Until now.
“Someone I know?” Coleman said.
“Remember the thugs who grabbed Irene?” Rapp said.
“Of course.”
“I’d thought that getting rid of the Hezbollah ringleader, Mukhtar, would be enough.”
“Now you don’t?”
Rapp didn’t answer right away, which only increased Coleman’s anxiety.
Rapp was as methodical in his speech as he was in his killing. He wasn’t prone to overlong deliberations or navel-gazing. Rapp intuitively understood a tactical situation the way Mozart knew music. Rapp decided on a course of action at a speed that almost seemed instantaneous. He didn’t second-guess himself or suffer a loss for words.
Ever.
“Has Irene seemed… different?” Rapp said.
Coleman hadn’t seen this coming.
“How?”
Rapp shrugged. “Like maybe the Iranians got inside her head.”
Rapp was undoubtedly referring to Irene’s capture and interrogation at the hands of Iranian Quds Forces operatives and Hezbollah terrorists. Coleman’s relationship with Kennedy wasn’t on the same level as Rapp’s, but anyone who’d been subjected to what she’d endured would certainly view life differently. She’d been beaten and humiliated by murderous animals who’d been a hair trigger away from raping and executing her.
Coleman could only imagine the resulting psychological scars.
“Sorry,” Coleman said, shaking his head, “I’m not following.”
“I smoked a bunch of Quds Force officers during Irene’s capture and later killed Mukhtar. I assumed the rest of the Iranians got the message. Maybe I should have made sure.”
Coming from anyone else, the observation would have sounded like a schoolyard boast. Iran’s Quds Force officers were capable and experienced killers, and unlike the terrorists Rapp normally hunted, they had the resources of a nation-state at their disposal.
A nation-state with aspirations of joining the nuclear weapons club.
Stan Hurley had done more than his fair share of wet work while running assets in East Germany and other nations on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but what Rapp was musing about was more akin to decapitating the KGB than an operative-on-operative skirmish.
“Where’s that leave us?” Coleman said.
The question wasn’t just a prompt.
Coleman still didn’t understand everything that went on in his friend’s brain, but he usually had a fairly good idea of where they were headed.
Not today.
“The conventional forces aren’t going to help us find the missing Iranian Quds Force officer without some major prodding,” Rapp said. “I could ask Irene to go to work on the president, but by the time the order trickles down to here, the Iranian will be across the border into Pakistan. I need to get at this a different way.”
“What can I do?” Coleman said.
“Act as my point man here and be ready to execute at a moment’s notice.”
“What about you?”
“It’s time for the mountain to go to Muhammad.”
CHAPTER 49
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
FOUR hours later, Nash was ready to reassess his previously optimistic attitude.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
Nash was ready to flip the bird to the men seated on the long, cream-colored couch across from him, get back on his shiny Gulfstream, and fly home. But one did not flip the bird to the chief of the Army staff for the Pakistani Army, especially when the president of Pakistan was watching.
“The operation you conducted on our border was needlessly destabilizing.”
General Davi’s comment had been the culmination of an overly long soliloquy in which Pakistan’s most senior member of the armed forces ran through a list of grievances both real and imagined against his American counterparts. Some of the general’s complaints had merit, but many were meant to obscure his own failures.
Nash bit back the first response that leaped to mind.
The one that had Rapp written all over it.
Nash wasn’t Rapp.
While Rapp would have undoubtedly pointed out how Pakistan’s practice of allowing Taliban and HIG thugs to cross the porous Afghan border with impunity was destabilizing to the entire region, Nash did not want to the blow the summit out of the water.
