Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(19)

The reaction of the people she passed was interesting in its predictability. A few—old acquaintances close to retirement—stopped to exchange veiled words about what was happening to the organization and country. Most, though, just averted their eyes and scurried away.

In the alternate universe that was the nation’s capital, one was either in power or invisible. It was an adjustment that many influential people never managed to make, causing them to spend the rest of their lives begging for scraps. Kennedy, on the other hand, had always looked forward to the day she would leave it all behind. Obviously, this wasn’t the way she’d imagined that exit, but it had its advantages. A clean break with no entanglements that could arrest her momentum.

Mitch Rapp’s philosophy was even more unusual. His preference would have been to go through life without anyone in Washington ever knowing he existed. Paradoxically, he’d accomplished too much to make that possible.

And now here she was, not asking for the gratitude he was owed or the recognition he deserved. Nor for compensation for the endless list of injuries he’d accumulated or the personal losses. Only that he be allowed to live out his life in peace. After everything he had done, that was the best he could hope for.

They entered the elevator and rose to the seventh floor. When Kennedy stepped out, she found the same décor but all new faces. Expected, but still disorienting. Old colleagues had warned her that Hargrave had little interest in the Agency’s operations throughout the world and was focused entirely on eradicating her influence from the organization. Talented veterans were being demoted, forced into retirement, or moved to remote posts, only to be replaced by people she would have never dreamed of putting in positions of responsibility.

After only a week under Hargrave’s leadership, her prediction was coming true. The CIA’s focus was moving from protecting the country to protecting the Cooks.

She was pointed to a chair in what had been her outer office and told to wait. It would be a while, she suspected. A petty power play that so many in Washington couldn’t resist. Yet another reminder of her newly minted insignificance.

Kennedy pulled a tablet from her bag and opened the book she was reading. Incredibly, it contained nothing at all about geopolitics, economics, or military strategy. Instead, it was a memoir by a woman who had moved to Italy to renovate an old house. Kennedy had bought it in hardback when it was first released but had been forced to donate it unread to the library when she’d run out of bookshelf space. Now she was a third of the way through the electronic version and enjoying herself immensely.

“Ma’am?”

Kennedy looked up at Hargrave’s assistant. “Yes?”

“Electronic devices are prohibited.”

She smiled and went back to reading.



“You’re up, Irene.”

Almost forty-five minutes after her arrival, Darren Hargrave finally appeared in what was now his doorway. Kennedy powered down her tablet and stood, but instead of waiting to shake her hand, he disappeared back into his office. She collected her things and entered, closing the door only to find him already stationed behind his desk.

Of course, all her personal belongings were gone. As promised, they’d been delivered by courier the day after her dismissal. The artwork, most of which had been on loan, was also missing, replaced with myriad eight-by-ten photos of Hargrave posing with other people. Not unusual. Washington’s denizens loved to hang pictures of themselves hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. Upon closer inspection, though, she noticed that Hargrave’s taste was a bit more specific. Every single picture—and there were more than she could count without being obvious—featured Anthony Cook. Also interesting was that there was no third person in any of them.

“Sit,” he said, motioning to a chair in front of his desk.

She did, ignoring the fact that the command was delivered with the tone someone would normally use to address a dog.

“Catherine told me I should take this meeting, so here we are. Now, what is it I can do for you?”

“I assume that by now you know Mitch is in Africa?”

He just glared at her. A man like Hargrave would take that as a veiled insult. A reminder that he’d failed both to capture Rapp at his home in Virginia and to prevent him from leaving the country. In fact, she had no such intention. While she had a strong distaste for her successor, she couldn’t blame him for his lack of success. If she’d been charged with capturing Mitch Rapp, she wouldn’t have fared any better.

“Why would I care?” he shot back and then immediately seemed to recognize the idiocy of the response.

“It appears that the president is concerned that Mitch might want to do him harm. I’m here to convince you that’s not the case.”

He laughed. “I’m told that you’re a persuasive woman, Irene. But I’m not an idiot.”

“Neither is Mitch. He recognizes that the president was within his rights to ask Mike Nash to provide him with information from the CIA database and that he was free to do as he saw fit with that information.”

“There’s more than that, though, isn’t there, Irene? Nash didn’t go to Uganda just to talk.”

“Mike could have walked away at any time. The fact that he didn’t was his own decision.”

“I’ll ask you again, Irene. What do you want?”