American Assassin

Chapter 21
AS planned, Rapp was the first one to arrive in the former capital city of the Byzantine Empire. He'd been given a long list of orders, and one of them was to stay away from the safe house until it was dark. It was February and the temperature was in the midfifties. Rapp took the tram to the Beyoglu District, found a men's room, retrieved a few objects from his luggage, and then deposited the suitcase in a locker and set about exploring the area, which he'd already memorized by map. He was immediately taken by the scope of the city, as well as its rich history. He'd traveled to London and Paris previously, and Istanbul rivaled them in every way. The images of London and Paris were well known throughout the Western world, but Istanbul, far more rich in history, had in a way been forgotten by people in Europe and America.

After stopping for a quick bite at a cafe, Rapp made his way toward the Galata neighborhood, where their target lived. Hurley had given him specific orders to stay clear of both the target's apartment and his office. Rapp had not made a conscious decision to defy the order; it more or less just happened. As he turned onto Bankalar Daddesi, or Banks Street, he couldn't help but walk past the target's place of work along with several hundred other people who crowded the sidewalk. Rapp passed on the opposite side of the street and noted the bank guard standing next to the front door. With that done, he decided he might as well take a look at the man's apartment, which was six-tenths of a mile from the office. It was on a tree-lined street that reminded Rapp of a much smaller version of the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. It was a wealthy enclave, and as in all such enclaves in cities the world over, the occupants were protected from the riffraff by security guards, ornate fences, and iron bars on the first-floor windows. At first glance, neither the office nor the apartment looked like the ideal place to strike.

When the sun finally set, Rapp found his way to the two-bedroom flat via a back alley. He went by once without stopping to check and see if there were any surprises and then circled back. In the poor light he threaded the worn key into the lock and held his breath. The first attempt did not work. Rapp jiggled the key a bit and then tried again. This time the deadbolt released. He stepped into the room, barely breathing, and closed the door behind him. He stood statuelike, all of his senses on high alert. This apartment was the only definitive link to him in the entire city of twelve million people. Hurley had warned him that this was the second-most-dangerous moment when conducting an operation. Rapp asked him what was the most dangerous, and the old man had replied with a devilish smile, "When you engage the target."

After dropping his bag, he locked the door and found the wall switch. Two small wall sconces cast a yellow light over the room. He fished a large rubber doorstop from his suitcase and wedged it under the door. He couldn't help but smile to himself as he thought of Hurley's rules. The man even had rules about how to go to the bathroom. Some of them, like the rubber doorstop, made complete sense, while others, like which stall to choose, and why, seemed a bit much. Rapp checked the windows next. They had bars, which were padlocked. There was only one way in and out - the door he'd just come through. That was not the best situation should the police come looking for them. Rapp made sure the shades were pulled tight on the two garden-level windows that faced the alley and then he went straight for the bedroom.

At the bottom of the armoire, under an extra blanket and pillow, he found what he was looking for. Rapp placed the tattered leather suitcase on the bed, dialed in the combinations, and popped the clasps. Inside was a shrink-wrapped file, a small arsenal of pistols, silencers, ammunition, knives, and a surveillance kit. Rapp snapped on a pair of latex gloves and retrieved a Beretta 92F from the foam cutout. He checked the slide, the chamber, the firing pin, and then the trigger. The gun had been cleaned by a pro. After screwing a silencer to the end, he took one of the fifteen-round magazines and inserted it, chambered a round, and checked the safety.

Rapp then set about doing a complete examination of the apartment. He retrieved the electric razor from his shaving kit, pressed two buttons, waited for the light to blink. The shaver was actually a scanning device used to detect bugs. Hurley had explained that the flat had been rented by a freelancer, which in this case was code for a retired Agency employee. The man was to sanitize and stock the flat, but Rapp had been ordered to go over the entire place again from top to bottom just to make sure. It took him the better part of an hour to go over the entire apartment.

When the jet lag finally caught up with him, Rapp was too tired to make anything to eat, so he took a quick shower and then tore the shrink wrap from the file. He had been given a full briefing on Hamdi Sharif back in the States, but this file, he was told, would be far more target-specific. The target was fifty-eight years old. He was a Turkish national, and according to press clippings, had made his money in real estate. What the clippings left out was that the majority of his wealth had come from supplying arms to various regimes throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia. British, French, and American intelligence agencies all had his number, but Sharif was in bed with the Russians, which made him a bit of a sticky situation. None of the allies wanted to risk upsetting the Russians, so they tolerated him.

Rapp frowned as he reviewed the section on Sharif's ties with the tangled web of former Soviet generals and Ivan-come-lately millionaire businessmen. All but a few were thugs and Mafiosi, and the legitimate businessmen were being dropped and squeezed out of their holdings on a weekly basis. Russia had become the Wild West, and the sheriff was in on the fix. The KGB brutes had new business cards, but other than that, not much had changed. The allies, for some reason, couldn't see that the more they turned a blind eye the more brazen these men were becoming. Rapp could give a rat's ass about the Russians and who they used to peddle their arms, so long as those arms didn't end up in the laps of terrorists. Unfortunately for Sharif, that was precisely what he had been doing, and in ever-increasing shipments.

Most of the file was a summary of what Rapp already knew, such as his ties to Hezbollah, but there were a few new snippets about a Marxist outfit called Dev Sol. In the past year the group had targeted the overseas offices of fifteen U.S. corporations in Istanbul. The bombs were all military grade, and the Brits were saying Sharif's outfit had supplied the goods. Sharif was a Muslim and an ardent supporter of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Fatah. How he had ended up in business with a bunch of leftist, God-hating communists was a real head-scratcher. The file didn't draw any conclusions, just gave the facts. Rapp was left to venture guesses on his own. He supposed it was money first, and then the old saying - my enemy's enemy is my friend.

The Dev Sol wrinkle gave Rapp pause, however. He got the sense that this might be about more than just Pan Am Lockerbie, or at least that certain important people stateside don't care so much when innocent civilians get killed, but by God, if the day-to-day operations of a couple of Fortune 500 companies were disrupted, it was time to send a message. Those corporations contributed a lot of money to the coffers of important politicians in Washington. The more Rapp thought about it, the more he realized it didn't matter. It was like Sharif supporting Dev Sol. As long as he and the corporations were going after the same enemy, it didn't much matter.

Rapp finished the file and stuffed it under the mattress. He lay there for a long moment with his eyes open thinking about the detailed report. It was written in English, but it had not been written by an American. The choice of words was distinctive and the sentence structure more formal. Rapp concluded the Brits had put the report together, and that they had taken a long, hard look at solving the Sharif problem. They had conducted careful surveillance on the arms dealer. His daily routine was detailed down to the minute. The report didn't say how long they had watched him, but he got the impression it was for several weeks. Rapp remembered that the shrink back at the lake house had told him you could discern patterns in almost any person's life. In reading Sharif's file, those patterns jumped off the page. And one in particular was almost impossible to ignore. Rapp's mind began to wander down a path that he should have steered clear of, but he found it impossible to resist.

After a few minutes he set the alarm on his watch, turned off the bedside lamp, glanced at the loaded pistol, closed his eyes, and began to drift away. Hurley's orders couldn't have been more clear, but it would be two more days before he arrived in the city. Rapp began to imagine how he would do it. The act of his first kill played out in his mind like a movie. As he drifted off to sleep, he decided he would go for a nice long run in the morning. And he would break another one of Hurley's rules.