Order to Kill, Page 2

  Azarov couldn’t blame them for their carelessness. This wasn’t a battlefield and they had their unarmed opponent outnumbered three to one. In such situations, it was difficult not to become overconfident.

  The man on the left moved across his path in order to open the door and Azarov casually kicked the back of his foot, knocking it sideway behind his other leg. He stumbled, instinctively tightening his hands around the assault rifle instead of throwing them out to break his fall toward the wall. When his head came even with the long crack in the glass, Azarov grabbed him by the belt and shoved him violently forward. The hope was that the glass would shatter and his head would penetrate, but the material wasn’t sufficiently compromised. Instead of bleeding from a fatal neck wound, he landed facedown, dazed from the blow to the skull.

  Azarov spun and dropped, landing back-to-back on top of the man, pinning his weapon beneath him. In the brief moment it took him to free the guard’s holstered pistol, Azarov analyzed the tactical situation.

  The man now on his left had a pistol out and his finger was already tensing on the trigger. Based on the barrel’s position, though, the first round would go well above Azarov’s head and the recoil would create a brief delay before a more accurate shot could be fired. Mikhail Zhestakov was facedown on the floor with his hands protecting the back of his head, as expected. Utkin was clawing clumsily at a drawer which undoubtedly contained a weapon that he had never used to do anything more demanding than execute a bound prisoner.

  The soldier at the back of the room, though, was another matter. He was swinging his weapon smoothly in Azarov’s direction. There was no fear or panic in his eyes, only calculation. In another tenth of a second he would fire and he would hit what he was aiming at.

  With no time to bring the pistol up in front of him, Azarov fired it from an awkward position near his hip. The round went a bit lower than intended, hitting the man just below and to the right of his nose. Sloppy, but still sufficient to spray the contents of his head across the panicked Dmitry Utkin.

  The man to Azarov’s left fired and, as expected, the bullet went high. This time, Azarov was able to extend his arm fully and his shot impacted directly between the guard’s eyes.

  Azarov shoved the pistol into the back of the man beneath him, using it to propel himself to his feet while firing a single round. A moment later he was standing with the weapon’s sights lined up on Utkin.

  The aging oligarch had his hand wrapped around an old Makarov pistol but he froze just as it cleared the drawer. Unbidden, he dropped it and backed away with his hands in the air.

  “You live up to your reputation, Grisha.”

  He was neither stupid nor a coward. He knew what was coming and would die defiant and on his feet. It was how Azarov preferred it. There was something about killing cowards that he found distasteful.

  “I’m sorry our meeting will end like this.”

  Krupin had ordered him to shoot the man in the stomach and then to deliver a lengthy diatribe about the futility of defiance, but Azarov considered it both pointless and disrespectful. He fired a single round into Utkin’s forehead, followed by a round to the stomach in case Krupin should ever bother to look at the police reports.

  He then set the pistol on the desk and went to help Zhestakov to his feet. The businessman’s eyes were wide and wet, and he backed away until he bumped into the wall.

  “Dmitry’s empire is temporarily yours,” Azarov said, straightening his coat and checking for any blood that might have spattered on him. “You’ll manage its breakup and distribution to the other oligarchs and then you’ll take a position of responsibility in one of their organizations. Is that acceptable?”

  He nodded silently.

  “The president wants you to understand that he doesn’t blame you for Utkin’s behavior and admires your business acumen.”

  Azarov didn’t bother to wait for a second hesitant nod, instead turning and stepping over one of the bodies on his way to the door.

  Once outside, he dialed the phone in his pocket.

  “Can I assume that Dmitry was uncooperative?” Maxim Krupin’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “And that you’ve taken care of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You handled the situation even more quickly than I expected. I thought that piece of filth would keep you there for hours whining about corruption and the fall of Russia.”

  “May I ask the status of the Mitch Rapp operation?” Azarov said, changing the subject. There was little value in discussing Dmitry Utkin further. The threat he posed was at an end. This was very much not the case with the American CIA agent.

  “A rare error on your part, Grisha. Everything is moving forward smoothly. The reconnaissance and preparations are complete and it appears that taking the woman will be a simple matter.”

  “I’m pleased to have been wrong,” he said without conviction. He could still feel the slight queasiness he always suffered when Rapp’s name came up. Azarov had no involvement in Krupin’s Pakistan operation or in his plans to keep Rapp from interfering. It was the way he preferred it. At least for now.

  “Tell me,” Krupin said, obviously not willing to allow his subordinate to direct the conversation. “Did Dmitry beg?”

  “Yes,” Azarov lied.

  “The man was a pig,” he said, sounding predictably pleased. “He cared nothing about Mother Russia.”

  “And yet he was a powerful man who the oligarchs looked to for leadership.”

  “Your point?”

  “You didn’t exile him, sir. You killed him. Are you certain that distributing his assets to the others is going to be enough to appease them? There’s a difference between intimidation and fear. The latter can make men unpredictable.”

