Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
“I’M taking this chair.”
The muscular Pakistani man grabbed the chair in question and dragged it across AstroTurf-coated concrete to the far side of the patio. He didn’t wait for a reply from the table’s occupant. The Pakistani’s companion, a pretty brunette, frowned at her date’s boorish behavior. Though the sun had long since set and the evening’s unseasonably muggy air settled on the shoulders of her robin-egg blue shalwar kameez like a thick cotton blanket, she still shivered.
Sunrise Café was a trendy spot, and its outdoor courtyard was much in demand. The patio was populated by white wicker tables and matching chairs adorned with plush red cushions. Potted plants surrounded the seating area and hung from wooden adornments while cooling electric fans provided a semblance of a breeze.
The breeze had not caused the woman’s shiver.
Something about the slim man seated alone at the far side of the café gave her pause. Though there was nothing about his manner to suggest that he’d understood what her boyfriend had said, or taken offense at her date’s rude actions, the woman could not shake her sense of unease.
The man had an olive complexion and thick, black hair that had begun to gray at the temples. He could have passed for a half a dozen nationalities, but his expensive linen slacks, tailored sport coat, and silk dress shirt worn open at the collar had a European flair. He hadn’t so much as looked up from his paper during the earlier interaction, but as if he could feel her gaze, he did so now.
The woman swallowed.
Though the man’s face bore no malice, his eyes made her stomach tremble. The black orbs stared through her, and she shivered a second time.
“Sorry,” the woman said, mouthing the word.
The man gazed at her for a beat longer.
Then, he slowly nodded.
“Sorry for what?” her date said. “Him? He’s nothing.”
The woman smiled at her companion as he settled into his chair. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.
Her boyfriend was not right.
The man had gone back to his paper and a sense of calm settled over the patio, though the woman couldn’t help but think that it was the calm before a storm.
Mitch Rapp was accustomed to being underestimated.
To be fair, Rapp made a practice of appearing as something other than he was. This was not so much because he was embarrassed about his vocation as that what he did for a living wasn’t often discussed in polite company.
Rapp was a professional killer.
“FAIRBANKS confirmed. I say again, FAIRBANKS confirmed, over.”
Rapp fought the urge to grind his teeth at the radio transmission, choosing instead to vent his frustration on his espresso. Selecting the unsuspecting spoon lying adjacent to the ceramic cup, he stirred the dark contents with an altogether unnecessary vigor.
Rapp knew that the man currently making his way down School Road toward Sunrise Café had been given the CIA code name FAIRBANKS. He knew that the Pakistani businessman owned homes on three continents. Rapp knew that he walked with an altered gait because of a cricket injury that had occurred at age twelve, that his hook nose curved slightly to the left, and that his right cheek sported a trio of pockmarks courtesy of a bout of measles.
Pockmarks that formed a precise isosceles triangle.
Rapp also knew that FAIRBANKS was a shitbag of the first order.
He knew all this because Rapp had been hunting FAIRBANKS for the better part of five years and, after finding him, had personally pitched this operation to Irene Kennedy, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Rapp’s boss. Rapp no more needed a CIA analyst who was watching FAIRBANKS’s route of travel from miles away, courtesy of a clandestine camera to verify the businessman’s identity, than he needed help picking out his own mother from across the kitchen table.
But the voice was whispering in his ear all the same.
With a final stir of the swirling liquid, Rapp tapped the spoon on the edge of his cup before setting the utensil on the saucer’s edge. The silverware’s placement was perfect, exactly ninety degrees from the cup and without a drop of liquid to foul the white tablecloth or the precisely folded newspaper lying to the cup’s left. This level of attention to detail was not because he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder or because he had a particular penchant for table manners.
No, his current behavior was driven by something else.
His legend.
While his features and polyglot ability permitted Rapp to pass for a number of nationalities, the Bordeaux-colored passport in his sport coat pocket proclaimed him a proud citizen of the République française and he intended to behave as such. Rapp was well traveled enough to know that not every French businessman was a caricature of the anal, self-absorbed Frog lampooned by American popular culture, but the stereotype existed for a reason. For the most part, people saw what they expected to see, and when the events of the next few moments were over, Rapp fervently hoped that his fellow Islamabad diners remembered a meticulous Frenchman occupying the table closest to the pedestrian path.
If they remembered anything at all.
“IRONMAN, please confirm you received our last transmission, over.”
On the pretext of scratching an itch, Rapp sent an index finger deep into his ear canal and removed a tiny flesh-colored receiver. He ruffled his paper to distract any wandering eyes even as he deposited the pea-size bit of electronics into his coffee, where it promptly sank from sight. Though he knew his actions would necessitate a sit-down with Irene when he returned stateside, Rapp already felt better.
The same could not be said of his earpiece.
An operational team was sometimes merited, but this was not the case tonight. Rapp had begun his CIA employment by working as a singleton. A lone killer. He hadn’t worked alone because he was some sort of antisocial vigilante. Rapp operated solo because he was good.
Very good.
The kind of good in which additional operational support tended to become a hindrance rather than a help. Saddling Rapp with extra shooters when he didn’t need them was the equivalent of teaming Kobe Bryant with players from a local high school. Unless Rapp picked his teammates, the other operatives just got in the way.
And he had not picked this team.
As if summoned by his thoughts, his burner phone vibrated.
Rapp reached into his pocket and powered down the device.
While he considered the earpiece gracing the bottom of his coffee cup extraneous, the same could not be said of his phone. There was a difference between being headstrong and acting foolishly. In roughly three minutes, Rapp intended to rid the earth of a particularly vile human being, and he had no intention of following his prey into the afterlife. To escape, Rapp would need the burner phone, so he permitted the device’s continued presence, but he did not need the distraction poised by whoever was currently texting him.
A car pulled up to the curb on Rapp’s left.
He allowed his gaze to settle on the vehicle with the same casual interest that might be displayed by any of the café’s patrons.
Rapp’s interest was not casual.
FAIRBANKS did not owe his survival to good fortune. While Rapp had been in the field long enough to understand the role that luck played in any operation, this alone was not enough to keep a man safe from a predator with Rapp’s abilities.
FAIRBANKS was still alive because he’d had help.
Help of the kind only a nation-state could provide.
By killing FAIRBANKS, Mitch intended to send the government who had aided and abetted his evil an unambiguous message—the old rules no longer applied. Nearly a decade after nineteen jihadis had perpetrated the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the war on terror had reached an inflection point. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan could either help the United States track down and eliminate terrorists or suffer the consequences.
A blunt message to be delivered by a blunt-force object.
The car door opened, and a man exited.
But not just any man.
Colonel Dariush Ruyintan stood not more than a stone’s throw from Rapp’s table.
Though Rapp was a veteran of countless clandestine operations, the sight of Ruyintan rocked him to his core. The Iranian Quds Force expeditionary commander had more American blood on his hands than any single individual save perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. He had funded the work into explosively formed penetrators and had masterminded the ratlines through which the devices had poured into Iraq from Iran. Though the US troop surge had stabilized Iraq and saved the war, Ruyintan had been the one who’d made it necessary. The intelligence officer had been so successful at countering American anti-insurgency efforts that Irene had lobbied to replace the head of Al Qaeda with Ruyintan as the number one counterterrorism target.
The CIA director hadn’t won that battle, but she’d had a pointed conversation with her top counterterrorism operative all the same. If Rapp ever found himself able to eliminate the Iranian, he was to do so. Fate had just served up the opportunity of a lifetime, but there was a problem.
Rapp already had someone else to kill.
Imported From: United States