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Durrani’s alliance with Rickman had come as a rare surprise. Fortunately, Taj kept close tabs on everyone in a position of power at the ISI. It had been through this surveillance that he’d become aware of Rickman and decided to delay the implementation of his own plans. The value of the information the CIA man possessed was beyond calculation, a prize Taj never imagined when he’d first started scheming.
His first instinct had been to simply do away with Durrani and take Rickman when he arrived in Pakistan. Upon further consideration, though, he realized it would have been a mistake. Rickman was too brilliant, his mind too twisted. Even under extended interrogation it would be impossible to sort truth from lies.
Taj had no choice but to stay in the background and wait for the man to reveal what he knew. The trick would be finding the right moment to step out of the shadows. While his and Rickman’s goals were similar, they were not the same.
Rickman wanted to punish the CIA, but Taj wanted to co-opt it. If he could gain access to what Rickman knew—his encyclopedic knowledge of every informant, traitor, and double agent in the region—he would have the ability to take control of the massive intelligence network while Irene Kennedy remained completely unaware. Before allowing the CIA to implode under the weight of its sins, he would siphon off its power. He would make the ISI, already swollen with billions of U.S. dollars, the most feared intelligence agency in history.
Unfortunately, between Durrani’s stupidity and Mitch Rapp’s brutality, the situation had become more complicated. In the end, though, it might be better this way. In every disaster lay opportunity.
He’d been watching Rickman long enough to know that the man was aware of the possibility of his own assassination and had made provisions to protect the information he’d so carefully compiled. That witch Kennedy was undoubtedly devoting her organization’s entire capability to locating it but she was at a significant disadvantage. The CIA was just starting its search while Taj’s men were nearing the completion of theirs.
CHAPTER 8
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
U.S.A.
THE intercom on Irene Kennedy’s desk buzzed and she picked up immediately.
“Dr. Kennedy, Senator Ferris just arrived.”
“Thank you. Tell him I’ll be just a moment.”
She pulled up the security feed of her outer office and examined the man walking awkwardly toward a wing-backed chair. The notoriously tardy politician was right on time, and the large taxpayer-funded entourage he normally traveled with was conspicuously absent.
Carl Ferris had been consolidating his power in the Senate since she was in college, finally rising to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. Surrounded exclusively with yes men and lobbyists, his ego had expanded to proportions unusual even by congressional standards. It gave him a gift for pontificating convincingly on any subject, ingratiating him with his constituents who tended to prefer simplicity and certainty to the more nuanced arguments of experts. The intelligence and military communities, though, saw him for what he was: an ignorant and ultimately dangerous blowhard.
He sat staring straight ahead, forgoing his normal demands from her staff for everything from coffee to the removal of a spot from his tie. It was a side of the influential senator that she had never seen, but that wasn’t entirely unexpected.
Ferris had spent the last two years building a web of disgruntle
d CIA, FBI, and State Department employees to help him in his quest to bring the Agency under his control. Combined with information fed to him by a contact high up in Pakistan’s ISI, he had been attempting to assemble enough damning evidence to hold public hearings designed to raise his own stature at the cost of America’s security. Those plans had come to a grinding halt when she and the FBI had wiretapped one of his little cabal’s meetings and arrested a number of his co-conspirators.
“How does he look?”
She glanced up at Mitch Rapp, who was sitting at one end of the conference table centered in her office. “Nervous. But reasonably healthy.”
His eyes narrowed. The CIA possessed information on heart problems that the increasingly overweight senator was keeping quiet in hopes that he would be his party’s next presidential nominee. She was convinced that the first thing Rapp did every morning was check his newsfeeds in hopes of finding a story about Carl Ferris dropping dead.
“I’m going to say again that I’d rather you weren’t part of this meeting, Mitch. Based on what we’ve learned about the Rickman situation, it’s time for a deescalation between us and the senator.”
“I’m staying.”
Kennedy sighed quietly. Ferris was scared, and that was something she could use. Panic, though, was a very different emotional state. It could create an environment where the politician turned desperate and unpredictable.
She reached for the intercom, resigned to the fact that nothing she could say would change Rapp’s mind. “Please send him in.”
Ferris entered a moment later, but froze when he saw Rapp. “What’s he doing here?”
“Please close the door behind you, Senator.”
“Are you crazy? He threatened to kill me! He said he was going to sneak into my house and—”
“Senator!” Kennedy said, allowing the volume of her voice to rise slightly. “Close the door.”
He hesitated, but finally recognized that he had no choice. Kennedy indicated toward the conference table and Ferris kept a wary eye on Rapp as he took the chair farthest from him.
