American Assassin (24 page)

CHAPTER
45
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND

W
HEN
it was all done Rapp would swear that he felt the zip of the bullet as it passed his left temple. It was that close. The only thing that saved him was the awkward movement that the Libyan made as he drew his pistol. The fake was weak. He looked over his left shoulder a bit too dramatically and then swung back to his right, drawing his gun, his long overcoat flaring like a matador’s cape. The other reason Rapp didn’t fall for it was that mean old cuss Stan Hurley. It was the first time Rapp could honestly say he was grateful for all the shit Hurley had heaped on him. All of that damn methodical, shitty training paid off in the split second it took Ismael to draw his gun and turn on him.

The fact that Rapp didn’t want to kill the wrong man also contributed to the harsh reality that he was now cowering behind a Swiss mailbox, rounds of an undetermined caliber thudding into the metal receptacle at an alarming rate. And Hurley had been right, of course. He had told them that there were two ways to win a gunfight. Either land the first shot or find cover and conserve your ammunition. Hurley had put them in a situation so similar to this that it was now damn near calming to listen to his opponent mindlessly fire one shot after the next into a four-sided box of steel that had survived every change of season for the past fifty years.

Back in the woods of Virginia the idea was to find cover while Hurley fired live shots at you. And mind you, he didn’t fire them safely over the horizon. He liked to hit things close to you. Not rocks or anything hard enough to cause a life-ending ricochet, but soft things like dirt, sandbags, and wood. The object of the lesson was to teach you what it felt like to be shot at, so you could keep your head when confronted with the real thing. As a bonus, you learned to count not just the number of rounds you fired, but the number of rounds your opponent fired as well. At first, the exercise was unnerving, but after a while, as with most things in life, you adapted and got the hang of it.

Rapp squatted, his back pressed firmly against the mailbox, and counted the number of shots, which had been eight so far. He was waiting for the inevitable calm in the storm. There was a problem, however. While Rapp’s pistols were equipped with silencers, the Libyan’s gun was not. Eight extremely loud gunshots had rung out in a city with one of the lowest murder rates in the entire industrialized world. It might as well have been an artillery barrage.

There was no telling how many extra magazines the Libyan had in his possession, but he doubted the man could match the seventy-two rounds Rapp carried. Rapp released the grip of his still-holstered Beretta and stabbed the big gray button on his Timex digital watch. Just as Hurley had taught him, it was set for stopwatch mode. The average response time for a police car in a city of this size was roughly three minutes. And that was assuming there wasn’t one nearby. There were rules that were flexible, and there were rules that couldn’t be broken, and killing a police officer was one of those unbreakable rules. Hurley had told them, “If you kill a cop I will kill you before they do.”

The first eight shots had come in rapid succession. By the sound they were 9mm or maybe .40 caliber at the most. Rapp never heard where the first one landed after it flew past his head, but the second shot had blown out the driver’s-side window of the white BMW parked a few feet away, which was now chirping and beeping like a car with Tourette’s syndrome. The next six had hit the mailbox. Not a smart move unless he had a second gun, and he was closing on him. Rapp though that unlikely. Ismael was spooked and on the run, which in itself bothered Rapp.

The drive from Zurich had been easy. Just under three hours, counting a quick stop to call the answering service and confirm that the target was at his place of work. The file was straightforward. They were monitoring the calls he made at work, they knew where he lived and the make and model of his car. Hurley gave Rapp specific instructions. Tail Ismael after work and follow him to his apartment. If he comes out for an errand or an evening stroll and there’s an opportunity, take him. If not, wait until morning and shoot him while he’s getting into his car. Rapp had followed the instructions to the letter, and when Ismael bowed out of his apartment at ten-oh-nine that evening, Rapp watched him round the corner and then pursued on foot.

A block later Rapp noticed that Ismael had a duffel bag slung over his left shoulder. It was at that point that the wheels started to turn in Rapp’s head. He asked himself if it was normal to leave your apartment on a crisp winter night when you should be getting into bed. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to head out after ten, but it was far from common. Especially on a Tuesday night. Throw in the overnight bag and you now had someone who might be running. That was pretty much what Rapp was thinking when Ismael pulled his lame matador move. That and wondering if he could rush him at the next intersection, shoot him in the back of the head, and be in France before midnight.

