Page 87 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

L AKE A NNA , V IRGINIA

D R. Thomas Lewis stared at his patient, waiting for the man to speak.

As a psychologist, Lewis’s job was to help people see the parts of themselves they would rather keep hidden.

While pop culture had propagated the stereotype of an all-knowing therapist who deftly guided patients on journeys of self-discovery, this did not match his experience.

It was true that he began each session with the broad strokes of what he thought a patient needed to confront in order to make progress, but these notions served more like a compass rather than a road map.

A directional azimuth for his opening questions, not a detailed script.

Lewis knew that most of his patients ranked coming to see him only slightly higher than a visit to the dentist. As such, he’d found it instructional to allow the patient to make small talk in the beginning of the session, since these seemingly throwaway comments sometimes hinted at deeper issues.

Not this patient.

The man seated on the other side of his office possessed almost a preternatural ability for stillness.

He was barely out of college and his shaggy hair and scruffy beard should have brought to mind a beatnik poet or maybe a fraternity brother just back from a spring-break jaunt to Mexico.

His lax grooming standards should have dulled the man’s edges or added some warmth to his unnerving black eyes the way a pink dog collar might soften a German shepherd’s appearance.

They did not.

Instead, the intensity radiating from the man elicited a different response.

Fight or flight.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Lewis said after it became obvious that Mitch Rapp was content to pass the morning in silence.

“Greta.”

Lewis scratched something indecipherable onto the yellow legal pad he was balancing on his lap. This was not so that he could remember what Rapp had said. Instead, he was writing to mask his own reaction.

Surprise.

“What makes you say that?” Lewis said.

“Give me a little credit, Doc. You brought me back to the place where it all began to remind me what I’d sacrificed to get this job. Now you want to know whether I intend to keep it.”

Lewis’s reply was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream.

The voice wasn’t recognizable, but the gravelly basso that followed it certainly was.

In a nondescript-looking barn on the other side of the property, Stan Hurley was imparting some rough wisdom to the next crop of candidates slated to join the Orion program.

“How long is he going to be back in the schoolhouse?” Rapp said.

Lewis shrugged. “Believe it or not, he’s here of his own accord. After returning from Moscow, he asked for a meeting with me, Irene, and Stansfield. He said he had fences to mend and requested to oversee the training of the next batch of recruits.”

“Hurley volunteered to come in from the field? If that’s not a sign of the Apocalypse I don’t know what is.”

Rapp made the comment with a ghost of a smile, but Lewis kept his features carefully neutral.

He was good, this kid.

Good and getting better.

Where before Rapp had been primarily concerned with the martial aspects of the job, Irene’s prize assassin now seemed to be picking up a few HUMINT tricks of the trade.

As a former Green Beret and now employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, Lewis was used to playing for the varsity team.

A colleague considered average in Lewis’s world would be a top achiever in any other organization.

But even on this extended talent scale, Rapp stood head and shoulders above the rest. The question Lewis was trying to answer this morning wasn’t whether the assassin could still do the job for which he was trained.

It was whether he still wanted to.

“Then let’s cut to the chase,” Lewis said, crossing his legs. “How do things stand with you and Greta?”

The smile vanished and the icy silence returned.

This time, Lewis was determined not to be the one who broke it.

Losing Rapp would be a horrific blow to the Orion program and the nation’s security writ large, but what they were trying to build was bigger than any one man.

As George Washington had so elegantly displayed by resigning from the presidency, no one was irreplaceable.

Not even Rapp.

“We broke up.”

The three words landed with the force of three granite boulders.

Rapp was one of his most guarded patients, which was saying something, since Lewis’s clientele was made up almost exclusively of spies.

Trying to peer behind Rapp’s walls was nearly impossible, but he knew that the assassin’s relationship with Greta wasn’t a youthful fling.

Rapp did not love quickly or easily. In fact, Lewis was willing to bet that he hadn’t used this word in the context of a romantic relationship since Mary.

“Why?” Lewis said.

Rapp’s expression changed to something Lewis couldn’t quite read. No longer the stoic assassin, but neither was there any hint of the earlier mirth. Had he been pressed to name the emotion paired with the assassin’s features, Lewis would have used one he’d never before associated with Rapp.

Resignation.

“Her grandparents’ death rocked her to the core.”

“And she blamed you?”

Rapp shook his head as he gave Lewis an annoyed look.

Lewis realized that he’d just violated a therapist’s cardinal rule—never interrupt your patient.

It wasn’t so much that he’d broken in because of rudeness as surprise.

Rapp seldom revealed what he was truly thinking, and on the rare occasions when he did, his feelings came in staccato bursts.

It had never occurred to him that Rapp might continue speaking.

“I’m sorry,” Lewis said. “Please continue.”

“She didn’t blame me. The opposite in fact.

