The Survivor (7 page)

“So what happened?” Hurley said.

“It automatically downloaded a video.”

“What kind of video?” Kennedy asked. “Did you watch it?”

Dumond shook his head. “I figured it was stuff I didn’t really want to know.”

Rapp slapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Marcus. Now why don’t you go back to work and see what else you can dig up.”

When he was gone, Hurley and Kennedy came over to the pool table and Rapp clicked on the video file in the middle of the laptop screen. A window opened, showing Joe Rickman sitting in his Jalalabad home office. He was wearing tooled leather boots, which were propped lazily on his desk. The location and the fact that his soft body and face were uninjured suggested that the recording had been made before his faked kidnapping.

“Hello, Mitch. If you’re watching this, me and Akhtar Durrani are dead. And if that’s the case, I figure you did it.”

Kennedy reached out and paused the playback. “Interesting. How many of these videos do you think he made?”

“What do you mean?” Hurley asked.

“What if Durrani was still alive? What if we’d captured and not killed him? How many scenarios did he have covered?”

“About a thousand if I know that little weasel,” Hurley said.

She pressed the play button and Rickman came to life again.

“I have to admit that I thought Gould had a good chance to take you out. I mean, if not him, who? He’s one of the top private contractors in the world and he already blew the crap out of your wife and kid.”

Rickman’s face broke into a wide grin as Rapp’s darkened. He wished the son of a bitch really could come back to life. Because then he could kill him again.

“Look over at him, Irene,” Rickman continued. “Does he look pissed? Well, how do you think I feel? I’m dead. Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah. Mitch. Lord knows you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, but you do have one undeniable talent: not getting killed. When it comes to you surviving and your enemies ending up with a bullet in their skulls, you’re an honest-to-God genius. Or maybe I should say idiot savant.”

He laughed a little too wildly. As though he knew he no longer had to contain it. That he no longer had anyone to fool.

“Afghanistan will drive you nuts. You know that. We’ve talked about it. A thousand years of culture, man. You could kill everyone here except one cute little seven-year-old girl and you know what she’d do? Stab you with a pair of scissors the minute you turned your back. You might as well try to create a democracy in a rattlesnake den. And now the politicians are giving money and jobs to the people who a few years ago were trying to kill us.”

What he was saying was true. Congress had decided that if they just threw enough money around, everyone in Afghanistan would learn to get along. In reality, the politicians just wanted out in the most face-saving way possible. Kick the problem down the road until they were retired and hitting golf balls in Florida.

“This place ruined my life, my family, my health. I have nothing left. A little pension so I can spend my old age sitting alone in a one-bedroom apartment while these bastards sit in their mansions and eat caviar with their kids.”

He pulled his feet off the desk and leaned into the camera. “You destroyed me, Irene. So I’m going to return the favor. The leaks are going to keep coming. When I’m done with you, you’ll be in jail and the CIA will be an embarrassing little entry in a history book. The world is chaos, punctuated by brief outbreaks of civilization. Mitch, you know that better than anyone. Where you go wrong is thinking you can change it.”

He leaned back in his chair again, flashing another insane smile. “See you again soon.”

The screen went black and Kennedy took a hesitant step backward. She’d offered to promote him, to pull him out of Afghanistan. But he’d
repeatedly declined. Had the warning signs been there? Had she ignored them out of fear of losing his unique skill set?

Rapp seemed to read her mind. “We’re all crazy, Irene. It’s a prerequisite for the job. No one saw this coming. Not me, not Stan, and not Mike. Even the people who worked with Rick every day were completely blindsided.”

“It wasn’t their responsibility to see it coming. It was mine.”

“Spilt milk,” Hurley said impatiently. “You make things too complicated. All we have to do is find the people who have Rick’s files and kill them. Problem solved.”

“What did he know?” she said. “Sitting Bull was well outside his sphere of influence. How long had he been collecting intelligence on our network? How long had he been planning on using it to inflict maximum damage? And it’s not just what he knew. He could lie, too. He could establish his credibility by handing over some legitimate -assets, then start mixing in disinformation by naming people who aren’t on our payroll.”

