Chapter 3
VIA Cappello was charming in the way of many old-world streets.
Though barely wide enough for a handful of pedestrians standing side by side, the cobblestone thoroughfare was easily trafficked on foot.
The road was bordered by sidewalks made of marble, as befitted the high-end stores that faced the narrow walkway.
Apartments sporting the occasional balcony sat above the stores, and streetlights perched on electric wires spanned the alley.
The ambience was quite charming.
It was not conducive to a foot pursuit.
The tight confines and heavy pedestrian traffic made chasing a running suspect through the warren of side streets difficult.
Verona’s roads were not laid out on a grid that mirrored the cardinal directions.
Via Cappello ran from the southeast to the northwest, but the thoroughfare was intersected by west?east running tributaries and narrow alleys too numerous to count.
The streets were packed with tourists and locals alike.
Were he the one being chased, Rapp would have used this to his advantage by surging deeper into the city.
The scientist did not.
Instead, the Pakistani seemed to be fleeing toward space and the perceived freedom that accompanied it.
Space meant turning right once the scientist reached Via Cappello and heading northwest toward Piazza Erbe.
Rather than follow the fleeing Pakistani, Rapp intended to head him off at the pass.
He threaded through the crowd, angling toward an ivy-covered brick wall.
A dark archway beckoned, no doubt leading to an alley that was cramped, damp, and littered with refuse.
But it was an alley that led northwest.
Rapp pushed through the crowd, sprinkling in the occasional scusi as he jostled bystanders out of the way.
The scientist had a head start, but he also had a greater distance to travel, assuming Rapp was correct about the alley’s provenance.
The closer he came to the brick archway, though, the more he began to second-guess his choice.
The smells wafting from the darkness were in a word unpleasant.
A mixture of decay, trash, and the moldy scent of crumbling stone.
Taking a final breath of fresh air, Rapp plunged inside.
The claustrophobic alley did not disappoint.
His unexpected presence startled something that scurried out of the way, heading for the darker recesses.
Rapp chose to believe it was a cat. A skinny, hairless cat with a curly tail.
As was typical of Verona’s old sections of town, the buildings on either side of the alley met somewhere above his head, meaning that sunlight did not venture here.
Or perhaps light of any kind.
Rapp sloshed through puddles of unknown origin, pumping his arms and legs.
His haste was driven partially to minimize his span in the squalor, but more so in order to arrive at the plaza with enough time to plan what he intended to do next.
As a former all-American collegiate lacrosse player, he was pretty good at thinking on the move.
But war-gaming how to set up a pick-and-roll on the fly wasn’t quite in the same league as spontaneously determining how to kill a man.
Or whether he still should.
The methods by which Rapp went about his business varied from job to job.
Killing a senior member of a terrorist cell undoubtedly made that organization less effective, but done correctly, the assassination could also send a message.
Killing a Libyan finance minister in his Paris hotel room as he slept shouted to the world that his operational security had been thoroughly penetrated.
Killing a bomb maker on the streets of Beirut proclaimed that there was nowhere the enemies of freedom could take refuge.
But the Pakistani scientist was… different.
Pakistan was notionally an American ally, and the scientist was still employed by his government.
That neither of these facts was precisely true was widely understood on both sides of the Atlantic.
Be that as it may, there were conventions to uphold.
The scientist was still slotted to meet his maker, but the manner of his demise was meant to be subtle.
A message for those who cared to dig, but explainable enough so that his government benefactors could save face.
Rapp wasn’t usually much for subtle.
But in this case, he understood that discretion might just be the better part of valor. A weapons scientist who died in a mugging gone wrong was still one less shitbag in the world, and if the powers that be didn’t get the message, Orion team members could always escalate.
Rapp was big on escalation.
He hurdled a final pile of garbage and left the darkest part of the tunnel behind. Light was now filtering from an opening ahead, which meant that he was almost to the piazza.
And his decision.
Rapp didn’t know for certain what had spooked the Pakistani, but the sudden appearance of the Italian police officers seemed to be a safe bet. Whether this assumption was correct was immaterial. When it came to the proliferation of chemical weapons, safe was better than sorry.
Rapp did not intend to allow the scientist to be arrested.
The Italians had elevated corruption to an art form, and while this wasn’t to say there were no honest cops in Verona, Rapp wasn’t willing to bet his operation on the polizia’s integrity.
Maybe the Pakistani had forgotten to pay a parking ticket, or maybe one of his would-be clients was unhappy that their bid hadn’t been enough to secure the scientist’s services.
The specifics didn’t matter.
Italian law enforcement could not be allowed to take the Pakistani into custody.
This meant that an operation that had been built around subtlety now stood a very good chance of becoming high-profile.
That was okay. Rapp had only been in the killing business for a handful of years, but his mentor and trainer, Stan Hurley, had been doing this for the majority of his thirty-plus-year career.
During a session at the firing range, Hurley had once boiled down the essence of the Orion program into one of his trademark pithy lines.
When in doubt, plug the son of a bitch.
Rapp subscribed to this philosophy wholeheartedly.