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Rapp ignored the pain in his shoulder and scowled at Luke. “Are you done fucking around? I came to you with a serious proposal and rather than doing as we agreed, you decided to bring along this halfwit, and then you try to strong-arm me.” Rapp brought his fist up as if he might strike him.
Luke flinched and then tried to hide his concern over the fact that Rapp had so easily bested his man. Alfred had tipped over another table and chair and then managed to bounce into a streetlight, which he was now leaning against clutching his throat and gasping for air.
“He’ll be fine,” Rapp said in an irritated tone. Trying to allay some of Luke’s concern, he added, “I didn’t hit him that hard.” A moment passed while they both watched Alfred lean over and gulp for air.
“You could have killed him.”
“That’s right, but I didn’t. Now are you done fucking around?”
Luke nodded, his eyes still a bit wide from the shocking turn of events.
“This was probably for the best,” Rapp said, taking a sip of wine. “I’m easy to deal with as long as you don’t try to fuck me.” Placing his right elbow on the table, Rapp looked into Luke’s still-shocked eyes and said, “This is serious business and it’s best to know right now where we stand. You are not afraid to resort to violence and neither am I.” Rapp opened his jacket just enough to give Luke a glimpse of the black grip of his pistol. “We made a deal, and I expect you to honor that deal. If you plan on screwing me, or don’t think you are capable of honoring our arrangement, you should get up and leave right now.” Rapp released the fold of his jacket. “I don’t really care. I will find someone else if I have to.” Rapp let a beat pass. “However, I’d prefer to get this done tonight. Everything is in place. The question is, are you going to be greedy or smart?”
Ignoring the question, Luke craned his neck around and studied Alfred. He seemed to find some relief in the fact that his friend was breathing more regularly. A couple passed on the sidewalk, and for a moment it looked as if they were going to stop and help Alfred, but once they got a good look at him they decided to hurry past. Luke shook his head and turned back to Rapp. In a voice full of suspicion he asked, “Who are you?”
For most people it would have been a fairly easy question to answer. You are who you are, after all, but for Rapp his life had become something far more complicated. There were times when even he wasn’t sure who he was. He had five separate identities that he used on a regular basis and several more that were tucked away in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland. His existence had become a lie within a lie. His own brother had not a clue what he was up to, nor did any of his friends. Over the last several years he had distanced himself from all of them. Not an entirely unusual thing after graduating from college, but his reasons were different.
The kid who had grown up in Virginia and played lacrosse for Syracuse University was gone. Replaced by a killer. There was no melancholy or regrets. He was on a path he had chosen. Rapp softened his hard stare and said to Luke, “I’m someone who could make you a lot of money tonight. All I need to know is are you in or are you out, and if you’re in, I need you to play by my rules.” Rapp sat back, fished out a fresh cigarette, and lit it. After he exhaled a cloud of smoke he asked, “So what’s your answer?”
Luke did not answer right away. Rapp watched him. He knew what the other man was thinking and answered his own question for him. “Luke, if I worked for the police, why would I go through all of this when we could simply arrest you for selling drugs? This is exactly what I told you it is. You either want to make a boatload of money tonight, for very little work, or you don’t, but I need an answer right now.”
Luke regarded Rapp for a long moment before nodding. “I’m in, but I’m warning you, I have friends with the police and a very good attorney. If anything goes wrong you will be the one taking the blame. Not me.”
“Nothing is going to go wrong, Luke. Trust me.”
“Famous last words.”
Rapp cocked his head, revealing a bit of surprise. “You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.”
“Maybe God is trying to send you a message.”
“I don’t think so.” Rapp took off his hat and handed it to Luke. “Here, wear this. If anyone sees you, they’ll think it’s me.”
Rapp fished out the keys and a piece of paper with instructions and the codes for the security system and the safe. He went over everything with Luke and answered his questions as pati
ently as he could. Alfred wandered back to the table at some point and Rapp showed just enough of the pistol to get him to back off. Luke told him he would meet up with him in a few hours. When Rapp was done he pointed to his watch and said, “You have one hour. Be on time. All right?”
Luke nodded and Rapp got up and left.
CHAPTER 29
THERE were days when his job truly sucked, but this was not one of them. Tonight Stan Hurley was a happy man. He had over ten grand in his pocket and a beautiful, classy woman at his side, who he happened to have fantastic intimate memories with. The food was off the charts and the sommelier had come through with two phenomenal bottles of Bordeaux. She’d aged a bit, but so had he, and on her it looked good. Her raven black hair was shorter now, just below her ears, and she’d added a few wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but in a strange way it made her even sexier. That a woman could age so gracefully was something that turned Hurley on. Whether it was due to genetics or some daily regimen, he didn’t care. The end result was all that interested him, and the end result was a gorgeous forty-four-year-old woman who had never tried to place any constraints on him. There were never any games with this one. No matter how long it had been since they had seen each other, they always picked up where they’d left off. Which was dinner, lots of laughs, and great sex.