“If he was going to release it all at once, he’d have done it by now,” Rapp said. “No, he’s going to dribble it out. Use it to torture us. That gives us time. Stan’s right, we just have to find who has the files and stop them. Then it’s over.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

“We follow the only lead we have.”

“Obrecht,” she acknowledged.

Leo Obrecht was a Swiss national who controlled Sparkasse Schaffhausen, a boutique bank based in Zurich. His name and that of his organization had been coming up since Rickman first disappeared. It was he who had accused Rapp and Rickman of depositing illicit personal funds in his bank.

Most interestingly, though, he was Louis Gould’s handler. Vetting offers and accepting payments for an assassin wasn’t exactly a common side project for a reputable banker.

“If I recall correctly,” Kennedy said, “getting to Obrecht didn’t work out well last time.”

When Rapp had gone to Europe to get answers from the man, he’d run into a carload of ISI agents with the same mission. Three ended up dead and the other, Kassar, had been captured. Later, he’d proved critical to the operation against Rickman and Durrani.

“Obrecht’s personal security is tight as hell,” Rapp agreed. “And it’s gotten even tighter since the incident with the Pakistanis. He doesn’t leave his property at all anymore. But based on the amount of encrypted Internet traffic running between his mansion and the bank, he’s keeping busy.”

“Busy wiping all evidence of his involvement in this thing from his company’s records,” Kennedy said.

“A good bet.”

“Can you two get to him?”

“Not easily,” Hurley said before Rapp could answer. “Our best option would have been to take him while he was on the move.”

“But you’re saying he doesn’t move anymore.”

“He has to eventually.”

Kennedy nodded thoughtfully. “Rickman’s files are going to keep coming. When and how I can’t say for certain, but I guarantee that it will be in the most damaging way possible.”

“Can we absorb the hit?” Hurley asked.

“I honestly don’t know, Stan. I ask myself, why did he do this now? He was still relatively young, he doesn’t appear to have been ill, and I had no plans to pull him out. Rick never guessed, he planned. He analyzed. The only reason I can think of is that he believed he had enough to take us down. And when Rick believed something, it was usually because he was right.”

“So if waiting isn’t an option, we go for Obrecht at his house,” Rapp said.

“With what?” Hurley responded. “A few Abrams tanks and an Apache?”

Rapp pushed himself up onto the edge of the pool table. “We’re running out of time, Stan.”

“Don’t say it,” Hurley pleaded.

“Look,
I could probably figure out a way to get in there and kill the man, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about getting him out of his compound alive and transporting him somewhere we can interrogate him. I like it even less than you, Stan, but without Louis Gould’s help, I don’t see a way to make that happen.”

L
AHORE

P
AKISTAN

A
HMED
Taj looked between his two security men as the densely populated slum gave way to open highway. He would eventually be transferred to a nondescript Suzuki Mehran that would take him to a private jet registered in the name of a local extraction company.

It seemed almost impossible that his plan was finally going into action. He’d spent the last decade developing it, poring over every detail, examining every potential pitfall. And in many ways it extended even farther back than that. The groundwork for what was to come had been laid almost from his birth.

He had been raised in a modest neighborhood surrounded by the poverty that continued to plague Pakistan. Despite accumulating significant power and wealth, his father had been an unassuming man who deferred to those around him and rarely looked anyone in the eye.

It was the lesson that he beat into his son. Present nothing of yourself that the world would take note of. Build up others while diminishing yourself. Let the endless supply of egocentric men stand in the spotlight they craved while you remained in the darkness. That was how lasting empires were built.

Taj had quickly lost count of the men who had underestimated his father. The men whose bodies still littered the countryside surrounding his childhood home.