Now, because he had failed to head Hurley’s warnings, he was crouched behind a mailbox, counting bullets and wondering if Ismael had one or two guns. One more shot thudded into the mailbox and then there was a two-second pause. Rapp stuck out his gloved hand to see if he could draw a shot. He pulled it back as a tenth bullet whistled harmlessly past. It sparked off the stone sidewalk and skipped down the street. Rapp thought he heard the clank of a slide locking in the open position, but he wasn’t sure. A split second later he heard the heavy footsteps of someone running. That was it. He was either reloading or out.

Rapp drew the silenced Beretta from under his right arm and bolted between the two parked cars to his left. He stayed low, glancing over the roofs of the cars. He caught a glimpse of the Libyan as he took a left turn at the next corner. That put a smile on Rapp’s face.
Run all you want,
he thought. The more distance we can put between us and those ten muzzle blasts the better.

Rapp rounded the corner wide and fast, trying to keep the parked cars between himself and Ismael. They were on the Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, and Ismael was headed toward the Rhone. They had just turned off a street that was purely residential and onto one that was a mix of retail and apartments. The shops were all closed and fortunately the sidewalk was deserted. Rapp stayed in the street and broke into a full sprint. Geneva, because it was wedged between two mountain ranges on one end and a lake on the other, was even more cramped than your standard European city. The streets were barely wide enough for two small cars to pass. An American SUV was out of the question.

Ismael was a good hundred feet in front of him. Not an easy shot standing still, let alone running and aiming at a moving target. Rapp kept the pistol at his side. Long black coat, black pants, black shoes, and a black gun. Black on black. Nothing to see. He was gaining on Ismael with every stride, staying low, the top of his head just barely visible over the roofs of the vehicles. And then Ismael saw him as Rapp passed from one car to the next. There was now no more than seventy feet of separation. Just over twenty yards. Either the man was really slow or Rapp was really fast, or probably both.

Sixty feet and closing was the best Rapp could figure when they locked eyes. Rapp started to raise his pistol to fire, but before he had it leveled, Ismael was swinging the bag around and then all hell broke loose. The bag exploded, spitting red-orange flashes on the dark street. Rapp turtled, dropping behind a nice piece of German steel. Counting shots was not an option with whatever it was in the overnight bag. The rate of fire told Rapp that it was probably an Uzi or a MAC-10. To the uninitiated, a gun was a gun, but in his new line of work, caliber was every bit as important as rate of fire. Since the Mercedes had no problem stopping the rounds, Rapp concluded it was a 9mm Uzi. If it had been the MAC-10 he would have felt the punch of the .45 caliber rounds as they penetrated the body and rattled around the interior of the car.

Rapp glanced at his watch as glass rained down on him from the blown-out windows. He could picture, in his mind’s eye, the Libyan backing up as he laid down fire. The Uzi he was firing used either twenty-, thirty-two-, or forty-round magazines. The forty was unlikely because it probably wouldn’t fit in the bag, and if it was twenty he would be done already, so that meant it was thirty-two rounds and he was almost out. And once Rapp heard the click it would be over. There was no way the guy could pull a weapon like that out of a bag and reload it before Rapp was on him.

The bullets stopped, the noise replaced by a half dozen car alarms that were now chirping and beeping and screeching and flashing. Rapp came up with his weapon this time, his finger on the trigger, ready to fire. Ismael was gone. Rapp caught a glimpse of him farther down the block and tore off, again staying in the street so he could use the cars for cover. The clock in his head was marking time as he pressed his advantage. He closed again to within sixty feet. Ismael looked over his shoulder, raised the bag, and let loose another burst. Rapp went into a crouch behind a car but kept moving. Rapp couldn’t be sure if it was a four- or five-round burst, but it had stopped and Ismael was on the run again. Rapp, thinking the gun was out of bullets, or close to being out, ran tall now, more worried about speed than cover.

