Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(83)

The question was whether to kill Rapp or make a deal with the U.S. government to turn him over. His impression of Barnett was that she was even more corrupt and power hungry than the Mexican politicians he dealt with on a day-to-day basis. And while the mundane bribes he was accustomed to paying out wouldn’t interest her, Mitch Rapp in chains was another matter. Certainly there could be little harm in having the gratitude of the world’s most powerful leader.

He let his head sink deeper into his pillow, putting the matter out of his mind and starting to drift again. One problem at a time.

The hand gripped him again, this time tighter. He was about to swat at the girl but then heard a harsh whisper.

“Carlos! Wake up!”

The sound of Vicente Rossi’s voice jolted him awake. What was the man doing in his bedroom? Instinctively, he reached for the bedside lamp, but Rossi slapped his hand away.

The girl next to him rolled onto her back. “Carlos, are you—”

Rossi lurched forward and clamped a hand over her mouth. “Be silent, bitch! Stay still and don’t speak! Do you understand?”

Esparza saw the vague outline of her head move up and down before his assistant pulled back.

“What the fuck are you doing in here?” he whispered, trying to get control of the situation while his heart pounded uncomfortably in his chest. “Is it Losa? Are we—”

“Shut up!” Rossi said, pulling a phone from his pocket. The screen lit up, bathing the gaunt face of his assistant in a dull blue light.

“What—”

“Read it,” Rossi ordered.

Esparza looked at the phone, scanning a headline about the interception of anthrax on the U.S. border. “A news story? You woke me up for this? What the—”

“Don’t talk. Read!”

Esparza took the phone and scanned through the story, his anger flaring when he reached the part stating that the intercept had been made at the San Ysidro mall.

“Those motherfuckers,” he said under his breath.

The Arabs he was dealing with weren’t heroin traffickers. They were terrorists trying to use his network to smuggle a bioweapon into the United States.

“Tell the guards to go to the shed and kill every one of—”

“Forget the Arabs!”

Esparza fell into confused silence.

“You trusted Mitch Rapp enough to hire him based on one thing and one thing only. You believe that a man like him doesn’t care about drug trafficking.” Rossi tapped the screen. “But he does care about this.”

? ? ?

Mitch Rapp stood motionless and listened to the jungle around him. The hum of insects. The quiet rustling of leaves created by a breeze too light to feel. The rhythmic dripping of water.

The only practical way out of Esparza’s house without being seen was through a narrow strip of bushes that extended all the way to the walls. Rapp had climbed out a window when two guards briefly abandoned their posts to share a cigarette. Slipping beneath the foliage, he’d spent the next hour and a half inching along the power conduit it hid. Finally, he’d made it to the jungle.

And that’s where he was still, looking back at the dark compound. Esparza ran his security in two twelve-hour shifts, with all posts manned around the clock and three additional roaming guards at night. The problem was that none of those men were currently visible. All posts now appeared to be empty and everything was silent. On the surface, that lack of guards would seem to be a good thing. But it was unexpected. And he hated unexpected.

Coming up with a coherent strategy to handle this situation had turned out to be harder than he’d anticipated. His first plan had been to get to Rossi’s phone, but it was an idea that didn’t hold up under examination. Assuming he could get into Rossi’s room undetected and assuming Rossi had a phone capable of connecting internationally without Esparza’s authority, what then? Call Kennedy for the cavalry? Based on his last conversation with Esparza, she was fighting for her political life. And he wasn’t in Iraq or Afghanistan. This was Mexico, a country that wouldn’t take kindly to a bunch of U.S. troops rolling in unannounced.

Further, the threat he faced wasn’t just a shed full of bioweapons; it was a shed full of bioweapons that could think and move on their own. If they made it out of here, the shit was going to hit the fan in a way that no one had seen for more than a century.

In light of all that, there was no point in trying to get fancy. Better to just shoot them all, close their bodies up in the shed, and set it on fire. Nice and neat on the bioweapon front but it did leave one small loose end.

Him.

He didn’t need Gary Statham to tell him that if he went into that building and started splattering blood around, he had a high probability of being infected. So when this was over, he couldn’t risk any human contact at all. No going back to the house. No fighting with guards. No getting to a phone. At best, his next two weeks would be spent living barricaded in a muddy cave in the mountains. At worst, his next two weeks would be spent dying barricaded in a muddy cave in the mountains.

Another careful scan of the compound didn’t turn up any sign of the missing guards, so he started forward again. Staying silent in the dense foliage forced him to move at a crawl but he finally came alongside the shed housing the Arabs.

All the equipment and supplies the clapboard building had once contained were now piled haphazardly around it. Rapp dropped to his stomach and slithered across the damp earth, aiming for what appeared to be a small tractor stacked with rakes and shovels.