Vince Flynn: Pursuit of Honor

Hurley cupped his left hand around the tip of the cigarette and spun the wheel on the old Zippo. The flame shot up, and after a long, deep pull he exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, “I know you can, but I need to do this.”

Rapp would have preferred to handle it himself, but he knew there would be no changing Hurley’s mind. “Well . . . let’s get started. I have to be back up at Langley by nine.”

THE big double doors to the barn were closed, so Rapp and Hurley used the smaller service door around the corner. A medium-sized tractor, a couple of ATVs, and a Ford F-150 pickup truck were parked on the side closest to the big doors. The other side of the floor was dominated by what looked like a large safe but was actually an industrial kiln that Hurley used for his incongruous hobby of pottery and a few other things.

The two men walked to the opposite wall and approached a large oak card catalog cabinet. The brown wood was scuffed and dusty and a few of the old brass pulls on the drawers were missing. Even without all the various screws, nuts, bolts, nails, and assorted knickknacks that filled the eighty drawers, the thing looked as if it weighed a thousand pounds. Hurley reached around the back, pressed a button, and the cabinet began to swing away from the wall, revealing a concrete staircase. Rapp went down first, and once Hurley’s head was clear, he punched a code into a keypad. The cabinet began sliding back into place.

Once the cabinet was back in place, Rapp punched in another code. When the light turned green, and he heard the electric motor release the lock, he turned the knob and stepped into a rectangular room with poured-concrete walls. There were two battleship-gray metal desks, a couch, and a round table with four chairs. One man was sitting behind the closest desk. He stood when Hurley and Rapp entered. The second man was on the couch, lying on his back, his feet up, a Baltimore Orioles hat covering his face. He was either sleeping or didn’t care to look and see who had just arrived.

The room had the heavy, sour smell of nicotine. When Rapp had gone through his training this place didn’t exist. Hurley used a discreet contracting firm that was run by a former operative and had it built after 9/11. The floor of the barn was excavated and the foundation underpinned, to make room for the basement. The walls were poured and Spancrete sections were placed on top to create the roof for the new rooms and the floor of the barn. Within a two-hour drive of Washington there were three similar facilities, all of them built with private funding, and each one known by only a handful of individuals. Necessity was, after all, the mother of invention. In order to fulfill its mission the CIA needed to be able to conduct most of what it did away from prying eyes and in secret. Hurley had explained on many occasions that during the Cold War they had more than a dozen such places that they would use to debrief defectors as well as the occasional traitor.

“Where’s the doc?” Hurley asked the big man who had been sitting behind the desk.

The muscular man pointed toward the steel door at the far end of the room and said, “Talking to Adams. Been in there almost two hours.”

The big man’s name was Joe Maslick. He was a native of Chicago, and a former Airborne Ranger, who’d done three tours, one in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. He was wearing a black Under Armour T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

Hurley looked at Rapp and asked, “Is he drunk?”

Rapp nodded. “He was pretty much on his way when we picked him up last night.”

“And since then?”

“I gave him a few drinks on the plane ride down.”

“No problems at the airport?”

Rapp shook his head. “Loaded him in the hangar right there at Teterboro.”

“The pilots?” Hurley asked.

“Cockpit door was closed the whole time.”

Hurley mumbled something under his breath and then said, “Why didn’t you just drive him down?”

Hurley’s words were less a question than a criticism, and Rapp did not do well with either. If it were anyone other than his old instructor, Rapp would have asked him why he hadn’t gotten his lazy ass out of bed and handled the job himself, but it was Hurley, so he gave him a pass. “Stan, these pilots have flown me all over the world. They’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“And if they’re asked at some point who was on that plane . . . ?”

“They’ll say they deadheaded it down to Richmond because they had an early hop the next morning.”

“And when the feds want to talk to the exec who chartered the plane?”

Rapp glanced at his watch. It was 6:58 A.M. “The plane is on its way to Mobile as we speak. And the man on board has no idea I even exist.”

“I still don’t like it,” Hurley grumbled as he began digging for a pack of cigarettes.

Rapp almost said, tough shit, but didn’t, because he knew this was harder on Hurley than he’d ever admit. He had been best friends with Adams’s father. Had served all over the world with him. Wanting to get off the subject, Rapp asked, “Did you listen to the audio from last night?”

“Yeah.” Hurley exhaled a fresh cloud of smoke.

“And?”

Hurley stepped behind the desk and looked at the flat-screen monitor on the left. It showed Adams sitting in the next room talking to a fiftyish man with curly blond hair. His name was Thomas Lewis, and he was a clinical psychologist. Hurley wasn’t sure who he was more upset with, himself or the little turd sitting in the other room. “He’s a fucking traitor . . . an embarrassment to his family name.”

Rapp didn’t know what to say, so he kept his mouth shut, and since Maslick wasn’t much for conversation the three of them stood there in silence watching the screen. Across the room, though, the man napping on the couch decided to make himself heard. From under his baseball cap he announced, “Embarrassing the family name is no reason to kill a man.”

Rapp wasn’t surprised by the comment, but it still pissed him off. He’d been arguing with Mike Nash about this entire mess for the last few hours.

“How about committing treason, boy genius?” Hurley asked.

“Definitely a capital offense, but then again it doesn’t exactly fall under our jurisdiction.”

Hurley’s eyes scanned the surface of the desk, his hands beginning to tremble with rage. He skipped the stapler, grabbed a ceramic coffee mug, and whipped it across the room. The mug hit the concrete wall just above the leather couch and shattered into a thousand pieces, shards raining down on Nash.

Nash jumped off the couch shouting, “What the hell?”

“You wanna argue with me, sport, you do me the courtesy of getting off your ass and looking me in the eye!” Hurley turned to Rapp and snarled, “What kinda shit show are you running? If I wanted personal opinions I’d join a fucking book club.” Hurley set out across the room, growling and cursing under his breath. When he reached the steel door he banged on it several times with his cane and then punched in the code to release the lock.

Rapp looked at Nash and mouthed the words, What in the hell is wrong with you?

Nash didn’t bother to reply. He was too steamed at Hurley to deal with Rapp.

A moment later Dr. Lewis joined them and the door to the interrogation room was closed and locked. No one took a seat. Rapp and Hurley faced Lewis while Maslick stayed behind the desk to keep an eye on the monitors and Nash stayed on the other side of the room, still stewing about his rebuke.

“Give it to me straight,” Hurley said to the shrink.

Lewis started to speak and then paused as if deciding where to begin. He ran a hand through his curly blond hair and said, “Classic narcissistic personality disorder.”