Page 37 of Denied Access
After spending the better part of an hour floundering in the surf, Rapp was forced to come to terms with a simple fact he’d been trying to ignore—while his shoulder was feeling much better, he was nowherenear one hundred percent. He had tried to settle into a relaxed swimming cadence, but the pain and tightness had forced him to abandon his more powerful freestyle stroke in favor of flipping onto his back and allowing the current to do most of the work.
Not ideal.
The outcome might not have been anywhere near as rosy if he’d attempted to fight the current by swimming east. The tides probably would have turned him around and sent him west. Probably. But if he’d floundered into a riptide, the results could have been much more dire. Yes, he felt good most of the time, but his body was not done healing and he could not expect to operate at one hundred percent.
He needed to remember this lesson.
This time Rapp received no catcalls from sunbathing beauties. Instead, the stretch of nude beach consisted of mostly elderly men and women basting their sagging bodies under the cloudless sky. The median age had to be about seventy-five. Maybe there was a retirement community nearby. He smiled at the thought of a bunch of old people trekking from afternoon bingo to the beach and back wearing nothing but sandals.
His humor was short-lived.
Besides working on his tan, Rapp had had precious little to do while drifting down the coast besides think.
Think and remember.
Though he no longer had to contend with a fresh bullet wound, the persistent ache in his shoulder coupled with the feeling of floating weightless in the water’s embrace was familiar.
Too familiar.
Not that long ago, he’d been submerged in the Seine’s filthy water with a fresh bullet wound, floating through Paris as he tried to work out who had attempted to kill him. Today the climate was more agreeable and his body in better shape, but the circumstances were too similar for Rapp’s liking. Dangerous people were again hunting him, and he had no idea who they were or how he’d been found.
Entering the beach’s public bathroom, Rapp selected an empty stall.
After closing and locking the door behind him, he unzipped the woman’s waterlogged bag and uncinched the plastic liner. As he’d hoped, his clothes were dry. Using handfuls of toilet paper, Rapp blotted the worst of the ocean water from his body before flushing the soggy mess.
Then he dressed and considered what to do next.
During his thoughtful float, Rapp had arrived at several unsettling conclusions. While Ohlmeyer’s dispute might be with a Cold War adversary, this no longer felt like a grudge match between two onetime combatants. The surveillance and rendition team who had attempted to interdict him at the airport was not just hired help.
He knew a bit about the lucrative world of executive protection. During his time with the Orion program, Rapp had crossed swords with numerous bodyguards ranging from hired goons to former military. High-end mercenaries could match, or in some cases exceed, the competency of their government-employed counterparts, but it wasn’t so much the skill of the airport team as the impunity with which they’d operated. Even the wealthiest Saudi prince had limits on what his funds could accomplish. Money could buy perks, but cash alone was not enough to entice the cooperation of a national police service or allow a private plane to use a berth normally reserved for wide-body jets. This was to say nothing of the kind of coercion required to convince the Spanish government to permit a surveillance-and-interdiction team to conduct a rendition in the crowded terminal of one of their busiest international airports.
That sort of pressure came from just one source.
A nation-state.
This realization required a reframing of his task. It was one thing to fly to another country, interdict a private citizen, interrogate him, and end his life. Absent the interrogation portion of the equation, Rapp had been following this exact formula for almost two years.
Going to war with a nation-state was something else.
But this was just one of his concerns, and not even the most pressing. The more pertinent question had to do with location. More specifically, his location. How had the rendition team known Rapp was going to the airport when he himself had only found out during his meeting with Ohlmeyer?
The answer was equal parts simple and devastating.
The team had known because Ohlmeyer had known. Either the banker’s inner circle and his extensive security protocols had been breached, or…
Or.
Or Ohlmeyer had set Rapp up.
Rapp stared at the final two items in the waterproof bag as he considered that possibility. He didn’t know the German man well, but Ohlmeyer had been comrades in arms with two generations of American clandestine warriors—Stansfield and Hurley. Neither CIA officer allowed people into his confidence easily, yet Ohlmeyer was a friend to both. Still, even the hardest of men showed cracks in their iron façade when it came to their families. If the person responsible for lopping off the head of one of Ohlmeyer’s oldest friends threatened to do the same to Greta unless the banker gave up Rapp, would he do it?
Rapp didn’t know.
If he were in Ohlmeyer’s place, it would be a tempting trade to make. He didn’t believe Greta’s grandfather harbored any ill will toward him, but the German banker had come of age during the Second World War. That conflict had since been relegated to fuzzy black-and-white pictures and dusty history books, but it had been hell on earth. Children had been used as couriers by the Resistance, while teenagers fought in partisan squads charged with sabotaging railroads or ambushing German supply lines. If his formative years had been forged in this crucible, would Ohlmeyer balk at sacrificing an American assassin he barely knew in exchange for the life of his treasured granddaughter?
Probably not.
The pair of phones at the bottom of the bag might as well have been coiled vipers. One of the cells belonged to him, while the other had come with the bag. Rapp had removed the batteries from each, so the electronic devices were harmless at the moment, but as soon as he reconnected their power sources the handsets held the power to kill.
