this, but I tell you,” Adams’s face flushed with anger, “if Rapp so much as looks at me the wrong way, I will bury him.”
Hurley wouldn’t have believed the man’s arrogance if he hadn’t been here to witness it. “I don’t think you’re going to be going anywhere for quite a while.”
“I’d better,” Adams felt his heart begin to race, “because what little understanding I have is quickly wasting away.”
“You’re an idiot,” Hurley said as if he were telling him his shoes were untied. “I tried my best to help you early in your career, but you really are one dumb son of a bitch.”
Adams acted as if he’d been slapped in the face. “Uncle Stan, I have done nothing wrong. I am the one trying to do the right thing.”
“If you think you’ve done nothing wrong, then I might as well shoot you in the head and get this over with.”
Adams ’s mouth was agape. Here was a man he had known since birth-his father’s best friend, for Christ’s sake. Adams blurted out, “I’ve served my country. I don’t understand… I signed up just like you and Dad.”
“Do yourself a favor and don’t start comparing your clandestine service career to your father’s.”
“I…” Adams stammered, “I wasn’t about to go down with that ship of rats. They were the most corrupt bastards I’d ever met.”
“Corrupt? You talking about our fine boys down in Bogota back in the eighties?”
“Of course I am. They should have all been thrown in jail.”
Hurley considered slapping him, but he didn’t want to make this any more personal than it already was. “This is all my fault. The other instructors at the Farm wanted to wash your ass out, but I protected you. They knew you didn’t have what it would take, and I knew it, too, but I thought I owed it to your father, so I talked you up and let you graduate.” Shaking his head in self-loathing, he added, “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”
“Didn’t have what it would take?” Adams asked, some anger finally seeping into his voice. “You mean like a frontal lobotomy? You mean the ability to ignore every ethical standard I’d ever learned? Ignore everything Congress says about what I should or shouldn’t be doing?”
“The problem with you, Glen, is that you always thought you were special, and the truth is you’re not. You were a dogshit operative. The only thing you were good for was wining and dining at the embassy parties. Anything that involved getting your hands dirty, you pissed and moaned like a little girl.”
“By getting my hands dirty you mean breaking the law?”
“You’re damn right I do. What in the hell do you think it is that the CIA is supposed to do? You think we’re supposed to obey everyone’s laws? Go ask the International Court and the U.N. and the fucking State Department for permission to find out which Colombian military officers are on the drug cartel’s payroll?”
“Oh… I think you’re simplifying it a bit.”
“You want me to simplify things? Here it is. You were a complete failure as an operative, you were a mediocre prosecutor who kissed all the right asses and managed to land an empty-suit job as the chief watchdog at the CIA where your entire mission is to get in the way of people who are actually trying to keep us safe. Is that simple enough for you?”
“Get in the way!” Adams shouted. “You think things like the rule of law and the Constitution simply get in the way?”
“No, but neither have I deluded myself into thinking that the men who wrote it ever intended for a second that it be used to protect our enemies.”
“So guys like Mitch Rapp should be able to do whatever they’d like without any oversight? Kill whomever they deem a threat without answering to any higher authority?”
“If I have to choose between Mitch and those menstruating partisan hacks on Capitol Hill, I’ll put my money on Mitch.”
Adams, his fists clenched, stood and demanded, “Do you know why they hate us?”
“Who?”
“The terrorists? Who do you think? They hate us because of men like you and my father and Rapp and Nash and rest of you knuckle-dragging goons.”
“Those goons,” Hurley said in a quiet angry voice, “have done more to protect this country than the entire House and Senate put together, and they’ve done it without an ounce of recognition or thanks from all the intellectually arrogant fucks like you.” Hurley stepped back and swung his cane around, smacking Adams in the elbow.
Adams yelped and grabbed himself. “What in the hell is wrong with you?”
“I was your only chance, you dumb ass. All I wanted was the slightest sign of remorse, and instead I got more of your pompous defiance.” He turned for the door.
“Where are you going?” Adams asked in a voice that had suddenly lost its command.
“To get the man you think so little of.”
“Wait!” Adams said in a voice that finally betrayed a bit of fear.
Hurley didn’t bother to turn around. “You blew it. Now you get to find out firsthand if torture works.”
CHAPTER 11
RAPP checked his watch. He had thirty minutes at the most and then he would have to hightail it up to Langley. He wasn’t worried about his alibi. Should the feds come knocking, he’d send them to Hurley, and as long as the tough bastard kept breathing, he’d tell them that Rapp had arrived shortly before seven the previous evening and stayed the night. As to what they’d discussed and done during the roughly twelve hours since, they could confidently tell the feds to pound sand. The agents might not like it, but the men and women of the clandestine service had good reason for being tight-lipped with them and the good ones knew it.
What bothered Rapp was the fact that there were more important things for him to be dealing with-like trying to find the three terrorists who had vanished. They had launched a manhunt like nothing he’d witnessed in his nearly twenty years of service. Every law enforcement officer in the country was on high alert, and so far they’d only come up with thousands of false leads. Seven days postattack they finally started looking at different scenarios. At first they’d concentrated on the airports, the borders, and the big ports. The Navy had boarded and searched twenty vessels that were deemed suspicious. Not a single person had been able to explain to Rapp what intelligence had landed those ships in the suspicious category, but he’d learned enough over the years to not try to swim against the current. The Navy was simply doing what they were ordered, and those orders were coming from men and women who would rather look busy and earnest than get thoughtful.
Now they’d moved on to the smaller marinas, airstrips, and remote border crossings. In Rapp’s opinion, and he’d voiced it rather loudly, this should have been the area of focus from the beginning. The men who were behind the attacks had shown a discipline and level of sophistication that he was sure would lead them to be every bit as creative and careful in their escape. Despite all the hard-working and devoted individuals who work for it, the federal government is not a precise instrument. In the post-9/11 world the training was better, the equipment was superior, and the ability to share information in real time had improved dramatically, but the alphabet soup of government agencies had also grown. As only Washington could do, layer after layer of bureaucracy was added, all in the name of streamlining the federal government’s ability to prevent and respond to a terrorist attack.
Rapp, and a handful of others, had predicted how the politicians would react. The very room he was standing in was proof that they had been right, and that they’d managed to stay one step ahead of the lemmings as they continued to do what they thought would be least offensive to the very men they were fighting. And now, on top of trying to find out where the terrorists were, he had to deal with this sideshow-this little drama with Glen Adams. It was adding undue stress to an already difficult situation. Rapp hadn’t liked it when Hurley asked him to bring Adams down to the lake house, but knowing the family history he conceded. Looking back on it now, Rapp wished he’d flown out over the Atlantic and dumped Adams out the rear luggage hatch of the G500 at about five thousand feet. It would have been a lot easier.
Now Rapp and the others had to stand around and watch this painfully slow tragedy unfold in real time. Rapp had been through this enough times to know that once you decided a man had to be killed there was no sense
