The Third Option Read online

  “Did you watch the news tonight?”

  “I caught a bit of it earlier.”

  “Did you happen to see the local story about the man gunned down in College Park?”

  Clark leaned forward and set down the wine glass. The murder in College Park had been the lead news story on every local station and appeared to be headed for the front page of the Post in the morning. More than fifty rounds had been fired. Most of them from silenced weapons, and most directed at the lone fatality. There were several eyewitness reports that a woman also had been shot, but the police had yet to confirm her existence. They were monitoring local hospitals for gunshot victims.

  “I saw the story.”

  Cameron shifted uncomfortably in his chair and finally said, “I was there.”

  “Why?”

  “I was keeping an eye on things.”

  Clark said nothing for a moment. He just stared at Cameron and his unkempt beard. Finally, he asked, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  Cameron started with an apology for not doing a better job of controlling Duser and his people. From there, Cameron went into the play-by-play of events. He verified that the woman mentioned in the story had been shot—killed, as a matter of fact—and that her body had been disposed of, as well as all of the weapons and vehicles that had been used. On a positive note, the muscle behind Gus Villaume, namely Mario Lukas, was no longer a threat.

  Clark managed to stay calm and listen without interruption, despite the fact that he desperately wanted to ask Cameron one blindingly obvious question. When Cameron finally finished, Clark got his chance. “What were you doing there?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “What were you doing in the car? Why would you expose yourself like that?”

  Cameron was slightly embarrassed. Clark had preached to him about keeping a low profile. “I knew this was going to be complicated, and I wanted to make sure Duser didn’t screw things up.”

  Clark felt the need to take a sip of wine. He reflected on the possibility that Cameron was not telling the truth. The man was a voyeur, that was obvious enough. His sudden desire to be so hands-on was dangerous. Cameron was the one and only person who could tie the senator to the events of the last five days. He took a second sip, and while the expensive red liquid slid down his throat, he decided Cameron would have to go. Clark didn’t know where he would find a replacement, but he would. The man had become too big a liability. The senator would have to make arrangements for his disappearance, but until then he would keep Cameron close and happy.

  “Peter, you’ve done very good work for me. I want you alive and out of jail.” The senator frowned. “No more field trips with the boys. You’re too valuable for that. Let them do the dirty work, and concentrate on keeping your hands clean.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cameron let out a sigh of relief and said, “There has been another development.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Oh, I think you’ll like this one,” replied Cameron with a smile. He retrieved a small tape recorder from his pocket. Holding it up, he said, “Earlier this evening, one of my people intercepted this conversation.” Cameron turned up the volume and pressed play.

  “Anna Rielly here.”

  “Honey, it’s me. Are you all right?”

  The quality of the tape was good. Clark leaned forward, resting his forearms on his desk. “Is that who I think it is?” Cameron nodded.

  “Mitchell.”

  “Honey, it’s me, but I can’t talk long. Are you okay?”

  A slow chill of excitement ran down Clark’s back. This was the first time he had heard Mitch Rapp’s voice. After carefully studying him for months, this was the first time he had felt the man’s presence. The voice was deep and a little scratchy, just as the senator had expected. Clark listened to the rest of the tape intently and then had Cameron play it back for him two more times. Clark memorized every word of the tape. He was beginning to see a path. A way to complete his plans. After a long moment of reflection, he looked up at Cameron and said, “I want you to get into the girl’s apartment. See if she keeps a journal. If she does, copy it. If there are any computer disks, copy them also. Find out what type of books she reads, what magazines she subscribes to, if she takes any medication.” Clark paused. “See if you can get her medical history. I want to know as much about her as possible, and I want it by tomorrow night.”

  “That might be a little difficult.”

  That was not what Clark wanted to hear. Not with Rapp so close. Things were reaching critical mass. “Peter, I pay you well. No excuses. I want that information by tomorrow evening.” Always aware of the need to keep both friend and foe close, he added with a warm grin, “When this is all over, I will make sure you are very well compensated, Peter. To the extent that you just might choose to retire.” Clark held up his wine glass in a toast to the future.

