Authors: Vince Flynn
Tags: #Mystery, #Political, #General, #Suspense, #Adventure, #Thrillers, #Politics, #Fiction, #Thriller
Consent to Kill (60 page)
She closed her eyes and kissed the baby’s head.
The door to the bedroom opened slowly and Gould poked his head in. He saw his wife sitting up in bed and smiled. They had married. He stepped into the room and said, “What are you doing up?”
Claudia looked to the corner of the room and he followed her eyes.
“If you so much as twitch you’re dead.”
Gould was dripping with sweat from his run. He looked at Rapp and very slowly raised his hands above his head. “I’m sorry about your wife.”
Rapp didn’t reply. Now that he was in front of the man, he was at a loss for words.
Gould looked at Claudia and dropped to one knee and then the other. His hands were folded behind his head.
To Rapp it was almost as if this had been rehearsed. Like they had discussed what to do if he ever found them.
“I’m sorry,” Gould said again, his voice cracking. “Please understand, Claudia had nothing to do with it.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
Gould slowly nodded, as if he was deeply ashamed. “I knew. Claudia didn’t know until after. She cried for days.”
Rapp glanced at the woman. She was crying now. A tear fell and splashed on the baby’s face. She squirmed in her mother’s arms.
“I know I’m in no position to ask for anything, but …” His voice trailed off.
“Let’s hear it.”
Gould swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Would you please spare Claudia, and if you don’t, would you please bring the baby to her parents in France?”
Rapp kept the silencer leveled at the man’s head. He wasn’t going to kill the woman. Any thought of that vanished the second he saw the baby in her arms.
“Anything else?” Rapp asked.
“I’m very sorry for everything I did to you. I should have never taken the job. Claudia was right.”
Rapp acted bored. “Is that it?”
“May I please kiss my baby and my wife good-bye?”
Rapp’s eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly.
Gould kept his hands behind his head and he got up slowly. He stepped over to the bed and sat next to his wife. He wrapped his arms around Claudia and they both cried. Gould stroked her hair and told her how much he loved her. He then bent down and kissed the infant on the head.
“My sweet Anna,” he said, “I am lucky to have seen you born and to have held you in my arms … even if it was only for a few days.” Gould’s shoulders began to shake and he wept over his baby. Claudia wrapped her arms around him and kissed the top of his head just as she had kissed the baby earlier.
Rapp stood there in the corner of the room with his gun pointed at the father, mother, and child.
What have I turned into?
he asked himself. This was his life, or what it would have been, if only Anna had lived. The pain of the last nine months came rolling back and slapped him with the memory of his wife and his unborn child. Standing there, his resolve teetering, he asked himself one simple question:
What would Anna do?
It was her life he was avenging, not his own. He could hear her calling out to him as if she were alive and standing right next to him.
The baby woke up and started to cry. “Anna, don’t cry,” the father said. “Everything will be all right. Your mother will take care of you, and I will love you forever.”
Claudia looked up at Rapp, her eyes red and moist with tears.
“You named her Anna,” Rapp said.
“After your wife.”
Rapp nodded and slowly lowered the gun. He took a deep breath and left the room without saying another word. He stepped out onto the patio and went straight down the stairs to the white sandy beach. He never looked back. He never feared for his life for a second. He would give Anna, both of them, what they surely wanted. If Gould was still the calculating killer that he had been, he wouldn’t be far behind. There would be other weapons in the house. He would grab one and he would step outside and that would be the end of it. Wicker would shoot him in the head before he ever got off a shot. If he truly loved Claudia and that little girl, he would stay right where he was and hold them until the sun went down.
Rapp stood in the surf with his gun in his hand and counted. He got to a hundred, thought of his wife, thought of the baby, and smiled. It was the first genuine smile he’d had in over nine months. He glanced down at the gun and then tossed it up in the air, catching it by its thick black silencer. Rapp hesitated for a moment, and then threw the weapon end over end into the ocean.
ATRIA BOOKS
PROUDLY PRESENTS
PROTECT AND DEFEND
VINCE FLYNN
Now available in hardcover
from Atria Books
Turn the page for a preview of
Protect and Defend
....
P
UERTO
G
OLFITO
, C
OSTA
R
ICA
M
itch Rapp ran his hand along her smooth, naked thigh, up to her waist, and then down along her flat stomach. His body was pressed against hers; front to back, her head resting on his arm. This moment had not been part of the plan, but it shouldn’t have surprised him. There had been signposts; furtive glances, comments made only half in jest. The tension had built for the better part of a year. Each of them silently wondering. Neither knowing for sure if it would ever go to that next level. And then they arrived at the private villa overlooking the tranquil beach. The warm, humid air, the crashing surf, the shots of tequila; all coalesced to create a situation of overwhelming sexual tension.
Rapp kissed her bare shoulder, nudged a lock of her silky black hair with his nose, and listened to her breathing. She was sound asleep. He lay still for a long moment, completely intoxicated by the smell and touch of the beautiful woman lying next to him. He hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. The guilt was still hovering at the recesses of his conscience, waiting to come rushing back in any moment. He could sense it gnawing at the edge of his psyche. Trying to get back in. Forcing him to think about things he wished he could forget, but knew he never would.
Pulling himself away from her, he rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling fan. Candles danced with the breeze and threw a faint light on the slow-turning blades and the dark, stained timber rafters above. Beyond the open balcony doors the waves rolled onto the beach. It had been two years since a bomb had destroyed his home on the Chesapeake Bay, killing his wife and the child she was carrying. Not once since that tragic day had he slept soundly, and tonight would be no different.
