Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(17)

“It’s not that messy. And Mitch just got here!”

“If you want to ride with him later, I suggest you go up there and get to work. Because your butt won’t be getting anywhere near that bike seat until everything’s back in your closet. And I don’t mean just thrown in there, either.”

“Fine!” she said angrily and stomped off. Rapp winced. She’d picked that up from him, too. He needed to be a little more careful. What they didn’t need was to get a call from school notifying him that she’d kneecapped one of her schoolmates with a cricket bat.

Claudia took him by the hand and led him to a steel reinforced door at the back of the living room. They passed into what had once been a windowless bathroom. The walls were now armored and a metal cabinet full of food and weapons stood where the bathtub had once been. Various electronics were stacked neatly on a shelf next to the sink and below a bank of color monitors. In the center was a tiny table with three folding chairs.

Again, a pale reflection of what he had in the States. Provisions were limited and the space had neither filtered air nor a secure water supply. To the positive, it was soundproof and sturdy enough to hold off even pretty well-equipped attackers for the better part of an hour.

Once the door was firmly shut behind them, Claudia’s eyes filled with tears and she threw her arms around him.

“What?”

“I didn’t know if we’d ever see you again. With everything that’s happened, I thought you might just disappear.”

“I considered it,” he admitted. “And it’s still an option.”

She released him and pulled back. “No, it’s not.”

“Hold judgment until you hear the full story.”

They sat, but before he could start, she spoke. “What happened to Mike, Mitch?”

“Maggie didn’t tell you?”

Claudia and Maggie Nash had become close friends during their time as neighbors in Virginia and, as a new widow, he assumed that she’d turn to Claudia for support.

“She told me that he saved you and the guys in the jungle. It was a beautiful story. Too beautiful to be true, I think.”

“Mike was the mole,” Rapp said flatly. “He was working directly for the Cooks.”

She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. The African sun had bleached it noticeably, while darkening her skin an equal amount. The contrast was increasingly obvious, as were the lines at the edges of now-downcast eyes. He knew people called them laugh lines, but in her case that might be a bit optimistic. It was hard not to wonder if their relationship was eating away at her even more than her prior one. Any way you looked at it, it had been a long thirty-five years for her. Sure, many of her problems were self-inflicted, but in his extensive experience, that didn’t make them any easier.

“Did you kill him?” she asked finally.

“What difference does it make now?”

“It makes a lot of difference, Mitch. You live with a lot, but Mike’s different. If that’s something you’re going to be carrying around, I want to know about it.”

“No. He killed himself. Before I could stop him.”

“And that’s the truth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Mitch. I know how close you were.”

He shrugged, making sure it looked more casual than it felt. “Everybody dies. And the rest of us move on until it’s our turn.”

“But move on to where?”

“That’s the question. I think it’s safe to say that Anthony Cook isn’t happy with me.”

“And what do you propose we do about that?”

“I’m thinking about asking Irene to try to broker a truce.”

Her expression suggested it wasn’t what she expected to hear.

“Surprised?”

“A little bit. It seems like an uncharacteristically sensible course of action.”

“It’s what Mike wanted. What he offered me and I didn’t take. If I had, he’d be alive and we’d be a hell of a lot better off.”

“But you were angry.”

“Hell yes, I was angry. All those years and he turned on me for some piece-of-shit politician he just met. What am—” Rapp caught himself before the bitterness he felt about Nash’s betrayal could take hold. Instead, he waved a hand around him, indicating her and the house. “But now I’ve put myself in a position where sensible is my only option.”

“And that’s our fault? Mine and Anna’s?”

“Fault? No. I made my choices and I don’t have any complaints. But you probably should. Anthony Cook is a megalomaniacal nut. And all megalomaniacal nuts have one thing in common: deep down, they’re cowards. He’s afraid of me. That makes him dangerous.”

“Having him as an enemy,” Claudia said, speaking deliberately, “is less than ideal.”

“That’s one way of putting it. The bottom line is that if he isn’t willing to let this go, I’ve got problems. And if we stay together, you do, too.”

“We’ve had this conversation so many times, I feel like we should record it and just play it back to each other once a year.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Claudia, but this isn’t some terrorist looking to make a name for himself. There could be a Reaper drone circling us right now. And when the government here complains about the new crater in their wine country, he’d say they were targeting an al-Qaeda cell, then spread around enough money to make the whole thing go away.”