Page 128 of Denied Access

“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 wordassassinintentionally. 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.