Act of Treason

Chapter 24
WASHINGTON, DC

Rapp stood in front of the TV in his towel and brushed his teeth. The perky duo on the screen told him a warm front was moving into the Potomac River Valley. The forecast for Monday morning was clear skies and an afternoon high of fifty degrees. By tomorrow they expected the mercury to hit sixty. The morning TV anchors were doubly excited about this in light of the ice storm that had hit the city the previous Friday. Rapp cared about the weather only to the extent that he needed to know how he should dress. Other than that he tended not to get excited one way or the other. It was what it was, and there was nothing he could do about it. What he really wanted to know was how much play the upcoming joint press conference was getting.

The apartment didn't have cable. It didn't have much, in fact, other than the essentials. This was Rapp's crash pad. His bolt-hole that he kept in Washington. His brother Steven was the only other person who knew about it. He'd shown it to his wife on one occasion. He brought her late at night so no one would see them, and he showed her how to enter from the back fire escape. The building was an eight-unit brownstone that his father had bought as an investment a few years before his death. Rapp was just eight years old but he remembered riding with him to the apartment on the weekends to clean the hallways and the laundry room.

The brownstone was located approximately a mile north of the White House in the Columbia Heights neighborhood only a few blocks away from the upscale Adams Morgan neighborhood. Columbia Heights was one of the many neighborhoods in the city that had fallen to urban decay in the sixties and seventies. Rapp's father, a real estate attorney, had bought the place for next to nothing. It was four units up, four units down, sturdy as all hell, and full of character. Rapp's mother almost sold the place twice after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack, but Steven had been adamant that they keep it. Steven, just a year and half younger than Mitch, could spot trends even back then. They weren't losing money on the brownstone, but it was a real pain. It was a rental property in a bad neighborhood; drugs, prostitution-there'd even been a murder right in front of the building. There were lots of complaints by the tenants, late rent checks, and more evictions than they could count. Not the type of hassle a single mother of two from the suburbs needed in her life.

Steven persisted, though. He insisted that their father had said the building was a gold mine. As soon as the neighborhood turned around they'd make a small fortune. Steven even went so far as to put an ad in the paper for a new building supervisor. He dragged his mother down there on a Saturday morning and helped her pick a nice old man whose apartment building was scheduled to be torn down by the city to make room for a section eight housing development. The man worked for free rent. He stabilized things and got good long-term tenants to move in. The neighborhood started to turn in the late eighties, and then the super passed away in 1991 and they decided to sell each unit as a condominium. Their father had been right. Over a three-year period they sold all eight units and made a small fortune. One of those units was bought by an LLC out of the Bahamas.

The CIA had taught Rapp to be a careful man. He'd operated for years without an official cover in some very hostile places. He'd been ordered to do things by his superiors that he knew were illegal. The fact that this apartment was illegal in the eyes of the CIA didn't bother him for a second. He'd been trained to live a lie. To deceive. To do whatever it took to survive and complete the mission without being caught. This apartment was a natural extension of what they had taught him.

Rapp walked into the bedroom. Sparsely furnished like the rest of the place, it contained a queen-size bed with a wooden headboard that matched the nightstands and dresser. Rapp threw the towel on the end of the bed and grabbed a pair of boxers, white T-shirt, and black socks from the dresser. He put them on and opened the closet. There were half a dozen shirts and two suits all wrapped in plastic. Rapp put on a light blue shirt and the blue suit. He found a silver and light blue tie and held it up to the mirror on the back of the closet door. It worked. He knotted the tie and walked over to the dresser.

On top sat a metallic Rolex submariner, his Maryland driver's license, a wad of hundred-dollar bills, a sleek Kahr 9mm pistol, a small conceal-to-carry holster, an SIM card, and a new cell phone that was partially dismantled. Rapp put the gun in the holster and placed it inside his waistband at the small of his back. He put the new cell phone in his left breast pocket and the battery and battery cover in the right breast pocket of the suit coat. He walked back out into the living room, turned off the TV, and looked out the window. It was 6:38 a.m. on Monday. The press conference was a little more than three hours away. Rapp grinned and wondered if they were still going to go through with it. They really had no choice. They had a person in custody. Someone they could blame for the attack. If they canceled the press conference they would look like fools, so Rapp was willing to bet that it would go off as scheduled at 10:00 a.m. Between now and then he had a few calls to make, but he didn't dare do it from the apartment. He would leave the neighborhood and then make his calls.