Page 23 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

He headed south in a distance-eating lope, his pace a product of countless training runs.

Trail running wasn’t really his forte, but he only had half a mile or so of truly rough terrain to cover.

The gritty soil was challenging, but Rapp kept to the rows of oak and catalpa trees.

Their root structure helped to hold the earth in place, defeating the wind and water, which eroded the lower-lying stretches of land.

The wood line at the estuary’s edge paralleled his intended direction of travel and for several hundred yards, Rapp just ran.

Then the trees intersected a narrow west-east-running road.

At barely two lanes, it was just wide enough to permit cars to travel in opposite directions, but the surface was largely gravel and littered with potholes.

Exactly the type of road one would expect to follow for beach access.

Rapp considered using it, but didn’t. While the road boasted plenty of parked cars and beachgoers walked along it in twos and threes, Rapp felt too exposed.

The earlier trees and scrub brush that had provided at least a modicum of cover were gone.

The south side of the road boasted the occasional hedge or palm tree, but the open expanse was mostly grass.

He would be easy to spot on the long stretch of road, especially since he wasn’t dressed like the other beachgoers.

Rapp crouched beside a bush as he surveyed the open no-man’s-land separating him from the beckoning ocean. His clothes were a liability. The linen slacks, button-down shirt, and loafers weren’t beach attire.

He needed to improvise.

For the first time, Rapp opened the woman’s handbag.

As he’d expected, the purse was configured with surveillance in mind.

The interior was surprisingly roomy and featured a plastic liner that could be cinched closed to ward off moisture—a necessity when running surveillance in the rain.

Several cleverly placed zippers permitted the purse’s size and shape to be reconfigured on the fly, another surveillance must. A quick inventory of the contents turned up several interesting items—a spare cell phone, a wallet complete with a picture ID, and a couple of benign things like a key chain, makeup compact, and lipstick and the like.

Some of the innocent items probably concealed something more sinister that he might be able to suss out with more time.

Unfortunately, time was not something he had in abundance.

Though he hadn’t heard or seen his pursuers, Rapp knew they were out there.

One did not careen across an airfield in a stolen baggage tractor and expect to waltz away scot-free.

If nothing else, sheer embarrassment would motivate the national police and airport security officers to continue to look for him.

Rapp needed to disappear, and while he had the beginnings of a plan, something had to be done about his appearance.

It would do him no good to elude his pursuers just to have a helpful bystander explain to the police exactly where he’d gone.

The ocean was the solution to his problems, but unless he came up with a way to escape into its welcoming embrace, the waves might as well have been four hundred miles distant rather than four hundred feet.

Rapp was considering threading the needle by attempting to follow the road east while remaining concealed in the spotty hedges when salvation arrived in the form of a man.

A very old, very naked man.

Surprise and revulsion blinded Rapp to the possibilities at first. The image of sagging, wrinkled things was now forever seared into his mind. For a long moment, Rapp couldn’t fathom why an eighty-year-old man would be strutting down to the ocean in just his birthday suit.

Then he got it.

A nudist beach. After monitoring the old man’s progress all the way to the water to ensure that he didn’t elicit any outraged reactions from fellow sunbathers, Rapp got busy.

Shucking his shoes, clothes, and underwear, he bundled everything together, placed it in the watertight container, and cinched the bag shut.

Then he looped the carrying strap over his shoulder and started across the street.

Rapp was not particularly prudish, but neither was he an exhibitionist. Figuring that blushing cheeks would be a dead giveaway, Rapp kept his eyes on the surf crashing against the beach and pointedly ignored a trio of rather attractive young ladies sunbathing to his left.

As he drew even with them, one of the women lowered her sunglasses and let loose a burst of Spanish.

The words might have been indecipherable, but the woman’s tone left no doubt as to her intentions.

Rapp flashed her a smile and then jogged the remaining distance to the water.

Without breaking stride, he dove into the breaking waves, doing his best to ignore the chill.

While the swim trunks he normally used weren’t insulated, the water still felt bracingly cold to his unprotected nether regions.

He tempered his strokes in acknowledgment of the still-healing gunshot wound in his shoulder, but before long he’d swum beyond the surf break and into open ocean.

After tightening the bag’s strap across his shoulder and back, Rapp turned right and settled into an easy rhythm.

Ninety minutes later, Rapp walked from the surf.

His chest heaved as salt water ran down his skin in rivulets. Between his still-sore shoulder and the drag induced by the handbag, the swim had been more strenuous than he’d anticipated.

A lot more strenuous.

Rapp had originally considered swimming east, against the current, in favor exiting the water in one of the less populated coastal areas, but he’d rejected the idea.

He would attract much less attention coming ashore in front of one of the many resort hotels than if a random person saw him emerge from the water on one of the secluded sections of sand that bordered the industrial area around the port.

Besides, if he swam too far east, he might accidentally wander into the commercial shipping lanes.

After spending the better part of an hour floundering in the surf, Rapp was forced to come to terms with a simple fact he’d been trying to ignore—while his shoulder was feeling much better, he was nowhere near one hundred percent.

He had tried to settle into a relaxed swimming cadence, but the pain and tightness had forced him to abandon his more powerful freestyle stroke in favor of flipping onto his back and allowing the current to do most of the work.

