hunt for her killers was the only thing that got him through the first nine months. After that, he'd tried pills for a while. At first they worked. At least they helped him sleep. But after a month they started to make him crazy, so he threw them all away. That was when he dropped out. He flew to Paris, made a stop in Switzerland, and then disappeared for two months. He drank profuse amounts of alcohol and went on an opium binge in Bangkok that lasted for a week. He even slept with a couple of women along the way, but the brief flings only worsened his guilt. Finally, in late October, he woke up one early evening in his hotel room in Calcutta and turned on Sky News. That was how he heard about the attack on the motorcade. He looked at his puffy red face and bloodshot eyes in the mirror and knew he had reached the tipping point. He either went back to the States and got back to work, or he would drink himself to death. Rapp was a lot of things, but nothing more so than a survivor.
Kennedy was happy to see him, but there were questions, and Rapp wasn't good at answering questions. The CIA got a little skittish when their operatives disappeared. The FBI also took notice. Kennedy covered for him as best she could, and told the inquisitors that Rapp had taken a leave of absence. Most understood. The death of his wife was a very public affair. Rapp had his enemies in the government, however, and they wanted answers. Rapp, in his typical manner, told them to go fuck themselves, which only served to make the situation worse. In the end it was the president who intervened on his behalf. The commander in chief came down extremely hard on those who questioned Rapp's loyalty. This was not the Cold War. No longer did agents get turned by the enemy. This new war was about terrorism, and the thought of Rapp going over to the other side was simply preposterous.
This all came down the week before the election, and it was Ross's people at National Intelligence who made the biggest stink. When Alexander and Ross pulled off their come-from-behind victory, both Rapp and Kennedy knew their days were numbered. Almost two years earlier, he had warned Kennedy that he thought al-Qaeda, or one of its offshoots, might try to hire outside help to run some of their operations. They had the cash to do it, and they also had a practical motive. The U.S. and her allies had done a tremendous job of rolling up terrorist cells, which operationally left al-Qaeda ineffective when it came to striking at the heart of America. The motorcade incident changed all of that. Somehow they had managed to stage a spectacular attack inside, and they had left surprisingly few clues. In Rapp's experience, lack of evidence meant a professional was involved.
Nowhere in any of the early reports did Rapp read a thing about the mystery man in the red hat. He learned that when he sat down to talk to Special Agent Rivera. At first Rapp was shocked that there was no mention of him in the reports, but then it began to make sense. Rivera was the only one to notice the man. He didn't show up on any surveillance monitors from the surrounding businesses. Paramedics did not treat him after the explosion. He simply disappeared, or as several doctors tried to tell Rivera, he never existed except in her mind. She'd suffered a serious concussion. It was a given that she might be confused about when and where things had occurred. The long and short of it was that the lawyers at the Justice Department didn't like loose ends. Especially loose ends that would fan the flames of conspiracy theorists for decades to come.
Rapp went back to the scene of the crime with a map that listed where every pedestrian and vehicle was on that afternoon in October when history was changed. Two of the apartment buildings across the street were now holes in the ground. The adjacent buildings on either side were under construction. Other than that everything looked normal. The huge crater in the road had been filled and repaved, and fresh trees had been planted. Rapp found the tree where Rivera said the man had been standing right before everything faded to black. The large oak was still there, but damaged. Some of the bark that faced the explosion was gone and there were several scars left by debris that had imbedded itself into the trunk.
For Rapp, it came down to the tree and one other thing. If the attack had really been carried out by jihadists, there would have been a body, or more accurately, tiny parts of a body. A true believer willing to martyr himself for the cause. No body parts meant remote detonation. And if Rapp had been the trigger man that day, he would have stood right where Rivera said she saw the man in the red hat. The FBI and the rest of the government could scour the planet for the terrorists who claimed responsibility, but Rapp was going to look elsewhere. The shadowy world of contract killers.
