Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(54)

Rapp just stood there.

“Not what you expected?”

“I figured you’d want me to go after your kids.”

The old man nodded. “It’s tempting. And a few years ago, that probably would have been my request. But I made them what they are. They’re my legacy. They’re the reason I won’t be forgotten.”

“Well, then you and I have no problem, Enzo. I’d be happy to kill you.”

Ruiz seemed unwilling to take the statement at face value. “But what I’m going to tell you isn’t what you want to hear. It’s going to make you angry.”

“Even more reason for me to twist your head off.”

“Even more reason for you to leave me to rot,” the Spaniard countered.

“If you know anything about me, you know I’m a man of my word.”

That seemed to satisfy him. But only barely.

“Unknown to my children, I still dabble in the business online. It’s what keeps me sane. The file came in on an email account I use for one of those businesses. From a Gmail account.”

“Whose Gmail account?”

“I have no idea. Besides the file, there was just a brief message asking me if I would be interested in killing her.”

“And you said?”

“I said yes, of course.”

“What else?”

He shrugged weakly. “I’ve contacted that Gmail account on a few occasions since, but received no response.”

“Have you done anything about this?”

“About killing her?”

“Yes. About killing her.”

“We still have a deal, correct?”

“I said we do, Enzo. And to be completely honest, I was planning on killing you anyway.”

The Spaniard seemed to want to smile again but caught himself. Clearly, he’d done something Rapp was going to be extremely pissed-off about. But what?

“I sent the document to Legion. He accepted the job and I have paid in full.”

Rapp waited for more but apparently that was the punch line. “Call him off.”

The Spaniard looked perplexed. “I can’t call him off.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

His confusion deepened. “Is it possible that you aren’t familiar with Legion?”

Rapp shook his head. He didn’t have much interest in the new generation of private contractors unless they were careless enough to get in his way. Most weren’t. The rest were dead.

Once again, Ruiz found himself in the driver’s seat. He straightened a bit more, clearly having the time of his life. “Legion is a completely new kind of killer. He has an anonymous email address that very few know of. If you want someone eliminated, you create your own anonymous email account and send him information on the proposed hit. If he agrees, you send two million euros in bitcoin. After that, both email accounts are deleted.”

“So how do you get in touch with him if you change your mind?”

“You don’t. Legion doesn’t know who I am, and I don’t know who he is. We have no way to contact each other. Once the contract is accepted and payment is made, the target is as good as dead.”

“So, you just sent two million euros into cyberspace with no guarantees? That seems a little trusting. What if he screws up? Or just walks with your money?”

“Then it will be the end of his business. Word spreads quickly in the circles I run in. Similar, I imagine, to your network. But it’s never happened. Legion never fails.”

“There’s got to be some mechanism for canceling.”

The smile appeared again. It shook a bit, possibly because Ruiz hadn’t used those particular muscles in years. “Not that I or anyone else knows of. But even if I could call him off, that wasn’t part of my deal with you. I gave you the information you asked for and the fact that Claudia Gould will soon be dead has no bearing on anything.”

Rapp sighed quietly and pointed to a laptop built into a swing-arm attached to Ruiz’s wheelchair. “So, you deleted all the emails related to this?”

“The ones to Legion. That’s the agreement. But not the others. Why would I?”

So you don’t get caught contracting a hit, Rapp thought, but then saw the error in his logic. What did this geriatric piece of shit care? If the Spanish authorities put him in prison, he’d probably be running the place inside of two weeks.

“Print them out.”

Instead of refusing, he did so with as much glee as a man like him could conjure. He’d called down the wrath of God on the woman Mitch Rapp loved and there was nothing Rapp could do about it. To a man like him that was heroin.

Sheets of paper started coming out of a printer near the foot of the bed and Rapp scanned them before shoving them in his back pocket. There was a hand towel hanging on one of the rails and he took it, walking around the back of Ruiz’s chair and clamping it over his mouth and nose.

The Spaniard fought for one last time in a life filled with violence. Rapp focused on keeping the towel in place with as little pressure as possible and preventing the old man from banging up his flailing arms. While it would be pretty clear what had happened there, best to keep the physical evidence to a minimum.

As Ruiz himself had predicted, he didn’t last long. Rapp kept the towel in place for another thirty seconds after the man had gone limp, just to make sure. When he finally pulled it away he saw that the old bastard had died with a smile on his face.