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It was a question that would never be answered. His old friend would be gone soon. Rapp could smell death a mile away and Hurley stunk of it. Just like everyone did eventually. Just like he would one day.
Rapp opened his eyes, but didn’t bother looking out the window again. Dwelling on Hurley’s cancer was a waste of time. It was beyond his control and he had bigger fires to put out.
Scott Coleman’s update two hours ago suggested that the Russian surveillance on Sitting Bull was getting more intense. As problems went, that was only the tip of the iceberg. What worried him was why the man was suddenly being tailed. Certainly not solely because of the brief mention of a code name on the Rickman video. Russia’s internal security agency, the FSB, would have no way to connect it to Vasily Zhutov. No, the only answer was that Rickman had leaked additional classified information before Rapp had put a bullet in his head. But how much more?
The hum of the landing gear lowering filled the cabin. Rapp cleared his mind of the thousand disaster scenarios fighting for his attention and focused on the problem at hand. The FSB had undoubtedly been following Zhutov to see if he would lead them to anyone interesting, but now Coleman’s team was seeing activity that suggested the Russians were setting up for a rendition.
The question was what to do about it. Zhutov didn’t know anything particularly useful about the CIA’s network, and his cover appeared to have already been blown. That made sitting back and letting the FSB snatch him the option that most of the desk jockeys at Langley would go for. Just another casualty in the game they’d been playing with the Russians for nearly three-quarters of a century.
In Rapp’s mind—and to a slightly lesser degree in Kennedy’s—that was an unacceptable sacrifice. Sitting Bull had put himself in harm’s way to help the CIA contain Russia’s unpredictable and often self-destructive impulses. Rapp had worked with many moles over the years—traitors who betrayed their homelands for money, or sex, or revenge. They could be useful but were never to be trusted or regarded with anything but contempt.
Zhutov was different. He was a patriot who loved his country and believed in its potential to be a positive force in the world. He’d made it clear from the beginning that he would never give up military secrets and he refused any kind of compensation. Rapp admired him, and there was no way he was going to leave the man twisting in the wind.
How many more Sitting Bulls were out there? All the assets Rickman had given up in his phony torture video were accounted for in one way or another—either vanished, dead, squirreled away in a U.S. embassy, or covered by a team like Coleman’s. What else had Rick known? Who else had he given up before Rapp had killed him?
The rain started as they touched down on the private airport’s only runway. Rapp walked forward as they taxied, grabbing a duffel from the closet and waiting for the plane to roll to a stop next to a parking lot scattered with cars. The cockpit door remained closed, as was his preference, so he opened the hatch himself and jumped down.
A quick scan of the area turned up no movement. The cars all appeared to be empty and, as promised, no one from the airport was there to greet him. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket to obscure his face not only from anyone looking down from the tower, but also from his own pilots.
The weathered Ford was right where Coleman said it would be, isolated on the east corner of the lot. Rapp tossed his bag in the back and slid behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition, and a well-used passport identifying him as Mitch Kruse was in the glove box with all the proper entry stamps.
He started the engine and pulled out onto the road, staying well within the speed limit as he dialed his phone. It was picked up on the first ring.
“How’s the car?” Scott Coleman said.
“Fine. What’s the situation? Are our competitors looking to make a move?” The phone was encrypted but neither of them trusted the technology. In light of the NSA’s obsession with vacuuming up every cell signal on the planet, it was best to keep the conversation in line with his cover as a sales executive.
“An hour ago I would have said the situation wasn’t pressing. Now, though, things are starting to look more urgent. I’m glad you’re here to help close the deal.”
• • •
Rapp managed to cover the fifteen miles to the center of town relatively quickly. Coleman had sent his coordinates to Rapp’s phone, and the turn-by-turn instructions were being fed to an earpiece camouflaged by the intersection of his beard and shaggy hair. Parking tended to be opportunistic in Istanbul, so he pulled in behind some disused scaffolding and stepped out into the cool drizzle.
The sidewalk was typically crowded with pedestrians, but no one gave him a second glance as he lit a cigarette and started up a side street. The leather jacket and dark jeans were right down the center of Istanbul fashion. Combined with his black hair and dark complexion, he became just another local hurrying to get out of the rain.
The clouds were too thick to get a precise bead on the sun, but Rapp guessed it had sunk below the horizon about five minutes ago. Headlights were coming on around him, glaring off wet stone and prompting him to pick up his pace. This is when it would happen—the short period of disorientation when the primitive part of the human mind adjusted from day to night.
The foot traffic thinned as he entered an area lined with closed stores devoted to electronics and construction materials. Sitting Bull would certainly be aware of the Rickman video, but he didn’t know his own code name and would have no reason to believe that a man working in Jalalabad would have any knowledge of his existence. Because of that, he was still comfortable routing through this relatively quiet part of Istanbul to get home from his job. Sharif had been cursed with a similarly careless habit of walking his dog in the same park at the same time every morning. And look what happened to him.
The mechanical voice was still giving him directions through his earpiece. Another three minutes and he spotted the hazy but unmistakable outline of Joe Maslick crammed behind the wheel of a white panel van.
Rapp slowed and casually dialed Coleman, looking around as though he were lost.
“Have you arrived?” Coleman said by way of a greeting. “The meeting is about to start.”
“Thirty seconds out.”
“Why don’t you come in through the back?”
Rapp disconnected the call and skirted around the rear of the van, opening the door and slipping into the cramped space. Maslick didn’t look back, instead continuing to watch the street through the rain-soaked windshield. Coleman pulled his earphones partially off and pointed toward a shaky image on one of the monitors.
“Bebe’s still following Zhutov. Based on what we’ve seen over the last few days, he’ll cross another two streets and then go diagonal into a small square. There’s a van parked at the north end with two men in the front seats. No way to know if anyone’s in the back. They’ve been there for a half an hour, which is about the variation in Zhutov’s schedule depending on if he stops for coffee. Luckily, he did today.”
Rapp nodded. “Tie me into Bebe.”
Coleman flipped a switch on the console in front of him and held out the microphone that had been clipped to his collar. The heavily encrypted radio signal didn’t travel very far, so Rapp felt comfortable being more direct than he would be on the phone.
“Bebe. Slow down when you start to approach the square. I don’t want you anywhere near this when it goes down.”
