Chapter 19
VERONA, ITALY
MITCH Rapp was not in the habit of doing something stupid.
Usually.
But he was also not in the habit of losing.
And that’s what watching the Pakistani get snatched from under his nose felt like.
Not to mention finding himself in a lopsided engagement with an operative from an unknown surveillance team.
Though to be fair, his opponent might have managed to escape, but he had not done so unscathed.
At the low end of the injury scale, the man probably had one hell of a headache, but Rapp was betting that it would take more than a couple of Advil to mitigate the damage he’d inflicted.
Rapp had taken someone off the battlefield, but that victory hadn’t brought him any closer to fulfilling his operational purpose.
Killing the weapons scientist.
This was why he was surveilling a flat while considering doing something stupid.
Keying his low-profile radio, Rapp whispered into the microphone secreted under his shirt cuff.
“Confirm orange exterior, with second-floor balcony. I see a table, one chair, and a wine bottle. There’s also a fire escape that empties on the building’s west side. ”
Addresses were all fine and good, but Europe’s twisty streets and confusing numbering systems often made identifying the correct flat from outside the building difficult. When it came to verifying a target, Rapp much preferred to compare visual cues with his surveillance team.
“Sì. And there are two empty wineglasses next to the bottle.”
Rapp pushed the transmit button twice in confirmation. His transmission had been in Italian, but he still wanted to keep his words to a minimum. Veronese were pretty tolerant folks, but even the friendly townspeople might look askance at a man sitting at a café and talking to himself.
As of late, Rapp had spent a lot of time at cafés.
He wasn’t sure his heart would be able to handle any more caffeine, so he’d switched to sparkling water.
This choice flummoxed his waiter, who kept offering him wine, which forced Rapp to keep finding new reasons to decline.
As much as he’d welcome a glass of Veronese red, he needed his wits about him.
“The girl’s been gone for twenty minutes. I don’t think she’s coming back.”
Rapp broke squelch on the radio twice in reply as he gazed at the target’s open window, considering what he intended to do with the information Rob Ridley, head of the agency surveillance team, had just relayed.
Technically, Ridley didn’t work for him.
At least, not directly.
While read in on the Orion team and the program’s target list, Ridley’s area of responsibility lay with the CIA advance team.
His specialists prepped the battlefield for Rapp’s arrival by conducting surveillance on the target, securing Rapp’s safe house, and pre-positioning any weapons or equipment Rapp might need for the hit.
In a perfect world, the legitimate agency employees never crossed paths with the off-the-books Orion team assassin they supported.
In what should have been a surprise to no one, the world was proving to be less than perfect.
True to her word, Irene had reached out to Ridley and tasked him to use his in-country surveillance team to assist Rapp by setting up on the flat belonging to Enzo Romano.
Romano was a member of the Italian Service for Information and Democratic Security, or SISDE, and more importantly, the asset who had fed the CIA the Pakistani’s Veronese itinerary.
The SISDE was a domestic intelligence organization akin to Britain’s MI5, responsible for safeguarding the Italian people from espionage and foreign terrorists.
Based on what Rapp had observed over the last several days, neither Romano nor the SISDE were exactly doing a bang-up job in that department.
Ridley’s team had set up on Romano’s flat several hours earlier, and Rapp had only recently joined them.
He’d spent the first part of the evening waiting at a different café in the hopes that Romano would answer the request for a crash meeting his CIA handler had transmitted to him yesterday evening.
The Italian counterintelligence officer had other ideas.
Not only had Romano not answered the meeting request, he’d elected to spend the evening at home.
About an hour before Rapp joined the team, Ridley reported that a pretty redhead had entered Romano’s flat.
The team hadn’t had time to wire the place for sound, but they did observe Romano and his friend drinking wine on the balcony before retiring inside.
Thirty minutes later, the girl was seen exiting the apartment building.
According to Ridley, she’d looked happy.
Now Rapp was left with a choice.
For reasons that might not ever be clear, Romano had elected not to answer his handler’s summons.
Maybe this was nothing more than the classic Italian la dolce vita approach to life, or maybe the Italian spycatcher had decided he was done offering his services to the americani.
Either way, Romano wasn’t cooperating and Rapp’s clock was ticking.
The meeting with the Mystery Man was soon, and Rapp needed to see if Romano could shed any light on what had occurred.
It was not happenstance that Italian law enforcement had been about to arrest the Pakistani scientist any more than it was pure dumb luck that a shadowy organization had spirited him off Verona’s streets.
Someone had leaked. Someone who’d known about the Pakistani’s presence.
Someone like Romano.
Rapp had tried being sensible.
Now it was time for plan B.
Tossing a handful of lira on the table, Rapp got to his feet.
“Mitch—where are you going?”
Ridley’s question carried a sense of finality. The voice of a person who already knew the answer to their question but still felt compelled to ask it.
“To pay our friend a visit,” Rapp said.
“Our writ is for surveillance. We were only going to make contact if he came out of the apartment.”
“I was going to make contact if he came out of the apartment. Now I’m changing our writ.”
Rapp could imagine the steam coming from Ridley’s ears and he knew the agency officer had a point.
Interacting with a member of a friendly intelligence service was tricky business.
Allied nations didn’t shed many tears if a terrorist unexpectedly wound up dead on their soil, but their citizens were a different matter.
Several months ago, Rapp had killed a high-ranking French DGSE member to stop the man from revealing his identity.
The fallout had been substantial.
In the aftermath, Kennedy, Stansfield, and Hurley had all taken his side. Hell, Hurley had even driven the getaway car. In his moment of crisis, the Orion team had closed ranks and supported his battlefield decisions.
But this was different.
Rapp’s life wasn’t in danger and Romano might not even be a traitor.
Fortunately, Rapp had a plan.
Unfortunately, it did not include the woman approaching the apartment building’s door.