Ismael made it to the corner and turned left. Rapp stayed wide again, and when he cleared the corner, he came upon the unwelcome sight of Ismael standing there with his left arm wrenched around a woman’s throat. Rapp didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to look at her. Old, young, fat, skinny, none of it mattered. Ismael’s right hand was still in the duffel bag, gripping the Uzi, which might or might not be out of bullets. Ismael started screaming at him to drop his weapon or he would kill the woman. Rapp continued to close as he had been taught. His pistol was up, directly in front of his face, an extension of his left eye, which was attached to his brain, which was still counting the seconds and telling him to finish this and get the hell out of there.

The woman was now screaming, and for the first time Rapp noticed she had a small dog on a leash that was yipping and snapping at Ismael’s legs. He had no doubt that Ismael would kill the woman, but what purpose would it serve? If Ismael had any bullets left in that gun he would turn it on Rapp right now and zip him with a nice burst to the chest. If he shot the woman, he was a dead man, and he didn’t want to die, as he had proven very loudly over the last half minute. His only way out of this was to kill the man who had been chasing him. He was nicely shielded by the woman. All he had to do was swing the bag around and unload. Rapp stopped at twenty feet and decided that since Ismael hadn’t taken aim at his chest, he was bluffing.

In the end, it was the dog that tilted things in Rapp’s favor. Ismael wisely tried to create some distance between them by stepping back. What he didn’t know, because he hadn’t bothered to look down, was that the little yipping dog had run a couple of circles around them, and his leash had formed a nice little lasso around the Libyan’s ankles. Ismael stumbled and jerked to his left to catch himself. For a brief second, the side of his head was clearly visible. Rapp was now only twenty feet away. He squeezed the trigger once, and that was all it took.

CHAPTER
46
BEIRUT, LEBANON

H
URLEY
stepped onto the roof, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, his thoughts already traveling back in time. The hotel was in a neighborhood called Bourj Hammoud. It was controlled by the Armenians, which was why Hurley had decided to stay here for the night. The Armenians were one of the few factions that had managed to stay neutral during the civil war. There had been a few shots fired between the Armenians and their Maronite neighbors, but no major battles.

It had been a strange day—the meeting with Kennedy, the briefing with Rapp before sending him off, and the analysis of the intercepts. There was nothing like stealing a man’s fortune to get him riled up. Voices they hadn’t tracked in years had popped up. Beirut was going to be a very target-rich environment. Before they could leave, though, they had to look the part. He dragged Richards to one of Zurich’s secondhand clothing stores, where they purchased some ill-fitting suits and dress shirts, well-worn shoes, and some beat-up luggage. Hurley added some gray to his hair and both men skipped shaving. They boarded a flight for Paris and then on to Beirut, just two men in a sea of travelers.

They arrived as the sun was setting on the far end of the Mediterranean, feeling a mix of anticipation, anger, and apprehension. That’s what Beirut did to Hurley. He’d spent time in the city before the civil war, back when it was a thriving mecca of Christians and Muslims living side by side, socializing, raising families, enjoying life, and for the most part getting along. Then the PLO began to radicalize the slums and demand a say in how things were run. The Maronites had no intention of sharing rule with these gypsies, and the battle lines were drawn. No one, not even Hurley, had thought the disagreement so egregious that it would plunge the city into a fifteen-year civil war, but it did. More than a million had fled, 250,000 were killed, hundreds of thousands of people were wounded and crippled, and the economy and much of central Beirut were laid to waste. That such a great city could be so thoroughly destroyed was enough to shake the faith of even the most optimistic.

At the airport there were a few signs that things were headed in the right direction. The part of the terminal that had been severely damaged during the Israeli shelling of 1982 was now torn down, and reconstruction was under way. Hurley and Richards trudged down the metal stairs with their fellow passengers. Tired and bored Lebanese militiamen flanked the travelers and directed them toward Immigration and Customs. The last time Hurley had been here, Immigration and Customs consisted of a single portly bureaucrat sitting behind a metal desk on the tarmac. His job had been less about border security than about collecting the bribes needed to enter the country. Now they filed into the airport, where there were posterboards announcing ambitious rebuilding plans.

