Oath of Loyalty (Mitch Rapp #21)(97)

He let the sensors probe him as he stared at a blank wall.

“You can drop your arms,” the voice said after about twenty seconds. “You’ll see a pair of handcuffs hanging by the door to your left. Please put them on with your hands behind your back.”

Again, Rapp complied.

“Show them to the camera.”

He turned so they could zoom in.

Apparently they were satisfied, because the door opened and a man wearing fatigues and a flak jacket entered. He had a tube of superglue in one hand and a bottle of accelerator in the other. After taking a position behind Rapp, he tightened the cuffs to the point of discomfort and then sealed the keyholes.

“Now the only way to get these off is to cut them off,” he whispered in Rapp’s ear. “Or maybe we’ll just bury you in them.”

Not Secret Service. Foreign accent. It’d be interesting to know if they had some history together that Rapp couldn’t remember.

He was surrounded by five more men and led to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center—a secure structure beneath the East Wing. Years ago, Rapp had saved the life of a former president who had holed up in a similar bunker not far from there. In many ways, it had been the operation that made him who he was. Would this be where it all ended, too?

The room hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d seen it. The main difference was that all of the furniture had been removed, with the exception of two chairs. The one near the door looked like it had been taken from the now-missing conference table. The other was on the far side of the room, constructed of heavy steel and anchored to the floor. Not surprisingly, he was led to that one. After sitting, his handcuffs were padlocked to a chain on the back and the glue ceremony was repeated. Then he was left alone.

Rapp figured he’d have to wait a while for Cook to show up but it turned out to be less than five minutes. Apparently, the situation was weighing on the president enough that he couldn’t bring himself to exercise that particular display of self-importance. Even more interesting was that after entering, he immediately closed the door behind him.

“Where’s the wife?”

“She has her place,” Cook responded, looking down at him from across the room. “This isn’t it.”

Rapp suppressed a smile. Leaving his smarter half out of this was a mistake. So far, things were going even better than Kennedy and her crystal ball had predicted.

“There are no microphones in here, but there are cameras,” Cook said, taking a seat that preserved the distance between them. “One wrong move and there’ll be armed guards in here before you even stand. So, don’t try it. My men have been training for this and even you’re not that fast. No one is. Not even close.”

The fact that he wouldn’t shut up about it suggested he wasn’t as convinced as he wanted to sound. He should have been, though. There was no way out of the cuffs and even at a full sprint, it would take a good second and a half to get to him. But that’s not why Rapp was there.

“So where do we start?” the president said.

“I thought a little history. To be sure we’re on the same page.”

“By all means. Go ahead.”

“You and I agreed to a truce. I would leave the country for as long as you were in power, stay in plain sight to the degree possible, make no moves against you. In return, you’d leave me alone.”

Cook nodded, so Rapp continued.

“Instead, you sent a dossier about Claudia to her enemies. That caused Gustavo Marroqui to attack us in South Africa and ended with Enzo Ruiz hiring Legion to kill her. I captured Legion and changed their target.”

Cook gave another slow nod before speaking. “While I agree in principle with what you’ve laid out, I have to take your word for the fact that you planned to honor our agreement. Typically, when you bury the hatchet, it’s in the skulls of people you consider to be your enemy.”

“I do what I say I’m going to.”

“Promises are kept until they become inconvenient.”

“Spoken like a true politician.”

Cook smiled thinly at the insult. “So that’s where we’ve been, Mitch. The question that Catherine and Irene want us to resolve is, where are we going? They seem to think that putting us in the same room is the first step to building trust between us. You’ve allowed yourself to be handcuffed to a chair inside my defenses and I’ve agreed to get within a few feet of you alone. I suppose the idea is that we reaffirm our commitment to our imperfect little agreement. And that this time everyone abides by it.”

“Is that what you’re here to do?”

Cook leaned back and crossed his legs. In his way, he really was impressive. The good looks, the charisma, the sense of quiet strength that oozed from every pore as long as Rapp’s handcuffs held. It wasn’t hard to see why people were so anxious to follow him. Why anyone would trust him, though, was another matter.

“So, your problem is easy to summarize,” the president said finally. “You’re handcuffed to a chair surrounded by a hundred armed men sworn to defend me. Mine, though, is a little more complicated. First, Legion is now coming for me. And second, your men have disappeared.”

All true. A few hours before Rapp arrived in DC, his people had gone up in smoke. Coleman had jumped over the side of his boat with some scuba gear and never returned. Wick had disappeared into his backyard—also known as Wyoming. Bruno had lost himself in New Zealand, and Maslick had disappeared down a manhole in Northern Virginia.