Pursuit of Honor

“No, but neither have I deluded myself into thinking that the men who wrote it ever intended for a second that it be used to protect our enemies.”

“So guys like Mitch Rapp should be able to do whatever they’d like without any oversight? Kill whomever they deem a threat without answering to any higher authority?”

“If I have to choose between Mitch and those menstruating partisan hacks on Capitol Hill, I’ll put my money on Mitch.”

Adams, his fists clenched, stood and demanded, “Do you know why they hate us?”

“Who?”

“The terrorists? Who do you think? They hate us because of men like you and my father and Rapp and Nash and rest of you knuckle-dragging goons.”

“Those goons,” Hurley said in a quiet angry voice, “have done more to protect this country than the entire House and Senate put together, and they’ve done it without an ounce of recognition or thanks from all the intellectually arrogant fucks like you.” Hurley stepped back and swung his cane around, smacking Adams in the elbow.

Adams yelped and grabbed himself. “What in the hell is wrong with you?”

“I was your only chance, you dumb ass. All I wanted was the slightest sign of remorse, and instead I got more of your pompous defiance.” He turned for the door.

“Where are you going?” Adams asked in a voice that had suddenly lost its command.

“To get the man you think so little of.”

“Wait!” Adams said in a voice that finally betrayed a bit of fear.

Hurley didn’t bother to turn around. “You blew it. Now you get to find out firsthand if torture works.”

CHAPTER 11

RAPP checked his watch. He had thirty minutes at the most and then he would have to hightail it up to Langley. He wasn’t worried about his alibi. Should the feds come knocking, he’d send them to Hurley, and as long as the tough bastard kept breathing, he’d tell them that Rapp had arrived shortly before seven the previous evening and stayed the night. As to what they’d discussed and done during the roughly twelve hours since, they could confidently tell the feds to pound sand. The agents might not like it, but the men and women of the clandestine service had good reason for being tight-lipped with them and the good ones knew it.

What bothered Rapp was the fact that there were more important things for him to be dealing with-like trying to find the three terrorists who had vanished. They had launched a manhunt like nothing he’d witnessed in his nearly twenty years of service. Every law enforcement officer in the country was on high alert, and so far they’d only come up with thousands of false leads. Seven days postattack they finally started looking at different scenarios. At first they’d concentrated on the airports, the borders, and the big ports. The Navy had boarded and searched twenty vessels that were deemed suspicious. Not a single person had been able to explain to Rapp what intelligence had landed those ships in the suspicious category, but he’d learned enough over the years to not try to swim against the current. The Navy was simply doing what they were ordered, and those orders were coming from men and women who would rather look busy and earnest than get thoughtful.

Now they’d moved on to the smaller marinas, airstrips, and remote border crossings. In Rapp’s opinion, and he’d voiced it rather loudly, this should have been the area of focus from the begi

Rapp, and a handful of others, had predicted how the politicians would react. The very room he was standing in was proof that they had been right, and that they’d managed to stay one step ahead of the lemmings as they continued to do what they thought would be least offensive to the very men they were fighting. And now, on top of trying to find out where the terrorists were, he had to deal with this sideshow-this little drama with Glen Adams. It was adding undue stress to an already difficult situation. Rapp hadn’t liked it when Hurley asked him to bring Adams down to the lake house, but knowing the family history he conceded. Looking back on it now, Rapp wished he’d flown out over the Atlantic and dumped Adams out the rear luggage hatch of the G500 at about five thousand feet. It would have been a lot easier.

Now Rapp and the others had to stand around and watch this painfully slow tragedy unfold in real time. Rapp had been through this enough times to know that once you decided a man had to be killed there was no sense putting it off. The hand-wringing and moral debate had to take place up front. In Adams’s case, that meant before they even picked him up. Once that was done there was no turning back. You couldn’t undo the fact that they’d already broken a number of laws. Yet here Nash was making waves. No doubt it had something to do with the strain they’d been under lately, but even so, Rapp expected more from him.

Rapp had seen it before, usually in the military, where despite amazing effort, the use of force was not always as precise as they would like. One too many i

Rapp was begi

“Mitch, get in here and bring the file.”

Rapp stopped. It was Hurley. He would have to wait and talk to Nash in the car on their way back to D.C.