Pursuit of Honor_A Thriller Read online

  “Glen here thinks you’re the problem,” Hurley announced.

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. He doesn’t want to talk about what he was doing last night.” Hurley rolled his eyes. Turning to Maslick he said, “Grab the cart.”

  Maslick wheeled a three-level cart into the room and left it in the corner. Then, dragging the table away from Adams, he pointed at the nearest chair and said, “Sit.”

  “Listen,” Adams said while holding his hands up in an affable manner, “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t have to know who you are, but trust me when I say you don’t want to be involved in this.”

  Rapp stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips, a determined expression on his face. “You’re wasting your breath, Glen. He’d just as soon kill you, but he’s a good soldier, so he’ll wait until I tell him. In the meantime, sit down and do what you’re told.”

  Adams hesitated so Maslick helped him back into his chair. Then the big man grabbed some flex cuffs from one of the cargo pockets on his khaki pants. Adams complained while his wrists were pulled behind the back of the chair and bound. Next came his ankles to each of the chair’s front legs. Rapp wheeled the cart over. On the top sat a polygraph machine.

  Hurley stood in front of Adams and asked, “Glen, since you’re so smart, I’m wondering if you could tell me what makes a guy like Mitch here get out of bed and bust his ass for people like you?”

  “I don’t pretend to know the criminal mind, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s a perverse thrill that he derives out of inflicting pain on others.”

  “That’s the best you can do?” Hurley asked. “No other reasons?”

  “None.”

  “Well, I trained him, you dumb ass. If I thought for a moment that he was some sadistic brute who was two ticks away from being a career criminal, I’d a bounced his ass right out of the program, and trust me I know the difference, because I got rid of plenty of them over the years. The only thing that a guy like Mitch gets out of climbing down in the gutter with these religious nut jobs is the knowledge that he is fighting the good fight. That he’s doing the honorable thing, while all the overeducated assholes like you sit in your nice leather chairs and criticize his every move.”

  “And you would have me . . . what? Let him defy the rule of law? Let him kill whoever his pea-sized brain thinks deserves killing?”

  “No, but at a bare minimum I expect you to resist the urge to delude yourself into thinking our enemies would like us if only we were nicer to them.”

  Adams exhaled a tired sigh as if to say they were wasting his time. “Do you want to wait until the poly is hooked up so you’re sure I’m giving you the right answer?”

  “We’re not going to bother with the poly,” Hurley said half laughing. “Any clandestine officer with half a brain knows how to fool that thing.”

  Rapp stepped forward, grabbed Adams’s shirt, and tore it open. “Normally, I’d try to stay detached while interrogating someone, but this is going to be tough.”

  “You are making a huge mistake,” Adams warned.

  “The only mistake I’ve made in the last twenty-four hours was not killing you sooner.”

  Adams laughed nervously. “I know all about your methods.”

  “As usual, I think you’re talking out of your ass.”

  “You’re going to scream at me, you’ll keep me up for seventy-two hours . . . you’ll raise and lower the temperature in this room, you’ll probably give me more vodka.” He shook his head and added, “In the end you’ll learn nothing and you’ll have to let me go. After that I will march straight into the attorney general’s office and demand that you be brought up on kidnapping charges, and that’s just for starters. So . . . if the three of you can scrape together enough brain cells to see that the only rational course is to let me go while I’m still in the mood to forgive this lack of judgment, you might be able to avoid some serious jail time.”

  “There’s one big problem with your plan,” Hurley said as he leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “When we’re done wringing the truth out of you, I’m going shoot you in the head with this.” Hurley pulled back his jacket and drew a pistol from a shoulder harness.

  Adams was suddenly transfixed by the gun.

  “It’s a Kimber Stainless Gold Match Two, .45 caliber pistol. Finest production pistol in the world.”

  Adams blew off the threat as theatrics. “You wouldn’t dare. The Intelligence Committees, the DOJ, the FBI . . . they all know I’m close to exposing this cancer in the clandestine service. They know I’m on to Rapp, and if I turn up dead, they’ll be all over you guys.”

  “Who said you’re going to turn up dead?” Hurley looked at Rapp and said, “Show him the file.”

  Rapp held a photograph in front of Adams. “We got this off the surveillance cameras at JFK. It was taken last night. Does the guy in the bottom right corner look familiar?”

  Adams studied the grainy black-and-white surveillance photo and after a second saw the mirror image of himself.

  “Here’s the flight manifest.” Rapp placed another sheet in front of him with Adams’s name highlighted in yellow. “Your flight will land in Caracas in one hour. You will be seen leaving the airport, and then you will simply vanish.”

  Adams swallowed hard. Feeling real nerves for the first time, his mind scrambled to find a way out. “You don’t think I’ve taken precautions?”

  “You mean like the safety deposit box you have at the First Bank of Bethesda?” Rapp asked.

