Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(75)

The cheese was barely starting to melt when he heard a hum overhead. Apparently, the surveillance drone operator was no longer under orders to be subtle. It slowed to a hover over the patio, turned on a spotlight, and focused it on him. Maslick put his spatula down and raised the middle finger of his newly freed hand.

The clock was ticking.

He slid his burger onto the patty and began wolfing it down. A little rarer than he liked, but he ground his own steak, so not bad. The cheddar still had a little tooth, though. And in his haste, he’d completely forgotten the onion slices lying on his kitchen counter.

As Rapp had predicted, the sound of cars roaring up his driveway became audible a few moments later. He kept cramming the burger in his mouth as men armed with assault rifles approached from both sides of the house. The exact models were impossible to discern in the semidarkness but that was less important than the fact that they were all pointed in his direction.

“Put your hands where I can see them!” someone shouted.

Maslick jammed the rest of his dinner in his mouth and then obeyed the command. When he spoke, the burger made his words nearly unintelligible.

“What seems to be the problem, Officer?”



Catherine Cook was clicking through the news channels in the White House residence, stopping whenever she saw a video of her husband being dragged offstage. It had been hours ago, but the clips were still saturating every media outlet from cable television to Twitter to Facebook. She hit the pause button a split second before the lead Secret Service man reached him, and took in how small he looked. How frightened and weak.

Apparently, he had been taken directly to one of the new fortified locations that Rapp and Kennedy knew nothing about and was now on his way back to the White House.

For what it was worth.

She lowered herself into a chair, staring silently at that frozen image until the door opened. Her husband walked across the wood floor and stopped behind her. He didn’t seem to have anything to say. But she did.

“You can steal, Tony. You can lie. Cheat. You can even pursue policies that destroy the lives of your own constituents.” She pointed to the screen. “What you can’t do, is look like that.”

“Sam’s already working on a story about an operation I’m carrying out against ISIS. We’re going to say that we received information that they were planning an attack. Darren’s feeding the FBI disinformation about an Egyptian immigrant studying at Georgetown. They’re going to pick him up tomorrow. It’ll have more impact if we can put a face on it.”

Again, she pointed to the TV. “You have put a face on it, Tony. That’s going to be your next opponent’s campaign poster.”

“Joe Maslick—”

“I heard,” she interrupted. “How far from that venue was he? Still an hour? With traffic an hour and a half? What exactly was the threat again?”

“You have no idea,” Cook responded defensively. “Killing is all Mitch Rapp and his people do. We can’t afford to take chances.”

She held up an eight-by-ten photo depicting Joe Maslick flipping off a surveillance drone. “He’s toying with you, Tony. How much more obvious could it be? He wanted to make a fool out of you and to make you pull back from the public even more. What Rapp wants is for you to lose the next election. Because once you’re out of the White House, you’re defenseless.”

“I—”

“He knows, Tony. I don’t know how, but he knows about the dossier. Probably from Enzo Ruiz, but it doesn’t matter. Mitch Rapp just sent you a message. The truce is off. And if Legion manages to kill Claudia Gould, there’s nothing he won’t do to see you dead.”

“She and Rapp are back at the house in South Africa with limited security. Darren thinks they’re trying to draw Legion in. We need to quit screwing around and deal with him.”

She laughed. “We did deal with him. We agreed to a truce. And he was going to abide by it. All you had to do was nothing. But you couldn’t help yourself.”

“So now you trust Mitch Rapp?”

“I trust him to pursue his own self-interest and the interests of his country. He’d have understood that what we were offering was a good deal. And if not, Kennedy would have convinced him.”

“I disagree,” her husband said coldly.

“What now, then? Do we take another run at Rapp and hope it goes better this time? Scott Coleman? Irene? What about the hundreds of other people who owe Rapp their lives?”

“We already have Maslick.”

“For God’s sake, Tony. Let him go. He’s a war hero who hasn’t broken any laws. Right now, Irene Kennedy is sitting around figuring out how to leak this to the press in the most damaging way possible.”

Cook finally came around and sat on a sofa in front of her. “Lately all I hear out of you is criticism. That I’m a coward. That I’m an idiot. That I’m being played. What I don’t hear is solutions.”

“I gave you the solution!” she snapped. “You threw it away. And now you’re going to sit there and try to shift the blame? I’m not one of your adoring cult members, Tony. Don’t treat me like one.”

He leaned back, putting as much distance between them as he could without appearing to retreat. When he spoke again, his tone was more respectful. “You always have a plan B, Catherine.”