  Cameron nodded. “I’ll get it done.”

  With a smile still on his face, Clark decided to go ahead and hire the person who would get rid of Cameron. There was no telling when he might have to have him taken out.

  THE CLUB WAS located off 695 in Dundalk. Downtown Baltimore was four miles due west. It was a Bally’s Total Fitness club, one of hundreds nationwide. That’s why Gus Villaume had joined. Flexibility and anonymity. At Bally’s he was just one of millions trying to fight the never-ending battle. Villaume was in the twenty-sixth minute of his workout, and he was sweating profusely. Four more minutes on the stationary bike, and he was done. There were eight televisions mounted on the wall in front of him. They carried the signals of MTV, VH-1, ESPN, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. Most of Villaume’s attention, however, was focused on the issue of Condé Nast Traveler that was sitting in the bike’s magazine stand. Villaume’s real job—or fake job, depending on how you looked at it—was travel writing. He was published under the name Marc Gieser, and his two areas of expertise were southern France and French Polynesia. The job provided him with a great cover for international travel and a good thirty to fifty grand a year in legitimate income. The other benefits were obvious: he could stay at some of the world’s finest hotels for next to nothing, just so long as he continued to write nice things.

  The club was pretty calm. Villaume refused to enter the place between the hours of eleven A.M. and nine P.M. This evening, there was one guy running on a treadmill and two women talking to each other on the stair steppers. Villaume had chose Baltimore as his home because it kept him close enough to Washington to be readily available but far enough away to keep him from bumping into the wrong people when he was out and about. He had been thinking a lot about Peter Cameron since returning from Colorado. There was something unsettling about the man. In a nutshell, he couldn’t be trusted.

  Villaume and his people were not usually hired to kill someone. More often his work involved simple intelligence gathering: rifling through an office in the middle of the night, copying a computer hard drive, tapping phones, and planting bugs. Attorneys and businessmen were his two biggest clients. He knew who they were, but very few of them knew who he was. The rules were simple. Villaume had a network of overseas accounts that he used to collect fees. He would receive a name and summary of the information desired. Villaume would then quote a price to the client. If the client agreed, he or she would transfer half of the fee into one of the accounts. When Villaume handed over the desired information, they would wire the other half. It was usually very simple.

  That was, until Peter Cameron had shown up. The man had been insistent on meeting face-to-face. To help assuage Villaume’s fears, Cameron offered to double his fees. At the relatively young age of fifty-two, Villaume was looking to retire. There was, however, a catch. He wanted to make sure he was absolutely set—no financial worries. The lifestyle he had in mind required at least two million dollars. When Cameron waved the prospect of double fees in his face, the temptation was too much to resist.

  Now he wondered if it might not be a good idea to take wha
t he had and disappear, at least for a while. He would have to alert the others. Tell them to cool it for a while and lie low. Maybe take a long trip. He’d already warned Lukas and Juarez to be careful. With Cameron associating with the likes of Duser, things could get ugly.

  The thirty minutes was up. Villaume stopped pedaling and closed his magazine. He had made up his mind. Lukas and Juarez needed a vacation. There were two others on the team, but, fortunately for them, Cameron didn’t even know they existed. As Villaume stepped from the bike, he looked up at the array of televisions above the running track. The local news was starting. It appeared all three stations were leading with the same story. Villaume froze upon seeing the words “College Park” flash across the screen directly in front of him. The volume was off, but subtitles were running across the bottom of the picture. A reporter was standing in front of a yellow maze of crime scene tape. She pointed over her shoulder at two parked cars. Villaume scrambled to read the white-on-black words as they were typed in from left to right. There was something about one hundred shots being fired…one dead for sure, maybe two. The police were looking for a silver SUV. A Maryland driver’s license appeared on the screen. The station reported that the victim’s name was Todd Sherman. Gus Villaume knew better. He turned and started walking for the exit. The face on the driver’s license belonged to Mario Lukas.

