Flynn Vince - Pursuit Of Honor

“I… I… I,” Adams stammered, “wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Rapp glanced at his watch. He might have to be late for the meeting. “And just what does Kathy O’Brien have to do with this?”

“She’s… how I found out.”

“You already said that. I want specifics.” Rapp saw Adams ’s eyes begin to dart around again, which was a sign that his brain was scrambling to find the right lie. “Don’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Lie to me.”

“I’m not… I mean I wasn’t going to.”

“Anything you say to me I’ll have verified within the hour, and if I find out you’ve lied to me… well, let’s just say I’m going keep you alive as long as it takes to make you feel some real pain.”

“She…” Adams’s eyes started darting again, until suddenly, a knife tip appeared an inch in front of the left one.

Rapp held the blade perfectly still. “I can tell when a man is lying to me. So one more time, what does Kathy have to do with this?”

Adams closed his eyes and said, “She’s been seeing a therapist.”

“And?”

“We had the office bugged.”

With great effort to conceal his surprise Rapp asked, “The therapist’s office?”

“Yes.”

Rapp’s mind was flooded with a half-dozen questions, but for now he needed to keep Adams focused on the most immediate facts. They could squeeze the rest out of him later. “So if I call my source at Justice, she’ll tell me that you had warrants to wiretap the therapist’s office?”

Adams took a long time to answer, which in itself was an answer.

Rapp cocked his head to the side. “You didn’t have a warrant?”

“Not exactly,” Adams admitted.

Rapp pulled the knife back and shared a quick look with Hurley. Things suddenly began to fall into place for Rapp. Why Adams knew the broad brushstrokes of what they had been up to, but could not pass the threshold needed to refer a case to Justice. “You wiretapped the office of a doctor and recorded the private therapy sessions of the wife of the director of the National Clandestine Service. And you did it illegally.”

“I was only trying to do my job.”

“And you lecture me about breaking the fucking law,” Rapp snapped.

“I was just trying to stop you. You were out of control.”

“Out of control… I break those laws to keep people safe. Real people. You break ’em to protect some piece of paper you don’t even understand.”

“I am trying to protect the world from animals like you.”

Rapp stuck the tip of the knife into Adams ’s left nostril and said, “I should-”

“Mitch,” Dr. Lewis announced from the door, “I’d like to have a word with you and Stan.”

Rapp resisted the urge to slice the traitor’s nose clean off his face. They had a standard policy during interrogations that whenever Lewis asked anyone for a private word, they were to drop everything and leave the room. Rapp stood and left the cell with Hurley. They closed the door and found Lewis pacing nervously. Nash was back from the house, shaved and in a dark blue suit, while Maslick was sitting behind the desk keeping an eye on the monitors.

Lewis held up a couple of fingers and said, “Two things… the first

… I don’t think you can ever allow him to go free. There is a chance that his illegalities were driven by a lack of judgment precipitated by the onset of alcoholism, but I think the odds of it are small. It’s more likely that in addition to suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, he is also a sociopath.”

“And this changes things… how?”

“He uses rules as a weapon. He gets extremely upset when he thinks anyone has acted inappropriately, or has broken the law, yet he sees nothing wrong when he decides to break those very same laws. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it. He’s so narcissistic, so in love with himself, that he thinks he’s privileged. Rules are for the commoner, not someone like him, who is destined to make a difference in the world.”

“I could have told you that,” Hurley said, “and I didn’t even go to med school.”

Lewis ignored Hurley and said, “The narcissistic sociopathic combination is extremely dangerous… almost impossible to treat and never in a situation with this much pressure. He will say and do whatever he needs to stay alive and then after you let him go, the first chance he gets he will bolt. He would turn to anyone who he thought had the power to take you down.”

“Your second point?” Rapp asked.

“Normally, I would never admit this, but considering the situation, I think it would be best.” Lewis hesitated, wrestling with how best to word his admission.

“Doc,” Rapp said, “I don’t have all day. Spit it out.”

Lewis cleared his throat and nervously announced, “I am Kathy O’Brien’s therapist.”

RAPP was out of time. If he and Nash were to have any chance of making the powwow at Langley, they had to be on the road in the next few minutes, and even then they would have to drive at least eighty miles an hour to give themselves a chance. Normally, Rapp didn’t concern himself with getting to meetings on time, but this was not your average run-of-the-mill bureaucratic black hole of a meeting. Kennedy had made it very clear the president had requested the presence of both her senior counterterrorism operatives, and while Rapp really didn’t care much for politicians, he’d dealt with a few presidents over his career, and found them tolerable in the sense that they understood it wasn’t a bad idea to have a man like Rapp around to deal with some of the stickier situations that popped up.

“Mike and I have to go.” Rapp looked at Hurley and said, “I wanna know who he used to bug Doc’s office. I wanna know where the originals are and I wanna know how many copies he made. And I want to move on this ASAP.”

“My money’s on Max Johnson,” Hurley said.

“Yeah,” Rapp replied. He was thinking the same thing. Max Johnson had been the second in charge of Security at Langley until he retired a few years earlier. He now had his own consulting firm, which coincidentally did a lot of work for Langley. Rapp didn’t know him personally, but had heard a few things over the years that would lead him to believe the guy would have no problem stooping this low. “I want a list of everybody Adams has talked to about Kathy O’Brien.”

“I want those tapes handed over to me immediately, so I can destroy them,” Lewis said.

“Doc, I don’t like this any more than you do, but someone is going to have to listen to those tapes.” Rapp thought of Chuck O’Brien. It would kill him to know that Kathy’s private sessions with her therapist had been recorded.

“I think you can trust me, Mitch.”

“It has nothing to do with trust,” Rapp said impatiently. “I need to listen to them so I can assess the damage.”

“I don’t think Kathy would approve.” Lewis shook his head and added, “and I don’t think Chuck will be too pleased either.”

Nash entered the fray. “Well, maybe he should have thought about that before he started sharing classified information with his wife.”

“She worked in Ops for twenty-three years,” Lewis said defensively. “Her record is unassailable.” Looking back to Rapp, he said in a very forceful manner, “I want the tapes. They are private and they belong to me.”

“It ain’t going to happen, Doc,” Hurley said matter-of-factly. “Kathy was read in on a lot of serious shit, but that doesn’t give Charlie the right to start sharing stuff with her, and it sure as hell doesn’t give her the right to spill her guts to you. That’s why we have these rules.”

“But… I think we can all agree that you trust me.” Lewis looked around the room. “I mean let’s get real. What we have going on here is far more serious than anything that might be on those tapes.”