Paulette was a refined metropolitan woman who oozed confidence. She was nearly ten years younger than the rough-and-tumble Hurley, but she had a wisdom about her that Hurley had found extremely unusual for a reporter. She had pegged Hurley for a spook from almost the moment they’d met in Moscow nearly twenty years earlier. Paulette LeFevre had been a reporter back then and was stationed in Moscow, where Hurley was running around doing all kinds of bad things for the CIA. Now she had risen to the position of chief editor of Le Monde, the left-leaning French newspaper. While it was easy to classify the political bent of the newspaper, LeFevre was more complex. She was too independent to march in step with any political party and she had a contrarian streak in her that, depending on her mood, made her either predictable or unpredictable. She had been raised an only child by two devout communists who had thoroughly indoctrinated her into the utopian ways of the Soviet form of governance. She was raised in a commune an hour outside of Lyon where she had grown up speaking both French and Russian. Her parents had taken her on multiple trips behind the Iron Curtain, and she had watched them lie to themselves and their friends about how much better life was under the benign, velvet glove of the Politburo. When she was eleven they were having a picnic in Gorky Park in Moscow with several families from the commune who were all extolling the virtues of centralized planning and shared sacrifice when Paulette’s mother announced that she needed to use the bathroom. She then asked one of their companions for the communal roll of toilet paper. The future reporter looked up at her mother and said, “If communism is so great, then why do we have to bring our own toilet paper everywhere we go?” It was one of Hurley’s favorite stories. He’d spent drunken weekends arguing with entrenched communists and gotten nowhere, but somehow an eleven-year-old girl had managed to break the debate down to the most basic level. How could one form of government be superior to another when it couldn’t even keep its public restrooms supplied with toilet paper?
Hurley smiled at her and thought back to their first meeting. It was at a party in Moscow hosted by the French Embassy. LeFevre, with shoulder-length shiny black hair, was dressed in a pair of form-fitting black pants, a white blouse, and a pair of black leather riding boots. From Hurley’s vantage she looked to have the nicest ass he’d ever laid eyes on. She was an intoxicating combination of simple and stunning at the same time. Hurley couldn’t resist her pull and began to make his way across the crowded room. Within an hour he had talked her into leaving the party. Unlike most foreigners, Hurley knew the local hot spots. One of the secrets of his success was that he understood the inherent economic need for a black market economy in the one-size-fits-all Eastern Bloc. Hurley specialized in getting to know the people who ran these underground markets. He’d done so in Budapest, Prague, and then Moscow. It was a world where American cash was king and the profit margins were enormous. Hurley helped these individuals set up new lines of distribution for goods, especially American ones, that were in high demand but extremely hard to come by. His wares ran the gamut from jeans, to music, to pharmaceuticals, to booze, to cars, and everything in between. The CIA was hesitant at first, but when Hurley explained that the venture would generate a profit and also enable them to find out which Communist Party officials were on the take, the powers that be back in Langley, Virginia, got out of his way.
LeFevre was amazed at the clubs he took her to. She did not think such places existed outside of Paris or New York—never in Moscow. After consuming large amounts of vodka they ended up back at Hurley’s apartment. Neither was very inhibited where sex was concerned, so they were naked within minutes. The next morning the reporter in LeFevre kicked in, and she began to ask a lot of questions. Hurley didn’t think his apartment was bugged, he knew it was bugged, and the people who bugged it knew that he knew. That was the way the game was played. After a few hand gestures he got her to understand that it wasn’t safe to talk in the apartment, so they went for a walk, and it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship that to Hurley’s great surprise ended up being about much more than just sex.
LeFevre was an intellectual dynamo with a tireless thirst for the truth and a mind that could quickly dissect the incongruities in an argument, movement, or philosophy. He remembered her saying on that walk, “If communism is so wonderful, then why must they force people to participate? If it is so wonderful, why do they control the press? Why do they have to spy on their own people?”
Hurley would have asked her to marry him right there on the spot, but he was already twice divorced and had come to the conclusion that marriage was not an institution he should participate in. His life was full of too many lies, too many late-night phone calls, too many sudden business trips where a long weekend turned into months away from his family, and worst of all too much death. LeFevre had somehow managed to make it work. She’d been married for eleven years and seemed to be happy, which sometimes irritated the heck out of Hurley.
He snagged a fresh cigarette and asked, “So how is your husband?”
Without bothering to look, LeFevre smacked him in the shoulder. “The last time I saw you, you promised you would put your jealous ways to bed.”
“I said I wanted to take you to bed. I never said anything about putting my jealous ways to bed.”
