everything I want to know, or I will tell Claudia how you have continued with your little hobby despite promising her you were done. I will tell her about the type of people you’ve been working with and how you have put her and Anna in harm’s way, all for your own selfish gratification. And then you can spend the rest of your life in a cell agonizing over your stupidity and wondering what your daughter looks like with each passing birthday. So what’s it going to be, Mr. Gould, are you ready to talk or do want to continue with these stupid games?”
His head hung in defeat, Gould said, “I’m ready to talk.” “What is my name, and what do I do for a living?”
“You’re Dr. Irene Kennedy. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Kennedy nodded and pressed the buzzer. It opened a second later to reveal Nash. She told him, “I need a pen and a pad of paper. Mr. Gould is about to give us a good deal of information.”
Nash looked more than a little surprised that his boss had been able to accomplish what he couldn’t, and in only a few minutes. He nodded and turned to get what she’d asked for.
“And you can turn everything back on.” Kennedy let the door close and surveyed the strange man sitting across from her. “You might not understand this but I care about what happens to you.”
Gould looked up at her with disbelieving eyes.
“I know that’s hard for someone like you to believe, but it’s true. Mitch spared your life for reasons that I don’t entirely understand, which leaves me to wonder if there isn’t a bigger reason that none of us understood, and still don’t understand.” Kennedy watched for a sign that the man was capable of feeling either guilt or gratitude. She saw neither, but she wasn’t displeased, for his expression was one of fear, and Kennedy knew from personal experience that fear could be a great motivator. “You have a role to play here, Mr. Gould. I don’t know what it is yet, but I think we’re about to find out.”
Chapter 29
Joel Wilson was used to getting his way. So much so that when people didn’t bow to his whims, he became such an insufferable bastard that his opponents’ only option was to surrender. At least that’s the way it usually worked, but every once in a while Wilson ran up against someone who was more than willing to match him toe to toe in his little game of threats, wild conjecture and pure bluster.
It had started off well enough. Wilson had landed at the Kabul International Airport without alerting the CIA, or anyone from the FBI, for that matter, that he and his team had arrived. He then placed a call to the FBI liaison at the embassy and explained to him that they needed to talk. “No,” Wilson explained to the man, “you are not in any trouble-at least none that I know of, so I suggest you follow my orders to the tee.” Wilson went on to explain that no one, including the ambassador, was to know that he and his people were in the country. The liaison went along with Wilson’s requests and within the hour his team was inside the embassy and ready to descend upon the CIA personnel.
That was when things started to get a little bumpy. Wilson, primed for his first confrontation, was extremely disappointed when he discovered that Darren Sickles, the CIA’s station chief, was not in the building. Wilson badgered Sickles’s secretary for a good ten minutes. The only thing he managed to get out of her was that Sickles was at the Ministry of the Interior on important business. When he asked for Sickles’s second in command he was told he was in Jalalabad. When he inquired as to the whereabouts of Mitch Rapp, the woman completely shut down. It didn’t matter how many threats he leveled at her, she refused to answer his questions.
In the end it was the liaison that came through, a pasty little man with too much hair. Wilson thought he looked like a foreigner. Apparently there had been a gunfight with the local police and Rapp. It was causing an uproar in the capital. Early reports had it that Rapp and his men had killed more than twenty police officers and Rapp had been injured in the battle. The liaison discovered that Rapp had been taken to the Cure International Hospital, so Wilson loaded up his team went to see what they could find out.
The decision proved to be a colossal mistake. Angry relatives and locals had congregated at the hospital, where many of the dead and wounded police officers had been taken. Wilson and his people were pelted with rocks and garbage as they entered the hospital, only to find out that Rapp wasn’t there. They wasted two additional hours at the hospital waiting for a military escort to take them back to the embassy. By then Wilson had heard bits and pieces of what had happened to Rapp and his men. Apparently a corrupt police commander had ordered the attack. Wilson had his own priorities to deal with but this also sounded like an area he might have to look into.
After returning to the embassy, Wilson learned that Director Kennedy was in the country. Wilson became irate over their squandered opportunity. Kennedy could easily insert herself between Wilson and her people, making his investigation nearly impossible. The liaison came to Wilson for a second time claiming to know where Rapp was. Wilson told him if was wrong this time, he would find the worst posting the FBI had and he would make sure he was sent there. The team went back to the Kabul airport, and was ferried by helicopter up to the Bagram Air Base.
Landing at the base was uneventful as they were met by another contingent of FBI special agents who were assigned to the base. Wilson was pleased to see the stress that his visit had induced. He’d learned from the past that transported to the base hospital. And that was where the real problems started. The nearly insurmountable obstacle came in the form of a little five-foot-tall Latino Air Force sergeant, who for reasons that Wilson could not grasp, had decided to become his archenemy.
It started out simple enough, the fuzzy liaison from the embassy inquiring at the main desk about a patient named Mitch Rapp. The young man sitting behind the desk had two chevrons and a star. Wilson had no idea what rank that was but he assumed it was very low because the enlisted person in question had bad acne. The airman first class was a law-abiding, extremely patriotic twenty-one-year-old from Kansas who didn’t have it in him to challenge authority, so he simply gave them directions to the ward where Rapp could be found.
It was at that second desk where Wilson ran into immovable Air Force Command Master Sergeant Sheila Sanchez-all four feet eleven inches of her. In hindsight, Wilson realized that his tactics had been wrong, something not easy for him to admit. His five-person entourage had grown to nine special agents by the time they’d arrived at the hospital. These wards were filled with young men and women who’d had their bodies mangled in the most awful ways, typically from explosions. That meant that the people who cared for them conducted themselves almost as if they were cloistered nuns who had taken a vow of silence.
So the mob of agents stumbled upon the ward that among other things handled head trauma. The badges came out and Wilson was both too loud and too firm about what he wanted. The women behind the desk grew horrified as the male agents began looking in open doors to see if they could identify Rapp. Upon hearing the disturbance, Sheila Sanchez quickly removed her reading glasses, spun her chair away from her computer and waddled at double pace out of her office and into the hallway.
Sanchez ran her ward with an iron fist. The patients came first and the patients on this particular floor needed a great deal of rest, which required peace and quiet. As she was the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer on the floor, even the doctors gave her a wide swath. It wasn’t that they feared Sanchez so much as that the woman knew what she was doing, so the officers let her call the shots, everywhere except the operating room.
Sanchez had seen it all in her time on the base. Presidents, vice presidents, cabinet members, generals from every service, admirals, rock stars, movie stars, and comedians. They all came with their entourages and even though they meant well, they were all a pain in the ass. Sanchez had made it very clear to the people down at the front desk that when these groups came through; they were not to be sent to her floor. Send them to see the patients with broken bones and bullet holes, but leave her head trauma patients the hell alone.
The first thing she did was draw the index finger of her left hand up in front of her mouth and shush the entire group of men. Having silenced the crowd, she headed for a man who had made it around the desk and had pushed his head into one of the rooms. The agent, caught in no-man’s-land, didn’t know what to do, so he stood there frozen in the doorway. Sanchez swatted him in the ass as if he were a three-yearold boy who had just run out in the street. When the agent turned to protest, Sanchez grabbed him by the tie and yanked him down the hall and back to the area on the other side of the desk.
Keeping her voice down but her intensity extremely high, Sanchez hissed, “Do you people think you’re at the zoo? My patients are just animals… you can just walk in here, loud as hell, and start poking around?”