They threaded through the Customs lines, trying their best to look tired and bored. Richards passed with barely a glance. He handed over his cash that they called a fee, but was more of a bribe, because it never saw its way into the Treasury. Hurley had to answer a few questions from the Customs official, but nothing that was too alarming. He thought he caught one of the supervisors standing behind the three Customs agents paying him a little too much attention, but that, after all, was his job. In the end it was nothing to worry about. The man did not intervene or follow them to baggage claim.

They collected their luggage and stood in line once again. This time they were both searched. Then, outside at the cab stand, Hurley slipped the man a twenty-dollar bill and told him in Arabic that he wanted to pick his own cab. For no reason other than the fact that it was random, Hurley chose the fourth cab in line. They took it to the under-renovation Intercontinental Hotel, where they went inside and bought a drink. This was also where Hurley persuaded the bartender to sell him the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. From there, they found another cab, skirted the central business district, and had the man drop them off three blocks from the Mar Yousif Inn.

Hurley would have preferred to have had the safe house ready, but there was no getting around it. Not if he wanted to use someone he could absolutely trust. Besides, there was only so much he could control. Setting up a new base of operations was never easy, and was even more difficult in a town like this, with shifting battle lines.

Hurley looked out across the skyline. He couldn’t swear, but there seemed be quite a few more lights than there had been a few years earlier. Perhaps progress was being made. He heard some voices and stepped around the top of the blockhouse that encased the stairs. A few of the hotel workers were clustered around a folding table, sitting in plastic chairs. They waved to Hurley. He flashed them a smile and walked to the far edge. Beirut was like most densely packed cities, in that the inhabitants used roofs to try to escape the claustrophobic feeling of being shut in. There was another plastic chair in the corner where he was standing, but he didn’t feel like sitting. He looked north, over the rooftops, at the ocean. Way out there on the horizon to the northwest he could make out the glow of the lights on Cyprus. Back to the south the airport was lit up, receiving its last few flights for the day.

A not-so-welcome memory started to bubble up. Hurley gripped the bottle tightly, held it to his lips, and took a swig of Jack with the hope that he could drown it out. After a minute he started up a heater and tried to remember the last time he’d been in the city. He wasn’t counting his last trip two years earlier, as he had been in and out in less than a day. Hardly enough time to look up any of his old contacts. The city brought back so many memories. A few good, a lot bad.

He took another swig but it didn’t work this time. His gaze was drawn to the west where the old embassy had stood. He’d been here that day—here being the Bourj Hammoud district. Hurley had met one of his contacts for coffee that morning, a man named Levon Petrosian, the Armenian crime boss who kept things working during the civil war. In addition to making sure the neighborhood had power, water, and food, Petrosian handled all of the gambling and prostitution, and of course collected a pretty penny in protection money. After their meeting, Hurley decided to take the crazy Armenian up on his offer to sample some of the merchandise. Hurley had been in bed with two women from the Armenian Highlands of Eastern Turkey when the explosion rocked the room.

His worst fears were realized when he’d scrambled onto the roof, still pulling on his pants. Bombs were becoming increasingly common back in 1983, but this one was much bigger than the average mortar round or RPG. The plume of debris and smoke was close enough to the embassy that Hurley was certain it had been the target. The only question was the amount of damage done. Hurley raced back to the bedroom to collect the rest of his stuff and then down to the street, where his driver was asleep behind the wheel of the company Jeep. Hurley bumped him out of the driver’s seat, started the Jeep, and tore off down the street.

When he arrived and looked up at the seven-story building his heart was in his throat. The front entrance was gone. A gaping hole from the seventh floor all the way to the first. A big gash between the main part of the embassy and one of the wings. Strangely enough, the roof, for the most part, was intact. He remembered something about its being reinforced to handle all the communications gear they’d put up there. As the dust settled, the first of the survivors began to crawl out of the building. Hurley was still holding on to hope at that point.