  “And the used Dell laptop you have stashed behind the workbench in your garage,” Hurley added. “The one you’re using to write your book.” He took a big puff from his cigarette and then pointed the hot end at Adams. “You have a lot of problems, Glen. Chief among them is the fact that you’re insecure. It’s not unusual . . . in fact, most of the assholes I’ve come across suffer from the same affliction. It’s the reason you could never cut it in this line of work. Not because you’re not smart enough—you’re far from retarded. The problem is . . . when you’re as insecure as you are, the only way you can make yourself feel good is to convince yourself that your enemies are stupid. And in this line of work, you can never underestimate your enemies.”

  “It’ll never work.” Adams forced a smile onto his face and some confidence into his voice. “There are too many people in Washington who know I was about to blow this thing open.”

  Rapp could see he was going to have to jump-start things if he was going to make it back to Langley by nine. He held up his right hand and said, “You see this?” Rapp watched Adams’s eyes zero in on his right hand, and then with his left hand, he unleashed an open-handed slap that cracked Adams flush across the face.

  Adams yelped like a wounded pup, and then in a panicked voice yelled, “That’s it. You’ve crossed the line. I am going to make sure you spend the rest of your days in a jail cell. I’m going to—”

  He never finished the threat because Rapp whacked him again, this time with his right hand. He then grabbed him by his thin silver hair and forced him to look at the sheaf of documents in his left hand. “Do you think those defenders of yours know you’ve been going through two bottles of vodka and another six to eight bottles of wine a week?”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “It’s the truth! You’re a frickin’ drunk! We have your bank statements, credit card receipts, ATM withdrawals . . . we even have video of you buying booze at three different liquor stores, and they’re the only three we checked. We found vodka in your trunk, your desk drawer. We even have video of you stopping at a park to dump your extra bottles.”

  “Marty and Mary are out of the house,” Hurley chimed in, mentioning Adams’s two children. “Off to college and calling home once every couple weeks. You and Gretchen don’t even sleep in the same room anymore. Hell . . . we’ve had your house bugged for a week . . . you don’t even talk. You’re the classic bitter narcissist who’s pissed at the world because everyone has fai
led to recognize his genius. The biggest laugh of all is that we don’t even have to plant evidence. It’s all right there for them to see, and trust me they’ll find it. Your wife . . . your kids . . . your friends . . . they’re all going to get put through the wringer.”

  “The curtain’s going to get pulled back,” Rapp said in a dire tone. “You really want your kids to find out their old man is just a bitter alcoholic? A failed fucking bureaucrat, who committed treason?”

  “It won’t work,” Adams said with sweat cascading down his forehead. “Kenny Urness will know you guys killed me, and he’s not the only one. They won’t rest until you’re brought to justice.”

  “Who,” Hurley growled, “other than some fucking looney, anti-American, CIA-hating scumbag is going to A, care that you’ve disappeared and B, spend the next five years of his life trying to find out what really happened?”

  “You have no idea how powerful my contacts are!”

  “Really?” Hurley said skeptically. “Is that why you had to fly up to New York and meet with an ambulance chaser last night? So you could hatch a plot to write a tell-all book and line your pockets?”

  “That’s not why I went to New York.”

  “Almost two hundred of your countrymen were killed last week, and you’re out trying to get rich off it.”

  “That’s a lie and you know it,” Adams spat. “You two are the problem . . . not me. You are why they hate us, not me.”

  Hurley smacked him across the head and yelled, “You’re a fucking embarrassment to your family.”

  Adams felt his options slipping away. Felt really for the first time that they might actually kill him. “You don’t know Kenny Urness if you think he’ll just drop this whole thing when I don’t show up for work.”

  “What Kenny Urness saw last night was a drunk,” Rapp said in a flat voice. “A delusional drunk, and when he finds out that you flew to South America and disappeared, he won’t waste more than two minutes trying to figure out if it’s true.”

  “And if he comes after us,” Hurley said, “tough shit. He can look all he wants. We’ve been through your shit. If you had any real evidence you would have already taken it to the feds.”

  “That’s not true!” Adams pleaded.

  Hurley stepped forward and extended the big .45 caliber pistol. “Any last words before I blow your head off.”

  With tear-filled eyes, Adams shook his head and cried, “You can’t do this, Uncle Stan. You and my father were best friends.”

  “I can, and I will.”

  “But my father?”

  “You were a disgrace to your father,” Hurley growled. “You broke his heart.”

  “But . . . I didn’t know,” Adams pleaded, tears now rolling down his cheeks.

  “You didn’t know because you’re a narcissistic fuck. The only person you’ve ever cared about is yourself.”

  “That’s not true,” Adams half yelled. “I have sacrificed. I have done what I thought was right.”

