Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(68)

She sounded more like a fangirl than a target, but Rapp let it go. Sadie was Sadie and there was nothing anyone—including him—could do about it.

“So, what I want to do,” Rapp continued, “is turn this thing around. There’s a lot of experience in this room. If the three of us had been hired to get to Claudia, how would we do it?”

“Are we assuming that it can’t look like a hit and there can’t be any collateral damage?” Bebe said.

“Those seem to be the parameters Legion works under.”

“Not easy, then. The obvious thing would be to use the crime problem around here as cover. Attacking the house again would be a stretch. Maybe a carjacking? And haven’t I read something about people randomly throwing cinder blocks off freeway overpasses? I mean it’s not exactly elegant, but in the context of South Africa it wouldn’t generate a lot of questions.”

“Too low percentage,” Sadie said. “Particularly with the armored SUV. A carjacker would need an RPG and how do you aim a cinder block well enough to guarantee a kill? Plus, it just feels wrong for them. Too heavy-handed. What about the water supply? Are there any common diseases or contaminants around here? Even if it didn’t kill me, it could create an emergency that would force us to improvise.”

“All the water goes through a filtration system that’s inside the house and still fully functional. It’d have to be taken off-line for that kind of an attack to be feasible.”

“Okay, maybe not,” Sadie conceded. “But what about the air-conditioning units? I once rigged an HVAC system at a hotel and pumped carbon monoxide through an open window. It killed the target’s wife, too, though.” She turned thoughtful for a moment. “But I think his kid survived. I can’t remember.”

“They’re outside the house, but still inside the wall,” Rapp said, recalling that the kid in fact had not survived. “And we’re trying to avoid collateral damage.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure that rule’s still in play?” Bebe asked. “After what you did to the Guatemalans, you might have lost innocent bystander status. If I were them, I’d break my rule and do you at the same time. The last thing in the world I’d want is to spend the rest of my life waiting for you to drop a Soviet surplus bomb on my house.”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Rapp admitted. “But we have central climate control so that means you die, too.”

“Inconvenient, but not insurmountable,” Sadie said. “Run the gas and when everyone’s unconscious, short out the unit. After that, all you have to do is stroll in with a tank of carbon monoxide and a face mask. Claudia dies and everyone else makes a full recovery.”

“You mean you die and everyone else makes a full recovery,” Bebe said, but Sadie ignored her.

“You could even make it look like undiagnosed damage from the gunfight.”

“Complicated,” Rapp said.

“Yeah, but there’s no easy way to get to Claudia. And that’s what Legion does, right? Complicated?”

“Okay. You’ve convinced me. Bebe, I’ve got carbon monoxide detectors in the house, but they’re just ones I bought from the hardware store. I don’t even know if they work anymore. Can you install some hidden ones that we can count on?”

She jotted a note on the legal pad in front of her. “Consider it done.”

“Next?”

“We talked about creating an emergency to get Claudia outside the gate where she’s vulnerable,” Sadie said. “But what about your vulnerability? I know you’ve been staying off the roads lately, but I’ve read about people stringing wires and creating other kinds of traps on trails. I’m not sure it happens here but it does in the US and Britain. If you got badly hurt, I’d come running.”

“I’m going to avoid putting myself at risk until this is resolved. No mountain biking, trail running, or climbing.”

“What about Bebe?”

“Unpredictable,” Rapp said. “I might respond to that, not you.”

“To me, Anna’s the weakest link,” Bebe said. “Any problem with her creates a panicked response in her mother, who would then ignore her own safety to get to her as quickly as possible.”

“Agreed,” Rapp said. “We’re letting Anna communicate in a limited way with her friends but obscuring her location. I think we should assume that, at a minimum, Legion’s already compromised her best friend’s phone. Can we use that to maneuver them into making a play?”

“I’d be pretty focused on Anna if I were them,” Bebe said, lining up her collection of pencils to the right of her pad.

“So, we let them find her,” Sadie proposed. “They injure her and I bolt out of here in a way that looks panicked but is actually carefully controlled. When Legion make their move, we take them out.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Rapp said, “but putting Anna in harm’s way is a hard no.”

“I think your judgment’s clouded,” Sadie said. “Getting hurt is better than losing your mother, right? And there’s no way they’re going to kill her. A dead daughter lacks urgency. I mean, why would Claudia even leave the house? More likely you’d just have someone bring the body back for burial, right? I’d go for a really visceral and painful injury. Not so bad that she’d end up in a coma, though. Something that would keep her awake, suffering, and calling for her mother. Bad burns? Or what about an animal attack? Do they have chimpanzees in Uganda? I saw a news report once about a woman who got charged by one. It bit her face right o—”