They had come for him on that fall afternoon—not her. His guilt over her death drove him to the heights of rage and the valleys of sorrow. He had been a fool to think he could settle down and have a family. There were too many enemies. Too many relatives of the men he had killed. Too many governments and powerful individuals who would like nothing more than to see Mitch Rapp lying facedown in a pool of his own blood. There had been moments—moments of deep despair where Rapp had quietly wished one of them would succeed. He welcomed the challenge. Just maybe, someone would get lucky and put him out of his misery.
The odds of that happening tonight, however, were slim to nonexistent. Contrary to his current prone position and the woman lying next to him, Rapp had not traveled thousands of miles for a romantic getaway. Simply put, he had journeyed to this tropical location to kill a man. A narcissistic political operative who had selfishly put the needs of his party and himself above those of America. His scheming had changed the course of the last presidential election and resulted in the deaths of dozens of innocent people. With each passing week, it become more obvious that the man thought he had gotten away with it. In fact, only a few people knew of his involvement, but unfortunately for the target, they were not the type to let treason go unpunished.
Rapp and his people had kept an eye on the man for the better part of a year. At first the surveillance was extremely passive. He was on one coast and Rapp and his people were on the other. They tracked him electronically through his credit cards and ATM withdrawals. As the months passed, and the target began to let his guard down, they stepped up the surveillance. Listening devices were placed near his home, office, and boat, and his cell phone calls were monitored. Spyware was installed on his computers, and they began tracking his every move, looking for a pattern or an opportunity.
That was how they discovered the trip he had planned, a monthlong excursion from San Diego down to Panama and back. The target was planning on putting his brand-new two-million-dollar boat through his own sea trial. Rapp got his hands on the complete itinerary for the trip and sent an advance team to scout the ports of call. Terminating the target in a remote Third World country was infinitely better than doing so in America.
It turned out Puerto Golfito was the perfect location. Relatively small, the fishing village had a growing tourist industry. Cruise ships now dropped anchor a few times a week to disgorge their passengers. Commerce was on the up, real estate was booming, and the entire village was in a state of flux. It was the perfect environment for two people to come and go unnoticed. As far as operations went, this one was not all that challenging. Even so, one aspect of the plan was giving Rapp some concern. The naked woman lying next to him was adamant that she be the one to send this man to his grave.
Maria Rivera had been the logical choice to accompany Rapp. Fluent in Spanish, she was highly motivated where the target was concerned. A little too motivated, possibly, which in addition to one other thing made Rapp a bit hesitant. She was more than capable of taking out the target, either by hand or with a gun, but she lacked practical experience. There was a reason why professional killers typically came from either the special forces or the mean streets. Both groups of men were desensitized to violence. They looked at it as a way to achieve an end. The formula for success was often no more complicated than meeting violence with superior violence.
The lovely Latina woman beside him had seen neither the mean streets of a ghetto nor the rough, covert world of special forces operators. Quite to the contrary, she had spent the last decade working for one of the world’s premier law enforcement agencies. Maria Rivera was a sixth-degree black belt and a former Secret Service agent who was an expert marksman with a pistol. She had been destined for greatness until a bomb tore apart a motorcade she was assigned to protect. The internal investigation that followed cleared her of any incompetence or blame, but in a business where success went unnoticed and failures became documentaries on the History Channel, she was quietly ushered off the fast track and stuffed away in a basement cubicle where her ambitions began to atrophy like the unused muscles of a comatose patient. Rapp knew she wouldn’t last long, so he offered her a chance at a new career.
Officially, Rivera worked for a private security company headquartered in McLean, Virginia. She was given the title of vice president and put in charge of personal protection and threat assessment. Her salary was three times greater than what she had earned with the Secret Service. The war on terror was good business for private security firms. Much of the company’s work was legitimate, but more and more, Rapp was using them to do things that Langley needed to hide from the press and Congress.
This little south-of-the-border excursion was a perfect example of such an operation. Individually, Rapp would have had no problem getting a select number of senators or congressmen to sign off on the operation, but getting an entire committee to agree and not leak was impossible. Ego and political ambition trumped national security for far too many elected officials.
Rapp turned and looked at Rivera. Even though this operation was fairly simple, there was absolutely no room for mistakes. It had to look like an accident, or there would be too many questions. He wondered if she really had it in her, or if the years of law enforcement training would kick in and give her reason to pause. Killing a fellow human being was not always as difficult as one might believe. Give someone a minimal amount of training and put them in a situation where they are forced to defend either themselves or their family, and most will rise to the occasion. Give someone like a Secret Service agent hundreds of hours of training and they will efficiently, and without hesitation, use lethal force to stop a gun-wielding presidential assassin.
Ask one of those same agents to kill an unarmed civilian and you have now moved into the unknown. Even if guilt is confirmed, and the punishment fits the crime, few law-and-order types relish the role of executioner. The agent is no longer being asked to react to a threat. An entirely new skill set is needed. Essentially you are asking a person who has only played defense to now line up on the other side of the ball and perform with the same level of proficiency. To change one’s role so quickly is nearly impossible. To kill cleanly, and make it look like an accident, was the domain of the rare, tested assassin.
Rapp checked Rivera again. She was sleeping soundly. Slowly, he slid his right arm out from under her neck, pulled back the sheet, and slid out of bed. As he covered her with the sheet, her head stirred slightly and then settled back onto her pillow. Rapp backed away and walked across the cool tile floor to the balcony. A soft, humid breeze ruffled the tops of the palm trees below. He looked out across the bay at the bobbing masts of the sailboats and searched for the sleek cruiser that belonged to the man they had come to kill. The boat had arrived late in the afternoon and dropped anchor a convenient two hundred feet from the nearest boat. The sixty-three-foot
Azzurra,
with its bright red stripe, was easy to pick out among the other white hulls.