  “He was gunned down like the animal he was. They could expect no different outcome.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Krupin had always been mistrustful, but the Arab Spring had amplified that to a dangerous degree. Watching dictators much more entrenched than himself being ousted and killed had caused the man to become paranoid. No slight was too trivial or player too insignificant to escape his notice. All were dealt with in the same ruthless manner.

  With Utkin, though, Azarov wondered if Krupin had finally gone too far. If this time he had lit a fire that could not be extinguished.

  CHAPTER 1

  NEAR FRANSCHHOEK

  SOUTH AFRICA

  MITCH Rapp eased his rental car onto a quiet rural road and began winding his way through vineyards. The sun had just hit the horizon, turning the craggy mountains orange against a clear sky.

  The scene couldn’t have been more different from the smoggy, traffic-choked Pakistani cities he’d spent the last two months in. Swapping the stench of diesel and sweat for the idyllic setting of South Africa’s wine country should have been a pleasant change. If anything, though, it had tightened the knot in his gut.

  When he’d killed the fundamentalist director of Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus a few weeks ago, blowback had been inevitable. But now it had grown beyond even his and Irene Kennedy’s worst-case scenario.

  There was still no question that Ahmed Taj’s elimination had been necessary in order to keep Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal out of the hands of Islamic hardliners. Unfortunately, his death had left a power vacuum that was pushing the already unstable country to the brink. Umar Shirani, the head of the army, was using the growing chaos to continue Taj’s effort to oust the country’s relatively moderate president.

  One of the keys to his plan was to gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, confident that the world would be forced to back anyone with the means and will to incinerate a large swath of the region. Or, if not back, at least not oppose.

  To that end, General Shirani had taken the country’s nukes from their secure locations and was moving them around Pakistan in order to keep the civilian government from extending its authority over them. Of course, he said that his actions were to keep the weapo
ns safe in the increasingly unstable environment, but no one actually believed him. He was forcing a showdown—making Pakistan’s politicians and power elite choose sides.

  Rapp and his teams had been charged with trying to track the weapons’ movements and to make sure that none of Pakistan’s terrorist groups got hold of one. It was a virtually impossible task. They were being asked to follow the constantly moving individual components of the world’s seventh-largest nuclear arsenal while being actively opposed by its sixth-largest army. It was a little like the old cup and ball magic trick, but with a hundred balls—each one of which had the potential to explode and take out a major city.

  Rapp rolled down the window and accelerated the vehicle, navigating by his memory of a map he’d glanced at months ago. He’d never actually been to the area, instead relying on a CIA team that specialized in selecting these types of locations.

  And that’s exactly what Irene Kennedy had tried to get him to continue to do: rely on specialists. Despite everything that was happening in Pakistan, though, he couldn’t bring himself to pass this one off. So he’d put Scott Coleman in charge and boarded the CIA’s Gulfstream G550 for South Africa.

  A mistake? Most likely. Dereliction of duty? Maybe. But better to deal with this situation personally over the next twenty-four hours than to spend the next week trying to micromanage it from Islamabad.

  The phone on the passenger seat chimed and he grimaced when he saw it was another text from Monica Estridge. The subject was the same as the last twenty unanswered messages from her. Granite.

  He’d given the surprisingly relentless interior designer complete dominion over finishing the construction of the house he’d started before his wife was killed. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to understand the simple concept of “complete dominion.” He had no idea how many swatches, paint colors, and wood finishes there were on the planet, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to rest until he’d looked at every one.

  The dirt road began to climb toward a mountain striped with cliff bands and Rapp made sure he kept the vehicle’s speed at a level that wouldn’t attract attention. When he reached the top of the first rise, he spotted the gray roof of the home he was looking for.

  A ten-foot-tall wall topped with colorful shards of broken glass ringed the property and the trees had been cut back almost to a neighboring farmer’s vines, leaving an open perimeter with an unobstructed view.

  The scene probably wasn’t appreciably different than it would have been if he’d been riding in on horseback at the turn of the twentieth century. Just beneath the surface, though, was a state-of-the-art security system that was not only connected to local police and a private security response team but to the CIA’s top people in the country.

  At his direction, Claudia Gould—now Dufort—and her daughter had moved in recently. Despite a long, painful history and the death of her husband at the hands of Stan Hurley, Rapp couldn’t get her out of his mind. They seemed to be tangled together in a way that no amount of effort could reverse.

  It was hard to reflect on his relationships with women without using the words “disaster” and “catastrophe.” On particularly bad days, “cataclysm” also sprang to mind. His first love had died in the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 when he was still young. Years later, his wife and unborn child had been murdered by Louis Gould, the late husband of the woman living in the spotless Cape Dutch house he was passing.

  Since then, Rapp had tried futilely to find someone he could fit into his life. His wife, Anna, had been an idealist and in some ways that was why he’d loved her so intensely. While he was constantly mired in the dark, she saw the world with unflagging optimism and hope. Being with her helped him regain the humanity that sometimes seemed to be slipping irretrievably away.

