Chapter 40
ROME, ITALY
YOU can speak English? Like a native?”
Rapp nodded.
His appearance had always been just as big a selling point for his inclusion in the Orion team’s ranks as his aptitude for languages.
Maybe more so. Though he’d never given it much thought as a child, Rapp now sometimes wondered if he had a bit of Arabic blood in his family history.
With his hair grown out, his beard unshaven, and his olive skin sun-darkened, he could pass as a native for many of the countries spanning the Fertile Crescent.
His Iraqi-flavored Arabic only helped the sell.
Though he’d yet to spend any appreciable time undercover, Rapp had worked hard to learn the region’s customs and mannerisms. When the time came for a deep-cover role, he wanted to be ready.
The irony of the situation was that now that he’d finally been afforded the opportunity to pose as someone else, he had to convince the terrorists that he could pass as something equally foreign to them.
A Westerner.
“I don’t know—he looks too Middle Eastern to me.”
Rapp didn’t bother answering.
As he’d learned within moments of making the acquaintance of the cluster of three men surrounding him, his opinion did not matter.
Instead, he waited in silence while the Muppets, as Rapp had come to think of the men, bickered.
The tiny apartment was an island of calm in the hustle and bustle that was the Roma Islamic Center.
Though the apartment’s cinder-block walls kept the interior relatively quiet, the center could accommodate thousands of worshippers across its sprawling thirty-thousand-square-meter footprint, and the crowd’s ambient noise was tremendous.
Ali’s plan to have Rapp meet in the mosque was a master stroke from a strategic point of view.
The difficulty of infiltrating or conducting surveillance on such a massive structure combined with the likelihood that an Italian intelligence or police presence would stand out among such a homogeneous population aside, there was another reason why Rapp and his co-conspirators didn’t have much to fear.
Like most of its European neighbors, Italy’s strategy to combat the danger posed by radical Islamic terrorists consisted mainly of hope.
As in hoping the jihadis chose someone else to attack.
“Say baseball.”
“Baseball,” Rapp repeated, wondering if this was some sort of fever dream.
“I don’t know, I still hear his accent.”
“Enough. It is him or no one. He will do.”
At this, the other two Muppets fell silent.
As Rapp had suspected, the elderly man seated across from him was actually calling the shots.
All three wore an imam’s flowing robes, but that’s where their similarities ended.
The trio were a study in contrasts—one old, one young, and one fat.
They hadn’t offered their names, so Rapp had invented his own—Youngster for the junior man with the threadbare beard and peach-fuzz mustache; Gordo for the short, dumpy Muppet; and Arab Gandalf for the old man, who bore a striking resemblance to a Tolkien character.
Though their constant bickering and inane questions were vaguely amusing, there was nothing funny about what they were discussing.
Rapp had been invited here for one reason.
To kill someone.
After finishing with Victoria in Turkey, Rapp had flown back to Rome on his new British-supplied legend and caught a cab to the Islamic Center.
It lay on the western side of a sprawling greenbelt crisscrossed with parks, hiking trails, and playgrounds.
The rectangular-shaped space was more than a mile from north to south and almost three-quarters of a mile wide.
Its meandering paths and thick foliage would have been a perfect location to conduct an SDR, but Rapp remained in his taxi.
Whether or not he was under surveillance was largely immaterial, since he was following Ali’s instructions.
He was also under a time crunch.
Asr, or afternoon, prayers were about to begin.
Rapp ducked into the mosque as the main hall was filling with worshippers.
The feeling was eerie. As part of his Orion team training, he’d attended prayers in several mosques stateside to gain a sense of the flow and community dynamics that accompanied the gathering, but this was the first time he’d done so while operational.
Rapp had the sequence of the salah memorized, so proceeding through each rak’ah didn’t require much thought.
This familiarity was a two-edged sword in that while it alleviated any worries he might have had about looking out of place, his preparation gave his mind free rein to dwell on less helpful topics.
Like what he was going to say to Hurley if this was just a wild-goose chase.
Rapp had just voiced his final Allahu Akbar when he was tapped on the shoulder by a small boy.
In halting Arabic, the youngster asked Rapp to follow him.
Rapp did.
After edging past several clusters of men talking in groups of two or three, the boy led Rapp out of the main hall with its soaring ceiling, intricately designed columns, and plush carpeting to the sprawling grounds ringing the mosque proper, where someone else was waiting.
A young woman.
After handing Rapp off to the woman, the boy rolled a soccer ball out from where it had been hidden beneath a bush and began to kick it against the brick wall.
Judging by the loud smack the ball made each time it hit the wall, the boy had quite the leg.
Rapp turned to the woman. She wasn’t much older than eighteen or nineteen and was dressed in a hijab that covered her head and a long, flowing dress that obscured most of her body, but her eyes were large and expressive.
She looked Arabic, but he couldn’t be sure.
The woman turned her head when Rapp tried to make eye contact, but not before he saw a discolored splotch along her cheekbone. A splotch that looked suspiciously like a bruise.
“What’s your name?” Rapp said.
He tried the question twice, once in Italian and once in Arabic. He was partway through asking a third time—this time in French—when the woman spoke.
“Please—follow me.”
Her instructions had been given in Arabic. Arabic flavored with a lilting, lyrical Lebanese accent.
“Of course,” Rapp said. “But can you please tell me your name?”
