Act of Treason by Vince Flynn Page B

only worsened his guilt. Finally, in late October, he woke up one early evening in his hotel room in Calcutta and turned on Sky News. That was how he heard about the attack on the motorcade. He looked at his puffy red face and bloodshot eyes in the mirror and knew he had reached the tipping point. He either went back to the States and got back to work, or he would drink himself to death. Rapp was a lot of things, but nothing more so than a survivor.
    Kennedy was happy to see him, but there were questions, and Rapp wasn’t good at answering questions. The CIA got a little skittish when their operatives disappeared. The FBI also took notice. Kennedy covered for him as best she could, and told the inquisitors that Rapp had taken a leave of absence. Most understood. The death of his wife was a very public affair. Rapp had his enemies in the government, however, and they wanted answers. Rapp, in his typical manner, told them to go fuck themselves, which only served to make the situation worse. In the end it was the president who intervened on his behalf. The commander in chief came down extremely hard on those who questioned Rapp’s loyalty. This was not the Cold War. No longer did agents get turned by the enemy. This new war was about terrorism, and the thought of Rapp going over to the other side was simply preposterous.
    This all came down the week before the election, and it was Ross’s people at National Intelligence who made the biggest stink. When Alexander and Ross pulled off their come-from-behind victory, both Rapp and Kennedy knew their days were numbered. Almost two years earlier, he had warned Kennedy that he thought al-Qaeda, or one of its offshoots, might try to hire outside help to run some of their operations. They had the cash to do it, and they also had a practical motive. The U.S. and her allies had done a tremendous job of rolling up terrorist cells, which operationally left al-Qaeda ineffective when it came to striking at the heart of America. The motorcade incident changed all of that. Somehow they had managed to stage a spectacular attack inside, and they had left surprisingly few clues. In Rapp’s experience, lack of evidence meant a professional was involved.
    Nowhere in any of the early reports did Rapp read a thing about the mystery man in the red hat. He learned that when he sat down to talk to Special Agent Rivera. At first Rapp was shocked that there was no mention of him in the reports, but then it began to make sense. Rivera was the only one to notice the man. He didn’t show up on any surveillance monitors from the surrounding businesses. Paramedics did not treat him after the explosion. He simply disappeared, or as several doctors tried to tell Rivera, he never existed except in her mind. She’d suffered a serious concussion. It was a given that she might be confused about when and where things had occurred. The long and short of it was that the lawyers at the Justice Department didn’t like loose ends. Especially loose ends that would fan the flames of conspiracy theorists for decades to come.
    Rapp went back to the scene of the crime with a map that listed where every pedestrian and vehicle was on that afternoon in October when history was changed. Two of the apartment buildings across the street were now holes in the ground. The adjacent buildings on either side were under construction. Other than that everything looked normal. The huge crater in the road had been filled and repaved, and fresh trees had been planted. Rapp found the tree where Rivera said the man had been standing right before everything faded to black. The large oak was still there, but damaged. Some of the bark that faced the explosion was gone and there were several scars left by debris that had imbedded itself into the trunk.
    For Rapp, it came down to the tree and one other thing. If the attack had really been carried out by jihadists, there would have been a body, or more accurately, tiny parts of a body. A true