Vince Flynn - Memorial Day

To the men and women whoserve

Acknowledgments

A s always I must first thank my best friend and love of mylife, my wife, Lysa. As my friends are fond of pointing out, I definitelyoverachieved when I married you. To my editor, Emily Bestler, and my agentSloan Harris, thank you once again for all of your guidance and friendship. Icant imagine working with anyone else in the business. To Sarah Branham andKatherine Cluverius, thank you for putting up with me. To Jack Romanos andCarolyn Reidy at Simon Schuster, two of the smartest people inpublishing, a sincere thanks for all of your support. To Judith Curr and LouiseBurke, your enthusiasm and humor are two of the many reasons why I enjoy beingpublished by Atria and Pocket Books. To Paolo Pepe for his creativity, SealeBallenger for his commitment and hard work, and as always, to the entireSS sales force. To John Attenborough and all of the folks at SSAustralia, thank you for showing my wife and me your lovely country. We cantwait to come back. Also, a special thanks to Jeffrey Berg at ICM for takingsuch a personal interest inMemorial Day.

One of the best parts of my job is getting to meet the people Ibase my fiction on. At the CIA Id like to thank Bill Harlow, Chase Brandon,Robert Richer, Michael Tadie, and all of the people at the CTC who gave me sucha warm reception last year. At the FBI Id like to thank Brad Garret, PatOBrien, and Jay Rooney. I admire the commitment and sacrifice that all of youmake. To Larry Johnson, again, thank you for your always unique take onnational security. To Kat, your frank advice and humor are always welcome. Andto Carl Pohlad, thank you for all your generosity and friendship.

To Larry Mefford, who recently left the FBI for greener pasturesand hopefully a little less stressyou are a true gentleman and a professionalwho will be missed. To Paul Evancoe, a real shooter, thank you for taking thetime to explain to me the intricacies of the Nuclear Emergency Support Teamsand all things technical. Your career is a story worth telling, and when youget it down on paper I cant wait to read it. Thank you for your commitment toservice and country, and best of luck with your new endeavor. Lastly, to all ofmy sources who wish remain anonymous, thank you for your insights.

Prelude

M itch Rapp stared through the one-way mirror into the dank,subterranean cement chamber. A man, clothed in nothing more than a pair ofunderwear, sat handcuffed to a small, ridiculously uncomfortable-looking chair.A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, dangling only a foot or so above him.The stark glare of the light combined with his state of near total exhaustion,caused the mans head to droop forward, leaving his chin resting on his chest.He was dangerously close to losing his balance and toppling over, which wasexactly what they wanted.

Rapp checked his watch. He was running out of time and patience.Hed just as soon shoot this piece of human refuse and get it over with, butthe present situation was more complicated than that. He needed the man totalk, that was the point of this endeavor. They all talked eventually, ofcourse, that wasnt the problem. The trick was to get them to tell you thetruth. This one was no exception. So far he was sticking to his story, a storyRapp knew to be an outright lie.

The CIA counterterrorism operative hated coming to this place.It literally made his skin crawl. It had all the charm of a mental hospitalwithout the barred windows and the beefy orderlies stuffed into their whiteuniforms. It was a place intentionally designed to starve the human mind ofstimuli. It was so secret, it didnt even have a name. The handful of peoplewho knew of its existence referred to it only as the Facility.

It was off the books, not even listed in the black-intelligencebudget submitted in secret to Congress every year. The Facility was a relicfrom the Cold War. It was located near Leesburg, Virginia, and looked just likeall the other horse farms dotting the countryside thereabouts. Situated onsixty-two beautiful rolling acres, the place had been purchased by the Agencyin the early fifties, at a time when the CIA was given far more latitude anddiscretion than it was today.

This was one of several sites where the CIA debriefed EasternBloc defectors, and even a few of the Agencys own who were snared in the netof James Angleton, the CIAs notoriously paranoid genius who was in charge ofrooting out spies during the height of the Cold War. Very nasty things had beendone to people in this crypt. This was where the CIA would have likely takenAldrich Ames if they had caught him before the FBI did. The men and women whowere charged with protecting Langleys secrets would have given almost anythingfor the chance to put the screws to that traitorous bastard, but they wereunfortunately denied the opportunity.

The Facility was not a pleasant place, but it was a necessaryevil in a world chock-full of sadistic deeds and misguided, brutal men. Thiswas something Rapp was more than aware of, but that didnt mean he had to likeit. He was neither delicate nor squeamish. Rapp had killed more men than hecould even attempt to count, and hed employed his craft in a variety ofimaginative ways that spoke to the sheer depth of his skill.

He was a modern-day assassin who lived in a civilized countrywhere such a term could never be used openly. His was a nation that loved todistinguish itself from the less refined nations of the world. A democracy thatcelebrated individual rights and freedom. A state that would never tolerate theopen recruiting, training, and use of one of its own citizens for the specificpurpose of covertly killing the citizens of another country. But that wasexactly who Rapp was. He was a modern-day assassin who was conveniently calledanoperative so as to not offend the sensibilities of the cultured people whooccupied the centers of power in Washington.

If those very people knew of the existence of the Facility theywould fly into an indignant rage that would result in the partial or completedestruction of the CIA. These haters of Americas capitalistic muscle wanted toanalyze what we had done to evoke such hatred from the terrorists, all thewhile missing the point that they were using the logic of a seedy attorneydefending a rapist. The woman had on a short skirt, sexy top, and highheelsmaybe she was asking for it? America was a rude and arrogant country runby selfish, colonialist men who were out to exploit the resources of lessercountriesmaybe we were asking for it?

Under their narrow definition the Washington elite would callthis place a torture chamber. Rapp, however, knew what real torture was, and itwasnt this. This was coercion, it was sensory deprivation, it wasinterrogation, but it wasnt real torture.

Real torture was causing a person so much unthinkable pain thathe or she begged to be killed. It was hooking alligator clips to a manstesticles and sending jolts of searing electricity through his body, it wasgang-raping a woman day after day until she slipped into a coma, it was forcinga man to watch as his wife and children were sodomized by a bunch of thugs, itwas making a man eat his own excrement. It was monstrous, it was barbaric, andit could also be wildly ineffective. Time and time again such methods provedthat most prisoners would say or do almost anything to stop the pain, sign anyconfession, create terrorist plots that didnt exist, even turn on their ownparents.

Rapp was a practical man, however, and the prisoner sittingcuffed to the chair on the other side of the glass knew firsthand what realtorture was. The organization he worked for was notorious for its treatment ofpolitical prisoners. If anyone was deserving of a good beating it was this vilebastard, but still there were other things to consider.