Chapter 6
DON’T.”
It wasn’t so much the command that caught Rapp by surprise as the language in which it was uttered.
Arabic.
Arabic voiced in the melodic syllables of a Lebanese accent.
The list of people who had pointed a gun at Rapp and lived to tell about it was short.
Extremely short.
Not to mention that pressing a pistol against a person’s back was a rookie move.
Sure, a certain amount of psychological damage could be inflicted by a firearm’s cold, metal touch.
The victim was forced to confront their own mortality and acknowledge that their ability to draw another breath was now in someone else’s hands.
At least this was the case if the target was untrained.
Rapp was not untrained.
Sprinkled amid the near constant pain Hurley inflicted in the Orion team’s grueling selection course he ran out of an unassuming barn near Lake Anna, Virginia, were some genuinely useful lessons.
Chief among those was the principle of action versus reaction.
In short, the former always beats the latter.
To drive this home, Hurley had his trainees drill disarming techniques again and again.
The men began with fake rubber weapons but, by the end, had graduated to real pistols loaded with pain-inducing Simunition rounds.
While successfully disarming an armed opponent was not a hundred percent proposition, there was a window of constraints that made success more likely.
The first of those constraints was distance.
If the victim could touch the weapon, he could probably disarm his attacker before the attacker could squeeze the trigger.
For a graduate of Hurley’s school of hard knocks, this touching included the instance in which a weapon was pressed against the small of an opponent’s back.
With slow, exaggerated movements, Rapp released his hold on the Beretta’s pistol grip.
Then he shifted backward. The movement was so slight as to be nonexistent, but it served a critical purpose.
Rapp needed to verify the pistol’s exact location.
Counterintuitive though it may seem, the easiest way to accomplish this task was to back into the pistol until he could feel the muzzle pressing against his spine.
But when he shifted backward, the small of his back touched air.
“I don’t think so.”
The statement, still delivered in Arabic, carried a sense of amusement.
Rapp was not amused.
“What do you want?” Rapp said, asking the question in Arabic. Unlike the unseen speaker, Rapp’s pronunciation marked him as Iraqi. Whether or not that was advantageous in this particular situation remained to be seen.
“A great many things. The list is both long and exhaustive, so I won’t bore you with it. Instead, I find myself wondering whether we could help each other.”
“Why would I want to help you?”
“Why indeed?” The man sighed. “Let’s just say that I have an eye for talent and a belief in the utility of shared purpose.
For reasons I don’t yet know, you chose to involve yourself in a situation which has produced a beneficial outcome for me.
Now I’m considering whether I have it within my power to offer a similarly beneficial outcome to you. ”
A burst of police sirens washed over the street as a parade of motorcycle cops headed toward them from the piazza.
One by one, they turned right, pursuing the fleeing van east. The motorcycle cop Rapp had tackled was retracing his steps in the direction of his parked bike toward the hapless American who had thwarted his efforts to reach the Pakistani scientist.
The American now conversing with an unseen gunman in impeccable Arabic.
Time to end this interaction.
“This doesn’t feel beneficial,” Rapp said.
The man chuckled. “Of course not. We’re still getting acquainted. If you’d like to continue our conversation meet me at the Café Bongiovi tomorrow evening. Say around seven?”
“If I don’t?”
Another chuckle. “Then I thank you for your help. Though in my experience, Good Samaritans don’t often travel with pistols tucked into their waistbands. Good day.”
It wasn’t lost on Rapp that the gunman timed the interaction so that it ended when the motorcycle cop was just feet away.
Presumably, this was so he wouldn’t be inclined to pursue the man with the Lebanese accent.
On the whole, not a bad plan, but Rapp wasn’t about to let him vanish without at least attempting to get a look at the man.
The CIA employed a cadre of facial sketch artists.
If Rapp could get a glimpse of him, perhaps an agency analyst might be able to match his likeness to a photograph.
Rapp was in the middle of turning when a thunderclap echoed down the street.
A cloud of smoke drifted from a store to his right.
The motorcycle cop changed directions and sprinted in the direction of the explosion.
It only took Rapp a split second to process what he’d seen, but that was long enough.
By the time he turned back toward where the speaker had been standing, the street was a mass of fleeing pedestrians.
He’d been outplayed.
Sighing, Rapp moved with the crowd, using the chaos to effect his escape.
He was an assassin, not a CIA case officer.
His job was to service targets not recruit assets, and his safety lay in his anonymity.
He could still return to his apartment, pack his belongings, and ghost out of Italy with no one the wiser.
That was the safe and arguably smart play.
But it meant returning to Paris and his cover life empty-handed.
People who chose to become assassins weren’t known for playing it safe or, for that matter, smart.
The Pakistani was a sensitive target that had required weeks of prep work and planning.
He was now probably beyond Rapp’s reach, but that probability became a certainty if Rapp abandoned his mission.
This was to say nothing of the Mystery Man with the Lebanese accent.
Rapp was not tasked with providing intelligence, but neither was he ignorant of the fact that he worked on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The scientist’s rendition had been flawlessly executed.
Any thug could stage a kidnapping, but snatching someone from a crowded street in broad daylight under the nose of a substantial police presence required finesse.
The men in the van were pros, as was the Mystery Man.
Maybe he ought to see what he could learn about his competition.
Rapp could almost hear Hurley’s cigarette-ruined voice respond.
His job was to execute the OPLAN, not freelance.
Rapp considered the wisdom of these words as he paused at the next intersection.
Left led back toward his hotel. Right would lead deeper into the city.
He lingered for another moment, thinking through the ramifications of his choice.
Then he turned right.
Hurley wasn’t here.
Rapp was.