To my publishers, past and present-

Carolyn Reidy, Judith Curr, Louise Burke, Jack Romanos

and

In memory of Kent Mosher

AS always, to the two people who guide me through this process every year-Emily Bestler and Sloan Harris, my editor and my agent. To David Brown, the best publicist in the business. To Sarah Branham and Laura Stern, for polishing things up and making sure the trains run on time. To Jeanne Lee and the Art Department, for once again patiently listening to everyone’s opinion. To Al Madocs, sorry I did it to you again this year. To Michael Selleck and the S&S sales force, for doing an amazing job in a tough market. Kristyn Keene, Niki Castle, and Molly Rosenbaum, for all of your hard work and much-needed levity.

To Rob Richer, a good friend and someone to whom this country owes a great debt. To Edward Shoppman and Dennis Finnegan, for the new hardware. To Larry Nevin, Tim Flynn, and Bill Beaudette, for setting things up. To Dr. Jodi Bakkegard-we are lucky to have you in our lives. To all those who choose to remain in the shadows, thank you. To all those whom I may have forgotten, my sincere apologies.

To my amazing wife, Lysa, after ten years, you still take my breath away.

NEW YORK CITY

IT was nearing ten o’clock in the evening when Mitch Rapp decided it was time to move. He stepped from the sedan into the April night, popped his umbrella, clutched the collar of his black trench coat, and set out across a rain-soaked East Twentieth Street. He navigated the puddles and swollen gutter without complaint. The weather was a blessing. Not only did it clear the streets of potential witnesses, it also gave him a reasonable excuse to hide his face from the city’s ever-increasing array of security cameras.

Rapp had traveled to New York City to decide the fate of a man. At an earlier point, he had debated the wisdom of handling the situation himself. In addition to the inherent risk of getting caught, there was another, more pressing problem. Just six days earlier a series of explosions had torn through Washington, D.C., killing 185 and wounding hundreds. Three of the terrorists were still at large, and Rapp had been ordered, unofficially, to find them by any means necessary. So far, however, the investigation had been painfully complicated and had yet to yield a single solid lead. The three men had up and disappeared, which suggested a level of sophistication that few of them had thought the enemy capable of. The last thing Rapp expected, though, was that he would still be dealing with this other issue. In light of the attacks in Washington, he thought the fool would have come to his senses.

Beyond the significance of deciding if the man should live or die, there was the aftermath to consider. Killing him had the very real potential to cause more problems than it would solve. If the guy failed to show up for work there would be a lot of questions, and the majority of them would be directed at Rapp and his boss, Irene Kennedy, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One tiny misstep, and the shit storm of all shit storms would be brought down on them.

The head of the surveillance team had tried to talk him out of it, but Rapp wasn’t the kind of man who was going to start pulling the trigger from a climate-controlled office a couple hundred miles away. He needed to see with his own eyes if they were missing something-if there wasn’t some unseen or unpredictable factor that had caused the bureaucrat to jump the tracks. Rapp was keenly aware of the universal disdain for the man he had followed to New York. There were plenty of people on the clandestine side of the business who had cause to wish the prick dead, and that was another reason Rapp needed to be absolutely certain he was guilty of what they suspected. His dislike for the man would make it all that much easier to pull the trigger, and Rapp knew he had to fight that urge. He needed to give this idiot every last chance to save himself before they did something that could never be undone.

It would be a mistake to read too deeply into Rapp’s cautious attitude, though. If he found the proof he was looking for, there would be no hand-wringing or queasiness. He’d killed too many people to begin acting like an amateur, and although the man was a fellow American, he was also very likely a traitor. And not some low-level, paper-pushing traitor, this guy had one of the highest security clearances in the federal government and his hypocrisy had likely gotten one of Rapp’s agents killed.

Rapp moved down the sidewalk toward Park Avenue at a casual pace. He was dressed in a fashion similar to that of the thousand-plus executive car drivers who were shuffling their clients around the city on this rain-soaked evening-black shoes, black suit, white shirt, black tie, and a black trench coat. To anyone who happened to notice him, he would look like just another driver out stretching his legs, trying to kill a little time before his client finished his meal and was ready to head someplace else or call it a night.

As Rapp took up a position across the street and one door down from the Gramercy Tavern, he reached into his pocket and fished out a pack of Marlboros. Standing in the rain in New York City doing nothing might get you noticed, but throw in a cigarette and you looked like all the other addicts battling the elements to get their fix. Rapp turned away from the street and faced the blank façade of the building behind him. He tilted the umbrella so it looked as if he was trying to block the wind and flicked his lighter. He was not worried about the wind, but he was worried about one of the other drivers’ catching a glimpse of his face in the glow of the flame.

After a deep pull off the cigarette, Rapp casually looked out from under the rain-soaked umbrella and across the street. The target was sitting in one of the restaurant’s big windows sharing a meal, a lot of booze, and too much conversation with a man Rapp had never met, and hoped to keep that way. The other man was a concern, to be sure, but Rapp was not in the habit of killing private citizens simply because they were witnesses to the ramblings of a bitter man who was past his prime.

Despite every effort to find a different solution, Rapp’s mood was decidedly fatalistic. The surveillance team had the restaurant wired for sound, and for the last two hours he had been sitting in a parked Lincoln Town Car listening to his coworker trash-talk the Agency. As Rapp watched him take a drink of wine, he wasn’t sure what bothered him more, the man’s self-serving criticism, or his reckless behavior. One would think that anyone who worked at the CIA would be a little more careful about when and where he decided to commit treason.

So far his associate had done little more than espouse his political and philosophical views. Bad form, to be sure, but nothing that had risen to the level of outright sedition. Rapp, however, could sense that it was coming. The man had been drinking heavily. He’d downed two gin martinis and four glasses of red wine, and that wasn’t counting the bump or two he’d probably had on the flight up from D.C. and possibly at the hotel bar. Rapp had ordered his surveillance people to steer clear of the airports. There were too many cameras and trained law enforcement types who would eventually be interviewed by the FBI. If the night went the way it was looking, every moment of this guy’s life would be rewound and scrutinized, and they’d start with that U.S. Airways commuter flight he’d taken out of Reagan National up to LaGuardia earlier in the day.