Vince Flynn: Consent To Kill

"You're not serious?"

"Of course I am." Rapp held out the stick. "Plug it in. Take a look at it."

Kennedy closed her eyes. "I'll take your word for it."

"He also had magazines. A lot of really sick stuff."

"And you think the police and the press will automatically rule us out because of some porn fetish?" She shook her head. "I don't know, Mitchell, it sounds pretty thin to me."

Rapp glanced at the floor and then looked out the window. "There's one more thing."

"What's that?"

"His body was, uh…" Rapp let out a sigh, "hacked up a bit."

Her hands moved to her hips and a deep frown covered her face. "Why?"

"I didn't want it to look so professional."

She shook her head.

"Irene, trust me. I know how cops think. This thing will be classified as a revenge crime. They're gonna think that asshole defiled some guy's daughter, which by the way he probably did. We stuffed the money in his mouth and left him there with multiple stab wounds. Details like that will eventually get leaked to the press, and no one in a million years is going to think we had anything to do with it."

Kennedy turned and walked to the seating area at the far end of her office. A long couch and two armchairs were arranged around a rectangular glass-top coffee table. Rapp waited a bit and then followed.

She stood with her back to him looking out the window at the bright fall colors of the Potomac River Valley. After a long moment she shook her head and asked, "How was your meeting?"

Rapp, relieved that they were off the subject, said, "Unusual. Why didn't you tell me what they wanted?"

"I wanted your honest reaction."

"You wanted them to catch me off guard," Rapp corrected.

"You could say that," replied Kennedy. "You seem unusually calm. I half expected you to come marching in here and bite my head off."

Rapp was looking out the window, staring off into space. The fact that he and Senator Hartsburg had agreed on a pivotal issue was enough for him to question his senses, but that was only the beginning. The proposal that the two men had floated his way was mind-boggling. It had been the last thing he'd expected.

"You don't think they're trying to set you up?" she asked.

"No." Rapp kept staring out the window. "They might hate me, but I can't imagine them going through all of this just to take me down." He paused and then added, "Plus, they know I'd kill them before I'd ever let them string me up at some hearing."

Kennedy wasn't sure if he was kidding or not, which she supposed suited Rapp's purposes perfectly. The urban lore regarding Rapp's exploits had grown far beyond reality.

"I could maybe see Hartsburg being zealous enough to set me up, but not Walsh."

"I agree." She set her cup down on the coffee table. "I know what you're going through. I went through the same thing last week when they came to me. You spend all of this time in an adversarial relationship with them and then when you end up on the same side of an issue, it causes you to stop and question your own judgment."

Rapp looked at her. "That's exactly it. Kind of a thanks, but no thanks…do me a favor and get off my team."

"There's a key to understanding their motivations. Have you figured it out yet?"

"No."

Kennedy had seen it right away and was surprised Rapp hadn't. "I'm guessing you had a nice quiet drive from Capitol Hill out to Langley. What have you been thinking about?"

"How to structure it…how to fund it…how to kill them if they double-cross me."

She nodded slowly, deciding he really did mean that he'd kill them if they set him up. "I don't think they're going to double-cross any of us."

"I wish I could share your confidence, but I just can't bring myself to trust Hartsburg."

"The bomb changed everything, Mitch."

Rapp gave her a skeptical look. The bomb she was referring to was part of a plot by Islamic radical fundamentalists to incinerate Washington, DC. If it hadn't been for Rapp and a handful of dedicated government employees, Senators Walsh and Hartsburg and the majority of their colleagues would have been killed by the detonation of a fifteen-kiloton nuclear weapon.

The tumblers fell into place for Rapp and he said, "Self-preservation."

"It's their strongest instinct."

Rapp thought about that for a moment. Politicians were an amazingly resilient breed. He supposed on some Darwinian level she was absolutely correct. "Whatever works. I just want them one hundred percent on board."

"So what do you think of their proposal?" Kennedy picked up her cup for another sip.

"It's basically an expansion of the Orion Team. Which as we've discussed has been greatly underused."

The Orion Team was a covert operations unit that had been founded by Kennedy's predecessor, Thomas Stansfield, some twenty years ago. The idea was that the unit would operate in secret, independent of the CIA or the rest of the national security apparatus. The team allowed Stansfield to circumvent the leviathan of politics and get around small impediments like the executive order banning assassinations. It allowed him to do things that the more civilized crowd didn't have the stomach for. Rapp had been the group's star operative almost from the day he started at the age of twenty-two. He'd spent significant amounts of time in Europe, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia collecting intel and when the situation called for it, dealing with threats in a more final manner.

"Except this time we would have them on our side." By them Kennedy meant Hartsburg and Walsh.

"I might be missing something here, but explain to me why that's a good thing."

"I was part of the Orion Team," Kennedy began, "for eighteen years. Six of which I spent running it." She gave him a forced smile. "In addition to spending most of my time trying to keep you out of trouble, the next most difficult task was trying to scrape together the money to sufficiently fund the operations. With Hartsburg and Walsh on board the funding will no longer be an issue, and more importantly, we won't have to worry about them launching any investigations. Your job will be much easier."

Rap nodded. "I see your point. I just want to make sure they are beholden to us, and not the other way around."

"Absolutely." Kennedy brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear. "Any ideas?"

"Yeah, one." Rapp held up his BlackBerry. "Mutually assured destruction."

"MAD."

"Exactly." Rapp pressed a few buttons and began replaying the conversation that had taken place in the Congressional Library. After a few seconds he stopped the recording and smiled. "I hope you're not disappointed?"

"I would have been disappointed in you if you hadn't."

Rapp snapped the BlackBerry back onto his belt clip. "And I don't want any armchair quarterbacking."

"I already explained that to them."

"And how did they take it?"

"Listen, Mitch, you have a certain reputation in this town that has grown beyond even your own remarkable achievements. The secrecy regarding your past, the untimely death of two politicians who were involved in blowing your cover…it has all added up to an almost mythical reputation. When people mention your name they do so in whispers, and then only after they've looked over both shoulders. You get credit for things I know for a fact you had nothing to do with."

"How can you be so sure?" Rapp gave her a devious look.

"Because I know you weren't even on the same continent let alone in the same city when some of this stuff happened. But nonetheless people like a good conspiracy and you play into that perfectly." Kennedy rolled her eyes. "Rugged good looks, a beautiful wife who works for NBC, and none other than the president of the United States as your biggest champion. Add to that the aforementioned deceased politicians and what they leaked to the press, the press referring to you as an assassin…our first line of defense…and there isn't a person on Capitol Hill who doesn't get a little nervous around you."