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“I sent you there to meet with them. You kept avoiding those meetings.”
“You sent me there because I was expendable and couldn’t reveal anything about you or your organization. And I don’t take that personally. Business is business. But now you’re thinking about contacting the Russians and telling them about my involvement. Maybe even releasing your side of the story to the media. You believe it’ll start so much nuclear saber-rattling that you can just disappear into it.”
“The Russians have a reputation for making examples of people who cross them.”
“I’m sure you can stay one step ahead. In my experience, they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed—particularly with Semenov out of the picture. Plus, you’re ignoring the upside.”
“Upside?”
“Your legend is a big part of what keeps you alive, and sticking your foot in the Russian Federation’s ass isn’t exactly going to hurt your image.”
“Your arguments would be more persuasive if they weren’t complete bullshit,” Losa said, doing two things he religiously avoided—raising his voice and using profanity. Across the room, Julian’s eyes widened, but not at his boss’s unusual behavior. At what he saw on his computer screen. His hand shot out to the keyboard and the call disconnected.
“What? What is it?”
His lieutenant spun the laptop so that Losa could see the screen. “He’s not calling from Virginia, Damian. He’s calling from Prague.”
When Damian Losa stepped through the door to his study, the staff had already lowered the shades and dimmed the lights so that his movements would be obscured from anyone with a sight line on the windows. All security shifts were now active, and they were bringing in more men from his operations around the globe. Various vehicles and aircraft, as well as a number of body doubles, were being coordinated to help him slip out of Europe to a property he’d acquired in Ecuador only a few days ago. Irene Kennedy was unquestionablybrilliant, but she wasn’t clairvoyant. If he could get out of there without being tracked, he’d be safe. Not forever, of course, but for long enough to contemplate his next move. And more important, to contemplate Mitch Rapp’s.
What exactly were the man’s intentions? Had he called to lull his target into a sense of false security while he approached from the shadows? Certainly, Losa’s death would be convenient to him, the CIA, and America. As long as he was breathing, there was a chance he could leak the Agency’s role in Aleksandr Semenov’s disappearance.
He paused in the center of the room, looking at a bottle of Perrier on the sideboard and glancing behind him at the still-open door. Uncertain what else to do, he approached and carried out the ritual that had become so important to his mental state: the careful slicing of a lime, the placing of it in a crystal glass with a few cubes of ice, the pouring of the water. After an initial sip, he picked up the remaining item on the tray. A Glock 19.
This one had a silencer screwed to it, but there was nothing else remarkable about it. Other than the fact that Mitch Rapp had managed to put it there.
The message was clear. Their business together was done unless Losa decided otherwise.
He put the weapon back on the tray and walked calmly through the house as his staff rushed around him. Julian was in the living room, tearing down his electronics and trying to maintain some order amid the chaos that had taken hold.
“Send everyone home,” Losa called to the man. “We’re staying.”
EPILOGUE
WEST OFMANASSAS
VIRGINIA
USA
RAPPcouldn’t help feeling a little disoriented as he pulled up to his property. It had been less than two months since he last saw it, but it felt like two years. Further, Claudia hadn’t opened the gate from inside when she’d seen his car coming. It had become a bit of a battle of wills between them—him insisting that those were the kinds of sloppy protocols that got people killed and her insisting that he was paranoid. Had her fear of Damian Losa won him the war?
Somehow, he doubted it.
Rapp pressed his thumb to the reader and waited for the barrier to slide open, glancing in the rearview mirror every few seconds out of habit. The neighborhood felt abandoned and would continue that way for another week or so. All of the men who had participated in the Syrian operation had been safely extracted and fully paid. Wick was already back in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming, the only place he felt comfortable. Coleman had sailed from Cyprus to his place inGreece, where he’d met Bruno McGraw and Joe Maslick for a couple of weeks of R&R. Ahmed was apparently up and walking around his Berlin hospital room against doctor’s orders, demanding to be sent home to Jordan.
Losa had stayed put in Prague and was now under heavy CIA surveillance. Less because Rapp thought he would try to retaliate or run his mouth, and more in case the Russians came after him. Not that any of those scenarios seemed likely. The Kremlin had problems mounting so fast and from so many directions that a confrontation with Damian Losa was a headache they didn’t need. In the end, Rapp had gotten the better of the Mexican, but his takeaway was that Losa wasn’t a man to be fucked with.
As for Aleksandr Semenov, his situation had significantly improved. They’d transported him to a remote compound in Latvia, where the stick had transformed into a carrot. A talented chef, fawning staff, and a steady stream of high-dollar hookers had loosened him up even more than the cattle prod to the balls. Not only was he providing increasingly detailed information on Russia’s asymmetrical warfare capabilities, but he was also gleefully critiquing and tweaking America’s own. The man was a flat-out genius, but one with a pathological need to constantly prove he was the smartest guy in the room. CIA psychologists were carefully manipulating that trait and Kennedy was already comparing his potential to that of Wernher von Braun after World War II.
Not surprisingly, Russian intelligence was desperately trying to locate him, but would find nothing other than clues carefully designed to suggest that he’d been killed by the same insurgent group that kidnapped him.
Not a bad couple of months’ work, as long as no one ever found out about it.
When he pulled through the gate, Anna was already sprinting across the courtyard. Claudia wasn’t far behind, but keeping a more measured pace. Anna collided with him when he stepped from the car, leaping up and wrapping herself around his torso.
“We just got back, too!” she said breathlessly. “We were in New York. But in the country. It’s not just one big city, you know. We had tons of land and tons of horses. My instructor was named Anna, too. And she said I was really good. I learned superfast and could even jump.”
“You mean the horse jumped and you just sat on it.”
