Vince Flynn - American Assassin

Rapp wasn’t sure he could calm his nerves for the border crossing. The reality of what he’d just been through was setting in. There was no queasiness or feeling of nausea. He was simply pumped, the feeling very similar to the way he felt after scoring a game-winning goal, but better. He cranked the music and headed back for Zurich. Greta was on his mind, but there wouldn’t be time. He’d have to grab the first flight to Paris or Istanbul and then on to Damascus.

He made it to Zurich just before four, parked in the rental car lot, and tried to grab a few hours of sleep before things opened at six. It didn’t work, though, and he sat there with his seat reclined, playing it over and over in his head until he had analyzed every second of what had happened with Ismael. Each mistake was noted and alternatives explored, but as his old high-school coach liked to say, “A win is a win. It doesn’t matter how ugly it is.”

Strip it all down and that’s what it was. Rapp won and Ismael lost. As the sun started to rise, Rapp looked out from the concrete parking structure and realized that one day he might be in Ismael’s shoes. He’d pretty much spent the rest of the morning thinking of ways to prevent himself from ending up with a fate similar to that of the Libyan intelligence officer. From Zurich to Istanbul, and then Damascus, and all the way down this hot, dusty road to Beirut, he played a game of chess with himself. What should Ismael have done, and how should he have reacted if Ismael had done something different?

Exhaustion was finally catching up. Rapp let out a long yawn and then the kid motioned him forward. Rapp greeted the kid in French. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Rapp smiled while he tapped out the techno beat and chomped on his gum.

“What is your purpose?” the kid asked with a lack of enthusiasm you’d expect from someone who was expected to stand in the sun all day sucking on emissions and asking the same question over and over.

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Software.”

The kid shook his head. “What’s that?”

“Computer stuff.” Rapp reached over and picked up the flashy color brochure they’d ordered from a French company. He showed the kid, who was by now bored with their conversation.

“I like your music.”

“Really?” Rapp said, surprised. “Are you here every day?”

The kid nodded.

Rapp looked over at the kid’s dusty boom box and then reached over and ejected the tape. He slid it into the case and said, “I’ve been listening to it for a week straight. Knock yourself out. I’ll pick it up when I drive back out in a few days.”

The kid was excited and lowered his rifle. “Thanks… for you… half price today.” He flashed Rapp five fingers.

Rapp paid him, smiled, slipped the little car back into gear, and drove away. It took him another twenty minutes to find the safe house. Based on the stories he’d heard from Hurley, he was surprised that during that time he didn’t run into any more armed men. As per his training, he did a normal drive-by and barely glanced at the building. All he wanted to do was go to sleep, but it had been drilled into him that these were the precautions that would save his life, so he continued past and then circled back, checking the next block in each direction.

It was a five-story apartment building among four-, five-, and six-story apartment buildings. Rapp was too tired to care if it had any architectural characteristics beyond a front and back door. He parked the car, grabbed his bag, and entered the building. He didn’t have a gun on him, at least not yet, so there was pretty much only one thing to do. Climb the stairs. If it was a trap, he’d have to throw his bag at them and lie down and take a nap. No one was waiting for him when he got to the fifth floor. There were three doors on the left and three on the right. They had the two on the right toward the back. Or so he thought. After checking above each door he came up empty, so he checked the ones across the hall and found two keys. That was when he remembered he was supposed to enter from the back of the building.

That snapped him out of it a bit. That and the lesson that he might be Ismael some day. He told himself to slow down and stop rushing things. He checked his watch. It was two-eleven in the afternoon. He hadn’t slept in more than a day, and the day before that only a few hours. He opened the door and closed and locked it behind him. He could barely keep his eyes open, but he still dug out the doorstop and wedged it under the door. Not bothering to check the rest of the place, he went into the bedroom and opened the closet. There on the floor was a suitcase that looked a lot like the one from Istanbul. Rapp placed it on the bed, opened it, and found three Beretta 92Fs with silencers and extra magazines. It was the same suitcase.

Rapp loaded one of the guns and put the suitcase away. With his last bit of strength, he stripped down to his boxers and climbed under the covers of the twin bed. He shoved the pistol under the pillow and wondered who the person was who went from city to city dropping off their tools of the trade. Would he ever get the chance to meet this mystery man or woman? Probably not. As Hurley liked to say, they were on a need-to-know basis and there wasn’t a lot they needed to know. Rapp began to drift off to sleep even though he knew that Hurley and Richards would probably be there in a minute. He figured any sleep was better than none.

THE bag they’d placed over his head offered a mix of putrid smells-feces, vomit, snot, and blood all mixed together with the sweat of all the men who had worn it before him. And it wasn’t the perspiration of exertion, it was the ripe sweat of fear, an all-out assault on his olfactory system, designed to make him pliable to whoever it was who would walk through the door and begin asking questions. Hurley had no idea where he was, other than the fact that he was in a basement. He’d felt the stairs as they’d dragged him from the trunk of a car and into the building.

It was the second car he’d been in that morning. In the midst of his pummeling by the police he blurted out the only name that he thought might help. “Levon Petrosian! I am a friend of Petrosian!”

The clubbing and kicking stopped almost immediately, and then one of the men asked him what he’d said. Hurley could tell it was the portly one in the three-piece suit, even though he couldn’t see him. The man ordered him cuffed and placed in the backseat of one of the cars. They were not gentle, but Hurley did not expect them to be, so it wasn’t too bad. That was when they placed the first hood on his head. It wasn’t too bad, really. It could have used a good cleaning, but at least it didn’t smell like a bowl of shit.

He marked the time in the back of the car, counting the seconds and trying to make sense of the noises beyond the glass windows. The metal cuffs were biting into his skin. He twisted his wrists around and tried to see if he could get out of them, but it was no use. Twenty-seven seconds later, the car doors opened. Hurley couldn’t be sure, but he thought two men got in the front seat and one man joined him in the back. He felt something hard jabbed into his ribs.

“Don’t move, or I will kill you.”

Hurley couldn’t be sure if the object at his side was a gun or a truncheon. “Fuck you.” The object was jabbed even harder into his side.

“You shouldn’t talk to a policeman like that.”

The voice came from the front seat. It was the older pudgeball. “Policeman,” Hurley said with open disdain. “If you’re cops, what am I being arrested for?”

“For striking a police officer. One of my men has a broken nose.”