  In retrospect, though, their relationship hadn’t been all sunshine and flowers. Anna had struggled constantly with what he did for a living. Intellectually, she understood that men like him were necessary, but he’d come to believe that on a deeper level she thought he might be part of the problem. Just another violent man who kept the world from becoming the utopia she thought it could be.

  So, another Anna Reilly was out.

  He tried going in the opposite direction and took up with a talented Italian private contractor, but the relationship was doomed from the start. On the bright side, she was beautiful, exciting, and completely unconcerned with his lifestyle. On the other hand, he’d never been able to shake the feeling that for the right price, she’d start chasing him around the bedroom with an ice pick.

  After Donatella, his relationships could be categorized as brief encounters that barely rose above the level of one-night stands. A former Secret Service agent. A hedge fund manager his brother had introduced him to. A redheaded air force pilot who flew support on a few of his ops.

  But Claudia felt different for some reason. They’d first met years ago when he’d come to settle a score with her husband. He’d put a gun against her head, and to say the look in her eyes haunted him would be an overstatement. But he sure as hell hadn’t forgotten it.

  Claudia’s background wasn’t spotless like Anna’s, but neither was it drenched in blood like Donatella’s. She had a beautiful daughter and a soul that was just damaged enough for her to consider allowing someone like him into her life.

  That sense of possibility was why he’d gotten personally involved with relocating Claudia and providing her with an immaculate new identity. Or at least an identity that he’d been assured was immaculate. Now, a reliable informant had told him, someone was looking to snatch her. Precisely who or why, no one seemed to know.

  The likely bet was that one of her late husband’s enemies had come crawling out from under a rock for some petty revenge. It was the kind of amateur bullshit that really pissed Rapp off and he was there to set an example that would discourage the next asshole.

  It was another reason not to get Irene Kennedy’s people involved. As the director of the CIA, there were lines she shouldn’t cross. And his plan to identify the people stalking Claudia and then mail them back to their employer in FedEx envelopes was probably one of them.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE light from the setting sun moved slowly up the side of the mountain, creating a lengthening shadow at its base. Rapp set his pace to stay just below the transition from dark to light, a location that would generate the most visual distortion for anyone looking up from ground level.

  The terrain was steep enough that he had to use his hands for balance and loose enough that his boots occasionally sent a cloud of dirt and gravel cascading to the valley below. Like most plans created on paper, the climb he’d mapped out was in constant need of on-the-fly revision.

  He came to a gap in the narrow ledge he was following and stopped for a moment, looking down more than a hundred feet to the tops of the trees he’d parked beneath. The mountain offered an ideal vantage point. The rural highway leading to town was just visible in the distance and he had full view of the dirt road that led to Claudia’s house. A couple hundred more feet in altitude would give him a view of her fence line.

  Range would be almost a mile and a half to the house. That would make it impossible for a shooter to use this position to cover an attack on her home—something he’d made sure of before he approved its purchase. Unfortunately, the curving road came within a quarter mile of the base of the cliff. A reasonable distance for a gifted sniper with the right equipment.

  In truth, the property had never been ideal. Rapp would have preferred to put Claudia and her daughter in one of the heavily secured condo buildings in Cape Town’s business district. The complexities of getting to her in the crowded city center were far more daunting than they were in this quiet rural area.

  There were factors to consider beyond security, though. What kind of childhood would Anna have in the city? While his views on children had gone out of style over the past few decades, he’d always thought they needed room to run. What would he and his brother have
done if they’d been stuck in a concrete and glass box as kids? Most likely gotten into even more trouble.

  The gap in the ledge in front of him was narrow enough to jump, but the landing was strewn with rocks that would make an unacceptable amount of noise when his body weight came down. Instead, Rapp detoured up a gently overhanging cliff that led to flatter terrain. He went hand over hand, following a prominent crack system as the wind started to pick up.

  He moved as quickly as he could. Despite his having selected clothing roughly the color of the rock, his outline would stand out against the wall of stone. Throwing an arm over the top, he slipped onto a ledge and went still, scanning the valley for any sign of humanity. Nothing. For now, things were going his way.

  The snap of falling rock sounded above and he slid his Glock from beneath his jacket, rolling onto his back as a stream of dust and debris just missed him. He centered his sights on a flash of movement and tracked a furry torso for a few moments. Four baboons in total, including a large male that he’d rather not tangle with. Given a wide enough berth, they wouldn’t be a problem and might even provide some cover for his movements.

  Rapp continued upward, taking the most vertical route until he was well above what he considered the optimal position for taking out Claudia and her daughter. Having secured the high ground, he traversed south, keeping an eye on the tangle of ledges below. It took only a few minutes to find what he was looking for.

  A lone shooter lay prone on a stone outcropping about twenty yards below Rapp’s position. He was wearing gray-and-green fatigues, sighting through a scope attached to a Barrett M82 sniper rifle. All Rapp could see was the back of his head, most of which was covered by a baseball cap. A black wire led from his right ear to his jacket, suggesting that he was in contact with the ground team and probably with the man in charge of the operation.