It would be two full days before they grasped the extent of the damage. By then, the hope that Hurley had felt in those moments after watching the first survivor come out of the building was entirely gone, along with one of his best friends, Irene Kennedy’s father, and sixty-two others. As was standard for the Lebanese civil war, the locals took the brunt of the blast, but in terms of American personnel, the CIA took the heaviest toll. Eight Agency employees were killed, and the Near East Section was decimated.

Stansfield had been associates deputy director of operations at the time, and he had rushed over to assess the damage. The guilt Hurley felt was overwhelming. He tried to resign, but Stansfield would hear none of it. He didn’t care that Hurley had missed a one o’clock meeting at the embassy. There was some speculation about that. Was Islamic Jihad lucky in their timing, or did they have inside information that Langley’s top people would be meeting at that time, and if so, some had spoken out loud that it was very convenient that Hurley missed the meeting. Hurley was placed under a microscope by a few higher-ups, but Stansfield covered for him.

His operative was meeting with Petrosian the Armenian, and the meeting had gone longer than anticipated. That was as much as anyone needed to know. The fact that he was in bed with two hookers while the van crashed through the gate was inconsequential. They had already lost enough good people, they didn’t need to lose another because of his vices—vices that Stansfield was well aware of.

Hurley knew Stansfield was right, but that didn’t mean he could simply ignore what had happened. He was an operational wreck for those next few months. Stansfield received a report that Muslim men were turning up dead in areas of the city that were known to be relatively peaceful, completely randomly and at all hours of the day. One man was shot while reading the paper on his small terrace, another was strangled in the bathroom of a public restroom, another killed leaving a nightclub. All three men had loose connections to Islamic Jihad. Stansfield called Hurley back to D.C. to ask him if he knew anything about the murders, and to his astonishment Hurley admitted to the killings.

Stansfield could not allow one of his oldest friends and best operatives to go running off half-cocked killing whomever he wanted, even if the targets were somewhat legitimate. As Hurley had pointed out, Islamic Jihad had declared war on the United States; he was simply obliging them by participating in the war. There was a bit of logic in his thinking, but Langley couldn’t afford any more scrapes with the press and the politicians at the moment. The solution was easy. Things were heating up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and Hurley knew the Russians better than anyone. So Stansfield shipped him off to Peshawar to help train and equip the mujahedeen.

And now, almost ten years later, here he was full circle. Right back in this stew of religious fascists who all fervently believed they, and they alone, knew what God wanted. Hurley had been trying to warn Langley for years that these Islamic wack jobs were the next big problem. He’d seen both fronts up close. Beirut and Afghanistan and the Afghanis made these guys look like pikers. Any culture that swaddles its women from head to toe and refuses a drop of booze while exporting opium around the globe is seriously screwed-up. Another of Hurley’s rules was to be extremely distrustful of anyone who didn’t drink. Afghanistan was an entire society that didn’t drink, and it scared the piss out of him.

Hurley took a pull from the bottle and shook out another cigarette. He lit it, blew the smoke up into the ocean breeze, and thought about tomorrow. The safe house should be set up and equipped by then, and the backup would be ready by early afternoon. He’d have to see what kind of info the Agency guy had, and if it wasn’t enough, he’d go pay Petrosian a call. Hurley had heard he owned more than two thousand apartment units in the neighborhood. That would generate a lot of income, but a guy like Petrosian could always use more money, and that was one thing that Hurley finally had a lot of.

What he didn’t have was time. If they were going to save the Schnoz they would have to work fast. Sometimes working fast could be used to your advantage, but you had to mix it up, and they’d been moving at a pretty good clip for about a week. Sharif, Dorfman, and by now Ismael. They might as well stay on the attack for a few more days.

Hurley looked at the bottle of Tennessee whisky and wondered if he’d come back to Beirut to die. All the times he’d cheated death, all the men he’d killed over the years, all the gods, real or imagined, that he’d pissed off. If it was anyone’s time it should be his. Looking skyward, he said, “Don’t piss off the gods.” He poured some of the whisky down his gullet and smiled. If it was his time, so be it.