Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(88)

Predictably, Claudia looked like she wanted to carve his heart out with whatever blunt instrument was at hand. Before she could get a hold of one, he laughed.

“She’s a complete psycho, Claudia. Bebe and I had to wind her in duct tape to get her on the plane. I told the pilots to dump her on the tarmac in New York with a box cutter.”

Her expression softened. “We owe her, though. For what she did for us.”

“Yeah. And that terrifies me. My hope is to never lay eyes on Sadie Hansen again. Now what’s our situation here? Have you arranged our exit?”

“Of course.”

“How soon can we go?”

“Not tomorrow morning. Maybe afternoon if we push.”

“Then push. I want to be miles away from here before the Cooks can get a cruise missile teed up.”

“Okay. I’ll get on it. Why don’t you tell Anna? She dying to see you and I think she’ll be excited to be moving on. It’s getting a little slow here for her.”

“No problem.”

“Before that, though, you should probably go see Irene. She’ll want a full report on what’s happened.”

“She’s here?”

Claudia nodded. “Waiting on Nick. He’s due tomorrow.”

Not a conversation he was looking forward to. In light of that, a little procrastination was in order.



Rapp swept his toe under the soccer ball and sent it arcing gently into the air. “Use your head!”

Anna sprinted across the patch of grass in front of Nicholas Ward’s house, but wasn’t quite fast enough.

“Scott’s better than you!” she pointed out. “He can get it all the way to me. But he had to leave. He said he had to work. I don’t know where. He has lots of jobs. I wonder if he went to see Joe? Do you think he’s going to come back soon?”

“I dunno,” Rapp said, trapping the ball when she kicked it back to him. “But we’re leaving, too.”

Her eyes widened. “Are we going home? Is the house all fixed? ’Cause—”

“Not home,” Claudia called from her position near the pool. “We’re going to go have some fun.”

“Where? Are we going to get to fly on the helicopter? Because—”

“Not the helicopter,” Rapp said. “We’re going out by ground.”

He tapped the ball back toward the girl, but she let it go right by. “We can’t go out on the ground. There aren’t any roads that come here.”

“We don’t need roads. We’re not driving.”

Anna thought about that for a moment, seeming to seize on the most incredible possibility of her short life. “Are we going to ride horses?”

He frowned dramatically. “Why ride a horse when you can ride an elephant?”

She was momentarily speechless. A rare occurrence. “Are you serious?”

“I never joke about large pachyderms.”

Her excitement turned to confusion, forcing her mother to come to the rescue. “He’s one hundred percent serious, sweetie. In fact, you get your very own. It’s a baby one.”

That prompted a flood of questions, from its name to how old it was to whether she could keep it. Rapp went to retrieve the ball while Claudia tried to provide satisfactory responses. He hoped the young girl’s excitement would hold up. In truth, it was going to be a tough trip. Unavoidable if they wanted to be certain they weren’t tracked, but hard. The first three miles were straight down the side of the mountain on foot. Nothing but slick roots, mud, and humidity. Then there would be another four miles on flat terrain before they got to camp.

The elephants would be their main mode of transportation the next day but, in his experience, the fantasy was better than the reality. While it beat walking, they weren’t creatures that gave a lot of thought to what branches, trees, and rock outcroppings their passengers collided with. Then one more night outside, one more day on foot, and finally the Land Cruiser Claudia had waiting for them.

It’d be fine, he told himself. Anna would rise to the occasion because she was tough and there was no other choice. It wasn’t like the journey would have been a hardship for a local girl her age. It was never too soon to learn that either life kicked the shit out of you, or you kicked the shit out of it. Particularly when you were unlucky enough to be a member of this family.

As he was dribbling the ball back toward the pool, Irene Kennedy appeared from the trees. Claudia immediately turned her attention to Anna. “Do you want to go for a swim? Why don’t you go back to the bungalow and grab our suits. Then we can talk more about the elephants.”

“But—”

“Now, Anna.”

Recognizing her mother’s tone, she ran off, exchanging a short greeting with Kennedy as they passed.

“I thought I heard the chopper.”

She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white blouse, more tanned than Rapp had ever seen her, but not exactly relaxed. And he was about to make that worse. Much worse.

“We’re taking off tomorrow. I was coming by to see you but I needed to break the news to Anna first.”

“I see,” she said, pointing to Nicholas Ward’s terrace. He and Claudia followed her onto it and she used a remote to open the louvered walls. At the same time, a large panel rose and created an open doorway shaded by a lattice. She went inside, crossing to the kitchen and opening the refrigerator. “Drink?”