“Whoa! Easy, Mitch!” He raised his hands, one of which held a Beretta 92FS. “What the hell happened?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Thompson spotted the dead Arab and his eyes widened. “I popped that guy, man. I swear I did. Right in the head.”
“You didn’t check to see if he was dead?”
“It was point-blank range! His fucking hair caught fire!”
Rapp’s finger tightened on the trigger but it was out of anger at the kid’s stupidity, not because he thought Thompson had tried to set him up. Part of the Arab’s head was noticeably concave and the trail of blood he’d left on his walk to the door was obvious. It was the downside of head shots. While they got around the problems posed by body armor, they could be unpredictable.
“Come on, Mitch. I’m sorry. I don’t normally do this kind of close-up work.”
“Get out.”
“So we’re good?”
“As long as I don’t ever see you again.”
“Not a problem, man. I’m a ghost. But hey, could you give me a lift to-”
Rapp adjusted his aim slightly and put a bullet in the wall about a quarter of an inch from Thompson’s ear.
“Fuck!” the young assassin shouted, ducking and throwing an arm protectively in front of his face. A few seconds later he was out the front door and running up the road.
CHAPTER 7
MOSCOW
RUSSIA
AS was always the case when he arrived, the outer office was empty.
Grisha Azarov crossed it quickly, glancing at an ornate clock on the wall to confirm that he was precisely on time. The door at the back was open and he passed through, closing it quietly behind him.
The office was a stark contrast to the one he’d just visited in Siberia. Every wall was clad in the rich wood paneling favored by powerful men and gilt accents bordered the ceiling. Carefully restored antiques and priceless works of art were in abundance, tracing the whole of Russia’s history.
At nearly twenty meters square, it took a not insignificant amount of time to cross the room and take a position of attention in front of a desk that had once been owned by Czar Nicolas II. According to legend, he had used it only once before the people rose up and killed him for his sins and the sins of his forebears. Azarov had always thought it ironic that Russia’s president would choose a desk with such a history.
Maxim Krupin finished signing the document in front of him and set it aside, leaning back in his chair to finally acknowledge Azarov’s presence. The politician was relatively young at fifty-two, stocky and solid. He had recently grown a jet-black mustache that, despite being meticulously groomed, still had the effect of making him look a little wild. Undoubtedly the change was a calculated effort to further intimidate the West and to ingratiate himself with a constituency desperate to have the world tremble once again in Russia’s shadow.
By contrast, Azarov was clean-shaven, with a thin, muscular physique beneath a suit tailored to obscure it. The man who oversaw his training never allowed his client’s body fat level to rise above that favored by professional athletes. In a world flooded with modern weapons, strength was desirable, but speed and agility were the difference between survival and death.
“You look well despite the recent unpleasantness, Grisha.”
“It’s kind of you to say, sir.”
“Certainly better than when I found you.”
Their rare face-to-face meetings always began with Krupin subtly reminding Azarov that everything he had was a result of their association.
While Dmitry Utkin’s similar comment had been an exaggeration, Krupin’s was fundamentally accurate. Azarov had been pulled from his special forces post without explanation just before his twenty-fourth birthday. Having distinguished himself on a number of difficult clandestine operations as well as on the army’s intelligence tests, he had come to the attention of the country’s new president.
Krupin had ridden a populist wave into office and was then in the process of consolidating his power. In order to facilitate that consolidation, he’d needed a man with a specific skill set and unwavering loyalty.
The Russian army had provided the former while Krupin bought the latter. Almost overnight, Azarov had gone from living in a barracks and making a few rubles a month to a life of mansions, private jets, and runway models. It had been more than the son of a poor farmer from the rural north could ever have dreamed of. Now, though, he recognized it as the Faustian bargain it was.
“Our friends were beginning to forget their place,” Krupin continued. “Now they’re reminded that they’re only flesh and blood.”
He was, of course, referring to Utkin and Russia’s other powerful oligarchs.
“A weakness we share, Mr. President.”
“Do I hear fear in your voice, Grisha? It doesn’t suit you.”
Krupin was a brutal man who had risen through the ranks at great cost-a cost that was beginning to come due. The precipitous drop in oil prices had combined with Western economic sanctions to loosen the iron-fisted control he’d gained over the country. The control that kept both him and Azarov alive.
“They’re dangerous men with extensive resources, sir.”
“They have no patriotism, Grisha. No love for mother Russia. The Americans are trying to strangle us and all they care about are insignificant shifts in their stock prices. They have no vision for this country’s return to its former glory.”
Azarov wondered what exactly that former glory was. The dysfunctional aristocracy represented by the handcrafted desk in front of him? The genocidal mania of Joseph Stalin? The disastrous communist experiment?
In truth, his country was utterly dependent on the extraction of natural resources. Russia invented nothing. Made nothing. Contributed nothing. Its people had never had a chance to learn how.
In many ways, this is why Krupin had enjoyed such success in politics. He understood his people’s thirst for relevance and had a gift for slaking that thirst in ways that were ultimately meaningless but satisfying in the short term.
“Before he died, Utkin demanded details of your plan for the economy and proof that those plans would be effective, sir. I suspect the others will do the same.”
Krupin’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward across his desk. “I will cut the Americans off at the knees, Grisha. Russia will be respected and feared throughout the world. We will exceed even the power we had at the height of the Soviet era. Will that be sufficient for these little men?”
“What you describe would indeed be glorious,” Azarov said, trying to conjure the expected sense of enthusiasm.
It appeared that he was successful because Krupin nodded and sank back into his chair. “Unfortunately, I find myself in a position that I once again need to ask your help, Grisha. I was committed to keeping you out of the Pakistan operation but circumstances conspire to make that impossible.”
“What’s changed, sir?”
Krupin waved a hand in a dismissive gesture that seemed a bit strained. “We’ve lost touch with the men sent to deal with Mitch Rapp.”
Azarov didn’t allow himself to visibly react. Only two days ago, Krupin had boasted that the operation was going perfectly. That Rapp was falling headlong into the trap created for him.
“Lost touch?”
“Our best intelligence is that Rapp is on his way back to Islamabad and could interfere with our work.”
The operation targeting the CIA man had been planned entirely by Krupin and his logistics expert, Marius Postan. Azarov had been kept out of the loop, a move typical of the Russian president. One of the strategies he used to maintain power was to compartmentalize everything he did, never allowing anyone to see the entirety of his machinations. It was a level of secrecy that kept his opponents off-balance, but often had a similar effect on his allies.
Normally, Azarov would have requested to be included in the planning of an operation like this and Krupin would have eventually agreed. In this case, though, Azarov had decided to keep his distance. He had studied everything Russian intelligence had on Mitch Rapp, and it was hard to ignore the fact that even well-planned, well-executed moves against him tended to fail. Often catastrophically.