  Villaume forced a smile and said good night to the attendant behind the front desk. Inside he was burning up. Mario Lukas had been his friend for a long time. He had taken care of Mario, and Mario had taken care of him. Mario was the muscle, and Gus was the brains. Alone they were adequate, together they were the best. Villaume thought of running. They had made arrangements years ago that if one of them died, the other would get all the money. With Mario’s passing, Villaume’s retirement account had just effectively passed the two-million mark. He could disappear and never look back. But that meant allowing that smug prick Cameron off the hook. Villaume crossed the parking lot to his car. At the very least, he had to alert Juarez. After that, he could decide what to do with Cameron. As Villaume opened his car door, he was overcome with grief for the loss of his friend and hatred for a man he barely knew.

  In any other city, in any other walk of life, Donatella Rahn would have been seen for exactly what she was—a ravishing beauty—but in Milan, Italy, she was over the hill. At thirty-eight, the former model was washed up. Donatella was two inches short of six feet, and with a good diet, a daily walking regimen, and the help of a skilled plastic surgeon, she had maintained her gorgeous body. It was amazing enough that in her late thirties she looked as good as, or better than, she had when she was prancing across the runways of Milan, Paris, and New York, but it was even more amazing considering what she had been through. Donatella Rahn was a unique and complicated person.

  It was a nice fall morning in Milan as Donatella walked to work. Every spring the people of Milan eagerly awaited summer. It meant trips to some of the world’s most beautiful lakes. But by the time August rolled around, they were once again ready for fall. The warm, humid air of summer brought smog and choking pollution to the city. The crisp cool air of autumn helped clean things up.

  Donatella took her time walking this morning, which probably had something to do with the boots she was wearing. They had a four-inch heel on them, and as was the case with most of the fashion she helped sell, they were not very practical. She passed the House of Gucci on Via Monte Napoleone and resisted the urge to spit on the display window. She took a right onto Via Sant’Andrea and crossed the street. Up ahead was the House of Armani, her home for almost fifteen years. Donatella was fiercely loyal. It was, in fact, probably the only thing she had inherited from her mother other than her looks. She was the byproduct of an Austrian father and an Italian mother. Her mother was a Jew from Torino, Italy, and her father was a Lutheran from Dornbirn, Austria; it was no surprise that their marriage had failed.

  Italy was, after all, the Vatican’s backyard. The country had a not so illustrious record of crushing religious dissent. The marriage lasted three short years, and then she and her mother returned to Torino, where they lived with Donatella’s Orthodox Jewish grandparents. At sixteen she ran away to Milan. She wanted to model, and she didn’t want any more religion. She got her way on both counts, and it was the start of a very bumpy road.

  Now, all of these years later, Donatella Rahn entered the House of Armani knowing that her colleagues hadn’t the slightest idea of her full range of talents. She eschewed the elevator, as always, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. As usual, she was one of the first to arrive. She entered her sanctum and closed the door for privacy. Her office was modern industrial, a miniaturized version of an airplane hangar. Sketches of clothes cluttered every available inch of the two couches and four chairs. Her coworkers liked to complain that there was nowhere to sit in her office. Donatella wondered if they would ever take the hint that she wanted it that way.

  The only thing in the office that wasn’t covered with sketches was a large glass desk. Donatella sat down behind it and turned on her computer. Her sleek flat Viewsonic screen came to life a moment later. She checked her work e-mail and then her personal e-mail. After wading through seventeen messages, she checked a third on-line mailbox. This mailbox, she had been assured, could not be traced back to her. There were only three people in the world who knew about it. One in Tel Aviv, one in Paris, and one in Washington. Almost all of the messages came from the person in Tel Aviv.

  This morning was no different. Donatella clicked on the message, and the decryption software on her computer went to work. When it was done, she began to read. She was being offered a job in Washington. It was rated at a quarter of a million dollars, which meant the individual was not high profile. If he were, the rate would be a half million or more. On this she had to trust her handler. He had only screwed up once. It had almost cost her her life, but in his defense, it had been an honest mistake. She read a brief profile of the target and then checked her electronic organizer. There was a show in New York this coming weekend. It wasn’t a big one, but then again, part of her job was to find undiscovered talent.

