The Third Option

Vince Fly

The Third Option

The second book in the Mitch Rapp series

Prelude

There exists in America a silent and invisible order made up of former soldiers, intelligence officers, and diplomats. In Washington, they are everywhere and they are nowhere. The average person never sees them, never pauses to think about them, never notices the hand they may have had in a seemingly ordinary death. Most people never stop to think twice about the drug overdose of a lobbyist reported on page B-2 of the Washington Post's Metro section, or the suicide of a colonel in the United States Army, or the fatal mugging of a White House staffer.

Average Americans are too busy living their lives to look beyond the headlines and wonder what secrets these people may have taken to their graves. Among those in the know, eyebrows are raised and even a few quiet questions asked, but ultimately a blind eye is turned, and life goes on. To seek answers from this dark community is a very dangerous thing. It is the world of covert operations, a very real but unseen part of our government's foreign and sometimes domestic policy. It is bigger than anyone person. It is the third option, and it is one that is not always used by wise and honorable men.

1

Through the darkness the man moved from tree to tree, working his way toward the large house.

The nineteenth-century estate, forty miles south of Hamburg, Germany, spa

The man walking silently through the woods had already studied hundreds of photographs of the property and its owner. Some of the photos were snapped from satellites orbiting the earth thousands of miles up, but most were taken by the surveillance team that had been in place for the last week.

The assassin had arrived from America only this afternoon and wanted to see with his own eyes what he was up against. Photographs were a good start, but they were no substitute for being there in person. The collar of his black leather jacket was flipped up around his neck to ward off the bite of the cold fall evening. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since sunset.

For the second time since leaving the cottage, he stopped dead in his tracks and listened. He thought he had heard something behind him. The narrow path he trod was covered with a fresh bed of golden pine needles. It was a cloudy night, and with the thick canopy above, very little light reached the place where he stood. He moved to the path's edge and slowly looked back. Without his night-vision scope, he could see no more than ten feet.

Mitch Rapp had been trying not to use the scope. He wanted to make sure he could find his way down the path without it, but something was telling him he wasn't alone. Rapp extracted a 9-mm Glock automatic from his pocket and quietly screwed a suppresser onto the end of it. Then he grabbed a four-inch tubular pocket scope, flipped the operating switch on, and held it up to his right eye. The path before him was instantly illuminated with a strange green light. Rapp sca

After five minutes of patiently waiting, Rapp began to wonder if it wasn't a deer or some other creature that had made the noise. After five more minutes, he reluctantly gave in to the conclusion that he had heard an animal of the four-legged variety rather than two-. Rapp put the pocket scope away but decided to keep his gun out. He had not made it to the ripe old age of thirty-two by being careless and sloppy. Like any true professional, he knew when the time was right to take chances and when to cut and run.

Rapp continued down the path for another quarter of a mile. He could see the lights of the house up ahead and decided to go the rest of the way through the underbrush. Silently, he maneuvered through the thickets, bending branches out of his way and ducking under others. As he approached the edge of the forest, he heard the snap of a twig under his foot and quickly moved to his left, placing a tree directly between himself and the house. A ke

Rapp slid an eye out from behind the tree and looked at the ke

Officially, Mitch Rapp had nothing to do with the U.S. government. Unofficially, he had been working for the CIA since graduating from Syracuse University more than a decade ago. Rapp had been selected to join a highly secretive counterterrorism group known as the Orion Team. The CIA had honed Rapp's raw athleticism and intelligence into a lethal efficiency. The few people he allowed to get close to him knew him as a successful entrepreneur who had started a small computer consulting business that required frequent travel. To keep things legitimate, Rapp often did conduct business while abroad, but not on this trip. He had been sent to kill a man. A man who had already been warned twice.

Rapp studied the area for almost thirty minutes. When he had seen enough, he started back, but not down the path. If someone was in the woods, there was no sense in walking right into a trap. Rapp quietly picked his way through the underbrush for several hundred yards to the south. He stopped three times and checked his compass to make sure he was headed in the right direction. From the intelligence summary, he knew there was another footpath due south of the one he had come in on. Both paths entered the estate from a narrow dirt road and ran roughly parallel to each other.

Rapp almost missed the second footpath. It appeared less frequented than the first one and was overgrown. From there he worked his way back to the curving dirt road. When he reached it, he knelt down and extracted his pocket scope. For several minutes he sca

Rapp had been doing this for almost ten years, and he was ready to get out. In fact, this probably would be his last job. He had met the right woman the previous spring, and it was time to settle down. The CIA did not want to let him go, but that was tough. He had already given enough. Ten years of doing what he did for a living was a lifetime. He was lucky to be getting out in one piece and with a marginally sound mind.