Chapters (57)
And while all those threats were very real and as dangerous as anything he’d ever faced, they weren’t the kind he was equipped to resolve.
His phone rang and he looked down at the caller information—or more precisely, lack thereof. Irene Kennedy. Impeccable timing as usual. Sometimes he wondered if she had the ability to read his mind.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up.
“How’s the training going?”
“Good.”
“Find any interesting new toys?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’d be better to leave them for the next generation.”
“You sound a bit dejected.”
Rapp caught the bartender’s eye, tapping his empty beer bottle before holding up three fingers.
“Dejected? Maybe. Or maybe relieved. It’s been a long road and now I may have reached the end of it. Alive.”
“It’s a brave new world. There’s no question of that. But you’ve always kept step.”
“This time I’m not sure I want to.”
“In that case, I have some bad news.”
“What?”
“President Cook wants to meet you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible that it has something to do with what happened in Uganda. Have you been following that?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. More likely he just wants to size you up. See if you’re someone his administration can use.”
“Use,” Rapp repeated, knowing that Kennedy always chose her words carefully. “Can I take it that he hasn’t grown on you?”
“I never said that.”
“Word is that you’re letting Mike handle him.”
Mike Nash was a former operator who had become Kennedy’s right-hand man. A good-looking, endlessly likable Marine, he had a gift for dealing with the assholes on Capitol Hill. Rapp and he had been friends for years and, in fact, lived only a few houses from each other in a private subdivision west of DC.
“Like you, I’m trying to regain a little of my life. The lull we’re coming to the end of has reminded me how much I’ve given up.”
He was a bit jealous. The truth was that he’d never really had much of a life. Getting one back had to be easier than acquiring one for the first time.
“Fine. I’ll be back tomorrow. Then I have a couple days before I leave for Cape Town. If he can fit a meeting into that window, I’ll make it work. If not, he’ll have to wait until I get back.”
“Which will be when?”
“I don’t know,” he said as the bartender returned with his beers. “Maybe never.”
3
SOUTHWESTERN UGANDA
GREEN.
It was the word that had overtaken lucky to describe David Chism’s world.
He knew that his takeaway from all this should be terror. Or despair. Or rage. But it wasn’t. It was the color that surrounded him, pressed against him, closed in around him.