Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(54)

Rapp kicked the weapons away from the men and surveyed their condition. Flores was out like a light, so Rapp started with the first man he’d shot, rolling him on his stomach and using the flex cuffs hanging from his bulletproof vest to bind his wrists behind him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Braman starting to reach for his weapon.

“Don’t do it, asshole . . .”

When he didn’t listen, Rapp shot him in the ribs. That seemed to put an end to his plans.

The drone swooped in even closer when Rapp started dragging the men inside the building. Flores didn’t regain consciousness, but the other two moaned and swore under their breath at the pain of being moved. The ballistic vests had saved their lives, but between them they had more than a few broken ribs and probably one cracked sternum.

Braman was last, and by the time Rapp dropped him into a puddle of blood in the interrogation room, he’d gotten enough wind back to make some fairly graphic accusations regarding Rapp’s mother. He fell silent when Rapp hovered the barrel of his Glock an inch from his forehead.

“I don’t need your commentary, Braman—I just need the drugs. I’m having a few financial problems and this is going to take care of them.”

“Screw you!”

Rapp had to admit that this guy was starting to grow on him. Despite that, he slammed the butt of his Glock into Braman’s nose and walked out, bolting the steel door behind him.

? ? ?

Rapp straightened, stretching his back and looking around him at the cluttered storage room. Fortunately, it had a set of rolling doors that the DEA had put back in working condition. He’d been able to back his SUV up to them and load about five hundred pounds of coke, which was now covered by a dirty tarp weighted down with a couple of shovels. In the unlikely event he got pulled over, he’d just look like he was on his way back from Home Depot.

He finished changing into clean clothing while the dull ring of metal started on the other end of the building. Apparently, at least one of the three DEA men had recovered enough to free himself and go to work on the door imprisoning them.

Rapp slipped into the vehicle and pulled out, accelerating to a speed that allowed him to crash through the chain link gate. Not surprisingly, Carlos Esparza’s surveillance drone wasn’t far behind.





CHAPTER 26


NORTH OF HARGEISA

SOMALIA

SAYID Halabi shut down the computer on his improvised desk, watching the cave descend into gloom as the screen went black. He had scoured every report about the drug operation at the San Ysidro mall and found nothing even hinting that something unusual had been found among the confiscated drugs. Now most of the stories were about the sophistication of the tunnel structure and the profitability of the narcotics trade.

It was exactly what Carlos Esparza had told him to expect. A few of the individual packages would be randomly selected for testing and then the entire shipment would be destroyed. The chances of the brick containing anthrax being chosen were diminishingly small. But small was very different than nonexistent.

If the bioweapon were found, it was extremely unlikely that the discovery would be reported to the public. Kennedy would maneuver from the shadows, using the information she gleaned from the intercept to trace the bioweapon back to its source. And when she succeeded, she would send Rapp. It was how they operated. And it was how so many of his brothers had been martyred.

The Frenchman was completing another batch of anthrax, but Halabi had begun to question whether it had ever been important. He’d told himself that it was a necessary distraction to keep Kennedy blind to his real goal.

But was it?

He wanted so desperately to outsmart Irene Kennedy. To outfight Mitch Rapp. To ensure that the American people knew, as they slowly suffocated, how easy it had been to defeat them. He wanted Kennedy and Rapp to understand that he had been pulling their strings the entire time. That they had been the defenders of the walls when they had finally fallen.

Ironically, the semidarkness allowed him to see with unprecedented clarity. In Yemen, he’d already made the mistake of not striking when the moment was at hand. Allowing Rapp to escape had been an inexcusable tactical error, and he wouldn’t compound it by underestimating the threat the man posed. Halabi knew that every moment he hesitated was a moment the CIA man could use to destroy him.

The cave that housed the weapon that would annihilate the West was within the reach of America’s specialized weaponry. A single bombing run could incinerate the deadly virus incubating in his people’s bodies. And he would likely die with them, arriving at the feet of God having failed once again.

There was no choice but to accelerate his timetable forward. Rapp was coming. He could feel it. Speed was the critical component now. Not complexity.

Halabi reached for the notebook at the edge of his desk, opening it and running his fingers across Gabriel Bertrand’s elegant script. He had read the annotated Arabic translation that had been prepared for him, but there was something about seeing the original that created a compelling sense of history. Would this book one day be enshrined in a holy site commemorating the fall of the West?

Bertrand called the disease he’d discovered Yemeni acute respiratory syndrome, a laughably innocuous name for something that was about to reshape the world. Symptoms typical of a mild flu tended to appear within two days of exposure. Onset was fairly slow, with the illness generally not turning severe for another five days. For those who reached that point, around seventy percent would be dead within a week, a mortality rate thirteen times higher even than that of the Spanish flu, which decimated the world population in the early twentieth century.