The Survivor (2 page)

She spent her days locked almost entirely behind the soundproof door of her seventh-floor office at Langley trying to sort out the mess that had come to be known as the Rickman Affair. And even that had raised some eyebrows. The damage was bad, as it always was with this type of thing, but the question was how bad.

Kennedy didn't fault Rapp for killing her Near East black ops chief. Getting him out of Pakistan would have proved problematic, especially after that duplicitous bastard Lieutenant General Durrani was killed. Had Rapp managed to keep Rickman alive they would have been left with a man whose twisted intellect was capable of sowing so many seeds of disinformation and dissent that the CIA would have
been eating itself from the inside out by the time he was done. No, they were all better off with Rickman out of the picture. As Hurley was fond of saying, “Dead men tell no lies.”

They also offered no information, which was what Kennedy had been trying to assess during her days locked behind her door. Rapp had recovered a laptop as well as some hard drives from General Durrani's house. They were Rickman's, and her best people were poring over the encrypted CIA files, trying to determine what assets, operatives, and agents may have been compromised. One operation, due to its current sensitivity, had her particularly worried, and there were already some signs that things might be going off the tracks, which in this particular case was a very appropriate metaphor.

“What are we going to do with him?”

Kennedy slowly closed the red file on the kitchen table, removed her brown glasses, and rubbed her tired eyes.

Mike Nash set a fresh cup of tea in front of her and took a seat.

“Thank you.” After a moment she added, “I'm not sure what we're going to do with him. I've left it up to those two for now.”

Nash looked out the sliding glass door where night was falling on Mitch Rapp and Stan Hurley. Kennedy had forced them to go outside to smoke. Nash couldn't tell for sure, but they probably were also drinking bourbon. “I don't mean Gould. I mean I care about what we do with him, but for the moment, I'm more worried about what we're going to do with Mitch.”

Kennedy was growing tired of this. She'd talked to their resident shrink about the tension between Nash and Rapp and for the most part they were on the same page. Rapp was Nash's senior by a few years, and through some pretty impressive maneuvering Rapp had been able to end Nash's covert career. The how and why were a bit complicated, but in the end it was plainly a noble gesture. Nash had a wife and four kids, and Rapp didn't want to see all that thrown away on a dangerous life that someone else could handle. Nash for his part felt betrayed by Rapp. Their closeness was a natural casualty as Rapp began to share
fewer and fewer operational details with his friend, who now spent his time at Langley and on Capitol Hill.

“I know you're worried,” Kennedy said, “but you have to stop trying to control him. Trust me, I've spent twenty years trying and the best I can do is nudge him in a general direction.”

Nash frowned. “He's going to end up just like Stan. A bitter, lonely old man who's dying of lung cancer. Look at Stan . . . even now he can't put those damn things down.”

“Don't judge, Mike,” Kennedy said with a weary tone. “He's been through a lot. How he chooses to go out is no one's business but his own.”

“But Mitch . . . it's as plain as day. That's the road he's on.”

Kennedy thought about it for a long moment, taking a sip of tea. “We're not all made for white picket fences and nine-to-five jobs. He most certainly isn't.”

“No, but each time he goes out the odds are stacked against him.”

“I used to think so.” Kennedy smiled. “And then I came to a very simple conclusion . . .”

“What's that?”

“He's a survivor.”

A
BOVE
I
STANBUL

T
URKEY

T
HE
CIA's Gulfstream G550 started a lazy banking maneuver and Mitch Rapp peered out the window. The Bosporus was directly below, streaked with boat wakes and divided by a bridge linking Asia to Europe. It was a familiar view—the densely packed buildings, the traffic-choked streets, and the ancient mosques representing a religion that had been subverted by evil men.

A light fog condensed around the plane, obscuring his line of sight. He leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes and letting himself drift back to the first time he'd been there. To his first kill so many years ago.

The man's name had been Sharif. By outward appearance, he'd been a successful and widely respected real estate investor. In fact, his extensive property portfolio was nothing more than a way to launder the hundreds of millions of dollars he made selling arms to anyone willing to meet his price. Strangely, the particulars of the assassination remained more vivid in Rapp's mind than all the others that had followed. He could still smell the tiny apartment that had been rented for him through a maze of CIA shell corporations. He could recall how the Beretta 92F he'd favored at the time felt heavier and colder in his hand than it had during training.

The memory of the operational details brought a barely perceptible and slightly embarrassed smile to his face. He'd completely discarded Stan Hurley's plan, partially out of youthful arrogance and partly to stick his middle finger in the man's face. His pursuit of the target into a park that he had only superficial knowledge of seemed hopelessly amateurish to him now. And his use of multiple rounds when a single properly placed one would have sufficed was something Hurley still rode him about when he'd had too much to drink. Well deserved, unfortunately.

At the young age of twenty-four, Rapp had been one of the most highly trained and talented assassins on the planet. Two decades later, though, he could see how inexperienced and overconfident he'd been. No wonder he'd had the old cuss pulling his hair out.

Normally, planes put Rapp to sleep. He preferred the roar of a C-130, but what the Gulfstream lacked in white noise it made up for with its plush leather seating. On this occasion, though, he'd been awake for the entire trip from the United States. . . . Too much on his mind.

At the forefront was Stan Hurley—a man he'd once despised and who had undoubtedly wanted to quietly do away with the Orion Team's newest recruit after the Sharif job. Rapp had never asked, but he could imagine the knock-down, drag-out Hurley and Kennedy had over that. The old man screaming that Rapp was already out of control and Kennedy calmly extolling their young recruit's potential. It would have been interesting if she'd lost that particular argument. Who would have come out on top? Him or Hurley?

It was a question that would never be answered. His old friend would be gone soon. Rapp could smell death a mile away and Hurley stunk of it. Just like everyone did eventually. Just like he would one day.

