Page 6 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

F OR a long moment, Rapp tracked the man’s progress in silence, attempting to reconcile what he saw with what he’d expected to see.

Though she’d become an initiate into the world of shadows, Greta’s pathway to that community ran through him.

Yes, her grandfather had done some clandestine money-laundering on Hurley’s behalf back when the banker had lived in East Germany, but Carl Ohlmeyer was not a spy.

Neither was Greta.

Rapp had therefore assumed that the surveillance team was targeting him.

Erroneously assumed.

The man confidently striding across the courtyard was locked on to Greta’s table.

He threaded through the gaggle of skateboarders without missing a step, moving unerringly toward the Swiss beauty like an arrow fired from a hunter’s bow.

With calm, deliberate motions that belied his thundering heart, Rapp withdrew a flip phone from his pocket and thumbed the speed dial.

A two-tone beep indicated the call had gone through.

Greta reached for her purse.

“Allo?”

“Inside the museum. Now.”

Greta might not have been trained as a clandestine operative, but she’d begun to behave like one. Grabbing her purse, the Swiss beauty pocketed the phone, tossed a handful of pesetas onto the table, and made for the museum’s beckoning door.

Rapp lived in a world bound by distances and angles.

An existence in which the difference between a successful hit and one in which his body acquired another bit of puckered flesh came down to inches and degrees.

Though the cold metal of his Beretta’s frame still pressed comfortingly against the small of his back, Rapp knew the pistol was not the solution to this problem.

Not yet, anyway.

Greta moved toward the museum’s door with quick, distance-eating strides, but her pursuer was also determined.

It was going to be close.

Then it wasn’t.

One moment Greta was just feet from the door.

The next, the redheaded skateboarder tried another ollie.

What was meant to be a hop onto the smooth wall that fenced the museum’s entrance off from the courtyard became a pile of tangled limbs and curses.

Once again, the skateboard shot from beneath the woman’s feet like a wheeled missile.

Rather than following the board’s trajectory, the woman tumbled to the cobblestones directly in Greta’s path.

The Swiss beauty stopped.

Her pursuer did not.

Rapp felt more than saw the equations governing angles and distance change. Greta was not going to make it. Time for plan B. Turning from the window to the wall, Rapp saw salvation in the form of a red metal square with the word FUEGO stenciled in white block letters across the top.

Rapp smashed his elbow into the safety glass.

Then he pulled the fire alarm with his knuckle.

An electronic Klaxon sounded accompanied by flashing strobes. The handful of art aficionados sharing the second floor with him froze as if unable to reconcile the blaring alarm with the tranquil environment they’d been enjoying just moments before.

Not Rapp.

He was already in motion.

Rapp bounded down the staircase, taking two steps at a time.

Sprinting past the welcome desk and the much more animated employee, Rapp shot from the front doors like a pinball launched by a spring.

The fire alarm’s Klaxon echoed across the courtyard, and the skaters had largely paused their antics and were gesturing at the lights flashing from the building’s exterior.

The crowd of diners and streams of meandering pedestrians were similarly frozen.

Several café patrons had gotten to their feet but remained tethered to their tables as if unsure whether to stay or go.

The man hunting Greta did not suffer from the same indecisiveness.

As everyone else remained poised on the brink of motion, he closed the remaining distance to the Swiss beauty and snared her elbow.

Greta was no wilting flower.

Wrenching her shoulder, she tried to rip her arm away from the man’s grasp.

Against a slighter opponent, the maneuver might have worked.

The man gripping her elbow was not slight.

Heavy shoulders bunched beneath his dress shirt, and though the man was shorter than the statuesque Swiss woman, he more than made up for his lack of height with muscle.

Slipping forward with an agility that seemed out of place for his thick, blocky build, the man kept hold of Greta as she stumbled backward.

No matter.

Greta did not have to escape. She just needed to buy time for Rapp to flip the equation governed by angles and inches to his favor.

With a burst of speed, Rapp flowed down the museum’s steps while formulating the manner in which he would deal with the threat.

His concealed Beretta was the most obvious answer, but Rapp was loath to employ the pistol in broad daylight, especially since the stubby suppressor was not screwed onto the pistol’s muzzle.

The knife hidden in his belt buckle was another option, but that weapon required time to retrieve.

Time that Rapp did not have.

Instead, he would have to rely on two things he possessed in abundance—speed and violence of action.

Rapp tightened the knuckles of his dominant hand into a fist and selected his target.

Haymakers to the jaw made for great TV, but these sorts of strikes often did as much damage to the attacker as the recipient.

