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Kennedy nodded slowly. “That’d be nice. Thank you.”
No one spoke for a long moment and eventually all eyes turned to Rapp, who was clutching and unclutching his hands as if he were doing some new-age stress reduction exercise. Stofer spoke first, “Mitch, what’s wrong?”
Rapp wasn’t sure this was the time, but he knew it was better to speak his mind now. “I’m sorry to spoil the party here, but something’s not right.”
“What’s not right?” Kennedy asked.
“We’re all breathing a big sigh of relief when I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being set up.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” O’Brien said. “Rick’s dead.”
Rapp wasn’t prepared to refute that point, but neither was he convinced that Rick
man was no longer of this world. “I was at the safe house,” Rapp said, remembering the four dead bodyguards. “It was an extremely precise takedown. The kind of op we’d be proud of,” he said, looking at Hurley. “A state-of-the-art security system taken offline without our watchers at Langley having any idea, four bullets, four dead bodyguards, and not a shot more . . . all suppressed. The safe is opened, not cracked, and Rick’s laptop, files, cash, and God only knows what else goes missing. And not a witness to any of it.”
“I’m not sure I follow, either,” Stofer said earnestly.
Kennedy rubbed her forehead. She had known Mitch wasn’t going to be able to accept this. Nothing could ever be this simple. Stofer, for his part, was too reverential toward Rapp. Having come up on the analytical side, he had seen many of his predecessors manage the clandestine side of the business with condescension. Stofer worked extra hard to make sure the operatives felt that they were being heard. “You agree,” Kennedy said, “that Rick is dead?”
Rapp took a moment and then said, “I’m not sure.”
O’Brien moaned, “Come on, Mitch, it’s not that complicated. He dies right on the tape. You can see the panic on the faces of the two goons when they realize what they’ve done. The anger in the third guy’s voice when he can’t find a pulse.”
“Yeah . . . I know,” Rapp said, almost sounding as if he doubted himself.
“And then the third guy executes the other two. We know that was real because you guys found the bodies in the exact same position as they were last seen on the video.”
“But we don’t have Rick’s body.”
“Doesn’t surprise me one bit,” O’Brien said with total confidence. “They’re trying to act like he’s still alive. They’re going to do a slow drip, releasing snippets of the interrogation, only they don’t know we have the entire thing, because the idiots took the SD card and didn’t know the camera had an internal flash drive.”
Rapp wasn’t so sure, but he stuck with what he knew. “Someone, or more likely several men, hit the safe house, and they were extremely precise in their shots. Rick is then taken only a few hundred yards to another house, presumably by the same guys. The interrogation begins and a few days into it Rick dies. The third guy, who is obviously in charge, gets upset and empties a fifteen-round magazine into these two goons who screwed up.”
“And your point is?” O’Brien asked as if all of this made perfect sense.
“We’re shooters,” Rapp said, waving his thumb back and forth between Hurley and himself. “If we had hit that safe house it would have been no different. One shot in each guy’s head. If we’d brought Scott along with his guys, there would have been some double taps . . . but my point is there’s always a pattern. Good shooters are disciplined shooters. It doesn’t matter how mad we get, we don’t empty magazines into people just because we’re pissed off.”
All eyes moved to Hurley to assess what he thought. He ran his finger along his dry lips and nodded. “He has a point.”
“I think this could be an exception,” O’Brien said. “Going through what they went through to get Rick and then having him die after they’d broken him, but had only scratched the surface.” O’Brien thought of himself in the same situation. “I might lose my focus for a second or two.”
“Let me try it this way. The people who hit the safe house were pros. The two goons who beat up Rick were not pros. You can see it in the way they move. The third guy,” Rapp shook his head, “he’s a different story. When I watch him on the video I can’t help but think he’s putting on an act for the camera.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch, Mitch,” Kennedy said.
“It might be, but have you guys heard about the ballistics from the safe house?” They all shook their heads no, so Rapp continued. “Three of the bodyguards were shot in the center of the forehead with nine-millimeter rounds. All of them were on the first floor. The fourth guard was shot in the back of the head with a .45 caliber round. He was on the second floor moving toward the stairs, probably responding to the commotion downstairs. Rick’s personal sidearm was a Kimber .45.”
“I heard some rumblings about this,” O’Brien said in obvious disagreement. “I think the fourth guard was the inside guy and Rick found out at the last minute and shot him.”
“And the security system getting bypassed?”
“The bodyguards had the codes to arm and disarm it.”
“But, they didn’t have the codes to take it off-line. To shut the whole thing down, cameras and all . . . only Rick could have done something like that, or Marcus. Not a bunch of clowns from the Taliban.”
“They lived with Rick,” Kennedy said. “It would be entirely plausible for one of them to pick up on the codes.”
“Okay, how about the safe?” Rapp said. “It was opened without any coercion. Sid checked it out. There was blood all over the hallway on the second floor but not a speck on the safe. She makes a very strong point that the safe was opened by someone who had not been injured. At first I assumed Rick just wasn’t very tough, they put a gun to his head, and he opened the safe. Well, if you believe everything you see in that video we find out he’s pretty damn tough. They would have had to slap him silly to get him to open that safe and there would have been some blood.”