  “Well, you were wrong.” Hurley placed the muzzle of the pistol against Adams’s forehead and squeezed the trigger.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE report of the big .45 Kimber was deafening. Rapp didn’t have time to cover his ears. He’d barely had enough time to grab Hurley’s wrist and deflect the shot. Just barely, as was evidenced by the red powder burn that was now painted in a cone shape across the top of Adams’s forehead. The slug was now lodged in the concrete wall beyond Adams’s head. A crater the size of a fist marked the spot.

  Rapp couldn’t hear a thing but he could see just fine. Hurley was screaming at him and Adams was sobbing—his eyes closed, his head down, his chin bouncing off his chest every few seconds as he gasped for air, snot pouring out of his nose. Hurley pointed his Kimber at Rapp and began to use it to punctuate whatever point he was trying to make. Rapp, none too fond of having a gun pointed at him, almost snapped the older man’s wrist, but caught himself in time. He slowly brought his hand up and gently moved the muzzle of the gun to a less threatening direction.

  After pointing at his left ear, Rapp mouthed that he couldn’t hear what Hurley was saying. He walked over to the door and gestured for Hurley to follow him. Rapp hit the intercom button and asked for the door to be opened. As he stepped into the outer room, he found Nash, Lewis, and Maslick all standing there with shocked expressions on their faces. Rapp placed both palms over his ears and pressed down for a good five seconds while he swallowed several times and flexed his jaw. The first words he began to recognize belonged to Hurley. He was still cursing up a storm.

  Rapp looked at him still waving his gun around and yelled, “Put that damn thing away before you shoot someone.”

  Hurley pointed the gun at Rapp again and barked, “Someone! You’re the only one I’m thinking about shooting!”

  Rapp’s entire posture was instantly transformed. Like a big black panther who had been stirred from a lazy nap, his muscles flexed and his weight was transferred onto the balls of his feet. His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed and he half shouted, “Stan, put that gun away right now, or I’ll break your wrist.”

  Hurley, having trained Rapp, knew not only that he meant it, but that there was a good chance that at this close distance, Rapp could do it before he got off a shot. Slowly, and with a not-too-happy look, he shouldered his pistol and asked, “Why in the hell did you stop me?”

  The answer was complicated, although there was one really good reason and several decent ones. Rapp decided to go with the big one— the one they all should have thought of to begin with. “Where in the hell is he getting his information?”

  “We’ve already gone over that,” Hurley said in an irritated voice. “He’s filling in the gaps. If he had anything real, he would have taken it to the Justice Department.”

  Rapp shook his head. “He still had to start somewhere. Someone is talking to him.”

  “He’s the Gestapo. We’ve already found dozens of bugs. He has half the offices on the seventh floor wired.”

  The inspector general’s office at Langley was often called the Gestapo by the front-line troops at Langley. This was exactly what Rapp had feared—that they would let their dislike of Adams cloud their judgment. He took a deep breath and asked, “What’s our rush?”

  “You know as well as I do, you can’t let shit like this fester. The best can lose their courage, and besides, we have bigger fish to fry.”

  “And we also have one shot at finding out what he knows.”

  “We’ve gone over this,” Hurley snarled. “We have what we need. We kill him and whoever he was talking to won’t know if he’s dead or if he’s disappeared. Either way the effect is the same. We send a clear signal that we’re done fucking around.”

  “By we,” Nash jumped in, “I assume you mean the royal we, because no one knows you’re involved in this. Mitch and I are the two guys with the targets on our backs.”

  “Why you little . . .” Hurley reached for his gun.

  Rapp stepped forward and grabbed Hurley’s wrist. He looked at Nash and his bloodshot, tired eyes and instantly knew he was strung out. Hell, they were all strung out. Sleep was a luxury they had experienced far too little of in the past week. “Head up to the house,” Rapp said to Nash, “and get cleaned up. We need to be on the road in less than thirty minutes.”

  “But, I don’t—”

  “I don’t give a shit what you think!” Rapp barked. “It’s an order. Stan’s right . . . this isn’t a frickin’ book club. Now get your ass up to the house and get cleaned up.”

  It was obvious by the constipated look on his face that Nash wanted to say something, but he managed to keep his mouth shut and head for the door. After he left, Rapp turned his attention back to the group and said, “Something Doc said earlier got me thinking.” Rapp looked at Lewis. “You said he’d never commit suicide.”

  “I said it was highly unlikely.”

  “Good enough. So his desire for self-preservation is pretty high?”

&n
bsp; “Absolutely.”

  Looking back at Hurley, Rapp said, “I think we can turn him.”

  “And I think you’re nuts. Doc, tell him why we can’t?”

  “Once we turn him loose,” Lewis said, “and he feels safe, he will turn on you.”

  “What if he never truly feels safe? I could check in on him from time to time and remind him that I’m looking over his shoulder.”

  “And why take the chance?” Hurley asked.

  “Because he might be useful.”

  “Doc?” Hurley said as if he wanted him to explain the obvious to Rapp.

  “It’s risky, Mitch. With someone like this, there is never any real loyalty.”

  “What if we co-opt him,” Maslick suggested.