Kill Shot

Chapter 39

RAPP'S feet glided along the pavement, beating out a steady five-and-a-half-minute-a-mile-pace. His shoulder throbbed, but he did his best to ignore it, and when he couldn't ignore it he told himself he deserved worse. A man was dead. Luke Auclair, an innocent man who had been minding his own business, living his own life, until Rapp had sought him out and included him in his great miscalculation.

It had been a rough night. They'd traveled to the outskirts of Paris, where they'd stopped for gas and Rapp scrubbed the dried blood of the DGSE agent from his hands. He still had no idea if the man had made it. Maybe one life could be saved from the debacle. After that, they drove north a bit and checked into one of the big chain hotels by Charles de Gaulle Airport. The place was run-down, one of those five-hundred-room behemoths for business travelers who were willing to sacrifice service and cleanliness to be near the airport. The place was in dire need of remodeling, but Rapp barely noticed. He wasn't in shock, but rather a bit jumbled from an evening of unexpected events.

He and Greta sat in near silence as they ate a late dinner, and then they went up to the room. She was good enough to not ask too many questions. She could tell he was trying to sort through some very heavy questions. Around midnight, with them both tossing and turning, he started to talk. The part about Luke weighed the heaviest on him. He was an innocent, a noncombatant, and the first rule of his job was to never harm noncombatants.

"But you didn't know they would act the way they did," Greta said. "You were testing them."

"It doesn't matter. I should have never involved him."

Greta was quiet for a moment and then said, "But if you hadn't it would have been you down on the street."

"No," Rapp said with self-loathing, "I knew better than to go into that apartment, and even if I had, I would have gone out the back door and my gun would have been ready and I would have been on guard. No one could have snuck up on me like that."

They talked for a while longer and then Rapp kissed her on the forehead, told her he loved her, and said, "Let's try to get some sleep."

He held her with his good arm, and was grateful when he heard her breathing settle into a sleep pattern a short while later. Rapp continued to stare at the ceiling, replaying the events that he had watched from Bob and Tibby McMahon's apartment as if it were a box seat at the theater. He dozed off a few times, but not for long. Sleep was rarely a struggle for him, and the more elusive it became, the more restless he grew. He ran through every conceivable scenario to determine who could have betrayed him. He pictured each face and then considered the possibility that they'd all conspired to have him killed. Had they decided to kill him based on bad information, or some information he wasn't aware of? He slid his arm out from under Greta and decided he had to trust Kennedy. She had warned him to stay away from the safe house. She knew Victor was there, but did she know he'd been ordered to kill Rapp?

He finally fell asleep for a few hours and then woke just before 7:00 a.m. More restless than ever, he got out of bed and dug out his running shoes and some sweats.

Greta woke sleepily and asked, "Where are you going?"

"For a run. I need to work a few things out." Rapp could tell she wasn't pleased at the idea of his leaving, but she didn't say anything. "Don't worry, I'll be back in an hour and then we can have some breakfast and make some decisions."

"What kind of decisions?"

"I'm not sure." Rapp had been struggling with that question all night, but he felt that a good run would give him the clarity to see the best path forward.

He asked the front desk if there was a decent place to run and was directed to a park a kilometer from the hotel. Running at an easy pace, he found the park with little difficulty and then pushed himself. In hindsight, it was all brutally clear. His cavalier attitude had gotten a harmless man killed. Now, an inner voice he did not recognize told him Luke was nothing more than a piece-of-shit drug dealer. That the world would be a better place without him. That he needed to suck it up and push on. The last part was right, but the first two weren't. Rapp fought the instinct to rationalize his mistakes and his stupidity. This was a lesson that needed to be imprinted on his brain and never forgotten. Rapp knew if he failed on that front he would be on the express track to become Stan Hurley II, and he would sooner jump off a bridge than allow that to happen.

As he circled the park, pushing himself harder and harder, the clarity he sought began to emerge from the chaos. Kennedy was the one person he could trust and the one person he wouldn't harm. Victor was as good as dead. Rapp didn't care where he saw him next, but he hoped it was face-to-face. He wanted to look him in the eye when he pulled the trigger. It occurred to Rapp that it was unlikely that Victor would make such a bold move all on his own. He wasn't smart enough, and that meant Hurley was the one calling the shots. The big question mark was Stansfield. Of the three people who directly managed him, he knew Stansfield the least.

In large part that was due to the man's job. As deputy director of Operations he had more than a thousand people working under him. He received hundreds of calls and cables every day from his station chiefs at various outposts around the globe. There were deputies down the hall and all over the building who wouldn't move without his guidance, and Rapp was just one cog in a very big intricate wheel, although he was a very important cog. Rapp got the impression Stansfield was heavily involved in the decision to turn him loose and it only made sense that he would be equally involved in the decision to terminate him.

All of Stansfield's authority, however, could be ignored by the most stubborn man he'd ever known. Hurley was the problem, and yes, Rapp was biased when it came to him, but that bias was based entirely on how the man had behaved since he'd met him two years ago. He was everything that he accused Rapp of being and then some. The man was egomaniacal, reckless, disrespectful, dictatorial, and petty. Rapp concluded that Hurley was more than capable of issuing the kill order without Stansfield's knowledge. But why have Victor kill the other two guys on the team? What were they guilty of?

Rapp knew his running pace almost to the second, and after three miles, he nudged it to an even five-minute mile. Two miles later his shoulder was stinging and his lungs were burning and a thought struck him like a lightning bolt. Rapp's legs stopped pumping and he slowed to a stop. His chest was heaving, his lungs working extra hard to pull in oxygen. He stood as upright as possible and looked off in the distance at three cooling towers for a nuclear power plant. He kept running the idea over and over in his head, and the more he did so, the more it became the only thing that made sense. Victor thought he had killed him, and then he turned his gun on his unsuspecting fellow team members. Why would a man do such a thing? There were only two possible reasons. Either they'd done something seriously wrong, and had been targeted for elimination, or they were killed because of what they'd seen.

It was as if a bad picture had suddenly come into focus. If the other two guys had done something wrong there were much better, and quieter, ways to get rid of them. Rapp was suddenly convinced that they'd been killed because they saw Victor shoot a man they thought was Rapp in the back of the head. Victor and Hurley had made it brutally obvious that they didn't approve of him. Were they willing to frame him to get rid of him? Victor was incapable of accepting blame, which meant he would have to blame the other deaths on someone else, and that someone else was going to be Rapp.

Rapp turned and started running back in the direction of the hotel. He needed to get hold of Kennedy, and in order to do that he'd have to be mobile and, if at all possible, keep Hurley out of the loop.