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Kennedy swallowed hard and asked, “Do you remember what happened with him in Kabul?”
“That part’s a little fuzzy. I remember seeing him right before all hell broke loose and then nothing.”
Kennedy had been trying to figure out the odds of this strange coincidence. “Would you care to take a guess where Gould does his banking in Switzerland?”
“Herr Obrecht.”
“That’s right. He is Mr. Gould’s private banker.”
“You’re shitting me.” Hurley was out of his chair. “This whole fucking thing is really starting to stink.”
Kennedy was used to this kinetic behavior. Hurley, like Rapp, was not good at sitting still for very long. She likened it to sharks that never stop moving. “Gould has other bankers that he uses, but Obrecht is one of his main ones.”
Hurley paced to the refrigerator, exhaled a cloud of smoke, took a drink, and then came back to the table. “You know what this is starting to look like?”
Kennedy nodded. She’d thought it through.
“A well-planned, multipronged attack. Layered like the Russians used to do. Confusing as all shit until you got rid of all the deceptions and the feints and focused on their objective.”
“And what’s the objective this time?” Kennedy asked.
“The hell if I know. I mean we know, in a general sense, that this was designed to cripple us, but we don’t know the specifics yet.”
Rapp frowned and shook his head. A memory was coming back to him. A conversation he’d had with Rickman a long time ago. It was vague because Rickman had been talking so fast and flying off on tangents and then circling back.
Kennedy noticed the look on Rapp’s face and asked, “What are you thinking?”
“Something Rick said to me years ago . . . probably fifteen-plus. I don’t remember all of it, but it was about clandestine operations and how they should be set up and run on multiple levels. It was about recruiting high-placed assets. That it wasn’t enough to just recruit them. To increase our chances for success, secondary and tertiary operations needed to be launched that would distract the watchers . . . the guys who would be keeping an eye on our asset to make sure he wasn’t spying for the other side. He was very animated when he made the point that to increase our chances of success we needed to disrupt those people.” Rapp’s face brightened as it started to come back to him. He snapped his fingers. “His idea was to frame the watchers, for example, by making it look like they themselves were spies . . . set up real accounts in their names and if our asset was uncovered make the information public so the watchers would be distracted defending themselves. He advocated sleeping with the person’s spouse and a slew of things . . . anything that would trip the watchers up.”
“So you’re saying that’s what another intelligence agency was doing to us by using Herr Obrecht?”
“Possibly . . . they set up this bullshit story with this banker and they spoon-fed the info to the FBI to throw us off our game. And it almost worked. If Wilson had gotten a toehold, you and I and a lot of other people would be spending a shitload of time with the Feds right now, trying to prove our innocence.”
“If your theory is right,” Kennedy said, “then what’s their endgame? What are they trying to distract us from? And what does a theory Rickman had fifteen years ago have to do with it?”
Rapp grabbed his glass of vodka and took a drink. He thought about the last week and its roller-coaster of emotions. The “oh, shit” fear when they’d found out Rick was gone, the horror and panic over the release of the interrogation clip, and the absolute relief many of them had felt when they’d found the camera and learned that Rickman was dead and his secrets were safe. That was the feint, Rapp realized. “You’re not going to want to hear this again,” he finally said, looking at Kennedy. “Like I said before, Rick’s really not dead. They just wanted us to think he was dead.”
“You have no proof . . . it’s just your gut!”
“I told you already. I didn’t buy the idea that the same people who hit the safe house could have accidentally killed Rick and then conveniently left behind that camera for us to find.”
For Kennedy it was a frightening proposition. “Look, you know we’ve been taking your theory seriously, but remember, this is still all conjecture.”
“Hunches are what make or break us in this business.”
She thought about that for a long time. “You’re right.”
“Then I’d better get my butt to Zurich ASAP.”
“Are you up to it?”
“I feel fine.”
Kennedy looked at Lewis for his opinion. “Just don’t hit your head,” the doctor warned Rapp.
“Zurich’s a safe city. I’ll be fine.” Looking back to Kennedy he asked, “Surveillance?”
“I have a team in place.”