Vince Flynn - The Last Man

“You better not have disclosed all your financials,” Hurley said in his typical gruff tone. “Have you learned nothing from me?”

“Stan,” Kennedy said in a chiding tone.

“Stan, nothing,” Hurley shot back. “We’re out there putting our nuts on the chopping block. We don’t get any hazard pay. You know the rule, if we come across some ill-gotten gains along the way they go into our rainy-day fund.”

This was all old-school. Kennedy hated it when they talked this way around her. On a certain level she understood where they were coming from, but it was something she could never condone. “This is the type of talk that gets a man like Wilson all lathered up.”

Hurley slapped his hand through the air, rejecting the complaint. “We’re not stupid. The majority of the stuff we come across gets kicked into the various accounts we’re talking about to help fund these ops, but you can’t begrudge my boys’ taking a little commission along the way. It’s the only insurance we have if we need to run.”

“Well, you shouldn’t need to run.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.” Hurley was getting angry. “Try to tell that to this idiot Wilson and that cock sucker Ferris. Shit.” Hurley set his drink down and grabbed a pack of unfiltered Camels. As he lit the cigarette he caught the look of concern on Kennedy’s face. Hurley exhaled a cloud of smoke into the lights above the table and said, “Listen here, princess. I have cancer. I’m going to die. A couple more of these aren’t going to matter.” Hurley took another drag and then felt bad for the rebuke. Kennedy was like a niece to him. “I’ve had an amazing life. No regrets… at least none that I’m going to tell this group… well, maybe I’ll tell Mitch before I croak, but I don’t want to see any long faces. We’re all dying. The fact that I’ve made it this long is amazing.” Hurley held up his glass. “To a full life.”

They all touched glasses. Kennedy wiped a single tear from her cheek and laughed. “It is pretty amazing that you’ve lived this long. You’ve been smoking those things for as long as I can remember.”

“Before you were born,” Hurley added with a wink and a swig of Jack Daniel’s. “Started at fourteen back in Bowling Green.” Hurley got this faraway look on his face as he thought of his childhood, stint in the military, and then the glory years of working for the CIA behind the Iron Curtain. He had lived a blessed life. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and said, “Back to this banker. I assume we’re digging deep.”

“I have Marcus on it, as well as a few other things. So far nothing to go on but we do have something that… ah, is a little odd.” Kennedy looked almost sheepish as she turned to Rapp. “Something we need to discuss, actually.” She didn’t know exactly how to do this, so she just said it. “Does the name Louie Gould ring a bell?”

The glass of vodka was half full. Rapp looked into it and for a moment considered throwing the whole thing back. Instead he pushed it toward the center of the table and said, “I remember him.”

“You remember what he did?”

Rapp didn’t flinch. “He killed my wife.”

Kennedy swallowed hard and asked, “Do you remember what happened with him in Kabul?”

“That part’s a little fuzzy. I remember seeing him right before all hell broke loose and then nothing.”

Kennedy had been trying to figure out the odds of this strange coincidence. “Would you care to take a guess where Gould does his banking in Switzerland?”

“Herr Obrecht.”

“That’s right. He is Mr. Gould’s private banker.”

“You’re shitting me.” Hurley was out of his chair. “This whole fucking thing is really starting to stink.”

Kennedy was used to this kinetic behavior. Hurley, like Rapp, was not good at sitting still for very long. She likened it to sharks that never stop moving. “Gould has other bankers that he uses, but Obrecht is one of his main ones.”

Hurley paced to the refrigerator, exhaled a cloud of smoke, took a drink, and then came back to the table. “You know what this is starting to look like?”

Kennedy nodded. She’d thought it through.

“A well-planned, multi pronged attack. Layered like the Russians used to do. Confusing as all shit until you got rid of all the deceptions and the feints and focused on their objective.”

“And what’s the objective this time?” Kennedy asked.

“The hell if I know. I mean we know, in a general sense, that this was designed to cripple us, but we don’t know the specifics yet.”

Rapp frowned and shook his head. A memory was coming back to him. A conversation he’d had with Rickman a long time ago. It was vague because Rickman had been talking so fast and flying off on tangents and then circling back.

Kennedy noticed the look on Rapp’s face and asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Something Rick said to me years ago… probably fifteen-plus. I don’t remember all of it, but it was about clandestine operations and how they should be set up and run on multiple levels. It was about recruiting high-placed assets. That it wasn’t enough to just recruit them. To increase our chances for success, secondary and tertiary operations needed to be launched that would distract the watchers.. the guys who would be keeping an eye on our asset to make sure he wasn’t spying for the other side. He was very animated when he made the point that to increase our chances of success we needed to disrupt those people.” Rapp’s face brightened as it started to come back to him. He snapped his fingers. “His idea was to frame the watchers, for example by making it look like they themselves were spies… set up real accounts in their names and if our asset was uncovered make the information public so the watchers would be distracted defending themselves. He advocated sleeping with the person’s spouse and a slew of things… anything that would trip the watchers up.”

“So you’re saying that’s what another intelligence agency was doing to us by using Herr Obrecht?”

“Possibly… they set up this bullshit story with this banker and they spoon-feed the info to the FBI to throw us off our game. And it almost worked. If Wilson had gotten a toehold, you and I and a lot of other people would be spending a shitload of time with the Feds right now, trying to prove our innocence.”

“If your theory is right,” Kennedy said, “then what’s their endgame? What are they trying to distract us from? And what does a theory Rickman had fifteen years ago have to do with it?”

Rapp grabbed his glass of vodka and took a drink. He thought about the last week and its roller-coaster of emotions. The “oh shit” fear when they’d found out Rick was gone, the horror and panic over the release of the interrogation clip, and the absolute relief many of them had felt when they’d found the camera and learned that Rickman was dead and his secrets were safe. That was the feint, Rapp realized. “You’re not going to want to hear this,” Rapp finally said, looking at Kennedy. “Rick’s not dead. They just wanted us to think he was dead.”

“You have no proof… it’s just your gut!”

“I told you already. I didn’t buy the idea that the same people who hit the safe house could have accidentally killed Rick and then conveniently left behind that camera for us to find.”

For Kennedy it was a frightening proposition. “This is all conjecture.”

“You feel comfortable not acting on it?”

She thought about that for a long time. “No, I don’t.”

“Then I’d better get my butt to Zurich ASAP.”

“Are you up to it?”

“I feel fine.”

Kennedy looked at Lewis for his opinion. “Just don’t hit your head,” the doctor warned Rapp.