Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(79)

Resisting the urge to jam a thumb into his eye socket, Rapp instead gave him a stilted greeted that would camouflage his real ability with the Arabic language. Westerners with native-level fluency were unusual enough that they tended to generate questions.

“I speak English,” Attia replied.

Esparza smiled and offered his hand. “That’s excellent. I’m Carlos. This is my assistant Vicente.”

Attia shook hands a bit reluctantly, more interested in scanning his operating environment just as Rapp had been when he’d arrived.

Esparza pointed at Rapp. “Don’t just stand there. Take his bag.”

The cartel leader had been expecting all communication to have to be translated and was clearly enjoying being in a stronger position than expected. His curt order was intended as a reminder. You work for me.

Attia held the satchel out as Esparza put a friendly hand on his back. “Come. We have lunch prepared. I’m certain you’re going to enjoy it.” He glanced back at Rapp as they started toward a dining table decorated with fresh-cut flowers. “Take that to his room. And then you’re dismissed.”

Instead of going to Attia’s room, Rapp ducked into his own and locked the door. A quick search of the courier bag turned up what he was looking for: a duct-taped package about the size of a building brick.

He laid it in the bottom of the bathtub before digging a box of scrounged supplies from beneath the vanity. The sunglasses, a pair of kitchen gloves, and a scarf tied over his nose and mouth was the best he was going to do for protection. Better than nothing, but he imagined that it would get a disgusted face palm from Gary Statham.

Using a pocketknife, he carefully peeled back the tape to expose a shrinkwrapped core. The color and consistency of its contents were exactly like the pictures he’d seen of the intercepted anthrax. Lady Luck was with him. Or not, depending on whether he started coughing up blood in the next few weeks.

He filled the bathtub and worked beneath the surface, slitting the plastic and emptying it into the water. When it looked pretty well cleaned out, he drained the tub and washed both it and the bag with a bottle of high-end tequila that was the most reliable disinfectant he’d been able to turn up. It took another ten minutes to mix a decent facsimile of the anthrax with stuff raided from the kitchen.

He was forced to replace the shrinkwrap cellophane from María’s personal stash, but the original tape was salvageable with the help of a little superglue. It likely had hidden markings and their absence would be noticed by men down the supply chain.

Finally, Rapp patted the package with a bath towel and used a blow dryer to eradicate any remaining moisture. The finished product wasn’t bad. Someone would have to be paying serious attention to attribute the damage to anything more than normal wear and tear.

He put it back in the bottom of the bag and then carefully replaced the clothes and other items in the order they’d been removed. Now all he needed to do was take it to Attia’s room, trace him back to wherever he came from, find Halabi, kill him, and wipe out his operation. Preferably before Attia’s contacts in the United States noticed they were trying to destroy the great Satan with a mixture of flour, cornstarch, and dried mustard.

What could possibly go wrong?





CHAPTER 40


CENTRAL IOWA

USA

“I WANT you all to look around,” Christine Barnett said, gazing out over the crowd. “Let what you see really sink in.”

As was their custom, they did as they were told. Almost two hundred people, mostly men wearing work clothes despite being unemployed, craned their necks to examine their surroundings.

The building was cavernous and filthy. Disused machines stood silent and rusted. Spotlights had been brought in and were focused on the stage, leaving her audience illuminated only by what sunlight could filter through broken windows.

America was booming economically. The stock market was rallying, unemployment was under four percent, and corporate profits were near record highs. But none of that mattered as long as there were a few crumbling factories and pockets of forgotten citizens like the ones before her. Their confused, angry faces made all those statistics meaningless. And more important, it made Joshua Alexander’s affirmations of his administration’s success look callous and out of touch.

When attention turned back to her, she leaned closer to the microphone. “We have the world’s biggest economy. We have the most powerful military in history. We invented pretty much everything worth having. Cars. Electric light. Personal computers. Smartphones. The Internet. We push the world forward. We keep it safe. How did this happen? How did we allow this to happen?”

The inevitable applause started and she stepped back to gaze benevolently over the crowd. Of course, the answers to her question were well known. Mechanization had made many factory jobs obsolete. Others had inevitably—and, in truth, irretrievably—flowed overseas.

The world was changing at an ever-increasing rate and that was a trend that couldn’t be stopped. These people were the ones who had been left behind. The ones who steadfastly refused to leave the dead cities they had been born in. The ones who saw themselves as America’s backbone but who survived on government aid and disability checks. Drug addicts, drunks, and halfwits incapable of performing anything but the simplest of tasks.

Ironically, it was those self-destructive traits that made them so useful. Their inflated sense of worth and victimization was easy to manipulate. When asked what exactly it was they wanted, they either didn’t know or weren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it. What they did know—with burning certainty—was what they hated: the world that had stolen everything from them.