  She thought it over for a minute and then decided to accept. She typed in her reply and logged off. She would receive a more thorough dossier within several hours. The next call was to her travel agent to book a ticket and check the availability of the company’s apartment in Manhattan. With that accomplished, she set about clearing her schedule for the remainder of the week. Donatella Rahn was indeed a very complicated woman.

  IT WAS RAINING, and the Wednesday morning temperature was a chilly fifty-two degrees. Kennedy’s sedan drove east on Independence Avenue. Traffic was thick, as the deluge of government employees scrambled to make it to their desks by nine. The sedan rolled past the Air and Space Museum and then crossed 4th Street. Kennedy looked out the window at the throngs of people huddled under umbrellas waiting for the light to change. Normally, she would have brought something to work on during the ride from Langley to the Hill, but she had forced herself not to. She needed to straighten some things out in her head.

  The only good piece of news since Saturday was that Mitch was alive. She could have done without his dramatic reappearance and his skepticism in regard to her loyalty, but, as he had pointed out, she wasn’t the one who had been shot. Mitch was a different breed, and Kennedy had always respected that. He operated much closer to the edge than she ever would or could. He had once again proven that his level of skill was bewildering. With no help whatsoever, he had made it out of Germany and back to the United States, where he then broke into the CIA director’s house and in the process also broke the jaw of the CIA employee who was there to make sure such a thing never happened.

  When Rapp finally settled down, they filled him in on what little they knew. He in turn had asked a lot of questions for which they had almost no answers. The situation was dismal, Rapp was disgusted, and Kennedy was embarrassed. Rapp, never one to pull a punch, had placed the blam
e squarely on the shoulders of the director of the Counterterrorism Center and Stansfield, telling them, “You’ve got a leak, and if you don’t find it, I’ll find it for you.”

  Kennedy already knew she had a leak, but in the current political climate, the last thing she needed was Mitch Rapp running around Washington banging people’s heads together. To Kennedy’s consternation, Stansfield had actually encouraged Rapp to find the leak, but in her opinion, it was time to let Mitch take a long vacation. With the chairman watching like a hawk, she didn’t need Rapp drawing unneeded attention to himself, and ultimately her—no matter how good he was.

  What Stansfield had neglected to tell Kennedy was his real reason for wanting to turn their bull loose in the china shop. His doctor had told him the day before that the cancer was progressing much faster than anticipated. And indeed, he could feel it eating away at his insides. Each day was a little worse. It was no longer an issue of months but weeks. He needed to put things in order before he passed. He needed to find out who was behind the recent events. Rapp had been the target in Germany, but something told the old director that whoever was behind this move had a much bigger target in mind than Rapp. There wasn’t enough time left for subtlety, only results, and if there was one thing Rapp was exceptional at, it was getting results.

  The government sedan passed the Sam Rayburn House Office Building. The four-story behemoth was named in honor of Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn, the congressman from Texas who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1912 to 1961. The people of Texas had sent Rayburn to Washington a staggering twenty-five times. From 1940 until his death in 1961, Rayburn served as speaker of the house seventeen times. During that time, very little happened in Washington without Sam Rayburn’s approval. Chairman Rudin had an office inside the Rayburn Building, but he spent most of his time in a second office on the top floor of the Capitol. He liked to refer to it as his eagle’s nest. Max Salmen, the CIA’s deputy director of Operations, called it the vulture’s lair. Rudin didn’t like this one bit, but that, of course, was Salmen’s intent. In recent years, Salmen had stated that his sole mission before retirement was to drive Rudin insane. At first, Kennedy wondered why Stansfield tolerated this, and then it dawned on her that the more Rudin focused his hatred on Salmen, the less he would have left over for the rest of the Agency. She wished that were the case this morning.