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“Then Irene called me and told me to ignore the message.”

Rapp knew that Urda could be a bit territorial, and he had hoped to avoid any problems. He had just wanted to land, pick up what he needed, and be on his way. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Nope.” Urda looked over his shoulder. There were a couple of people sitting in the 4Runner. “My ex-wife.” Urda shrugged. “I don’t even like her, but I’ll tell you right now, if one of these jackasses killed her, there’d be hell to pay.” Urda pointed to the ground. “Stay here. I’ll go get him.”

Urda returned a moment later, leading a bound and hooded man. “I had them clean him up a bit for you. I guess he smelled pretty bad.”

Rapp waved Wicker over and handed the man off to him. “Buckle him in.” Rapp turned back to thank Urda. “I appreciate you doing this.”

“I know you’d do the same.”

Rapp nodded.

Urda started to leave and then stopped. “As far as I’m concerned, you were never here.”

“Good.” Rapp took a moment to stretch and then got back in the plane. The prisoner was wearing the local tribal garb. Rapp snatched the hood from the man’s head and studied his face. It was him all right. A little thinner for sure, but it was him.

The man squinted for a moment trying to adjust from total darkness to the faint light of the cabin. Upon seeing Rapp, Waheed Ahmed Abdullah’s face became a twisted mask of fear. “What do you want with me?”

“Nothing,” Rapp lied. Waheed had been part of a terrorist plot to detonate nuclear warheads in both New York City and Washington, DC. Rapp had captured him in Pakistan the previous spring and interrogated him personally.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your father is a man of great influence. He has secured your release.” In a way Rapp was telling the truth. Waheed’s father was a man of great influence in Saudi Arabia. He had also placed a bounty on Rapp’s head, which in a roundabout way ended up getting his son released from the hellhole of a prison he had been in. Rapp was not about to tell Waheed that his father thought he was dead.

“Just relax,” Rapp told Waheed as he pulled the hood back over his head. “If you behave, you will see your father tomorrow.” Rapp retrieved a hypodermic needle from his jacket pocket and removed the protective cover. He grabbed Waheed’s bound wrists and said, “I need to give you a sedative. When you wake up, we’ll be in Saudi Arabia.” Rapp stabbed the needle into his prisoner’s thigh and depressed the plunger.

62

ZIHUATANEJO, MEXICO

C laudia hovered over the keyboard, wondering if she had lost her mind. One e-mail was bad enough; the reply, risky, but anticipated; the follow-up, downright stupid. Now here she was composing her fourth message to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This new repentant attitude was waging a fierce battle with Claudia’s tactical training, and so far the repentant attitude was winning. She was taking standard precautions: changing servers and bouncing around the Web delivering her messages from different locations, but still, she was dealing with the head of the world’s most powerful spy agency. There was no telling what tricks the woman might have up her sleeve.

The first message, sent nearly twenty-four hours ago, had been a simple heartfelt apology. Anna Rielly was a mistake. I am sorry. I deeply regret taking the job. If you would like to know who hired me, I am willing to discuss. Claudia struggled over whether she should write the note for both her and Louie, but in the end decided Louie hadn’t shown the slightest sign of remorse, and was in fact at this very moment trying to finish the

job. By including him in the apology she would have continued to delude herself. She sent the message and went to bed. It was late Saturday night, and she did not expect to hear back from Kennedy until possibly Monday. She woke up on Sunday famished and ordered breakfast in her room. She managed to keep it down, and took it as a good sign, so she ventured out and took a long walk on the beach. She thought mostly about her father and mother, and tried not to think about Louie. She considered calling her parents for the first time in three years and when she made it back to her room she decided she would do just that.

She checked her various e-mail accounts first and discovered Kennedy’s reply. It read: How do I know you are the real person and not some imposter?

Claudia half expected this. She logged off and thought about her response for a minute. When she was ready she typed, We put trackers and bugs in her car, and found out he had knee surgery scheduled that morning. When they left for the hospital we filled the house with gas and waited for them to return. My partner was hiding in the woods across the street from their house. She was not supposed to be harmed.

After logging back on, Claudia sent the message and then logged off. For the next two hours, she checked the account every fifteen minutes until she finally received a reply. It read: Who hired you and why?

Claudia typed her response while online. Erich Abel. He is a former Stasi officer, and he resides in Vienna. He was acting as a middleman. For whom I do not know, but I suspect the Saudis. I have never worked with him before. She hit the send tab and logged off. Claudia stood. She was slightly short of breath, and surprised to find herself sweating.

It had been almost eight hours since she had sent the last reply and she had checked her in-box only once. The note she found from the director of the CIA asked simply, Why are you doing this?

Good question, Claudia thought, but not very easy to answer. For nearly three hours she had struggled with her reply, wondering if she was divulging too much and then simply not caring. It rambled on, page after page of her deepest thoughts and regrets. She explained that she was disgusted with herself for having any part in the matter. That she and her partner had parted ways over the debacle. She added two final points to the e-mail. The first were the names of the five Swiss banks from which Abel had transferred the money. Claudia listed the relevant routing numbers, dates, and dollar amounts, knowing that it was likely either that Abel’s name was not on the accounts or that he had used an alias. She did not know if she would have the courage to include one last piece of information.

She struggled with it for well over an hour, through fits of tears and pangs of guilt, until finally she surrendered herself to that voice of her youth—the voice of her conscience. It called to her over and over, telling her it would be difficult, but that in the end she would feel better, and it was right. The second she sent the e-mail she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her burdened heart.

Claudia turned off her computer and wiped the tears from her face. She knew nothing could bring Anna Rielly back, but she hoped that she had made it clear that she was deeply sorry for what had happened. She had gone further than she’d wanted to, and revealed far more than she should have. The lengthy final message gave away too much. It flew in the face of everything she had learned—everything that had kept her alive. Part of her didn’t care anymore if she was caught. A massive burden had been lifted, and she was ready for what life would hand her. She would go back to the beginning. To her roots. She would go home to her parents, have her child, and start over.

There was a knock on the door, and Claudia froze. She immediately assumed the worst. She should have changed hotels. They had found someway to track her, some new piece of technology she was unfamiliar with. She was wearing a white tank top and a pair of cutoff jean shorts rolled up several inches at the hem. Her professional instincts kicked in momentarily and she searched the room for a weapon. After a second she thought better of it. If the CIA had found her, there would be no escaping. If Louie had been here, maybe they could fight their way out, but she wasn’t a killer. Claudia imagined them on the other side of the door—men in black with big black guns waiting to bust the door down. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the patio and gravity pool. It was at least a thirty-foot drop to the jagged rocks and the surf.

Claudia collected herself and wiped her nervous palms on the front of her shorts. She stood tall and walked across the room. She would accept the inevitable. She would not run. Claudia didn’t bother with the peephole. She unlocked the door and opened it. She was prepared for anything other than what she found.

“You’re a hard woman to locate,” Louie said. “Do you have any idea how many hotels there are in Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo?”

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