The keys were buried beneath a rock near the front bumper and he used them to gain access. After starting the engine, Rapp dug a brand-new satphone from the glove box. Installing the battery, he used an encrypted protocol to connect to Claudia in Cape Town, South Africa.
“Are you all right?” she said by way of greeting.
“Fine.”
“Were you in the pipe all this time?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever install the latrine?”
“Let’s not talk about that,” he said, accelerating down the road.
“I had to move the plane to its tertiary location. You’ll be flying the first leg yourself. The weather looks good and it’s an aircraft you’re familiar with, but be careful.”
He frowned at the thinly veiled—but admittedly deserved—insult to his piloting skills.
“Understood.”
“When you get to the second plane, tell the pilot where you want to go. Fair warning: I’m being watched.”
It was to be expected. The Cooks would be covering all bases.
“How much effort are they putting into it?”
“One, maybe two people. No electronic surveillance on the property—I’m sweeping regularly—but they probably have some capability outside the walls. I doubt they think you’ll show up here. Too obvious.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“A mutual friend of ours lost her job.”
She was clearly referring to Kennedy but wanted to avoid keywords that the NSA’s artificial intelligence might flag for further attention.
“The end of an era,” Rapp said, uncertain how to feel about it. Anger? Resignation? The desire to open a good bottle of tequila and toss the cap in the trash?
“True. But it can also be the start of a new one.”
CHAPTER 6
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, DC
USA
CATHERINE Cook avoided her normal path across the lawn, staying to the pavement. Temperatures had risen into the eighties, but the grass was still soft from the torrential rains the eastern seaboard had suffered. Most important, though, was that the flooding in the Carolinas had subsided quickly enough to make her husband’s lack of interest more a missed opportunity than a weapon for the opposition.
A man with more sensible footwear than her own overtook her to the left, sweating in black tactical clothing behind a German shepherd. He spoke briefly with a group of similarly clad men—these holding assault rifles—before continuing on his way. Manifestations of her husband’s increasingly oppressive security.
Outside the gate, traffic was being diverted around recently installed barriers, exacerbating Washington’s already significant traffic issues. The additional security personnel were augmented by hastily erected checkpoints and scanner stations, giving points of ingress a distinct airport feel. Further, much of the personnel not directly involved with security had been deemed nonessential and sent home to work until further background checks could be done. She herself had lost a full third of her staff.
Her husband had always been seen as a risk taker. He knew what he wanted and went after it with a level of aggression that was unusual even in her world of high finance. That passion and the destructive impulses that sometimes came with it were what made him so relatable to the common man.
It was also what made them such an effective team. Her dispassionate, analytical nature tended to work as a foil. In the end, their hard-won compromises formed the best of all worlds—carefully calculated strategies wrapped in the messianic flair humanity needed from its leaders.
What she’d missed was that her husband had never been faced with a physical threat. The passion that she’d mistaken for strength was turning to terror as he realized that losing to Mitch Rapp wouldn’t be the same as a political loss. In politics, there were opportunities even in defeat. Ways to lie, spin, and blame. With Rapp there would be no second chances. His defeated enemies didn’t return stronger for the experience. Nor did they come back to fight another day.
To make matters worse, her ability to sway her husband seemed to be slipping. As his paranoia grew, he was increasingly looking to others for counsel. To people who promised him something she couldn’t: protection.
Finally, there was the threat posed by Nicholas Ward. He had returned to the public arena the day before, announcing that his death had been faked as part of a strategy to defeat a plot against him. A strategy that hadn’t just saved his life, but had allowed Mitch Rapp to wipe out one of the world’s most brutal terrorist organizations in the process. The story had hijacked the news cycle so completely that anything short of a war with Iran would be insufficient to get it back.