Not ideal.

The outcome might not have been anywhere near as rosy if he’d attempted to fight the current by swimming east. The tides probably would have turned him around and sent him west. Probably.

But if he’d floundered into a riptide, the results could have been much more dire.

Yes, he felt good most of the time, but his body was not done healing and he could not expect to operate at one hundred percent.

He needed to remember this lesson.

This time Rapp received no catcalls from sunbathing beauties.

Instead, the stretch of nude beach consisted of mostly elderly men and women basting their sagging bodies under the cloudless sky.

The median age had to be about seventy-five.

Maybe there was a retirement community nearby.

He smiled at the thought of a bunch of old people trekking from afternoon bingo to the beach and back wearing nothing but sandals.

His humor was short-lived.

Besides working on his tan, Rapp had had precious little to do while drifting down the coast besides think.

Think and remember.

Though he no longer had to contend with a fresh bullet wound, the persistent ache in his shoulder coupled with the feeling of floating weightless in the water’s embrace was familiar.

Too familiar.

Not that long ago, he’d been submerged in the Seine’s filthy water with a fresh bullet wound, floating through Paris as he tried to work out who had attempted to kill him.

Today the climate was more agreeable and his body in better shape, but the circumstances were too similar for Rapp’s liking.

Dangerous people were again hunting him, and he had no idea who they were or how he’d been found.

Entering the beach’s public bathroom, Rapp selected an empty stall.

After closing and locking the door behind him, he unzipped the woman’s waterlogged bag and uncinched the plastic liner. As he’d hoped, his clothes were dry. Using handfuls of toilet paper, Rapp blotted the worst of the ocean water from his body before flushing the soggy mess.

Then he dressed and considered what to do next.

During his thoughtful float, Rapp had arrived at several unsettling conclusions.

While Ohlmeyer’s dispute might be with a Cold War adversary, this no longer felt like a grudge match between two onetime combatants.

The surveillance and rendition team who had attempted to interdict him at the airport was not just hired help.

He knew a bit about the lucrative world of executive protection.

During his time with the Orion program, Rapp had crossed swords with numerous bodyguards ranging from hired goons to former military.

High-end mercenaries could match, or in some cases exceed, the competency of their government-employed counterparts, but it wasn’t so much the skill of the airport team as the impunity with which they’d operated.

Even the wealthiest Saudi prince had limits on what his funds could accomplish.

Money could buy perks, but cash alone was not enough to entice the cooperation of a national police service or allow a private plane to use a berth normally reserved for wide-body jets.

This was to say nothing of the kind of coercion required to convince the Spanish government to permit a surveillance-and-interdiction team to conduct a rendition in the crowded terminal of one of their busiest international airports.

That sort of pressure came from just one source.

A nation-state.

This realization required a reframing of his task. It was one thing to fly to another country, interdict a private citizen, interrogate him, and end his life. Absent the interrogation portion of the equation, Rapp had been following this exact formula for almost two years.

Going to war with a nation-state was something else.

But this was just one of his concerns, and not even the most pressing. The more pertinent question had to do with location. More specifically, his location. How had the rendition team known Rapp was going to the airport when he himself had only found out during his meeting with Ohlmeyer?

The answer was equal parts simple and devastating.

The team had known because Ohlmeyer had known. Either the banker’s inner circle and his extensive security protocols had been breached, or…

Or.

Or Ohlmeyer had set Rapp up.

Rapp stared at the final two items in the waterproof bag as he considered that possibility.

He didn’t know the German man well, but Ohlmeyer had been comrades in arms with two generations of American clandestine warriors—Stansfield and Hurley.

Neither CIA officer allowed people into his confidence easily, yet Ohlmeyer was a friend to both.

Still, even the hardest of men showed cracks in their iron facade when it came to their families.

If the person responsible for lopping off the head of one of Ohlmeyer’s oldest friends threatened to do the same to Greta unless the banker gave up Rapp, would he do it?

Rapp didn’t know.

If he were in Ohlmeyer’s place, it would be a tempting trade to make.

He didn’t believe Greta’s grandfather harbored any ill will toward him, but the German banker had come of age during the Second World War.

That conflict had since been relegated to fuzzy black-and-white pictures and dusty history books, but it had been hell on earth.

Children had been used as couriers by the Resistance, while teenagers fought in partisan squads charged with sabotaging railroads or ambushing German supply lines.

If his formative years had been forged in this crucible, would Ohlmeyer balk at sacrificing an American assassin he barely knew in exchange for the life of his treasured granddaughter?

Probably not.

The pair of phones at the bottom of the bag might as well have been coiled vipers.

One of the cells belonged to him, while the other had come with the bag.

Rapp had removed the batteries from each, so the electronic devices were harmless at the moment, but as soon as he reconnected their power sources the handsets held the power to kill.

Or save.

Slowly, a plan began to shape. As always, it started with big pieces that rushed together as the concept of the operation crystallized. Was what he was considering risky?

Absolutely.

The best plans always were.

With quick, efficient motions, Rapp cinched the watertight lining closed and slipped the handbag over his shoulder. From the time he’d first detected the surveillance team this morning until he’d dragged his naked body from the surf, Rapp had been reacting to his unseen enemy.

That was about to change.