American Assassin

Rapp and Hurley hadn’t exactly made peace. It was more of a truce. After the night he’d met George, or whatever his real name was, Rapp, Richards, and Hurley had gone back down to the lake house to begin prepping for the Hamburg operation. Hurley from time to time still looked at Rapp as if he were mentally retarded, but he had cut back on his yelling and cussing. Rapp took this as a sign of détente.

After five days Hurley asked Rapp to take a walk. “Have you gone over the last op in your head?”

“You mean Istanbul?”

“How many ops have you been on?” Hurley asked him with a wake-up expression on his face.

“Sorry,” Rapp said. “Yeah … I’ve thought about it.”

“Anything you would have done different?”

Rapp stared at the ground while they walked. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“The fact that you acted on your own is behind us. I already told you that. Part of my job is make sure you get better. What I’m asking you is a tactical question. When you look back on what happened in the park that morning, once you decided to kill him, is there anything that you would have done different?”

“I don’t know,” Rapp answered honestly. “It all just kind of happened.”

Hurley nodded, having been there before. “That’s good and bad, kid. It might be that you’re a natural at this. Ice in your veins, that kind of shit. Or … you got lucky. Only time will tell, but there’s one thing you did that jumps out as being pretty stupid.”

“What’s that?” Rapp asked. Hurley had his full attention.

“I read the police report.”

Rapp didn’t know why he was surprised, but he was.

“The shot to the heart … it was point-blank. Literally. The report was conclusive. The muzzle of the weapon was in direct contact with Sharif’s coat.”

Rapp nodded. He was there. He remembered it well.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I wanted to kill him.”

Hurley stopped and faced him. “Kid, I’ve seen you shoot. You’re not as good as me, but you’re damn good and you keep getting better. You don’t think you could have popped him from say ten feet?”

Rapp didn’t answer.

“Why did you sit down next to him?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Bullshit,” Hurley said with a smile. “You allowed it to get personal, didn’t you?”

Rapp thought back to that morning, not even a week ago. The feeling came back. That split-second decision to sit next to Sharif so he could look into his eyes. He slowly nodded. “Yeah … I guess I did.”

Hurley’s jaw tightened while he processed the admission. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you there haven’t been times … times that I took a certain amount of joy in sending some of these scumbags to paradise … but you have to be really careful. Pick the right environment. Never in public like you did. He could have had a gun, somebody could have seen you sitting next to him … a lot of things could have gone wrong.”

“I know.”

“Remember, in public, the key is to look natural. That’s why I showed you the shoulder holster technique. That’s why we practice it. You look at your watch and no one thinks twice about it. You’re a guy checking the time. You sit down on a park bench that close to another guy and someone might notice. Just enough to cause him to look twice, and that’s all it might take. The next thing you know the carabinieri are chasing you down the street shooting at you.” Hurley gave him a dead-serious look. “Trust me, I’ve been there.” Hurley shuddered at the memory.

“What?” Rapp asked.

“You ever been to Venice?”

“Yeah.”

“The canals.” Hurley made a diving motion with his hands.

“You dove into one of those canals?” Rapp asked while recalling their putrid shade of green.

“And this was thirty years ago. They’re a lot cleaner now than they were back then.”

The condo was raw exposed brick with heavy timber beams secured to each other by sturdy iron brackets with big bolts. The floors were wide plank, more than likely pine, stained light to add a little brightness in contrast to the dark mud-red bricks. The furniture was utilitarian. Grays and blues. Wood and metal frames. Long sleek lines and the kind of fabrics that could be cleaned. Pure bachelor efficiency. It was a corner unit, so it had two small balconies, one off the master bedroom and another off the living room. There was a second bedroom and a loft space with a desk and pullout couch. When they arrived Hurley had everything prepared.

The dining-room table was covered with a sheet. Hurley carefully pulled it back to reveal what he’d pieced together in three short days. The target was a banker by the name of Hans Dorfman. He looked i

“You’re probably wondering,” Hurley asked, “why a well-educated man, who was raised a Christian, would decide to help a bunch of Islamic whack jobs wage terrorism.”

Richards looked down at a black-and-white photo of the sixty-three-year-old banker and said, “Yep.”

“Well, officially it’s none of your goddamn business. When we’re given an assignment it’s not our place to question … right?”

Both Rapp and Richards gave halfhearted nods.

“Wrong,” Hurley said. “I don’t care what anyone tells you, HQ can fuck up and they can fuck up big-time. Beyond that, you’ll run into the occasional yahoo who doesn’t have a clue how things work in the real world. When you get a kill assignment, you’d better question it, and you’d better be damn careful. We don’t do collateral damage. Women and children are strictly off limits.”

Rapp had heard this countless times from Hurley and the other instructors. “But people make mistakes.”

“They do,” he agreed, “and the more difficult the job, the greater the chance that you’ll make a mistake, but if you want to make it out of this one day with your soul intact, follow my advice on this. Question the assignments they give you. We’re not blind—or robots.”

Richards was still looking at the photo of the banker. “Stan, are you trying to tell us this guy isn’t guilty?”

“This guy,” Hurley waved his right hand from one side of the table to the other. “Hell no. This Nazi piece of shit is guilty as hell. In fact, guys like this piss me off more than the ones who shoot back. This prick lives in his fancy house, takes two months off every year, goes to the nicest places, and sleeps like a fucking baby every night. He thinks it’s no big deal that he helps these scumbags move their money around. No,” he shook his head, “this is one of those times when I will enjoy pulling the trigger.”

CHAPTER 31

HURLEY explained to them that the process wasn’t so much about finding the best option as it was eliminating the bad ones. That is, if you had the time to go through all the alternatives. After two days together, Hurley made the decision and they both agreed. Sunday night was the perfect time to make their move, and it would happen at the house. It was located thirty-five minutes outside of Hamburg, a nice wooded one-acre lot. Rapp was pretty sure Hurley had known from the get-go that this would be the appointed hour, but he wanted some push back. He wanted Rapp and Richards to tear into his plans and make sure there wasn’t a better time to go after Dorfman. For two days that’s pretty much all Rapp and Richards did.

For Rapp one of the more enlightening exchanges happened when he asked the salty Hurley, “What about the dogs?”

“Dogs,” Hurley said with a devilish smile, “are a double-edged sword. Take this fuck stick, for example.” Hurley pointed to Dorfman’s black-and-white photograph. Hurley had taken a black marker and drawn a Hitler mustache on him the night before. “He’s an anal retentive Nazi prick if I’ve ever seen one. Wants complete order in his life, so he gets two poodles … why?” He looked at Rapp and Richards.