Rather than answer, the woman began to walk, forcing Rapp to follow.
He tried engaging her again, but the sound of his voice seemed to make the woman draw in upon herself.
She hunched her shoulders, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and increased her pace.
The woman moved in a sort of hitched stride that hinted at a limp and the way in which she hunched her shoulders suggested there were more bruises across her back and arms that her kaftan-type dress hid.
Rapp silently seethed.
He understood that he was not some sort of masked crusader just as he knew that the world was full of bad people who did terrible things to the weak and defenseless.
The cancer that was radical Islamic terrorism was rooted in a twisted belief system that viewed women as subhuman.
Rapp was in the business of killing terrorists who practiced this belief system, so he was bound to see more manifestations of its malignancy the longer he stayed in his vocation.
Like an ER doctor who had to learn how to separate himself from the traumas he treated during every shift, Rapp had to wall himself off from the evil he encountered when he waded into the sewer that was radical Islamic terrorism in search of his prey.
He could not save everyone.
But neither could he just turn away from evil when he saw it.
After traversing a cobblestone pedestrian area and down a flight of steps, the woman came to a squat, concrete structure with a series of doors leading to what Rapp guessed were individual offices or classrooms. The woman made a fist and was preparing to knock on the third door to the left when Rapp placed his hand between the frame and her fingers.
She froze.
“Do you want help?” Rapp whispered.
The woman remained motionless for a long moment.
Then she slowly shook her head.
“Okay,” Rapp said, “but if you change your mind, go to the police. You don’t have to live like this.”
He removed his hand.
The woman paused again as if gathering her thoughts before rapping her knuckles against the door.
From somewhere inside, a male voice instructed them to enter.
The woman pushed open the door and Rapp followed her into the dimly lit apartment.
Rapp tried to ignore the scratchy feeling between his shoulder blades when the door was closed behind him.
After he’d blinked several times, the dark interior resolved into a small room with three men seated on the floor, on plush cushions.
As he’d suspected, the room seemed to be temporary housing of some sort.
A kitchen area with a sink, refrigerator, and small stove sat along the far wall and a partially closed door leading to what he assumed was a bathroom lay to his left.
The main area was reminiscent of a studio apartment, with a bed along one wall, a small table cluttered with dishes and take-out boxes, a flimsy wardrobe, and a wobbly looking desk.
The woman immediately began tidying the room.
The seated men ignored her in favor of focusing on Rapp. After a moment of silence, the man who Rapp would later christen as Arab Gandalf gestured to an empty cushion positioned in front of the trio.
Rapp sat and his vetting began.
Now, forty-five minutes later, Rapp was approaching the end of his patience.
No, that wasn’t true.
He’d officially arrived. After the bullshit meetings with Ali, the jaunt to Turkey, enduring afternoon prayers, and listening to these idiots prattle on for the better part of an hour, he was done. This realization provided an immediate boost to his spirits.
It would not have the same effect for the Muppets.
“We should kill him and be done with it. He’s a threat to the operation. Nothing more.”
The woman was laboring at the sink behind the trio.
At Youngster’s pronouncement, she froze.
Rapp sighed.
Why was it that young and stupid went so well together?
Rapp enjoyed the dominance that came with being in his physical prime, but he found himself wishing for a smattering of gray around his temples. Anything not to be lumped into the same demographic as this imbecile.
“Excuse me,” Rapp said, raising his hand. “I have a question.”
“I told you,” Youngster said with his fists clenched, “remain silent or suffer the consequences.”
To add emphasis to his words, Youngster stood and took a step closer to Rapp. The junior Muppet’s broad shoulders and wide chest suggested that he compensated for his youthful appearance with long sessions at the gym. Rapp looked up with a bored expression, which seemed to anger the man even more.
“I was talking to the man in charge,” Rapp said, gesturing at Arab Gandalf. “Not you.”
Youngster stomped Rapp in the chest.
Or at least he tried to.
Rapp uncoiled the moment the man lifted his leg.
Exploding upward, he buried his head in the man’s torso, snatched the offending limb, and executed a picture-perfect single-leg takedown.
Youngster didn’t fall well. His encounter with the tile floor brought to mind a sack of concrete slipping off a truck’s tailgate.
After uttering a gurgling moan, he went limp.
“Stop,” Arab Gandalf said as Gordo reached beneath his robes.
Rapp did not stop.
Instead, he snapped a push kick into Gordo’s chest, driving the man backward. The dumpy Muppet slammed onto his back, and his head smacked into the ground with a dull thud.
He also went limp.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Rapp ignored Arab Gandalf’s yelling in favor of frisking Gordo.
As he suspected, the fat Muppet had been reaching for a pistol.
Rapp withdrew the weapon and racked the slide to ensure a round was chambered.
Arab Gandalf scrambled to his feet and made a break for the door, presumably under the impression that Rapp was distracted.
He was not.
Rapp arrested Arab Gandalf’s escape by grabbing a handful of the man’s greasy hair. The imam emitted a very unmanly sounding screech and opened his mouth wide, presumably to scream. He didn’t get the chance. Rapp shoved the pistol beneath the man’s chin, closing his jaws.
“My turn,” Rapp said.
Rapp had a number of carefully curated points he intended to relay to Arab Gandalf. Points he expected to expound upon without interruption.
He didn’t get the chance.
As he was preparing to speak, something unexpected interrupted him.
Applause.