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“This isn’t like snatching some mid-level ISI operative or hacking into one of their computers, Mitch. This is a nuclear weapon. What do I tell them?”
“That it’s a holiday weekend. That my plane ran out of gas. Or maybe that if they don’t want us to take them, they shouldn’t drive them around in fucking fruit trucks.”
“I’ve briefed President Alexander and he’s given his authorization, but he asked some questions that I had a hard time answering. We know they have nukes. We know they work. How much are the details worth to us?”
Rapp let out a long breath. “There’s something not right here, Irene. Something we don’t understand.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A Russian mobster working with ISIS, for one. Why?”
“To get you out of the way so they could get their hands on a nuke. With Saddam Hussein’s former generals starting to take charge, ISIS tactics are getting more sophisticated. They have money and it’s not hard to believe that they’d use it to hire outside contractors.”
“But our information was that the people looking to snatch this nuke weren’t ISIS. They were al Badr. The two groups aren’t really connected.”
“Agreed.”
“And then there’s what happened to Scott.”
“What did happen? Was he ambushed?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. It was one guy.”
“One man? Are you sure?”
Rapp dropped onto a bench. “I’m sure. And this guy went through Scott like he wasn’t there.”
“That doesn’t seem possible.”
“I’d say the same thing if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“Marginal.”
“And?”
“White guy around my size. Dark hair. Mid-thirties. Medium complexion.”
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“Nope.”
She fell silent for a moment, considering what she was being told. The number of people who could hope to even survive a confrontation with Scott Coleman was incredibly small. But to do it easily? If there was someone like that out there, how could Mitch Rapp have never run across him?
“Look, Irene. A guy like this doesn’t work for the Mob and he doesn’t take contracts from a bunch of half-assed terrorists. In fact, he doesn’t contract himself out at all or I’d have heard of him.”
“But you think he’s important.”
“My gut says that if we can find him, we’ll have the key to this thing.”
“The key? Or a target for revenge?”
Rapp ignored her question. “I figure there’s a seventy-five percent chance that he came up through a solid spec ops program. So, probably European. And since the Russians seem to have their fingerprints all over this thing, I’d start there.”
“What about the other twenty-five percent?”
“He could have been trained by the ops side of one of the intelligence agencies like I was.”