Vince Flynn - Act of Treason

“I get the feeling your idea of what you can do and his are miles apart.”

“I told him,” Ross pointed his finger at Garret, “that I would do everything I could to help him, but in the end it would be up to you know who.”

“No, I don’t know who.”

“The president.”

“Current or future?”

“Current.”

“I seem to remember you also telling him if Hayes balked you would get Josh to do it once he took the oath.”

“I did not.”

“You sure as hell did. I heard you. You said that between you and his father-in-law you would get him his pardon.”

“Shhhh…” Ross held his finger to his lips.

Garret glanced over his shoulder at the two agents in the front seat and then looked back at Ross. “You fucking think they have us bugged? You really are out of your mind.”

“In this town you never know.”

“Fuck…you’re paranoid.”

“And you’re a rude little bastard, Stu.”

“Yeah well guess what? We’re not in high school anymore. I’m not trying to win any popularity contests. My job was to get you elected. And I did that.”

“You weren’t the only one working on the campaign.”

Garret shook his head and said, “Our friend told me that you actually said you thought you were making up ground in the polls and that you had momentum on your side. He told me you said we may have won the thing all on our own. You didn’t really say that, did you?”

Ross looked out the window yet again. “Stu, elections are a strange business.”

“Mark, elections are my business. I’ve been running them and rigging them for over thirty years and I’m going to tell you right now you guys were dead in the water. You had about as much of a chance to win that thing as a Republican does the mayoral race in San Francisco…which is to say none.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do, Mark, and you’d better fucking snap out of it, because I’m telling you right now our friend over in Europe is not the type of man you want to fuck with.”

Ross had heard just about enough. “Next Saturday, I’m going to be sworn in as the vice president of the United States of America. I think our friend should start thinking about whohe wants to fuck with.”

“Yeah, well…he’s not your only problem, Mr. Vice President.” Garret looked out the window and said something under his breath.

“What?”

“The FBI, Department of Justice, and CIA have scheduled a joint press conference for tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Why?”

“The word on the street is that they caught the guy who was behind the attack on the motorcade.”

“The guy behind the attack,” Ross repeated with eyes as big as saucers. “You mean the guy who carried out the attack?”

“Or one of his associates. There are a lot of rumors flying around right now. I don’t know for sure who they have.”

“Does the media have the story?”

“Yeah, they’re all running it on the crawler, but they don’t have any specifics yet.”

“Shit,” Ross swore. “He told me he was going to take care of this. He told me last night when I talked to him.”

“When I spoke with him this morning, the news hadn’t broke yet, and I don’t think he knew or he would have said something.”

“Can this be traced back to us?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Garret hesitated and then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so…Your lack of certainty isn’t exactly comforting me.”

“What do you want me to tell you? The only way we can be linked to this is through Cy, and he’s a very careful guy.”

“He’d sell us down the river in a heartbeat.”

“For sure, but if I know Cy, he covered his tracks.”

“Have you talked to Marty?” Ross was referring to the attorney general.

“I tried, but he’s not taking calls.”

“Well, he’ll take mine.” Ross retrieved his mobile phone and turned it on. While he stared at the small screen waiting for it to come to life a contingency plan occurred to him. He was about to float the idea with Garret and then decided at the last second that it was best to keep it to himself. He would have to first find out what the attorney general knew.

Rapp stood in front of the TV in his towel and brushed his teeth. The perky duo on the screen told him a warm front was moving into the Potomac River Valley. The forecast for Monday morning was clear skies and an afternoon high of fifty degrees. By tomorrow they expected the mercury to hit sixty. The morning TV anchors were doubly excited about this in light of the ice storm that had hit the city the previous Friday. Rapp cared about the weather only to the extent that he needed to know how he should dress. Other than that he tended not to get excited one way or the other. It was what it was, and there was nothing he could do about it. What he really wanted to know was how much play the upcoming joint press conference was getting.

The apartment didn’t have cable. It didn’t have much, in fact, other than the essentials. This was Rapp’s crash pad. His bolt-hole that he kept in Washington. His brother Steven was the only other person who knew about it. He’d shown it to his wife on one occasion. He brought her late at night so no one would see them, and he showed her how to enter from the back fire escape. The building was an eight-unit brownstone that his father had bought as an investment a few years before his death. Rapp was just eight years old but he remembered riding with him to the apartment on the weekends to clean the hallways and the laundry room.

The brownstone was located approximately a mile north of the White House in the Columbia Heights neighborhood only a few blocks away from the upscale Adams Morgan neighborhood. Columbia Heights was one of the many neighborhoods in the city that had fallen to urban decay in the sixties and seventies. Rapp’s father, a real estate attorney, had bought the place for next to nothing. It was four units up, four units down, sturdy as all hell, and full of character. Rapp’s mother almost sold the place twice after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack, but Steven had been adamant that they keep it. Steven, just a year and half younger than Mitch, could spot trends even back then. They weren’t losing money on the brownstone, but it was a real pain. It was a rental property in a bad neighborhood; drugs, prostitution-there’d even been a murder right in front of the building. There were lots of complaints by the tenants, late rent checks, and more evictions than they could count. Not the type of hassle a single mother of two from the suburbs needed in her life.

Steven persisted, though. He insisted that their father had said the building was a gold mine. As soon as the neighborhood turned around they’d make a small fortune. Steven even went so far as to put an ad in the paper for a new building supervisor. He dragged his mother down there on a Saturday morning and helped her pick a nice old man whose apartment building was scheduled to be torn down by the city to make room for a section eight housing development. The man worked for free rent. He stabilized things and got good long-term tenants to move in. The neighborhood started to turn in the late eighties, and then the super passed away in 1991 and they decided to sell each unit as a condominium. Their father had been right. Over a three-year period they sold all eight units and made a small fortune. One of those units was bought by an LLC out of the Bahamas.

The CIA had taught Rapp to be a careful man. He’d operated for years without an official cover in some very hostile places. He’d been ordered to do things by his superiors that he knew were illegal. The fact that this apartment was illegal in the eyes of the CIA didn’t bother him for a second. He’d been trained to live a lie. To deceive. To do whatever it took to survive and complete the mission without being caught. This apartment was a natural extension of what they had taught him.