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“I’m sorry. I wish I could have spared you this.”
Claudia shook her head, tears flowing past the streaks of dried ones on her cheeks. “Please don’t, Mitch. Don’t ever tell me you’re sorry. We’d be dead many times over without you. I don’t deserve any of the things you’ve done for me.”
Rapp fished a set of keys from the pocket of one of the dead men. “Wait in the car. I’ll be out in a little while.”
He and Thompson watched her go before turning their attention back to the man pressed against the wall of the embalming room.
“But . . .” he stammered, pointing at the young contractor. “You’ve been paid! We had an agreement!”
His confusion was understandable. Killers of Thompson’s caliber rarely betrayed their customers. At best it was bad for business. At worst it could be deadly.
“I’m not an idiot,” Thompson said. “I work in a pretty exclusive profession, Ilya. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize Louis Gould’s wife and daughter? And that I wouldn’t know Mitch has a history with them? What do you think he was going to do after you were finished leading him around on his wild goose chase? He was going to hunt me down and put a bullet in my head.”
“Gould? I . . . I didn’t know!”
“Yeah, well, whoever you’re working for did. And since they were setting me up, I figured I’d give Mitch a call and return the favor.”
CHAPTER 6
THE Russian crouched and let loose a right hook when Rapp got in range. It wasn’t a bad effort—clearly the man had some training. Based on the speed, though, that training had been a lot of vodka and cigarettes ago.
Rapp ducked and shot an open palm up into the man’s chin. He’d retreated against the cinder-block wall and, as planned, his head snapped back into it. Not with sufficient force to knock him unconscious, but hard enough to make his knees buckle.
Rapp grabbed him by the hair and dragged him to the gurney centered in the room. He shoved the corpse occupying it onto the floor and replaced it with the Russian. He struggled weakly but was too dazed to prevent Rapp from using a roll of duct tape to secure him to the bloodstained metal surface.
“Ilya, right? What’s your last name?” Rapp said, grabbing his phone off the tray and starting to dial.
“I . . . I wasn’t going to harm you,” the man begged uselessly. “I don’t know anything. I was just hired—”
Rapp slapped a piece of tape over his mouth, silencing him as the phone on the other end of the line began to ring. Irene Kennedy picked up a moment later.
“Are Claudia and Anna all right?” she said by way of greeting. As director of the CIA, the demands on her time got worse every year. She reacted by making everything more efficient, and that had prompted her to do away with meaningless pleasantries. Rapp wholeheartedly agreed. After almost a quarter century of working together, small talk was a waste of limited resources.
“They’re fine. I’m holding a Russian who seemed to be running things. He’s got two Middle Eastern sidekicks that I’m betting are ISIS.”
“That’s an odd combination.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Have you had a chance to question them?”
“The Arabs are dead and I’m just about to
have a sit-down with the Russian. What I know at this point, though, is that none of this was about Claudia. It was about getting me out of Pakistan.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ninety percent.”
“There’s only one reason someone would want to do that.”
“Yeah. They’re going to make a move against one of the nukes the army’s moving around.”
“How quickly can you get back to Islamabad?”
Rapp ripped the tape off the Russian’s mouth. “Where are we?”
“I want to—”
