Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(18)
His enthusiasm for her idea seemed unusually muted. The man loved manipulating people. The strange truth was that he didn’t care about the trappings of power, just the exercise of it. He wanted to bend people to his will. To force them to turn away from reality and replace it with his carefully crafted speeches, tweets, and ads. Instead of the calculating excitement she’d expected, though, he looked worried.
“What?” she said.
“Do you think Halabi could actually succeed in an attack?”
She didn’t answer, instead walking to the window and pretending to look out. In truth, she was focused on her own reflection, searching her carefully curated appearance for anything that didn’t seem presidential. At fifty-two, she was still an extremely attractive woman—a product of good genetics, a rigid workout schedule, and a few discreet cosmetic procedures. The blue suit was conservative in style but fit her curves in a way that treaded the line between sex and power. Her still largely unlined face was framed by dark hair that could be used as a surprisingly versatile prop depending on her audience.
As always, everything was perfect. Despite that, it was still almost impossible to believe that she was about to become the most powerful person in the world. She had been neither born to power nor groomed for it. Her entry into politics had been largely at the whim of her tech billionaire husband. It was he who had suggested that she leave her law practice and run for an open seat in the Senate.
His company had been under heavy scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies for improprieties that had the potential to cause both of them serious problems. He’d backed her candidacy with virtually unlimited funds, and when she’d won, she’d used her new political clout to make their problems go away.
But it hadn’t ended there. Her gift for politics had been immediately obvious, and over the course of fifteen short years she’d risen to become the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now she was poised to take the Oval Office.
Her husband, on the other hand, had been relegated to an increasingly secondary role. While still successful as a venture capitalist, he now lived a relatively anonymous life in Chicago, where her two children were in college. They saw each other often enough to keep the press happy, but otherwise their family functioned more as a business than anything else. Her husband continued to provide her campaign heavy financial support in return for the quiet privileges she could provide and her daughters toed the line to keep their trust funds flowing.
“Your silence is worrying me,” Gray said finally.
She turned back toward him. “Could Halabi succeed in an attack? I have no idea. Can I assume we’re demanding a briefing?”
“I have multiple calls into the White House. They said they’re working on it and they’ll get back to us.”
She returned to the window, this time gazing past her reflection and into the American capital. In reality, a limited biological attack would be an ideal scenario for her. There was no way Alexander and his party could ride something like that out this close to the election. It would be a deathblow.
“We’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve always been strongly opposed to our involvement in the Middle East in general and Yemen in particular,” Gray continued.
“Because I was told that Halabi was dead. That ISIS was defeated.”
He looked skeptical. “You staked out that position before ISIS even existed and I don’t remember Irene Kennedy ever saying that ISIS was defeated or confirming that Halabi had been killed.”
She took a seat behind her desk again. “The American people don’t give a crap about political positions and they care even less about the truth. What they want is fireworks. They want a show and we’ve just been handed the script. While the other side talks about health care and the economy, we’ll be talking about Islamic terrorists unleashing a plague that could wipe our country out. About watching your children die while Irene Kennedy covers her ass and Mitch Rapp chases his tail. This is a gift, Kevin. Use it.”
CHAPTER 8
AL HUDAYDAH
YEMEN
“BUT it’s your last one,” the man said, staring longingly at the slightly bent cigarette Rapp was offering him.
Over the last five days, Rapp had graduated from sitting alone near the edge of the terrace to being crowded around a long table near its center. In that time, he’d gone through more than thirty cups of tea, twenty cups of coffee, every food product Yemen had to offer, and way too many cigarettes. It was a good way to blend in and make friends, but at this rate cancer was going to kill him before ISIS did.
“You’d be doing me a favor, Jihan. My youngest wife has been begging me to quit.”
“This new generation,” the man responded with a disapproving shake of his head. “They think they can live forever.”
There was a murmur of general agreement from the men around them.
“Tell me. How old is she?”
“Sixteen,” Rapp responded.
After another few seconds of thought, Jihan accepted the cigarette. “Then I’ll smoke it. You need your strength.”
The table burst into laughter and Rapp joined in, crumpling the empty pack and tossing it on the ground as the conversation resumed. The men wandered through the topics of the day—the Saudi bombings of the night before. The Iranians’ backing of the rebels. The continued spread of disease and famine. And, finally, America’s role in it all. Rapp tuned it all out, watching the discarded cigarette pack blow around on sun-heated cobbles.