It was a world Rapp knew well. The covert ops business required rubbing shoulders with people who were on par with Swiss bankers when it came to secrecy. In essence it was a loose network of former intelligence, law enforcement, and military types. Many of these people worked for real security firms. The firms handled legitimate work and subcontracted out the black bag stuff on the side. Rapp ruled these companies out from the start of his investigation. Targeting a presidential candidate and setting off car bombs in Washington, DC, was way off the reservation. No big security firm or foreign intelligence service would touch a contract like this. The downside was simply too great. The job would have been taken by someone out of the mainstream. Someone small. A one-, two-, or three-man shop at the most. It would also have to be someone who didn't mind taking money from terrorists, and that made the list of potential suspects pretty thin.
All of this was going through Rapp's head when they got the first big break-the Starbucks tape. There had literally been hundreds of tapes to review from local Georgetown businesses. A computer genius at Langley named Marcus Dumond had caught the oversight. Dumond had written a computer program that piggybacked the recognition software they already used. The thousands of hours of surveillance footage was scanned with the new program looking for baseball hats. It came back with over a hundred hits, but it was the Starbucks one that fit the time frame and Rivera's description of the man she'd seen. It did not provide them with a clear photo of the suspect, but it was a start. The brim of his hat blocked most of his face from the camera, but they knew what his mouth and chin looked like, and they also got a brief glimpse of his nose and the lower portion of his eyes. They also knew his height and approximate weight.
Most important for Rapp, though, was that he now knew how the man moved. How he carried himself. They had him on tape for twenty-seven seconds while he waited in line to order his drink. Thanks to the time stamp on the surveillance footage they were also able to go back and find out exactly what the assassin had ordered-a double espresso. Definitely more European or Middle Eastern than American, and that was where the hunt had led them-to the countries that bordered the Mediterranean.
Rapp started with the CIA's database and then contacted his colleagues in Britain, France, and Italy. For close to four weeks Rapp and a small team had been hopping all over the Mediterranean running down leads. They'd been in Tunisia, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and now Cyprus. They had narrowed the search down to three names. Whether those three names represented three separate individuals or one, they couldn't be sure. The business was funny that way. It was very easy for an operator to take on multiple identities and use different pseudonyms depending on the target, the type of hit, or the region. With each passing day, though, Rapp was beginning to believe it was one man. There were too many similarities. Too many intersecting paths.
Rapp's contact in Istanbul was dependable: a deputy undersecretary in the Turkish National Intelligence Organization who had been on the CIA payroll for almost three decades. He told Rapp there was a good chance the man he was looking for lived in Cyprus. He did business in Istanbul from time to time, but Limassol, Cyprus, was his home. The Turkish spy gave Rapp an address, an e-mail account, and a low-quality surveillance photograph. Dumond pulled all the information together in less than a day and was still trying to connect the dots. They had real estate records, tax returns, past and present e-mail accounts, and banking records. The guy he was looking for operated a front company out of an office above the cafe he'd been sitting across from for the past two hours. The owner of the cafe was his landlord. The tenant went by the name of Alexander Deckas. Rapp thought it a strange irony that the suspected assassin went by the same first name as the last name of the man he had tried to kill.
Rapp stood and dabbed the wine from his pants. A sympathetic waiter handed him a second napkin. He cleaned the wine as best he could while trying to come up with the worst possible overseas posting for Brooks. The waiter gave him a third napkin, and Rapp gave him the two soiled ones. He glanced around the area to see how much attention he had garnered. The cafe was on a one-way street in front of the hotel so all the parked cars were pointed east. Halfway down the block to his left, something caught his eye. Casually, he threw some cash down on the table and thanked the waiter in Italian. He didn't know Greek and figured it was the next best option. Rapp then started down the street. He pulled at his wet shirt and continued to act concerned over his soiled clothes. He glanced to his right and confirmed what he had seen. Two men were sitting in a car. One of them was holding a camera with a telephoto lens and it was pointed at the same cafe Rapp had been watching.
Rapp looked away and grabbed his phone. After several rings a man answered.
"What's up?"