Rapp opened his eyes, but didn't bother looking out the window again. Dwelling on Hurley's cancer was a waste of time. It was beyond his control and he had bigger fires to put out.

Scott Coleman's update two hours ago suggested that the Russian surveillance on Sitting Bull was getting more intense. As problems
went, that was only the tip of the iceberg. What worried him was
why
the man was suddenly being tailed. Certainly not solely because of the brief mention of a code name on the Rickman video. Russia's internal security agency, the FSB, would have no way to connect it to Vasily Zhutov. No, the only answer was that Rickman had leaked additional classified information before Rapp had put a bullet in his head. But how much more?

The hum of the landing gear lowering filled the cabin. Rapp cleared his mind of the thousand disaster scenarios fighting for his attention and focused on the problem at hand. The FSB had undoubtedly been following Zhutov to see if he would lead them to anyone interesting, but now Coleman's team was seeing activity that suggested the Russians were setting up for a rendition.

The question was what to do about it. Zhutov didn't know anything particularly useful about the CIA's network, and his cover appeared to have already been blown. That made sitting back and letting the FSB snatch him the option that most of the desk jockeys at Langley would go for. Just another casualty in the game they'd been playing with the Russians for nearly three-quarters of a century.

In Rapp's mind—and to a slightly lesser degree in Kennedy's—that was an unacceptable sacrifice. Sitting Bull had put himself in harm's way to help the CIA contain Russia's unpredictable and often self-destructive impulses. Rapp had worked with many moles over the years—traitors who betrayed their homelands for money, or sex, or revenge. They could be useful but were never to be trusted or regarded with anything but contempt.

Zhutov was different. He was a patriot who loved his country and believed in its potential to be a positive force in the world. He'd made it clear from the beginning that he would never give up military secrets and he refused any kind of compensation. Rapp admired him, and there was no way he was going to leave the man twisting in the wind.

How many more Sitting Bulls were out there? All the assets Rickman had given up in his phony torture video were accounted for in one
way or another—either vanished, dead, squirreled away in a U.S. embassy, or covered by a team like Coleman's. What else had Rick known? Who else had he given up before Rapp had killed him?

The rain started as they touched down on the private airport's only runway. Rapp walked forward as they taxied, grabbing a duffel from the closet and waiting for the plane to roll to a stop next to a parking lot scattered with cars. The cockpit door remained closed, as was his preference, so he opened the hatch himself and jumped down.

A quick scan of the area turned up no movement. The cars all appeared to be empty and, as promised, no one from the airport was there to greet him. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket to obscure his face not only from anyone looking down from the tower, but also from his own pilots.

The weathered Ford was right where Coleman said it would be, isolated on the east corner of the lot. Rapp tossed his bag in the back and slid behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition, and a well-used passport identifying him as Mitch Kruse was in the glove box with all the proper entry stamps.

He started the engine and pulled out onto the road, staying well within the speed limit as he dialed his phone. It was picked up on the first ring.

“How's the car?” Scott Coleman said.

“Fine. What's the situation? Are our competitors looking to make a move?” The phone was encrypted but neither of them trusted the technology. In light of the NSA's obsession with vacuuming up every cell signal on the planet, it was best to keep the conversation in line with his cover as a sales executive.

“An hour ago I would have said the situation wasn't pressing. Now, though, things are starting to look more urgent. I'm glad you're here to help close the deal.”

•  •  •

Rapp managed to cover the fifteen miles to the center of town relatively quickly. Coleman had sent his coordinates to Rapp's phone, and the turn-by-turn instructions were being fed to an earpiece camouflaged
by the intersection of his beard and shaggy hair. Parking tended to be opportunistic in Istanbul, so he pulled in behind some disused scaffolding and stepped out into the cool drizzle.

The sidewalk was typically crowded with pedestrians, but no one gave him a second glance as he lit a cigarette and started up a side street. The leather jacket and dark jeans were right down the center of Istanbul fashion. Combined with his black hair and dark complexion, he became just another local hurrying to get out of the rain.

The clouds were too thick to get a precise bead on the sun, but Rapp guessed it had sunk below the horizon about five minutes ago. Headlights were coming on around him, glaring off wet stone and prompting him to pick up his pace. This is when it would happen—the short period of disorientation when the primitive part of the human mind adjusted from day to night.

The foot traffic thinned as he entered an area lined with closed stores devoted to electronics and construction materials. Sitting Bull would certainly be aware of the Rickman video, but he didn't know his own code name and would have no reason to believe that a man working in Jalalabad would have any knowledge of his existence. Because of that, he was still comfortable routing through this relatively quiet part of Istanbul to get home from his job. Sharif had been cursed with a similarly careless habit of walking his dog in the same park at the same time every morning. And look what happened to him.

The mechanical voice was still giving him directions through his earpiece. Another three minutes and he spotted the hazy but unmistakable outline of Joe Maslick crammed behind the wheel of a white panel van.

Rapp slowed and casually dialed Coleman, looking around as though he were lost.

“Have you arrived?” Coleman said by way of a greeting. “The meeting is about to start.”

“Thirty seconds out.”

“Why don't you come in through the back?”

Rapp disconnected the call and skirted around the rear of the van,
opening the door and slipping into the cramped space. Maslick didn't look back, instead continuing to watch the street through the rain-soaked windshield. Coleman pulled his earphones partially off and pointed toward a shaky image on one of the monitors.

“Bebe's still following Zhutov. Based on what we've seen over the last few days, he'll cross another two streets and then go diagonal into a small square. There's a van parked at the north end with two men in the front seats. No way to know if anyone's in the back. They've been there for a half an hour, which is about the variation in Zhutov's schedule depending on if he stops for coffee. Luckily, he did today.”