Page 6 of Denied Access
This was an interesting, not to mention unforeseen, development, since the same young man had been only too happy to speak English with Greta at great length just yesterday morning. Normally, Rapp reserved his ire for actual problems rather than just inconveniences.
Normally.
But the thought of a surveillance team lurking just out of sight had him in no mood to deal with the man’s bullshit. “Listen to me, you arrogant fuckstick. I know you speak English. Now sell me a ticket before I lose my patience.”
The twentysomething swallowed and his eyes traveled over Rapp’s face as if seeing him for the first time. He reached for the ticket dispenser and ripped one off from the roll. His paperback was apparently forgotten, and this was a shame.The Cardinal of the Kremlinwas a fantastic read.
The man handed the ticket across the counter with shaking hands.
Rapp was accustomed to this reaction. In sticking with his legend as a French tourist on holiday, he was dressed in European casual. A button-down shirt, slacks, and Italian loafers. On the surface, he looked about as dangerous as a pastry chef.
On the surface.
A closer inspection revealed an olive complexion, thick black hair, and muscular build, but it was his eyes that really told the story. Rapp’s eyes were so dark as to be black, and when he was angry, they communicated an unnerving intensity. The museum worker might not havebeen able to explain his reaction, but he would have no trouble naming the emotion gripping his heart.
Terror.
“Enjoy the museum, monsieur.”
“Gracias,” Rapp said with a smile as he dropped a handful of pesetas on the counter. “Keep the change.”
Rapp took the ticket and made his way toward a spiral staircase, ascending the stairs with quick, even strides. Contrary to what he’d told Greta, his hurry had nothing to do with the toilets located on the second floor. Neither was his urgency driven by a desire to experience for a second time the avant-garde exhibit consisting solely of discarded paper napkins. Instead Rapp was anxious to make use of the added height offered by the second floor’s towering windows.
After confirming that the corridor’s handful of patrons was more interested in the exhibits than him, Rapp stepped to the tinted glass. Though he’d already examined the windows while outside and determined that their reflective surface didn’t offer a view into the museum, Rapp still positioned his torso behind the thick concrete wall. As his mentor and onetime instructor Stan Hurley had beaten into his head, safe was better than dead.
Stan would know.
Though he was more accustomed to the role of hunter than prey, the events from ten days ago had driven home the precarious nature of Rapp’s current profession in rather unambiguous terms. Betrayed by his own countrymen, ambushed in the middle of a job, and subsequently hunted across France by several intelligence services and a national police force, Rapp knew that his honeymoon period with the Central Intelligence Agency was officially over. As the dull ache in his shoulder and puckered flesh from a still-healing gunshot wound could attest, he was not invulnerable.
To make matters worse, the surveillance team Rapp had been sensing all morning had found him despite his intentions to disappear. This was troubling. Prior to the almost life-ending events in a French hotelroom, Rapp had plied his trade with relative impunity. While not every assassination had gone exactly as planned, Rapp had no reason to believe that his cover had been compromised. He’d been living his Paris-based software-salesman legend while hunting his nation’s enemies on their own turf for over a year. Now, in less than two weeks, he’d been burned twice. Rapp accepted that Murphy’s Law was real.
Sometimes shit happened.
Sometimes.
But a formerly airtight cover repeatedly breached over the course of a relatively short period of time suggested that pure dumb luck was not to blame. He could think of only one explanation for the surveillance team’s presence.
They’d had help.
Now that he was no longer pretending to be just another diner, Rapp surveyed the courtyard in a methodical manner more akin to the way in which a countersniper hunted an enemy shooter. A good surveillance team was maddeningly hard to detect if its members were disciplined enough to resist the urge to crash the subject, and equipped with a big enough bench to frequently rotate the member charged with close surveillance.
Put another way, the technique used to determine whether or not you were under observation hadn’t really changed in the thousands of years the art of espionage had been practiced. Seeing an identical face across multiple locations and times meant that you were being followed. To avoid detection, a surveillance team needed to ensure that its target never glimpsed the same person twice.
Though he’d yet to see a familiar face staring back at him from a shop window’s reflection, Rapp had identified other tells. A male coffee drinker who’d ignored Greta when the Swiss beauty had passed by his table. A flurry of motion that had exploded from an adjacent park bench when he and Greta exited a store, and a scooter engine roaring to life the moment they’d turned a corner. These tells all had viable explanations, but Rapp was not interested in the evidentiary standard practiced bycourts of law. He knew what his instincts were telling him. Rapp no longer entertained the question of whether or not he was being followed. Instead, his thoughts were focused on a different dilemma—how to deal with the surveillance team.
One story below and fifty feet in front of him, Greta checked her watch.
Over the last several weeks, she’d had an up close and personal view of his life. The kind of up close view that resulted in his dried blood beneath her fingernails after she’d bandage his gunshot wound. Rapp was still trying to navigate a world in which his professional life had so thoroughly intruded into his personal. This quasi vacation had been suggested by Hurley as a way to allow the events in Paris to blow over.
Rapp had also thought it would be an excellent opportunity to sort through his relationship with Greta. While an assassin paired with a beautiful woman might be a spy-movie staple, it didn’t work quite so well in real life. Besides trying to decide how much to tell her about his work for the CIA, Rapp also needed to balance the danger this information might pose to Greta.
Danger like the sort represented by the man rapidly approaching Greta’s table.
CHAPTER 3
DAUGAVPILS, LATVIA
JOEGaunt took a mammoth swallow of his Valmiermuiža beer.
