Almost forty-five minutes after her arrival, Darren Hargrave finally appeared in what was now his doorway. Kennedy powered down her tablet and stood, but instead of waiting to shake her hand, he disappeared back into his office. She collected her things and entered, closing the door only to find him already stationed behind his desk.
Of course, all her personal belongings were gone. As promised, they’d been delivered by courier the day after her dismissal. The artwork, most of which had been on loan, was also missing, replaced with myriad eight-by-ten photos of Hargrave posing with other people. Not unusual. Washington’s denizens loved to hang pictures of themselves hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. Upon closer inspection, though, she noticed that Hargrave’s taste was a bit more specific. Every single picture—and there were more than she could count without being obvious—featured Anthony Cook. Also interesting was that there was no third person in any of them.
“Sit,” he said, motioning to a chair in front of his desk.
She did, ignoring the fact that the command was delivered with the tone someone would normally use to address a dog.
“Catherine told me I should take this meeting, so here we are. Now, what is it I can do for you?”
“I assume that by now you know Mitch is in Africa?”
He just glared at her. A man like Hargrave would take that as a veiled insult. A reminder that he’d failed both to capture Rapp at his home in Virginia and to prevent him from leaving the country. In fact, she had no such intention. While she had a strong distaste for her successor, she couldn’t blame him for his lack of success. If she’d been charged with capturing Mitch Rapp, she wouldn’t have fared any better.
“Why would I care?” he shot back and then immediately seemed to recognize the idiocy of the response.
“It appears that the president is concerned that Mitch might want to do him harm. I’m here to convince you that’s not the case.”
He laughed. “I’m told that you’re a persuasive woman, Irene. But I’m not an idiot.”
“Neither is Mitch. He recognizes that the president was within his rights to ask Mike Nash to provide him with information from the CIA database and that he was free to do as he saw fit with that information.”
“There’s more than that, though, isn’t there, Irene? Nash didn’t go to Uganda just to talk.”
“Mike could have walked away at any time. The fact that he didn’t was his own decision.”
“I’ll ask you again, Irene. What do you want?”
“A truce.”
He studied her silently for a few seconds. “Terms?”
“None. He wants to be left alone. If the president doesn’t make any moves against him, he’ll show the same restraint.”
“So, the great and terrible Mitch Rapp is just going to turn the other cheek, huh?”
“He’s not as volatile as people make him out to be, Director Hargrave. And he has a family now.”
Her successor considered that for a few moments. “Well, he might not have terms, but I think we would.”
“Such as?”
“That he and his people stay in plain sight and none of them ever set foot in the United States again.”
“When you say ‘his people,’ who are you referring to?”
“Scott Coleman and his team.”
“Impossible. They have lives here and nothing to do with the relationship between Mitch and the president. The government certainly has the ability to watch them when they’re on American soil, but it’s a waste of time and resources. Even if Mitch wanted to harm Anthony Cook—which he very much does not—he’d be reluctant to involve the people close to him.”
“What about Rapp, then?”
She let out a long breath. “I imagine I can convince him to stay out of the US as long as the Cooks are in power. As far as being in plain sight, he’d likely agree to not actively try to evade surveillance. If your people were to lose him for whatever reason, they could just call and he could tell them where he is. Also, I think it would be reasonable to allow him a three-month window to wind down his affairs here.”
“No way in hell. Let his girlfriend deal with it.”
Once again, Kennedy found herself disoriented by what was happening. Without Mitch Rapp, there likely wouldn’t even be an America. After a domestic terrorist brought down the country’s power grid, it had been he who’d captured the man and figured out how to get the electricity flowing again. In the absence of that, America would have collapsed into hunger, cold, and violence. Anthony Cook had admitted as much in a recent meeting.