Vince Flynn - Consent To Kill

She looked him in the eye, wavered, thought she might not have the courage, and then blurted out, "I have been in contact with the CIA."

Louie searched her eyes for the truth. She was not lying to him. In as calm a voice as he could muster he asked, "Why?"

"It is complicated. It started out as a way to say that I was sorry for what happened to the woman. On top of that you know I don't like Abel. I didn't from the moment I met him."

"I don't care about Abel. I want to know what you did."

"After we parted ways, Abel sent several more threatening e-mails. I decided if that was the way he wanted to play I would give the CIA his name and see how he liked it when Mitch Rapp showed up looking for him."

Louie nodded slowly. A part of him admired Claudia for the move. He had warned Abel to watch his step. The man was in no position to threaten them, but he supposed the German was under a great deal of pressure to get the money back. The type of pressure that sometimes causes people to do very foolish things. "The CIA is a big place," Louie said. "Who did you contact?"

"Director Kennedy."

This surprised Louie momentarily. "When you say you've been in contact, what exactly does that mean?"

"We have e-mailed each other."

"How many times?" Louie asked, his chest tightening.

"I sent her four e-mails."

Louie released her shoulders and nearly bit off his own tongue. "Why four?"

Claudia's big brown eyes welled with tears. She could see Louie struggling to contain his anger. She ignored the question and moved onto the part that was really going to send him through the roof. "Please stay calm for a moment so I can get this all out, and then if you want to leave me I'll understand."

"I'm not going to leave you," he said, almost as if he was convincing himself.

Claudia grabbed his hands. "We've always split everything…Right?"

He nodded.

She knew of no easy way to say it so it just came out. "I put five million dollars into a Swiss bank account under Rapp's name."

Louie thought his head was going to implode. "Five million dollars." He was doing everything in his power to stay calm. He loved this woman standing before him. If he didn't care for her, he would have simply chucked her over the wall and taken great joy in watching her head split open as it hit the rocks. "Why?"

"Our baby."

"What does giving Mitch Rapp five million dollars have to do with our baby?" Louie's voice started to rise.

"I wanted to try and make things right…and buy some time."

"Buy some time." Louie frowned. "How does this buy some time?"

"You know he's going to come after us."

"Let him," Louie said in a quiet but angry voice.

Claudia shook her head. "You don't mean that. This is not some normal man. We killed his wife. His pregnant wife. What would you do if some man killed me right now?" Claudia watched him intently for a moment. "We both know you would stop at nothing until you had killed him with your own bare hands. If Mitch Rapp finds us, he will kill us both."

"And you think just because you gave him five million dollars he will forget about us?"

"No," she said, "as I told you, it will only buy us some time."

"Time?" he asked with a frown, still not comprehending what she was after.

Claudia placed his hand on her stomach and said, "I asked for nine months. I asked for him to spare our baby. I want to give birth to our child and hold it in my arms, and then whatever he does to us I will accept." She sensed some understanding in Louie's face. "That five million dollars isn't even ours," she said with disgust in her voice. "I never wanted the job, and we didn't finish it. If I had it my way, we would give him all of the money."

"We need that money," Louie said in a surprisingly calm voice. He was just now comprehending the maternal forces that had been at play. Her words had stirred his own sense of paternity-a need to protect Claudia and their unborn child. He disagreed vehemently with what she had done, and how it may have exposed them, but there was no undoing it. Her motives had been pure.

Louie kissed her on the forehead and said, "I still love you."

Claudia melted in his arms. "Thank you, darling."

They stood there, not speaking, for several minutes and then Claudia said, "Let's go back to bed."

Louie shook his head. "No."

"Why?" she asked, suddenly afraid that he would in fact leave her.

"We need to get out of here immediately. Pack your bags."

His first reaction was to think they were being played, fed some fake information that would lead them on a wild-goose chase and waste a lot of time and resources. He also didn't want to associate a single noble characteristic with his wife's killers. In the face of all of that, though, there was the five million dollars sitting in an account under his name. There was also according to Kennedy a very heartfelt confession, apology, and plea written by this woman whom Rapp had seen throwing up on the side of the road near his house. Rapp had been through a lot over the years, experienced a lot of strange things, but this one left him shaking his head. It didn't make any sense. If he had the time he could attempt to sort it out. He could analyze what he knew, investigate what he was unsure of, and ultimately decide what was subterfuge and what was the truth. He could gauge real intentions and weigh the possibility of an ingenious deception on the part of the real killer or killers. He told Kennedy to have Dumond empty all of Abel's bank accounts and keep an eye on the banks. Rapp didn't care how carefully the guy was hiding, when he found out eleven million dollars of his money was gone he would want some answers. In the meantime, though, Rapp needed to focus on reuniting a father and son.

Rapp arrived in the capital city of Riyadh as the call to noontime prayer was being sounded. Traffic was light, and then there was no traffic at all as shops were shuttered and closed and the streets were cleared. Kennedy had confirmed through a source on the ground in Riyadh that the father was where Rapp expected him to be. Saeed Ahmed Abdullah was a devout follower of the ultraradical Wahhabi sect of Islam. He had built countless mosques, orphanages, and religious schools all run by Western-hating Wahhabi clerics. Many Saudis follow the tenets of their faith when in the Kingdom, but as soon as they leave the country they partake in the forbidden fruits-gambling, booze, sometimes drugs, and especially sex. Not Saeed Ahmed Abdullah, though. He was different. He was a pious Muslim at all times. Not only did he pray five times a day, as was prescribed by his faith, but he did so in a mosque with the exception of the Isha, or nighttime prayer, that was said before going to bed.

Running a billion-dollar corporation was not easy. There were lots of demands on Saeed's time, so to help ease that pressure, and stay connected to his faith, he had mosques built directly across the street from his home and his office. A report by the Jordanian Intelligence Service said he attended the Fajr, presunrise prayer, and the Maghrib, post-sunset prayer, at the mosque near his house. The Zuhr, or noontime prayer, was said at the mosque by his office as well as the Asr, or late afternoon prayer. The Jordanians had kept an eye on Saeed for some time. In addition to building mosques, schools, and orphanages, Saeed also liked to donate large sums of money to Hezbollah, Hamas, and several other Palestinian terrorist organizations that specialized in suicide bombings. The Jordanians did not like the Saudis pouring gas on a fire that they had been trying to put out for decades, so they tried their best to find out who was doing it and then pass the information on to sympathetic ears in the royal family and the U.S. government.