“Anna, Mitch has been dealing with the house all week and traveling all night,” Claudia said. “The least you could do is walk yourself.”
She rolled her eyes and wriggled from his grip.
“In fact, why don’t you run ahead and make Mitch your special cereal. He hasn’t had breakfast yet.”
Anna perked up at that. Apparently she’d learned to create quite a concoction out of muesli, milk, yogurt, and local fruit—typically served in a coconut shell that leaked. Claudia waited until she’d disappeared up the trail before taking a position blocking his path.
“Why are you here, Mitch? You weren’t due for a few more days and you’re supposed to be meeting with our architect.”
He pulled out his phone, retrieved the dossier Grisha Azarov had sent, and handed it to her. She scrolled for a few seconds, the blood draining from her face.
“This is not good… Not good at all.”
Irene Kennedy finished going through Azarov’s email and then handed the phone to Scott Coleman so he could do the same. They were sitting across from Rapp and Claudia in the shadow cast by their bungalow. Everyone remained silent while the former SEAL studied the dossier and then tossed the cell on the table.
“I only see one explanation for this,” Rapp said.
“I know,” Kennedy said. “But I think it’s too soon to come to any hard conclusions.”
“Seriously?”
“Look, I eradicated all the information about falsifying Claudia’s death and creating her new identity from the CIA’s database. In fact, we went so far as to have Marcus create a worm to find and delete any reference to it.”
Whenever Kennedy resorted to stating the obvious, it was in an effort to give herself time to think. Rapp knew that, but his anger had reached the point that he wasn’t willing to play along.
“There’s no way to eradicate that many files that’s even close to clean, Irene. Even if Marcus’s worm worked perfectly, that just replaces one set of problems with another. You end up with incomplete narratives, references that don’t go anywhere, and reports that don’t make sense. And that’s ignoring the fact that a lot of the people who helped us make her disappear still work at the Agency. Sure, we picked ones we could trust, but where do their loyalties lie now? I hope you know, because after what happened with Mike, I sure as hell don’t.”
“No system is foolproof,” she admitted.
“And this is just the kind of sleazy, backstabbing operation that Darren Hargrave would come up with.”
“It also makes sense that Grisha would be high on his list,” Kennedy conceded. “The information about his run-in with Louis is well documented in the CIA’s database but your relationship with him isn’t. That information was so sensitive that we never recorded anything about it. There was never a file to delete.”
“Hargrave is a scumbag, but you’ve got to give him credit,” Coleman said. “This was a slick move. If Mitch really was going after the president, his window’s closing as they harden their security. This allows them to tie Mitch up without implicating themselves. Maybe even get him killed.”
“Look,” Kennedy said in the soothing tone she tended to adopt when things were blowing up. “I agree that there’s a good chance that Darren Hargrave is behind this. But whether it’s been done with Cook’s knowledge is—”
“Come on,” Rapp interrupted. “Hargrave is so far up the president’s ass, Cook can taste his hair spray. He—”
“Be that as it may,” Kennedy said, wrestling back control of the conversation, “we need to understand what we’re dealing with and what our options are. Rushing into a war with the president of the United States isn’t going to go well.”
“I completely disagree,” Scott Coleman said, and everyone immediately turned toward him. He had a deep respect for—and more than a little fear of—Irene Kennedy. Rapp couldn’t remember him ever taking a strong stance against one of her positions.
“These assholes aren’t going to just go after Mitch and let me and the guys off the hook. If they don’t kill us outright, they’ll figure out a way to arrest us for treason or murder and put on some big show trial. We aren’t exactly a bunch of nuns. We’ve all done some things that might not look so good in the news cycle. I say we go after those motherfuckers. We kill Cook, his creepy-ass wife, and then we throw Darren Hargrave in a wood chipper. Before they can close the gates around themselves.”