Vince Flynn - Consent To Kill

Claudia collected herself and wiped her nervous palms on the front of her shorts. She stood tall and walked across the room. She would accept the inevitable. She would not run. Claudia didn't bother with the peephole. She unlocked the door and opened it. She was prepared for anything other than what she found.

"You're a hard woman to locate," Louie said. "Do you have any idea how many hotels there are in Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo?"

Claudia was speechless.

"I'm sorry, darling. You were right. I was wrong." Gould handed her a bouquet of flowers. "We should have never taken the job."

Claudia took the flowers, a raging storm of conflicting emotions battling within. She had been so ready to move on only a minute ago and now here she was being pulled back. Her mind struggled to find the proper meaning in all of this. She tried to gauge the depth of her feelings and the sincerity of Louie's words.

"I can't bear thinking of life without you," Louie continued. "Will you please forgive me?"

It was his simple plea for forgiveness that got to her. It was something the nuns had drilled into her as a child. To receive forgiveness, one must be willing to grant it.

Kennedy had had her doubts about the first e-mail. It got her attention, certainly, but the CIA received thousands of e-mails every month from crackpots and conspiracy theorists. Rarely were they sent to her directly, but the nut-jobs were on her mind as she read the message. The second e-mail pulled her in. There had only been minor mention of Mitch's knee surgery in the press and no mention whatsoever about the killer hiding out in the woods across from the house. As far as the press was concerned, the explosion was still being reported as an accident.

Kennedy received the third message on the way to Camp David. One phone call to Langley confirmed that an Erich Abel had in fact worked for the East German Stasi. The possible Saudi connection fit with the information that had been passed on by the Jordanians. Kennedy called her associate deputy director of Intelligence and ordered a full workup done on Abel. She wanted to know everything the Agency had on the man, and Sunday afternoon or not she expected a briefing the moment she returned from Camp David.

The briefing had been held in her office at 4:15 on Sunday afternoon. Present were the associate deputy director for Intelligence, the head of the Office of Russian and European Analysis, and the deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC. One other person arrived late. He was Marcus Dumond, who was CTC's resident computer genius. Dumond informed Kennedy that the effort to track down the mysterious e-mailer had run out of gas in the Netherlands. Kennedy had pretty much expected this to be the case.

Kennedy was shown a sixteen-year-old photo of Abel and given twenty-plus minutes of information that, like the photo, was at least fifteen years old. She further learned that Langley's resident expert on East Germany, and the Stasi, had retired six years ago and was living in Arizona. They had tried to reach him, but he was busy playing golf and wouldn't be home for another hour. An address for Abel in Vienna had been confirmed and the Agency's people at the embassy in Austria had been put on standby and told to await instructions from the director.

Kennedy did not like that last bit of news. She wanted a low profile on this thing. If her people got too excited and started beating the bushes, this Abel might get spooked and run for it. She called the Vienna station chief herself and gave him explicit orders. She wanted passive surveillance and only passive surveillance to begin immediately. That meant parabolic mikes and drive-bys. No stakeouts with two guys parked in front of Abel's apartment waiting for him to show. Under no circumstances was anyone from the Agency to contact Abel directly or take any risk. It was approaching midnight in Austria. Abel should be at home sleeping, and by the time Monday morning arrived, Kennedy planned on having one of the Directorate of Operations' top surveillance teams in place.

Kennedy handed out some new marching orders. The information was old. She wanted to know what this Erich Abel had been up to for the last ten-plus years, and she wanted all of it on her desk by 6:00 a.m. Before leaving the office, Kennedy sent one last e-mail. She wasn't sure she'd get a reply, but she knew she had to try and keep the dialogue going. Her question to the mystery e-mailer was straightforward: Why are you doing this?

Kennedy had her suspicions. In her mind this was all about what Coleman had predicted. Tell the media Rapp is dead. The killers will get the rest of their money, and then when it is announced that he is still alive, the person or persons who did the hiring will demand that either the job is finished or that their money is refunded. Kennedy sensed they were turning on each other. This Abel was the middleman. If the e-mailer could be believed, and it was the Saudis who were behind this, Abel would be under great pressure to get their money back. He would in turn be demanding that the assassin finish the job or give the money back. Kennedy wondered if the assassin or assassins were using her to eliminate Abel.

Kennedy went home to check on Tommy and try to get some sleep. Steven Rapp had returned to New York. Her mother was with Tommy along with twelve heavily armed men from Langley's Office of Security. Tommy was tired, having not slept more than six hours the night before. Even so, he had a lot of questions about Mitch. Kennedy explained, as she always did, that she couldn't talk about work, but she could tell him that she had talked to Mitch and he was doing fine. Tommy fell asleep in her arms a few minutes past 8:00, and she carried him to bed. After talking to her mother for about thirty minutes she checked her e-mail one last time before heading off to bed herself.

As she began reading the lengthy message any thought of sleep vanished. The rambling two-page letter was beyond surprising, and Kennedy had to force herself to read the entire thing without stopping. Kennedy had a healthy sense of skepticism. In her business, information had to be checked and rechecked before it could be believed. This confession was filled with facts that would be exceedingly difficult to verify, but even so Kennedy already suspected the information was accurate.

She was left with two options. The first involved bringing the State and Justice Departments into the loop, and for several reasons she hated the mere thought of it. First of all, this was a CIA problem. Someone had tried to kill one of her people, and the CIA would take care of the problem on its own. Langley was more suited to play rough, which was what this would take. If she brought Justice and State in on it, they would spend the next five years in Swiss courts, and the only outcome would be a few forfeited bank accounts. No individual would be brought to justice and punished for Anna's death. Her second option was to get on a plane, fly to Zurich, and deal with this situation quickly and quietly.

In addition to a six-person security detail she brought Marcus Dumond. They left shortly after ten in the evening and with the time change between DC and Zurich, and the flight time, it was nearly ten in the morning when they arrived. Kennedy did not inform the U.S. ambassador that she was in the country, and she did not inform Ross or the president that she was leaving the country. The president would understand, but Ross would not. At this stage of the game it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Kennedy did, however, inform her Swiss counterpart and ask that he help her skirt customs once she landed. She explained to him that they had important matters to discuss and that it would be better if there was no official record of her visit. Two of the Agency's people stationed in Zurich were waiting on the tarmac at the airport with August Bartholomew, the head of the Swiss Foreign Intelligence Service. Kennedy rode with Bartholomew and managed to keep the conversation away from the purpose of her visit during the relatively brief ride to her hotel. She had no idea if Bartholomew had the car wired, or if he was wearing one himself, but either way she could not afford to take the risk. When they got to the hotel she would explain to him what was going on. Kennedy was sure he had already guessed that her visit had something to do with one of the two things the Swiss were famous for, and it wasn't chocolate.