Consent To Kill

Rapp considered this for a moment. He didn't want to alarm her, but at the same time he didn't want to make light of it. "I'm no more, or less, concerned than I normally would be. I had to talk to Jack about something else today, so I mentioned it to him. He's offered before, so I decided it was a good idea to take him up on it."

She looked at him with her reporter's eyes, trying to detect how forthright he was being.

"Honey, I'm serious. I don't want you to be alarmed, but at the same time I want you to be aware."

"Fair enough," she said after a few seconds.

The conversation turned to the more mundane topic of how their days had gone. Rapp neglected to mention his meeting with Ross. She ordered the sea bass, and Rapp ordered the New York Strip medium rare. He switched to red wine with his meal and A

"I had lunch with Liz and precious Gabe today." She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath through her nose. "I could just eat that little guy."

Rapp smiled. Liz O'Rourke and A

The dessert arrived. It was some triple chocolate mound of sin with a hunk of ice cream on top. It had to be over 2,000 calories. Rapp stared at it in awe as his wife dug in. After three bites she set her spoon down and said, "I have some big news."

Rapp cringed, and thought, Please don't tell me you're getting promoted and they're moving you to New York.

"Do you want to guess?"

"You got a promotion."

"No." She smiled. "I'm pregnant."

Rapp didn't move for several seconds. His mind was trying to cross the divide. As far as he knew, his wife was on the Pill.

"I know," she said reading his expression, "but I took the test twice, plus I'm late."

"But how?"

She shrugged. "It says right on the birth control package, 'Ninety-nine percent effective.' I guess we fall into the one percent."

They'd talked about having kids almost from the day they'd met. They both wanted at least two, but A

"Of course I am! Are you kidding me?"

He breathed a sigh of relief.

"Are you okay with this?" she asked a bit tentatively.

Rapp looked at her angelic face. He could see now that she was worried about his reaction. He reached out with his hand and gently held the side of her face. "I couldn't be happier."

27

Abel sat quietly at his desk. His office was on the third floor of a building built just prior to the start of WWI. The building, like much of Vie

Great civilizations rose and fell as surely as the tides. The Egyptians, the Incas, the Mayans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Mongol empire, the Ottoman empire all came and went. The Austro-Hungarian empire, the French, the British, the Russians, and the Nazis would someday merit only a footnote. Who knew what waited for the Americans? The other superpower, the Soviet Union, had lasted less than a hundred years with their grand experiment of communism. A blink as far as history was concerned. If Abel had to guess, America's preeminence on the world stage would last no more than another hundred years. The country had too many rights and too much wealth. Not enough sacrifice. Too much selfishness. The civilizations that had made their mark did so through brutality or great self-sacrifice by the populace, and often both. The Chinese would become the next sole superpower. They were hungry for change. Such long-range forecasts were always interesting to him, but in the here and now he had more pressing issues.

There was a certain Saudi prince whom he no longer trusted. Abel drew his attention away from the statue of Athena and looked at the documents on his desk. They represented his complete financial picture. Based on the papers before him, the assassin had been right in his assessment. Abel was not liquid enough. His real estate holdings in Switzerland and Austria were worth approximately $3,000,000. He had an additional $1,200,000 in cash and securities that he could liquidate without too much difficulty. It was not enough to live on for very long if he was forced to run. At least not with the lifestyle he'd grown accustomed to. What the assassin did not know, however, was that Abel was pocketing a full half of the fee. To add to the $1,200,000 in securities he now had $5,000,000 in cash. With that type of money he could probably disappear for a while. If the assassin succeeded in killing Rapp he would get another $5,000,000. Now he was talking real money, but still the thought of leaving behind his current life was not appealing to him.

Abel was facing a real quandary. As things sat now he had to prepare for three possibilities. The first was that the assassin would succeed and the Americans would start beating the bushes in search of Rapp's killer. This was the best outcome. Abel felt confident that, short of capturing the assassin, there was no way the Americans could link him to any of this. He'd been very careful in covering his financial tracks. The second possibility, which he was not even confident that he could pull off, would be to kill the assassin after he completed the job. That approach could blow up in his face in a variety of ways, the worst of which would be the assassin not dying and hunting Abel down. So far the assassin had been ahead of him every step of the way. There was no logical reason for him to think that he could suddenly outwit this extremely capable man. The third contingency to prepare for was that he himself was already a target. It would be just like Prince Muhammad to have already hired someone to take care of him. Any feeling of loyalty he'd felt toward the prince, which was really nothing more than a professional obligation to perform the duties he was paid for in the best possible way, was now almost entirely gone. He had suspected it would someday come to this. From the very begi