During an early sparring session in the Lake Anna, Virginia, training center he ran for potential Orion Team members, Stan Hurley had boiled the art of hand-to-hand contact down to a simple parable—use hard things on soft targets and soft things on hard targets.

Case in point, Rapp intended to embed his hard, bony knuckles into the soft flesh lining the man’s muscular neck.

If he hit the vagus nerve, so much the better, but the strike didn’t require that level of precision.

The punch only needed to stun the man and thereby open a pathway for a follow-on blow from Rapp’s pointy right elbow.

Rapp surged across the courtyard. The Swiss girl was still struggling, but her assailant was undeterred. Lifting Greta from her feet, the fire hydrant of a man shouldered his way past the tables and advanced toward the confluence of streets to the west.

A Good Samaritan moved to intervene.

The newcomer was rail-thin with narrow shoulders and shaking hands.

He seemed to have as much expertise with unarmed combat as Rapp did with quantum mechanics.

Still, what the man lacked in martial skills he made up for with courage.

While his fellow diners seemed content to watch a man kidnap a resisting woman, he acted.

The Good Samaritan reached for Greta with a pianist’s delicate fingers.

The kidnapper was unimpressed.

With the same disregard he might show a puppy attacking his trousers’ hem, the kidnapper cuffed the man with an open-handed slap to the head.

The heavy thunk generated by the flesh-on-flesh collision echoed across the courtyard.

The Good Samaritan spun in a half circle and crumpled.

He tried to arrest his fall with a limp hand, but succeeded only in overturning a chair.

A chair that tumbled directly in Rapp’s path.

The stricken man struggled to his feet on unsteady legs.

That his efforts thus far were proving to be unsuccessful didn’t seem to register.

Or perhaps his addled brain was still trying to reboot after bouncing off the inside of his skull.

Either way, Rapp figured he stood a better-than-even chance of joining the man on the cobblestones if he tried to leap over the prone figure.

Instead, he deviated to the right.

The distance and angles changed again.

The kidnapper gained a step.

Greta’s wide eyes found Rapp’s. The fear radiating from their depths became something else.

Resolve.

Greta tucked her knees against her chest like she was about to cannonball into a swimming pool, held the position for an instant, and then rocketed both legs toward the ground.

The abrupt change in her center of gravity caused her assailant to stumble.

Like a yo-yo winding back up its string, Greta used the man’s motion to her advantage by arcing her head toward his face.

She missed his nose but connected solidly with his chin.

Her abductor stumbled a second time.

Rapp did not.

Sprinting past the still-addled Good Samaritan, he closed the remaining distance to Greta and reached for her wrist.

Missed.

Reached again.

Brushed her fingertips.

Greta elbowed her abductor in the torso twice, turning her shoulders into each blow. The kidnapper grunted and faltered, trying to restrain his captive.

A step later, Rapp was on him.

Or at least he would have been were it not for the Citroen that barreled into the courtyard from a narrow side street.

Rapp heard the redlining engine and instinctively leapt skyward.

The car’s bumper missed his leg but caught the bottom of his foot, spinning him in midair.

Rapp crashed into the sedan’s hood, tumbled off the metal, and fell.

His head bounced against the hard stone and his vision swam.

For a long moment the world seemed far away as he drifted on the euphoria of semiconsciousness.

Then a shrieking engine birthed a single thought.

Greta.

Rapp groaned and pushed himself to his feet just in time to see the kidnapper bundle a flailing Greta into the rear seat before climbing in after her.

The passenger door slammed shut and the car’s engine revved.

The driver made eye contact with him through the windshield.

Rapp tried to get clear of the car’s bumper, but his sluggish legs weren’t responding.

The driver popped the clutch, and the Citroen lunged.

Backward.

With equal parts bewilderment and disbelief, Rapp tracked the car as it reversed out of the courtyard, executed a precise J-turn, and sped away in a cloud of exhaust.

Rapp shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs.

The driver’s actions made no sense. The man had had him dead to rights.

Maybe he hadn’t wanted to cause a scene by running over a pedestrian in broad daylight, but Rapp had been at this game long enough to know that displaying mercy on the battlefield was a recipe for disaster.

An enemy permitted to live today too often translated in an enemy that would have to be faced tomorrow, often on less favorable terms.

Thoughts about the Citroen’s driver brought with them something else: a revelation fluttering at the edge of his consciousness.

The man’s startled expression was important somehow.

Rapp thought he could decipher the expression’s significance if he just pushed a bit harder, but another matter demanded his attention.

A motor scooter.