Page 16 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

L ANGLEY , V IRGINIA

I RENE Kennedy walked through the hallway at a pace that was just short of a run. Her haste was partially due to the fact that she was late for a meeting with the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

But only partially.

While she’d become more accustomed to the ebb and flow of the headquarters building, Irene was still a field officer at heart.

She purposely avoided the bureaucrats who landed a coveted spot in Virginia with the intention of never venturing back to the real world.

Though she wanted to believe that such people made up a far smaller percentage of employees in the nation’s premier intelligence organization as compared with the other sprawling governmental agencies that called the greater Washington, DC, area home, recent events were putting this thesis to the test. The man many had figured as the odds-on favorite to become the next CIA director, Deputy Director Paul Cooke, had been found dead in a hotel room having been in the process of passing classified information to a couple of other equally dead bad guys.

And Rapp had been the one who’d killed him.

Irene wasn’t normally one for office intrigue.

Yes, she was a legacy employee who counted the legendary Stan Hurley as a sort of uncle and Thomas Stansfield, deputy director of operations and current acting director, as a surrogate father, but she had zero interest in the political jockeying that went along with moving up the ranks at the agency.

Instead, she’d approached her mandatory headquarters rotation with the attitude that she would keep her head down, work hard, and get back to an overseas posting as quickly as possible.

Her failure to return to the field in a more timely manner had more to do with Stansfield’s gravitational pull than her hard work, but even after several years, Irene still refused to consider Langley home.

But home or not, Irene was a spy and keenly attuned to things normal people didn’t notice.

Things like the sense of morale a place projected.

And Langley’s current morale could be summed up in one word.

Bad .

“He’s expecting you.”

Irene smiled her thanks at Meg, Stansfield’s assistant, pretending not to notice the implied rebuke.

With a force of will cultivated through countless hours of training at the CIA’s school for fledgling spies known as the Farm, Irene kept her expression placid until she was behind the woman.

Only then did she stop to nervously tuck her shoulder-length auburn hair behind her ears.

Though she’d yet to celebrate her thirtieth birthday, Irene was already reporting directly to the man who would probably occupy the seventh floor’s corner office.

She knew that Stansfield would have never promoted her so quickly had her work as a case officer not justified her rapid accession, but the same couldn’t be said for her coworkers.

A CIA case officer’s promotion was tied to successful asset recruitments.

Irene agreed with the philosophy of basing promotions on merit rather than time in service, but when peers succeeded at different rates, jealousy was a natural by-product.

Irene had to be better than anyone else because Thomas Stansfield had been her surrogate father after her own was killed when a Hezbollah terrorist detonated an explosive-laden van in front of the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.

But that wasn’t the only reason.

Surrogate daughter or not, Thomas Stansfield treated all his employees the same. If you produced, he rewarded you. If you didn’t, you were out. His management style was as simple as it was effective. So far, Irene had more than earned her mentor’s respect.

So far.

“Irene—nice of you to join us.”

Stansfield’s comment was delivered with a smile, but the implied warmth didn’t quite reach the discerning eyes behind his black glasses.

The last several weeks had been trying for multiple reasons.

Rapp’s sanctioned assassination of a former Libyan intelligence officer in Paris had been a setup.

An ambush designed to kill the American assassin facilitated by information leaked by the treacherous CIA officer, Paul Cooke.

Though wounded, Rapp had escaped the killing zone with his life.

The same could not be said of the several innocent Parisian bystanders who had been murdered by the terrorists gunning for Rapp.

But that wasn’t even the worst of the news.

The fallout from the compromised operation had brought to the surface tensions that had long been simmering between Rapp and Hurley, while at the same time compelling Stansfield to acknowledge the shit show that had developed under his watch.

Irene suspected it was Stansfield’s forced realization of his blind spot toward Stan Hurley and the toxic environment this forbearance had created that really had her boss on edge.

In the space of a week, years of work had nearly been undone.

Though Rapp had managed to plug the leak before Cooke’s damaging information had left the hotel room, France was a mess, the Orion program was being rethought, and Stansfield was reexamining his thirty-year history with Hurley in a new, much more critical light.

Morale might be bad for the rank-and-file agency employees who had learned that one of their own had been murdered in France, but for the handful who were truly in the know, Irene would use a different descriptor for their collective state of mind.

Abysmal .

“Sorry, sir,” Irene said. “A cable came in downstairs that I thought might be pertinent to this discussion. I wanted to get a final update.”

Though Irene’s actual role was to run the Orion program, that project was so black as to be nonexistent, so she needed a “cover” job.

Accordingly, the agency’s org chart listed Irene as loosely attached to the Counterterrorism Center, located in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building.

Normally this meant that the information she was privy to had a nexus to Islamic terrorism.

Normally.

But since Rapp’s handiwork in the French hotels had been labeled as terrorism, Irene had started perusing classified cables from CIA stations and bases across the continent to determine the fallout from the deaths.

In doing so, she’d stumbled across something interesting concerning a potential terrorist attack in the former Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Stansfield eyed her over the top of his reading glasses before waving her to a seat at his conference table.

He didn’t arch his right eyebrow, which she took as a good sign, but Irene knew she was on borrowed time.

While Stansfield had been staring down enemies for most of his life, this morning he had an appointment with a group of interrogators that caused even someone with his impressive résumé trepidation.

The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Paul Cooke’s death had been sensational and his employment with the CIA well-known.

The details were simply too juicy to pass up and the series of front-page stories that had run in the Washington Post and New York Times were starting to mirror the writing style of the National Enquirer .

The cold, hard facts were that politicians made their living by attracting voters and donors, and that was easier to do when elected officials were in the news.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, ranking members from both parties on the Senate committee had declared their intention to hold public hearings into Cooke’s murder.

Stansfield had considered appealing to the coterie of legislators known to be friendly to the CIA to cancel the hearings altogether, or at a minimum close them to the press and uncleared visitors, but Irene had argued against the idea. More than just the CIA’s reputation was at stake.

Cooke’s murder had the potential to expose the Orion program, not to mention the fallout that would occur if it became known that an off-the-books CIA assassin had killed an agency executive.

To Irene’s way of thinking, Stansfield’s best option was to come before the committee, handle the questions, and let the opportunists score their political points.

The French government had a vested interest in keeping the true nature of their DGSE operative’s role from coming to light and was doing what they could to characterize the gathering as an asset meeting gone bad.

Stansfield’s voluntary testimony would take the air out of many of the conspiracy theories currently circulating among the Beltway elite, while also engendering some goodwill from the very senators who would be voting on his eventual confirmation as head of the CIA.

It was the logical course of action and Stansfield had eventually agreed with Irene’s reasoning.

But agreeing to testify and testifying were two very different things.

“Another development in the investigation?” Stansfield asked.

Irene shook her head. “No, but perhaps something that will take their minds off Cooke.”

“Please tell me that Mr. Rapp hasn’t upstaged himself by killing the potential director of yet another intelligence service?”

Stansfield delivered the question with a ghost of a smile, but Irene knew the question was only half in jest. The people murdered in that Paris hotel room had not been on the Orion kill list and their deaths had not been sanctioned by Irene or Stansfield.

Hurley had claimed that he’d given Rapp the go-ahead before the assassin had done his work, but Irene had her suspicions.

So did Dr. Tom Lewis, the agency shrink in charge of vetting members of the Orion team.