Her grandparents’ murder drove home the true nature of the world in very personal terms. Her grandfather had worked with Hurley and Stansfield.

She understood that he was a combatant after a fashion.

Carl might have been killed unjustly, but he’d died because he was a pseudo-soldier. ”

“Those who live by the sword risk dying by it.”

Rapp nodded. “Her grandmother was a different story. Elsa was a civilian suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Her periods of lucidity were growing shorter and shorter. She was a noncombatant in every sense of the word. Her death wasn’t collateral damage. It was murder. Like Mary.”

Lewis scratched more nonsense onto his yellow pad. This time, instead of a single jumble of words, he went on for several sentences. Rapp almost never brought up his girlfriend by name.

About the time Lewis was beginning to believe he might have to fill an entire page with mumbo jumbo, Rapp continued.

“Greta didn’t blame me, but she didn’t want me part of that life anymore. She said that everyone retires at some point, and even though I’d only been in the game for a couple of years, I’d already done more than most. She wanted me to quit.”

Lewis gave a slow nod. “She makes a pretty compelling argument.”

“Even more compelling in person.”

Though Lewis had never met the Swiss beauty, he’d seen pictures. The woman could have been a model. Listening to Greta read the phone book was probably compelling.

“Not just because she’s beautiful,” Rapp said, as if reading his thoughts. “As we were standing in the lobby of her grandfather’s house, I could see it.”

“What?”

“Everything. In the span of a couple of seconds, I visualized our future lives. Our wedding, our house in Switzerland, our kids, even our grandkids. It sounds crazy I know, but it’s true.”

It did not sound crazy.

Not to Lewis.

While much had been made about Rapp’s raw athleticism and linguistic prowess, in Lewis’s opinion it was the assassin’s ability to war-game multiple courses of action in a fraction of a second that made him so formidable.

For someone capable of analyzing a target and his bodyguards the way Joe Montana could read the opposing team’s defense, imagining his future would be no great feat.

“Was it a good life?”

Rapp looked at the floor in silence. Then he slowly nodded. “A great one. But it wasn’t mine.”

“What does that mean?”

In a blur of motion Rapp snatched the legal pad from Lewis’s lap. He examined the top page for a moment before settling the pad on his knees. “I’m not even mad that everything you’ve written down is utter gibberish. Know why?”

Lewis shook his head.

“Because you’re a great shrink. You are uniquely suited to be a therapist for the CIA’s clandestine service.

Partially because your military background gives you a special vantage point into the lives of the men and women who do what we do, but that’s only part of the reason.

You were born to be a shrink. It’s in your genetic makeup.

This isn’t a job for you. It’s your purpose. ”

Every time he thought he had Rapp figured out, the assassin proved otherwise. Like a multifaceted rock, there was always some new depth or dimension to his personality that had previously been hidden from view. “And you’re born to be an assassin?”

Lewis had chosen the word assassin intentionally. Irene liked to refer to the Orion program members as counterterrorism operatives, while Stan called them door-kickers. Neither euphemism was correct.

Rapp, and the men like him, were killers.

“Our society is based on the principle that justice is equally distributed to all, but for far too long, that hasn’t been true.

Blame it on a lack of political fortitude, or realpolitik, or just that the shitbags who needed killing the most tended to live in places where it was really hard to get to them.

Whatever. The result is the same. People like Mary went unavenged.

Men, women, children, innocents. They died, but their killers were allowed to go on living.

Not anymore. Would my life with Greta have been spectacular?

Yes. But it wasn’t mine. My life, my purpose, is to be an avenging angel for people like Mary. ”

Rapp had laid out his raison d’être in calm, unemotional tones. He could have been explaining to a friend why he’d given up a lucrative career as an investment banker to take a job teaching underprivileged kids how to read. But Rapp wasn’t a teacher or an investment banker.

He was an assassin.

“That’s it, then? You’re going to spend the rest of your life skulking about in the shadows and shooting unarmed men in the face?”

Lewis had asked the question with the intent of provoking a reaction.

He succeeded.

With a flick of his wrist, Rapp tossed the legal pad at Lewis in a flutter of yellow pages. The notepad hit him in the chest. Lewis looked down to grab it before the pad slid off his legs. By the time he looked back up, Rapp was standing over him.

“I’m going do the job for which I’m uniquely qualified until it no longer needs to be done. Any other questions, Doc?”

Lewis had never felt personally threatened by Rapp, and he didn’t feel threatened now.

What he did feel was healthy respect for the man in front of him, almost as if he were standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

One wrong step and he could find himself hurtling toward the rocky floor’s jagged embrace.

“Nope,” Lewis said.

“Then maybe write my last answer down. It was a good one.”

Without asking for permission to leave, Rapp ghosted out the door.

Lewis expected nothing less.

There was still work to be done.