"Where are you?" asked Rapp.
"Athens."
"Get your ass to Cyprus, and I mean yesterday."
"What's wrong?"
"I don't think we're the only people looking for this guy."
"I'm at the airport right now. I'll see what's available and get back to you."
Rapp hit the end button and kept walking. He was trying to figure out his next move when it presented itself in the form of a mannequin perched in a storefront window near the end of the block. New clothes and a view of the two men across the street were exactly what he needed.
4.
ZERMATT, SWITZERLAND.
T he partygoers in the Alex Hotel were all in a good mood, and they should have been since not a single one of them had paid for a thing all weekend. This particular environmental conference was one of the hottest tickets on the annual circuit. One day of workshops and panels, and two days of skiing and debauchery at one of Europe's finest ski resorts. A Grateful Dead cover band was on a tiny stage playing "Cumberland Blues" as the crowd of rhythmically challenged, Birkenstock wearing, patchouli oilsmelling, prematurely gray, Mother Earth lovers danced a herky-jerky dance that would have made any lover of the Motown Sound either cry or double over in laughter. he partygoers in the Alex Hotel were all in a good mood, and they should have been since not a single one of them had paid for a thing all weekend. This particular environmental conference was one of the hottest tickets on the annual circuit. One day of workshops and panels, and two days of skiing and debauchery at one of Europe's finest ski resorts. A Grateful Dead cover band was on a tiny stage playing "Cumberland Blues" as the crowd of rhythmically challenged, Birkenstock wearing, patchouli oilsmelling, prematurely gray, Mother Earth lovers danced a herky-jerky dance that would have made any lover of the Motown Sound either cry or double over in laughter.
Mark Ross stood near the back of the room with a permanent smile on his face. He had attended the event five previous times as a U.S. senator and the attendees had always been nice to him, but now they treated him like royalty. He had been smart to embrace this issue years ago. If one was to rise to the top of the Democratic Party it was very important to have the proper credentials. No resume builder was more vital than the role of compassionate environmentalist. These were the foot soldiers. The people who got out the vote. Who organized things from the grass roots with their e-mail blasts and blogs. He appreciated everything they'd done for him, and would hopefully do for him in the future. He was already thinking about his turn. Eight years wasn't so long. There were limits though. He was now at the top of the political heap. One place from the pinnacle. He'd put in enough time with the unwashed. Now it was time to head off to Mount Olympus and bask in the adoration of the truly powerful.
The toughest invite of the entire weekend was for Joseph Speyer's party at his mountainside villa. The Deadheads were not welcome. Speyer's party was for the heavy hitters-European royalty; fashion icons from Paris, London, New York, and Milan; international financiers; media moguls; the occasional movie or rock star; hip politicians; and ultra-wealthy trust funders. In other words, the beautiful people who flew in on their private planes, partied hard, wrote big checks, and then flew on to the next big party, or one of several mansions they owned. Conservation to these people meant having their staff recycle their diet pop cans and designer plastic water bottles. Some of them went so far as to buy a small hybrid car, but the purchase was simply to drive to a friend's house on the weekend. They still kept their limos, SUVs, luxury sedans, and sports cars.
For Ross, Speyer's party was a must. It allowed him to tap into people with obscene money. People who could write million dollar soft-money checks, because that was how much money their bond portfolio had earned the previous week. Ross had been welcomed into this crowd from the get-go. He was tall, relatively handsome, and fit. But equally important was the fact that he'd built himself a small fortune on Wall Street, which endeared him to his fellow multimillionaires. The ultra wealthy had a much easier time writing checks to people who were already in the club. On some level they thought a fellow millionaire was less likely to abscond with the funds.
Ross shook a few more hands and turned for the door. The smell of cannabis was pungent. Michael Brown, the Secret Service agent in charge of his detail, stood a few steps away with a frown on his face. He fell into step with Ross as they left the room.
"What's the matter, Michael?" Ross asked with a smile. "You've never been stoned?"
