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“What do you mean?” Hurley asked.
“What if Durrani was still alive? What if we’d captured and not killed him? How many scenarios did he have covered?”
“About a thousand if I know that little weasel,” Hurley said.
She pressed the play button and Rickman came to life again.
“I have to admit that I thought Gould had a good chance to take you out. I mean, if not him, who? He’s one of the top private contractors in the world and he already blew the crap out of your wife and kid.”
Rickman’s face broke into a wide grin as Rapp’s darkened. He wished the son of a bitch really could come back to life. Because then he could kill him again.
“Look over at him, Irene,” Rickman continued. “Does he look pissed? Well, how do you think I feel? I’m dead. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Mitch. Lord knows you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, but you do have one undeniable talent: not getting killed. When it comes to you surviving and your enemies ending up with a bullet in their skulls, you’re an honest-to-God genius. Or maybe I should say idiot savant.”
He laughed a little too wildly. As though he knew he no longer had to contain it. That he no longer had anyone to fool.
“Afghanistan will drive you nuts. You know that. We’ve talked about it. A thousand years of culture, man. You could kill everyone here except one cute little seven-year-old girl and you know what she’d do? Stab you with a pair of scissors the minute you turned your back. You might as well try to create a democracy in a rattlesnake den. And now the politicians are giving money and jobs to the people who a few years ago were trying to kill us.”
What he was saying was true. Congress had decided that if they just threw enough money around, everyone in Afghanistan would learn to get along. In reality, the politicians just wanted out in the most face-saving way possible. Kick the problem down the road until they were retired and hitting golf balls in Florida.
“This place ruined my life, my family, my health. I have nothing left. A little pension so I can spend my old age sitting alone in a one-bedroom apartment while these bastards sit in their mansions and eat caviar with their kids.”
He pulled his feet off the desk and leaned into the camera. “You destroyed me, Irene. So I’m going to return the favor. The leaks are going to keep coming. When I’m done with you, you’ll be in jail and the CIA will be an embarrassing little entry in a history book. The world is chaos, punctuated by brief outbreaks of civilization. Mitch, you know that better than anyone. Where you go wrong is thinking you can change it.”
He leaned back in his chair again, flashing another insane smile. “See you again soon.”
The screen went black and Kennedy took a hesitant step backward. She’d offered to promote him, to pull him out of Afghanistan. But he’d repeatedly declined. Had the warning signs been there? Had she ignored them out of fear of losing his unique skill set?
Rapp seemed to read her mind. “We’re all crazy, Irene. It’s a prerequisite for the job. No one saw this coming. Not me, not Stan, and not Mike. Even the people who worked with Rick every day were completely blindsided.”
“It wasn’t their responsibility to see it coming. It was mine.”
“Spilt milk,” Hurley said impatiently. “You make things too complicated. All we have to do is find the people who have Rick’s files and kill them. Problem solved.”
“What did he know?” she said. “Sitting Bull was well outside his sphere of influence. How long had he been collecting intelligence on our network? How long had he been planning on using it to inflict maximum damage? And it’s not just what he knew. He could lie, too. He could establish his credibility by handing over some legitimate -assets, then start mixing in disinformation by naming people who aren’t on our payroll.”
“If he was going to release it all at once, he’d have done it by now,” Rapp said. “No, he’s going to dribble it out. Use it to torture us. That gives us time. Stan’s right, we just have to find who has the files and stop them. Then it’s over.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“We follow the only lead we have.”
“Obrecht,” she acknowledged.
Leo Obrecht was a Swiss national who controlled Sparkasse Schaffhausen, a boutique bank based in Zurich. His name and that of his organization had been coming up since Rickman first disappeared. It was he who had accused Rapp and Rickman of depositing illicit personal funds in his bank.
Most interestingly, though, he was Louis Gould’s handler. Vetting offers and accepting payments for an assassin wasn’
t exactly a common side project for a reputable banker.
“If I recall correctly,” Kennedy said, “getting to Obrecht didn’t work out well last time.”
When Rapp had gone to Europe to get answers from the man, he’d run into a carload of ISI agents with the same mission. Three ended up dead and the other, Kassar, had been captured. Later, he’d proved critical to the operation against Rickman and Durrani.
“Obrecht’s personal security is tight as hell,” Rapp agreed. “And it’s gotten even tighter since the incident with the Pakistanis. He doesn’t leave his property at all anymore. But based on the amount of encrypted Internet traffic running between his mansion and the bank, he’s keeping busy.”
“Busy wiping all evidence of his involvement in this thing from his company’s records,” Kennedy said.
“A good bet.”
