Chapter 21
RAPP reflexively grabbed the door handle and pulled.
It opened to reveal the woman.
She pushed a strand of black curls from her face, saw Rapp, and smiled.
His heart skipped a beat. Her dark brown, almond-shaped eyes sparkled with mischief.
This close, he could smell an intoxicating combination of the woman’s perfume and her warm, tanned skin.
Rapp clenched his free hand into a fist, fighting the urge to touch her arm.
The woman’s full lips stretched into an even broader grin as if she could sense his thoughts.
She was gorgeous, but it was more than that.
She had… presence.
“Buonasera,” Rapp said, stumbling over his greeting like an infatuated schoolboy.
“Ciao,” the woman said with a laugh.
Her gaze traveled across him before returning to his face. She chuckled again, a low throaty sound, and cocked her head to the side as if giving him an appraising look. Then she was moving. She brushed against him as she passed, fingertips tracing a line of fire against his ribs.
Turning left, she pushed open the door to the bookstore and entered.
Rapp hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself.
Follow the girl or continue inside?
“Car is rolling down the street.”
Rapp slid inside the building and allowed the door to close behind him. His last glimpse of the woman had shown her browsing a rack of fashion magazines by the bookstore’s entrance.
That somehow seemed appropriate.
“Pulling even with the building, time now.”
Rapp gave the lobby a quick once-over.
The space was clean and unremarkable. A bulletin board was affixed to one wall, while a row of mailboxes ran along a second.
A stairwell led upstairs and an elevator patiently waited.
A rack holding umbrellas and a potted plant of uncertain lineage flanked the entrance.
All in all, the décor suggested that the apartments were on the upper side of middle class—not nice enough to merit a doorman, but reputable enough for residents to feel comfortable leaving their umbrellas in the common area.
“Sedan is stopping. The girl just exited the bookstore and is walking toward the car.”
“Get the plate,” Rapp said as he took the steps leading up to the second floor two at a time, “and pics of the passengers.”
The surveillance team were professionals and probably didn’t need his reminder to do the obvious. Still, something wasn’t right. The woman’s time inside had been brief.
Too brief.
Assuming she’d visited Romano’s apartment and not a unit on the third or fourth floor, Rapp could think of only one reason why she would vacate the premises so quickly.
“Vehicle is pulling away with the woman inside.”
Rapp rounded the corner and slowed his rush. If his hunch was correct, time was no longer of the essence. The stairs emptied into a narrow hallway leading to a single door. As he’d suspected, Romano was the floor’s sole occupant.
Rapp frowned.
The building wasn’t the equivalent of the penthouse level on a New York City high-rise, but the accommodations were substantially better than what Rapp would have pegged as affordable for a humble government employee.
Rapp caught a hint of perfume in the air.
A familiar-smelling perfume. Easing down the hallway, he paused in front of the apartment’s door.
He tried the doorknob.
Locked.
He tapped on the wooden frame with his knuckle. Softly at first and then with more vigor.
No answer.
Rapp thumbed his radio’s transmit button. “What’s the situation out front?”
“Vehicle and the girl are gone. Normal pedestrian traffic. Nothing else. What’s the play, Mitch?”
That was a great question.
“Keep eyes on the building’s entrance. Anything out of the ordinary, I want to know.”
“Copy.”
The door’s exterior seemed to be wood, but the sound his knuckle made when he struck the surface suggested otherwise.
The man inside was an intelligence officer.
Perhaps a double-dealing intelligence officer.
Rapp was betting the oak panels hid some kind of metal core, or at the very least, an interior that was reinforced with steel bands.
There was no way he was forcing it open with anything short of a breaching charge.
He needed to pick the lock. Rapp withdrew the necessary tools from his coat pocket, set the torsion wrench in the keyway, and inserted the pick.
After applying pressure to the wrench, he began to rake the pins with the pick.
He tried to work as quickly and quietly as possible, but the lock was old and the pins stubborn.
Or maybe he was out of practice.
Visualizing the locking mechanism, he adjusted his angle and tilted the pick a bit to the left.
This time when he raked, he felt the tremble of feedback that signified the final pin had fallen.
He applied a bit more pressure to the torsion wrench and heard a satisfying thunk as the lock surrendered.
Rapp slipped the tools into his pocket, drew his pistol, and screwed on the suppressor.
Then he turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
He entered in a blur.
The suppressor moved in tandem with his head as Rapp panned the Beretta across the apartment’s foyer.
Empty. Reaching behind him blindly, he found the doorknob with his non-shooting right hand, eased it closed, and then threw the lock.
The resulting metal-on-metal click echoed through the apartment.
Rapp ghosted down the hall, the pistol now in a two-handed grip.
He shifted the Beretta from potential target to target, swiveling his shoulders like his torso was a tank’s turret.
Under moments of stress, the brain instinctively defaulted to the most important sense—sight.
This meant that sounds were often ignored in a phenomenon known as audio exclusion.
In the same manner, a person under the enormous tension induced by a fight-or-flight scenario often experienced a tunneling of their vision.
Rapp had been taught to combat this phenomenon by constantly shifting his perspective, like he was playing a flashlight over the entirety of a dark room instead of just illuminating the path ahead.
The pistol’s front sight post demanded the majority of his attention.
He had impressions about the apartment’s décor, its cleanliness and size, but these observations were fleeting.
Until he located Romano and cleared the flat of potential threats, everything else was secondary.
Including the faint sound of sirens.
“Two patrol cars inbound from the west. Three blocks and closing.”
Right about now, Rapp was wishing for a bit of audio exclusion. He didn’t acknowledge the radio transmission or quicken his pace, but his heart rate accelerated. The patrol cars might not be heading for this apartment, but based on how today had gone so far, it was a pretty safe bet.
He breezed past a bathroom and office.
Then he was presented with another closed door.
Bedroom.
Had to be.
Rapp tried the doorknob. Unlocked. He shoved open the door and entered, sweeping his pistol from left to right. His front sight post halted on the bed and the figure stretched across the blood-soaked duvet.
An unmoving figure.
Romano was naked with the exception of a pair of boxer shorts, and his eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling.
“Patrol cars are outside. Officers exiting.”
Rapp stepped closer to the body.
Two bullet holes in the chest and one in the forehead.
A professional’s work.
“Police are entering the lobby. Are you hearing this, Mitch?”
“Copy,” Rapp said.
He stepped past the corpse, opened the apartment’s window, slid onto the fire escape, and closed the glass pane behind him.
After peering over the railing to verify that the street below the balcony was clear of police, he descended the stairs and disappeared into the alley heading north.
His attempt to discover what had happened to the Pakistani had just gone up in smoke.
Time to give the Mystery Man a listen.