Vince Flynn - The Last Man

“I always have concerns.”

“Share them.”

“Some things don’t make sense.”

“Such as?”

She hesitated and then said, “Come here and I’ll show you.” They started down the hall. “Careful where you step.”

Rapp looked down and stepped around a sizable pool of blood. That was when he noticed the splatter on the wall. “What’s this?”

Hayek looked over her shoulder. “One thing at a time. I want to show you the office first.” She entered the room and walked behind the desk. There were no windows, the walls and ceiling were covered with acoustic foam, and the floor was covered with a series of rubber squares. Behind the desk, a narrow door covered in foam was open. Behind it was the open safe.

“What am I looking for?” Rapp asked.

“Nothing.” Hayek turned off the lamp on the desk and then hit the UV light on her visor. She looked down at the floor in front of the safe and then expanded the area, sweeping the light back and forth. “No blood. Not a drop.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Come here.” She walked across the room and stepped into the hallway. She hit the light switch and extinguished the hallway lights. The UV light on her visor lit up splotches and splatters of blood. “Lots of blood out here, but none in there. Now, I don’t know Rickman, but I’ve heard he was a pretty serious man.”

“Your point?”

“I’ve been around you long enough to guess that someone would have to beat you to a bloody pulp before you’d even think of opening that safe.”

Rapp nodded.

“There’s no blood in the office.”

“The rough stuff could have started anywhere… down in the kitchen.”

Hayek shook her head. “And there would be blood in that office.. even if it were just small traces, but there isn’t any.”

Hayek’s theory was slowly sinking in. “What else do you have?”

“This mess.” Hayek pointed at the blood on the wall. “Best guess is it belongs to one of the bodyguards downstairs.”

“The one missing half his face?”

“Yeah.” Hayek edged closer to the wall. She pointed at a gooey chunk. “I have samples of everything and I’ll be able to test them for verification when we get back stateside, but I’m 99 percent sure this is brain matter with a little bit of bone and blood. Consistent with the gunshot wound received by John Doe number four downstairs.”

“And this should interest me how?”

“Look at the pattern of the splatter.” Hayek acted as if she was holding a gun. “The bodyguard would have been facing this way toward the stairs. The person came up and shot him from behind. The bullet tore through his head, exited, leaving this large splatter on the wall, and then the bodyguard fell facedown here. That’s why there’s the big pool of blood.”

Rapp studied the blood splatter on the wall. It all lined up. “I agree. So what’s your point?”

“Three of the four guards were shot in the face… makes sense. They were reacting to the intrusion. Going to meet the threat. This one, though, is shot in the back of the head. Doesn’t make sense. He should have been shot over there at the top of the stairs, by the perps coming up the stairs.”

Rapp ignored her police talk. He was a little irritated with himself for not seeing it sooner. “How closely did you look at the bodies downstairs?”

“Close enough.”

“Did you take measurements of the entrance wounds?”

“Not exact, but I’m pretty confident that the first three men were shot by a nine-millimeter.”

“And you know that how?”

Hayek held up a Ziploc bag with three brass shell casings. “I found these on the floor.”

“And the fourth man?”

Hayek shook her head. “I’ve looked all over this hallway and the stairs and I can’t find the casing.”

“Best guess on the caliber?”

“Best guess… a. 45… hollow point. Definitely not the same caliber that took out the other guys.”

Rapp ran all the information through his head, knew where it was taking him, but didn’t want to go there even though he knew he had to. He looked back in the office. There was no sign of struggle. Not a thing out of place. The hallway was a bloody mess. Rapp’s eyes focused on the Rorschachlike splatter. “I suppose the slug is buried in that wall.”

“Yeah… I was going to dig it out but I wanted to ask you first. I don’t know this team coming in from Langley… don’t want to step on their toes.”

It would be a problem but Rapp could deal with it. “Dig it out as quick as you can. Anything else you need to tell me about?”

Hayek hesitated and then said, “No.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I’ll know more when I start matching up the blood samples with the bodies. I think we’ll be able to get a pretty clear picture of where everyone was when this thing went down.”

“Nice work, Sid. Do me a favor and keep this between the two of us. Until we know for certain, I don’t want anyone running around pedaling half-baked ideas. Anyone leans on you, send them to me. Understood?”

Kennedy had asked her to relay as much information as possible as quickly as possible. Hayek could see that she was caught between her two bosses, but Rapp was just starting to trust her, so she said, “Understood.”

“Good. Wrap things up and be ready to pull out in ten.”

“What’s the rush?”

“There’s a meeting back in Kabul. The whole alphabet soup.”

“You hate those kinds of meetings.”

“I hate any meeting, but especially this kind.” Rapp thought of Sickles running the meeting without him. Why the man worked for the Company was beyond Rapp’s ability to comprehend. “I need to make sure a certain idiot doesn’t make this shit show any worse than it already is.”

U.S. Embassy, Kabul, Afghanistan

“I’ve never even heard of this man,” the woman said with obvious frustration. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

Colonel Hunter Poole took a final drag from his cigarette, then tossed it to the gravel and crushed it with the heel of his black jump boot. “I don’t know much about him.” “But you’ve heard of him?”

Poole knew he needed to be careful. Arianna Vinter was a passionate woman whose one glaring weakness was that she thought she could bully her way to any victory, and from what he’d heard about this Rapp fellow, it was probably not wise to attack him in a direct fashion. Poole shrugged and said, “He’s a spook. They don’t exactly advertise their resumes.”

Vinter regarded her military man with a skeptical squint of her hazel eyes. “You’re holding back.”

Poole played it cool. “I’ve heard a few things… the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into official reports.” He lit another cigarette and said, “He’s notorious in certain circles.”

“Notorious how?” Vinter asked, taking a deep pull off her thin menthol cigarette.

Their liaisons had become increasingly common. The embassy was a crowded, cramped place, and smoking indoors by Americans was strictly forbidden, even in a country where virtually everyone smoked. And then there was the simple fact that they needed to be careful about their relationship. So they came to this corner of the compound where the multi-colored shipping containers were stacked. It was the hinterlands, where the workers and the occasional jarhead came to replenish supplies, but never the higher-ups from the embassy, and Poole and Vinter were definitely higher-ups.

Poole placed a hand against a rust-colored Conex container and thought about the various rumors regarding Mitch Rapp. The man, like Poole, was in his midforties. Unlike Rapp, however, Poole had a sterling record. He’d graduated in the top 5 percent of his class from West Point, completed Ranger School, and then blazed a trail through the big Green Machine with stops at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was a platoon leader in the first Gulf War, and by the time the Iraq campaign started he was the company commander of Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion. He completed three combat tours with the Rangers, two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. During his second tour in Afghanistan he was serving as an intelligence officer on the Joint Special Operations Command staff when he heard his commanding officer tell a story about a CIA covert officer who had bluffed his way into a detention facility at the Bagram Air Base by impersonating a U.S. Air Force colonel from the Office of Special Investigations.