Eventually, he had been sent to America for college. The custom of wealthy Pakistanis at the time had been to send their children to their former oppressor, England, for their education. His father had recognized that the United Kingdom was weakening while America’s influence grew. A devout Muslim, he understood that the massive Christian country would become a formidable enemy to the followers of Allah, and he wanted his son to understand its ways.

Taj had studied business and economics at an academically competent but unremarkable school in Virginia. In honor of his father’s life lessons, he’d sat at the back of the classroom, writing all the correct answers on his tests before changing them to maintain a B-minus average. He’d made no real friends, though he was polite and reasonably well liked. In the end, he’d been satisfied to study American society from its edges.

What he’d seen disgusted him. Women who used the freedoms they were given to turn themselves into whores. Intellectualism that not only marginalized God, but often denied his existence. And the hopeless, endless arrogance.

He had recognized the seeds of America’s decline and now those seeds were beginning to grow. Like the Soviets before them, the United States had been deeply wounded by its pathetic effort to conquer countries favored by Allah. Its insatiable greed for all things material had led to a financial collapse that was already in the early stages of being repeated. And its uncanny cohesiveness—the thing that was the secret to its strength—had devolved into petty squabbling and government paralysis. It was the fundamental flaw of democracy: Power found its way into the hands of liars and mobs instead of the cunning and the strong.

Upon graduation, Taj had returned to Pakistan and enlisted in the air force at his father’s insistence. The path to power in Pakistan wasn’t
through the private sector, he knew. Certainly great wealth could play a part, but the country’s soul was its military.

Taj had gone into logistics and made a name for himself as a competent and respectful officer. He’d made the right connections and, more important, done away with his rivals by manipulating them into destroying themselves. Eventually that led to his first star and to Saad Chutani foolishly giving him the helm of the ISI in an effort to gain control of the organization.

Now the unassuming Ahmed Taj was positioned to become one of the handful of men who ruled the world. He would turn his country into an enemy of America that would make what they’d experienced during the Soviet era seem trivial.

In fact, it should have already happened. As often was the case, though, even the most carefully laid plans could be derailed by unexpected events. In this instance, the actions of Akhtar Durrani.

Durrani had been a man of great hubris, violence, and ambition. He generated the fear necessary to rule over the ISI’s S Wing and was a convenient tool to insulate Taj from the potential blowback generated by its operations.

Durrani had been instrumental in hiding Osama bin Laden, allowing the Saudi to hold al Qaeda together for years longer than would have been possible otherwise. He coordinated the resistance to American forces in Afghanistan and kept track of the insurgent groups that based themselves in Pakistan. Most important, though, he kept those insurgents under control, preventing them from mounting attacks inside Pakistan without ISI consent.

Durrani’s alliance with Rickman had come as a rare surprise. Fortunately, Taj kept close tabs on everyone in a position of power at the ISI. It had been through this surveillance that he’d become aware of Rickman and decided to delay the implementation of his own plans. The value of the information the CIA man possessed was beyond calculation, a prize Taj never imagined when he’d first started scheming.

His first instinct had been to simply do away with Durrani and
take Rickman when he arrived in Pakistan. Upon further consideration, though, he realized it would have been a mistake. Rickman was too brilliant, his mind too twisted. Even under extended interrogation it would be impossible to sort truth from lies.

Taj had no choice but to stay in the background and wait for the man to reveal what he knew. The trick would be finding the right moment to step out of the shadows. While his and Rickman’s goals were similar, they were not the same.

Rickman wanted to punish the CIA, but Taj wanted to co-opt it. If he could gain access to what Rickman knew—his encyclopedic knowledge of every informant, traitor, and double agent in the region—he would have the ability to take control of the massive intelligence network while Irene Kennedy remained completely unaware. Before allowing the CIA to implode under the weight of its sins, he would siphon off its power. He would make the ISI, already swollen with billions of U.S. dollars, the most feared intelligence agency in history.

Unfortunately, between Durrani’s stupidity and Mitch Rapp’s brutality, the situation had become more complicated. In the end, though, it might be better this way. In every disaster lay opportunity.