Vince Flynn - Consent To Kill

"I missed you." She kissed him on the lips.

Gould smiled and took his foot off the brake. "Are you hungry?"

"Famished."

"I know of a good place. I think you'll like it."

The operational rules had been set. They only spoke English. While Gould's was so good he seemed like a native, Claudia wasn't as proficient. Like him, she was traveling with a Canadian passport. At least for the remainder of the day. Tomorrow morning they would change identities yet again.

She nodded. "No problem crossing the border?"

"No," he said, "and you?"

"Landed in Miami and cleared customs without too much difficulty."

"Did they fingerprint you?"

"I'm afraid so."

Gould nodded. He thought they would, but at least the new system wasn't in sync yet. The airports had months of backlogged fingerprints that needed to be input and correlated. "The money?" he asked.

"No problem. It's safe." That's where Claudia had been. Making sure the five million dollars was sliced and diced, moved and shuffled and then put back together in the vault of a boutique financial institution on a beautiful island in a very warm and sunny part of the world. Claudia was very good at such things. She had been in the banking business before they had decided to strike out on their own. She kept up on all the laws, regulations, and most importantly, which banks knew how to guard their clients' privacy in the face of an overzealous war on terror.

"What's the plan?" she asked as the car picked up speed.

"Downtown."

She looked at him sideways with a confused expression.

"I thought they lived out on the Chesapeake Bay."

"They do, but we don't know exactly where, and it would be foolish to start poking around. If he hears that strangers are asking questions, he's likely to come looking for us."

The explanation made sense to her. "But why are we going downtown?"

"Because that is where she works. We'll check into our hotel. Have a nice meal. Make love and then sleep."

"Tomorrow?"

"We'll do a little sightseeing. Get rid of this car, and if all goes well…we'll follow her home."

They were to meet at the Capitol Grill. It was one of their favorite restaurants. Bulletproof, Rapp liked to call it. The place had yet to let them down. Order anything on the menu and it was great. It came out hot or cold depending on how it was supposed to be served. They covered the surf and the turf equally well, which was important because she ate fish and he ate steak. He actually ate anything, but at these prices he preferred red meat.

Rapp was on time. She was late. This was nothing new, but it unnerved him to no end. They'd gone round and round over her lack of punctuality and had a few pretty big blowouts. Even under normal circumstances it would have bothered him, but their relationship was not normal. She was a TV correspondent who received at least one stalker letter a month. Nothing unusual really. At least not for women in her line of work. Middle-aged single men who undoubtedly had deep issues with their mothers. Voyeuristic sickos who got off on writing down their dirty thoughts. Every attractive woman at every TV station across the country had to deal with it to some degree or another. The good news was that ninety-nine percent of these perverts never graduated beyond the letter-writing stage. The remaining one percent gave Rapp cause for concern, but they were not the real source of his worries.

Rapp was a marked man with a price on his head. Fatwas, religious findings by Islamic clerics, had been handed down demanding that he be killed. This in part fed his desire to see men like Khalil resting in a pool of their own blood. They had entered the fray with their bellicose mouths and soft bodies. They were men who had never seen battle, and never would. Men who took perverse joy in inflaming the hearts of young Muslim boys, sending others to do work they had neither the skill nor the courage to perform. Those boys, and the ones who had grown into men, were the people Rapp worried about every time Anna was late.

Lovely Anna Rielly was a study in contrasts. Her delicate features and enchanting green eyes conveyed a sense of classic beauty. Just beneath the surface, though, lurked the tough street-smart daughter of a Chicago cop. Rielly had grown up with four brothers, three of whom had followed in their father's footsteps. The fourth brother became a lawyer. His choice of profession and Anna's created a bit of a divide among the siblings. The three brothers who donned the uniform referred to Anna and the lawyer sibling as the enemy. True to their Irish blood, the political debates were heated and shit was deep. As was their love for each other.

This colorful upbringing on Chicago's South Side added tenacity to her beauty and smarts. Anna did not like defeat, and she knew not how to retreat. It was a very potent mix for a reporter. Rapp sought to hone these natural instincts, and hopefully teach her to detect trouble before it was upon her. She teased him about the Dictaphone he bought her, but eventually came around to the wisdom of the device. "If you think someone is following you," he told her, "record the license plate and I'll run it." She'd seen Rapp do this himself at least once a week. He put her through a defensive driving course, and taught her how to shoot both pistols and shotguns.

She was pretty good with both. Since she'd never shot before, there were no bad habits to break. Unlike most guys she held the weapon without trying to choke it. She had a smooth steady trigger pull and didn't anticipate the shot. She just put the front site on the target and fired over and over. How good would she be if ever confronted with a real situation? It was hard to tell. The human body had automatic survival mechanisms. Chief among them was the release of adrenaline. At the first sign of danger the body released it before certain parts of the brain even knew what was going on. Adrenaline levels spiked in preparation for either of two choices-fight or flight. This is where it got tricky. It was where people came unglued, and it happened when they chose to do neither. They froze and were hit with the aftershock of the adrenaline hangover leaving them soggy and depleted. The only way to prepare someone for this was to practice over and over. Make all of the motions second nature. First work on the fundamentals, stance, grip, front sight, and trigger pull, and then work on marksmanship, and then after a solid foundation was built move on to situational training.

He had Anna practice drawing the gun from her purse and firing. They worked on both the left and the right hand. He taught her how to draw and fire at close range as if she were struggling with someone. How to reach out and punch the gun into the person's ribcage and let loose a round. He taught her to get in tune with her natural instincts. "If you're walking to your car at night and something doesn't seem right," he'd say to her, "unzip your purse and put your hand around the grip." Rapp got her a permit to carry and made sure every time she left the house she had the Smith and Wesson.38 AirLight revolver. It was light, had a short barrel and a relatively small hammer. It was very user friendly, and the ideal personal defense weapon for someone in Anna's position. He was obsessed with her well-being, and with giving her the edge that he himself possessed through years and years of training. He never worried about his own safety. Only hers.

Rapp was situated in the back of the restaurant in a corner booth. His drink arrived, and a short while after that the calamari was set on the table by one of the servers. It was the best calamari in town. Rapp did not wait for Anna. He was famished and surly, so he dug in. After devouring half the plate, he paused and took a sip of his whisky. He chased it with some water, looked toward the front door with his dark, almost black eyes, and shook his head in frustration. She was now twenty-five minutes late, and his mood was getting more rank by the minute. She was going to give him an ulcer.