He glanced at his watch about halfway up the climb, ignoring the flashing training data in favor of the time. Two more minutes. Probably not a bad idea to find some shade.
It appeared in the form of a concave cliff band to his right. A quick bushwhack through ragged trees and a few more prehistoric arachnids brought him to the base. Rangers had assured him that there were no predators in the park but the acrid stench of urine made him wonder. Yet another reason to make this quick. He pulled a satphone from his pack and installed the battery. At ten a.m. on the dot, it started to vibrate.
“How’s the fishing?” Rapp said, picking up.
“A little slow this morning,” Scott Coleman replied. “But it’ll get better. I’m feeling lucky.”
The former SEAL was floating off the coast of the Greek island he called his second home. Living the good life and offering Rapp an assist with his communications.
The ring of a phone on Coleman’s end became audible, followed by some expected crackling. The call was coming from Irene Kennedy on yet another anonymous satphone. Coleman would pick up, tape the two handsets together, and then put them in a soundproof box—likely his beer cooler. The air gap would add another layer of protection against the NSA using the call to locate Rapp in Namibia. Decades of tracking terrorists had made him an expert on the weaknesses of electronic surveillance. Ironic—and a little bit depressing—that he was relying on the same tricks that al-Qaeda and ISIS used against him.
“Irene?”
“I’m here. Are you doing all right?”
“We’re fine. Can I assume you’ve come up with something?”
“I met with Catherine and she’s agreed to help try to build a better rapport between you and the president.”
“Why would I be interested in that? It didn’t work the first time.”
“Because we’re both going to make the appropriate… let’s say, gestures.”
“When you say ‘we’ does that mean me?”
“Yes.”
“And what are these gestures, exactly?”
“I can get you within striking distance of the president.”
“Really? Where?”
“The White House.”
He laughed as he moved to a better place to watch the approach to his position. What he didn’t need was a cat slinking up on him. The spiders were bad enough. “So, your deal with her is that she’s going to let me into a building full of operators with orders to kill me on sight? I think your negotiating skills are starting to slip, Irene. If you don’t mind, I’ll just stay on vacation for a while and let Legion make my problems disappear.”
“I think you’re downplaying the risk he’s taking, Mitch. There’s a long list of people you’ve killed under conditions that everyone thought were impossible.”
“That may be true, but I don’t have to risk my ass this time. I can just sit by the pool and wait. For once, time’s on my side.”
“So, Cook dies, the vice president serves for a few years with no real mandate, and then Catherine wins the White House.”
“Not a problem for me. And you know why? Because she’s your evil twin. She’s going to calculate that coming after me doesn’t do anything to move the needle in her direction. She’ll be fully locked in on installing herself as a dictator and if the American people allow that, it’s on them. Like I said before, it’s not my job to save them from themselves.”
“I know you better than that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think you’re taking this position because you don’t see it as a real possibility. You think she’ll serve eight years and leave the country damaged but fundamentally unchanged.”
“You don’t?”
“If Anthony Cook dies over the course of the next year, I think that there’s a good chance that America’s democracy will fail. I think we’ll see an explosion of political violence, states attempting to break away from constitutional mandates, and eventually a shattered country with a government that isn’t much different than Russia’s or Venezuela’s.”
“That seems kind of alarmist to me.”
“It’s not.”
He swore quietly under his breath. An entire life spent trying to keep the world at a slow boil and the Cooks were blowing the lid off.
“What are you saying I should do about it?” he said finally.
“Deliver our terms.”
“Send a letter.”