Vince Flynn - Consent To Kill

"Try to get an address off the mailbox if you can."

Gould took his foot off the gas but did not hit the brakes. They were on a straight, narrow road. As they passed the house he read off the numbers on the mailbox. She checked the map to make sure they were still in Anne Arundel County. They were. She accessed the county's Web site and clicked on the property information tab. She punched in the address and five seconds later the corresponding information came up on the screen.

"The house was purchased in 1997 for two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars by Bay View Shores LLC. No officer listed under the company."

"It's him." Gould looked back over his shoulder.

"How can you be so sure?"

"He would never put it under his own name."

"What if she is merely stopping by to visit a friend?"

"It's him." Gould gripped the steering wheel and then flexed his fingers. "I can feel it. He's in there right now."

Mitch Rapp ran along the gravel shoulder, pounding out each step. His mood was anything but upbeat. There was a day not long ago when he flew down this road at a clip that would have left all but a few of the world's best athletes gasping for breath and falling to their knees. Even so, Rapp was a realist. He knew it was impossible to maintain the peak performance he'd had in his twenties and early thirties, but that didn't mean he had to like the aging process. He'd dealt with pain his entire life. He knew how to taunt it, suppress it, or just laugh it off. In fact, pain was something he'd actually learned to embrace. It was a welcome ally that propelled him to the finish line while it forced others to quit. The mind controlled the body. It could tell muscles and joints to ignore all kinds of warning signals. The problem, though, was that those warning signs were there for a reason. If they were ignored for too long, the body eventually broke down.

On this warm fall morning, as Rapp took each lengthy stride, he began to wonder if there was something different about this pain. It was his damn left knee again. He'd been trying to work through it for the better part of a month, and he was finally coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going away. No matter how hard he tried to block it out or get past it, no matter how much ice or Advil he used, the pain only worsened. His body was telling him something. It was telling him to stop running.

Only thirty-seven and he was falling apart. It should not have come as a surprise to him, knowing the way he'd pushed and abused his body over the years, but Rapp was the type of man who thought any obstacle surmountable with enough will, determination, and talent. There were the broken bones and cuts from sports as a kid and then in college, there was the inevitable wear and tear that came with competing as a world-class triathlete, and then there were the scars, both mental and physical, of his trade. On the outside were four pucker marks left by bullets that were meant to kill him and two decent-sized scars left by knife blades. On the inside, most of the physical damage done by the bullets had been repaired, but the mental toll his work had left on him was something he simply tried not to think about. His wife liked to tell him his brain was like a basement filling up with years of junk. If you didn't clean it out every year, you were one day sure to be left with one hell of a mess to take care of.

Instinctively, he knew she was right, but the only person who could ever understand what he'd done was someone who had walked in his shoes. And Rapp doubted there was a therapist on the planet who had any practical experience as an assassin. One of Rapp's forms of self-therapy was to never deceive himself. He didn't sugarcoat what he was, even though other people did. In national security circles he was referred to as a counterterrorism operative. He knew it was a nice way of saying he was an assassin. This had never bothered him, but now that Anna was pregnant, it gave him cause to rethink his profession. His days of being self-sufficient, of thinking first and foremost of himself, were receding with each heartbeat of the little baby in his wife's womb. Rapp was not afraid of fatherhood in the least. He was surprised, though, by the feeling of melancholy that accompanied the news. At first he didn't know the source but it came to him soon enough. It was his own unfulfilled relationship with his father. Rapp did not want his child to go through the same agonizing pain of losing a parent that he had. He was suddenly looking at the risks he took on the job in a whole new light. He'd been fighting it since the day he'd fallen in love with Anna, but now there was no more putting it off. He owed it to both her and their unborn child. He would have to step out of the line. Let someone else take the risks.

Half a mile short of the end of his run, it happened. Rapp felt a spike of pain and shifted his weight to his good leg just as his left knee locked up like an engine throwing a rod-metal on metal, no more oil to aid the simple mechanical movement. Bone on bone, no more cartilage to reduce the friction. As he hopped to a stop he muttered a series of curses under his breath. He was the only person out on the road at this early hour, but even so, swearing at the top of his lungs wasn't his style. After a few excruciating steps, he realized how serious the injury was and blurted out a single four-letter curse.

Slowly and carefully, he began hobbling his way back to his house on the Chesapeake Bay. The birds were chirping, and the early morning sun cast long shadows across the dewy grass and bathed his face in warmth. All things considered it should have been a glorious morning, but it wasn't. He rounded a slight bend in the road and was surprised to find two people standing on the side of the gravel shoulder another fifty or so yards ahead. The man had his hand on the woman's back and she was bent over. Two mountain bikes lay on the ground next to them. It was not uncommon to encounter someone on this road, but it was almost always someone he knew. There was Mr. and Mrs. Grant, retirees who rose early and walked with their two chocolate Labs. There was Mrs. Randal, the Energizer Bunny, who did her shuffle jog for hours on end, and there were a handful of others who Rapp vaguely knew. He was always polite, but never stopped to talk.

He immediately crossed to the other side of the road placing as little weight as possible on his left leg. His hand reached for his fanny pack. Inside was a FN Five Seven pistol. The weapon carried twenty 5.7 x 28mm armor-piercing rounds. Rapp unzipped the fanny pack and kept his left hand near the opening. Every move was second nature, done almost completely without thought. He checked the couple again. She appeared to be sick, which could either be genuine, or a classic diversionary tactic. He looked at everything he encountered through this prism of primal pessimism.

Ambushes were typically set up in one of three ways. The first, and most common, was to lie in wait and spring the trap on the unsuspecting quarry. The second way was to lure the target in, as could be the case with this couple. Act like you need help and then when that target steps in to offer assistance you have them right where you want them. The third and final way is to distract the target. Get them focused on one thing, and then hit them from somewhere else. At the moment this was what Rapp was most worried about.

In all likelihood the couple was nothing more than a harmless husband and wife out for a bike ride, but Rapp couldn't risk that. He checked over his shoulder and then began looking further afield to his left and right. He knew every inch of this road. He drove on it, ran along its shoulder, and biked on it. His mind was trained to catch anything that was different. He finished his sweep. Everything looked normal. Rapp turned his attention back to the couple. He was close enough now to hear the woman gagging. If this was a trap she was doing a pretty convincing job.