"I don't do drugs, sir. Never have."
"You don't have to lie to me," Ross said casually. "I'm not going to tell anyone."
Five more agents fell in around them. The shortest was six feet one and the tallest was six feet six. They looked more like a basketball team than a security detail.
"I don't lie, sir." Brown's eyes scanned the crowd in the lobby. "Just so you know, I'm going to have to put this in my report."
"What, in your report?"
"The presence of marijuana."
Ross looked at him sideways. "You can't be serious?"
"It was pretty thick in there, sir, and we take drug tests. I have to write it up."
Ross frowned. He could just see the press getting a hold of something like this.
"Don't worry, sir. It'll be internal. We're good at keeping secrets."
The Secret Service agents and the vice presidentelect stepped through the front door and onto the sidewalk. Two more six-plus-foot agents were waiting for them. They were traveling light, which was the other reason for Agent Brown's foul mood. Motorized vehicles were banned in the town of Zermatt. Brown wanted to get an exemption from the Swiss, but Ross wouldn't let him. It was after all an environmental conference. Ross would ride the electric city busses just like everyone else.
This was both a logistical and security nightmare for the Secret Service. There was no bombproofing, let alone bulletproofing, electric vehicles. They simply didn't have the horsepower to handle the extra weight, especially with some of the steep inclines they had to deal with. That meant Ross would be exposed to and from every venue all weekend long. In light of the attack on the motorcade, no one at the Secret Service liked this idea, but Ross held his ground.
The other problem was that Ross had sprung this trip on them at the last minute. That meant the advance team had arrived barely a day before the rest of the detail. A city bus was commandeered for the weekend, and two agents set about learning how to drive the large, low-powered vehicles. Brown arrived the next day to discover that his boys had crashed the bus. The narrow village streets were simply too difficult for amateurs to navigate. So now they had a civilian driving them, and no backup bus available as a decoy, nor a replacement should this one fail. The entire trip had degenerated into everything he'd been taught not to do. With Ross refusing to allow him to bring in one of the limos or Suburbans on standby in Milan, they were forced to adapt and settle for a less than ideal situation.
A perimeter had been formed around the yellow and green village bus. Black paper had been taped over the large windows along the back half. Brown escorted Ross onto the bus and walked him to the rear, where he sat him down between two black clad and heavily armed members of the Counter Assault Team. More agents piled on the bus and they started to roll. A light fluffy snow was falling as the bus hummed through the narrow streets. They didn't have far to go. That was one good thing about Zermatt. The village was small. Speyer's house was barely a mile away, most of it uphill. Two agents had been deployed in advance. Brown had wanted to send a team of six to sweep the house and wand the other guests as they arrived, but when Ross got wind of it he hit the roof. Ross chewed his ass out and Brown had to stand there and take it. He kept headquarters appraised of his every move and left a significant e-mail trail explaining that Ross had overruled him every step of the way. If something happened Brown wasn't going to take the blame for it. He'd watched what they'd done to Rivera after the attack on the motorcade. She'd been put on administrative leave pending the completion of the investigation. Now she'd been cooling her heels for two and a half months. Even if they cleared her, there was no way she would get anywhere near the president's detail.
With barely a hundred meters to the house the bus rounded a hairpin turn and stalled. The driver turned to Brown and in clear English said, "Too heavy. Too much weight."
"Wonderful." Brown scowled and then mumbled to himself, "What a chicken shit operation." He looked around at his fellow agents and said, "Everybody off accept Kendal and Fitz." Brown was referring to the two men sandwiching Ross.
One by one eight agents piled off the bus and then slowly but steadily, the vehicle climbed the last steep incline. The agents who had disembarked dogged it up the hill double time without having to be ordered. The bus couldn't go very fast so they kept pace, but when they got to the top they were all panting due to the thin mountain air. One of the two advance agents was waiting for them with a smile on his face. It vanished as soon as Brown stepped off the bus.
"What in the hell do you think is so funny?"
"Nothing, boss," the man said sheepishly.