of a wise Swiss banker, he had obtained the passport and charge card on his own without telling his CIA handlers. He devoured a big breakfast, did his best to ignore the pain in his shoulder, and scanned the papers, even though he knew the killings had happened too late to make the morning editions. The man behind the desk was true to his word and within an hour he was standing at Rapp’s table.
“Monsieur Johnson,” the man said, “your room is ready.”
Within minutes Rapp was in his room sitting on the edge of the bed, transfixed by the TV. The hotel murders were the hot topic on every local channel. The BBC had even picked up the story, but the only thing that Rapp learned with any surprise was the death toll. At first he thought they had their facts wrong. He had killed five people—Tarek and the four bodyguards, and he assumed that the prostitute had also been killed. That accounted for six total deaths. Who were the other three?
His shoulder throbbing, Rapp turned off the TV and headed off in search of some supplies. He kept a wide- spectrum antibiotic in his emergency bag, and a few other essentials, but he needed other supplies to clean and dress the wound, as well as some painkillers and other toiletries. It was now close to ten in the morning and the tourists were out in droves. Rapp hit three different pharmacies in a four-block area, wanting to spread out his purchases so as to not draw too much attention.
Every time he passed a pay phone he had to resist the urge to call Kennedy. He was still trying to figure out if he could trust her. On the face of it he thought he could, but the reality of their curious profession was that he didn’t really know any of his coworkers. They were all professional liars. Rapp passed a young couple holding a map and arguing. For some bizarre reason he wondered if he could kill Kennedy. Assuming she had set him up, of course. Hurley would be easy, at least in terms of the decision, but Kennedy was different. He liked her.
The pain from the gunshot wound was getting worse, and was interfering with his ability to focus, so he headed back to the hotel and popped some painkillers. He took another shower before cleaning and dressing the wound. With the pain numbed, he drew the curtains and climbed under the covers. Pain was something he was accustomed to, but this was more acute than the average pull or sprain. It went deep, touching nerves that had never before been touched by an outside object. The discomfort was making sleep nearly impossible, but after thirty minutes the drugs kicked in. Rapp lay there staring up at the ceiling, floating away while trying to understand where the other three bodies had come from. He wondered if he had somehow killed the last man in the hallway. Even then, it meant two more bodies that he couldn’t account for.
His dreams were wild and senseless. A jumbled mess of faces known and unknown. When he awoke later in the day, he ordered room service and watched more news on the television. There was little new information other than the announcement that four of the victims were bodyguards for the Libyan oil minister. Rapp scoffed at the information. If the men were bodyguards, why weren’t they with Tarek as he moved about the city? The answer was obvious. They weren’t bodyguards. They were a team sent to ambush him and Tarek was the bait.
Rapp fell asleep once again, his mind wrestling with all of the implications that flowed from what seemed to be the truth. Had Tarek volunteered for this mission or had he been betrayed by his own brotherhood? Had his value to his organization declined so much that they deemed him expendable? How had they known that he would be next on Rapp’s list? That was ultimately the problem that Rapp kept coming back to, for it implied something far more sinister and close to home.
As Rapp looked around the room, he thought of the close circle of people who knew of his existence. The Orion Team was a small clandestine unit, intentionally set up outside Langley with the explicit purpose of hunting terrorists. There was a firewall between the group and Langley for an obvious reason—there were too many bureaucrats in the building, many of them with law degrees, who did not understand the nature of their enemy. Men and women who had never served in the field, men and women who had no grasp of their enemies’ lethal designs, and who sincerely thought that everything must be done in the full light of congressional approval and proper legal channels, as if they were conducting a police action.
Rapp sat up and swung his feet from under the covers and to the floor in one motion. He glanced at the bandage on his shoulder and was pleased to see no sign of blood. Kennedy entered his mind. She was his most direct link. He saw her as someone who was genuinely committed to what they were doing, but then again she wasn’t exactly an open book. There was Rob Ridley, who ran the advance teams and was there to assist Rapp on the back end if he got in trouble. Stan Hurley, the relentless cuss, knew virtually every detail, as did Thomas Stansfield, the deputy director of Operations at Langley. How many others, Rapp had no idea. Kennedy claimed that there were only a handful of people, but it was no stretch to think that others had been brought into the loop without Rapp’s knowledge. A mole in a spy agency was not a novel idea, and the idea caused Rapp’s healthy paranoia to kick in.
Rapp hadn’t spent much time analyzing the motives of someone who would betray their country. Hatred, jealousy, a martyr complex, or some Dudley Do-Right who saw only black and white and the letter of the law—Rapp didn’t really care. He knew as surely as he knew that he had killed Tarek and the others that if he found the person who had set him up, he would strangle that person with his bare hands. The thought that someone back in Washington who was more than likely sitting in a cushy air-conditioned office had sold him out for money or some arrangement enraged him. Who it could be was a big question, and Rapp wondered if he could muster the skills and assets to find out.
He sat there for several minutes, the pain in his shoulder pulsing back to life, analyzing the various paths he could take. Disappearing was still an option and he had the skills to pull it off—at least for a while. Would they bother to look for him? If they knew the whole story, probably not, but the way the press was reporting things they would think he had killed the prostitute and three innocent civilians, and there was no guarantee that they would know anything beyond what the press was reporting. Rapp didn’t like that. Intuitively, he knew spending the rest of his life waiting for them to kick in his door was no way to live. More important, he believed in the mission and had no desire to abandon it. He cracked a smile as he briefly thought of staying with the mission, but doing so on his own. Hurley would flip out and hunt him down.
Slowly, Rapp realized there was really only one good avenue open to him. He would have to initiate contact and see how they reacted. He was the one with a bullet hole in his shoulder. They could bitch all they wanted about their protocols, but he was the one getting shot at. He would call Kennedy. It would be a day and a half late, they would be on edge, and if they believed the press reports there was a chance they’d authorized a kill order for him. That possibility gave Rapp an idea. He was a virtual needle in a haystack right now. If they were looking for him, there was just one logical place to start. Rapp considered the dangers involved in going there. Rubbing his eyes, he tried to work the fog of the painkillers from his mind. He was going to need all his wits about him for what was coming next.
CHAPTER 14
WHEN Rapp stood up, his shoulder immediately let him know that it was not happy. He froze between the bed and the bathroom, not sure if he should push on or lie back down. The pain, though, receded more quickly than it had the day before. He was either getting used to it, or it was getting better. He moved into the small bathroom and checked out his shoulder in the mirror. It didn’t look good. Bright red and purple bruising was spreading beyond the white bandage in every direction. None of it was migrating down his arm, though, which he took as a positive sign. Then he remembered he’d spent a long time on his back.
Turning to the side, he craned his stiff neck as far as he could and caught the reflection of his back in the mirror. Instead of bright red, the bruising was purple and almost black in a few spots. Rapp cringed and asked himself if it was possible that the bullet had clipped his lateral thoracic artery. He shook his head at his own
