At the kitchen table a woman sat wearing headphones. On the table in front of her was about a quarter of a million dollars in high-tech surveillance equipment. All of the gear was contained in two beat-up black Samsonite suitcases. If anyone were to stop by the cottage, the cases could be closed and moved off the table in seconds. Rapp had never met the man and woman before. He knew them only as Tom and Jane Hoffman.
They were in their mid-forties, and as far as Rapp could tell, they were married. The Hoffmans had stopped in two countries before arriving in Frankfurt.
Their tickets had been purchased under assumed names with matching credit cards and passports provided by their contact. They were told someone would be joining them and, as always, not to ask any questions. All of their equipment was waiting for them when they arrived at the cottage, and they started right in on the surveillance of the estate and its owner.
Several days after arriving at the cottage, they were paid a visit by a man known to them only as the professor. They were given an additional twenty-five thousand dollars and were told they would receive another twenty-five thousand dollars when they completed the mission.
He had given them a quick briefing on the man who would be joining them. Tom Hoffman poured Rapp a cup of coffee and brought it to him by the roaring fieldstone fireplace. Neither of these people had been outside. It must have been a deer that he had heard in the woods. The six-foot-one muscular man whom he knew only as Carl moved like a big cat—soft on his feet.
There was nothing clumsy about him. His face was tanned and lined from long hours spent outdoors. His jet-black hair was thick and just starting to gray around the temples, and there was a thin scar on his cheek that ran from his ear down to his jaw. Rapp looked away from Hoffman and into the fire. He knew he was being sized up. Mitch had already done the same with both of them and would continue to do so up until the moment they parted.
He looked back into the fire and focused on the plan. He knew the tendency in these situations was to try to come up with something that was truly ingenious—a plan that would bypass all of the security and get him in and out without being noticed. This was not necessarily a bad path to take if you had enough time to prepare, but as of right now they had about twenty-three hours to draw the whole thing up and pull it off.
With that in mind, Rapp had already begun thinking of a strategy. The pristine Maryland morning was interrupted by a dull thumping noise in the distance.
Two Marines walking patrol on the Jeep road by the west fence instinctively searched for the source of the sound. With Ms slung over their shoulders, they craned their necks skyward, both knowing what was approaching without having to see it. The telltale thumping was far too quiet. The white helicopter buzzed in over the trees and headed for the interior of the camp.
Just in front of the tower was a clearing with a cement landing pad. The bird slowed and floated smoothly toward the ground, its struts coming to rest right on the mark.
The pilot shut the turbine engine down, and the rotors began to lose momentum. A black Suburban was parked on the nearby road, and several men in dark suits and ties stood by watching as the visitor stepped out of the helicopter. Irene Kennedy grabbed her briefcase and headed for the truck.
Her shoulder-length brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a crisp blue shirt. Kennedy clutched the lapels of her tan suit against the cool air. When she reached the Suburban, an army officer extended his hand. Unofficially, she headed up the Orion Team, an organization born in secrecy out of a need to go on the offensive against terrorism.
In the early eighties the United States was stung hard by a slew of terrorist attacks, most notably the bombing of the U. Despite the millions of dollars and assets allocated to fight terrorism, after the attacks, things only got worse.
The decade ended with the downing of Pan Am Flight and the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians. The Lockerbie disaster moved some of the most powerful individuals in Washington to take drastic measures. They agreed it was time to take the war to the terrorists. Covert action would be taken. Money would be funneled into black operations that would never see the light of day, much less congressional oversight or the scrutiny of the press.
A clandestine war would be mounted, and the hunters would become the hunted. The ride took just a few minutes, and no one spoke. President, Dr. Kennedy is here. A pair of black-rimmed reading spectacles sat perched on the end of his nose, and when Kennedy entered he looked up from the print and over the top of his cheaters. Hayes was dressed for his morning golf match, wearing a pair of khaki pants, a plain blue golf shirt, and a pullover vest. He set his mug down on the table and poured a second cup for Kennedy.
Thomas Stansfield was a very private man. He had been with the CIA from its very inception, and it appeared he would be with it to the very end of his own life. The seventy-nine-year-old spymaster had just been diagnosed with cancer, and the doctors were giving him less than six months. The president turned his attention to the more immediate matter. Mitch arrived last night and gave me a full report before I left this morning.
The closed meeting between the president and Kennedy was one of many they had had in the last five months, all in an effort to harass, frustrate, destabilize, and, if possible, kill one person. That fortunate individual was Saddam Hussein.
Long before President Hayes had taken office, Saddam was a source of irritation to the West, but more recently he had done something that directly affected the fifty-eight-year-old president of the United States. Sign in to see the full collection. Fiction Suspense Thriller. Publisher: Atria Books. Kindle Book Release date: November 9, Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget.
You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again. The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here. You've reached the maximum number of titles you can currently recommend for purchase.
Your session has expired. Please sign in again so you can continue to borrow titles and access your Loans, Wish list, and Holds pages. If you're still having trouble, follow these steps to sign in. Add a library card to your account to borrow titles, place holds, and add titles to your wish list. But Mitch Rapp is no one's pawn, and he will stop at nothing to find out who has set him up.
The president is evacuated to an underground bunker, but not before nearly one hundred hostages are taken. One man is sent in to take control of the crisis. Mitch Rapp, the CIA's top counterterrorism operative, determines that the president is not as safe as Washington's power elite had thought. With each swift and untraceable kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of civilians in the Pan Am Lockerbie attack become increasingly aware that someone is hunting them.
Rapp is given his next target, and finds the man asleep in his bed in Paris. He had debated the wisdom of handling it himself. In addition to the inherent risk of getting caught, there was another, more pressing, problem. Just six days earlier a series of explosions had torn through Washington D. Three of the terrorists were still at large, and Rapp had been unofficially ordered to find them by any means necessary.
What do you think? Write your own comment on this author Please Login or Register to write comments or use smm accounts Log in Log in Log in. Write a comment. Gayle Forman Author. Lora Leigh Author.
Julie Garwood Author. Amanda Hocking Author. Rachel Caine Author. Marisa Chenery Author. Alexandra Ivy Author. Lauren Oliver Author. Robyn Carr Author. Veronica Roth Author. Allyson James Author.
Vivi Andrews Author.
0コメント