Vince Flynn - The Last Man: A Novel

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To all of my teachers and coaches at Saint Thomas Academy who taught me that to succeed in life, you need to raise the bar, not lower it.

T O my agent and friend Sloan Harris, for another smooth contract negotiation; you always come through. To Kristyn Keene at ICM, congrats on your promotion, and to Shira Schindel, who will be taking over for everyones favorite assistant. To Chris Silbermann, for a stellar job negotiating the extension with CBS Films. To Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and Nick Wechsler, for inching the movie ever closer to reality. I wish I had your patience. To Rob Richer, who continues to enlighten me on espionage, terrorism, and geopolitics. You truly are one of the good guys.

To my editor and publisher Emily Bestler, thank you for fifteen years of a great partnership and more to come. To Kate Cetrulo and Caroline Porter at Emily Bestler Books, for taking care of all the details I miss and gently reminding me that I need to hand in my homework. To Jeanne Lee, you never disappoint. Thanks for another great cover. To Al Madocs, my goal is that one of these years I will not have to put you in the acknowledgments, but for now, Im sorry, yet again, for putting you through the wringer. To David Brown, of all the people I work with, no one makes me laugh more. You are a joy to work with, and so is Ariele Fredman, who we all know really runs the department. To Judith Curr and Louise Burke, thank you for all your continued support. To Carolyn Reidy, for one of the smoothest, most business-minded contract negotiations that I have ever been involved in. It is an honor to still be part of the Simon & Schuster family after fifteen years.

Thanks to a lot of prayers and great medical care, Im feeling better than Ive felt in years. To all the friends and family in the Twin Cities and beyond who have continued to support my family through prayers, well wishes, and great kindness, I am humbled. To Dr. Bill Utz and Dr. Eugene Kwon and the amazing people you work withcancer sucks, but somehow you make the journey enjoyable. To Dr. Douglas Olson, my radiologist, you are in my prayers every day. To my friend Dr. Mike Nanne, I am in awe of your courage. To Misty Mills, Paul Hesli, Leslie Vadnais, Jodi Bakkegard, and Cristine Suihkonen, for all that you do for my family.

To my darling wife, Lysa, who has always been wise beyond her years, thank you for giving me some of that wisdom when I really needed it. Now if I could just get some of that grace from you, Id really have things moving in the right direction. You are my favorite thing about life.

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN

T HE four dead men were lined up on the living room floor of the safe house. Mitch Rapp started with the one on the left. The bearded face, the dark, lifeless eyes, and the dime-sized bullet hole that marked the center of the mans forehead were all expected. One bullet, nice and neatthe way Rapp would have done it. The next two bodyguards looked the same, including red pucker marks in the center of their brows. The fourth Afghani was a different story. Hed been shot through the back of the head. A quarter of his face was now a jagged crater of flesh, blood, and bone. The exit wound told him the man had been shot by something a lot bigger than a 9mmprobably a .45 caliber with ammunition that pancaked and tumbled for maximum damage. There was nothing about this mess to give Rapp any assurance that things would be fine, but this last little twist cracked open the door on something he did not want to consider.

Rapp set the troubling thought aside for a second, tried to imagine how it had gone down. The early signs pointed toward a well-coordinated assault. The perimeter security had been breached; phone line, cameras, motion sensors, heat sensors, and even the pressure pads had all been taken off-line. The backup connection through the satellite dish on the roof had also been disabled. Whoever had attacked the safe house had the knowledge and skill to hit the place without setting off a single alarm and alerting the quick-reaction force less than a mile away at the air base. According to the experts at Langley this was never supposed to happen. Four years earlier they had claimed the safe house was impregnable against any threat that the Taliban or any other local group could come up with. Rapp had told those same experts that they were full of shit. Hed never seen an impregnable safe house for the simple reason that people had to come and go.

As with most CIA safe houses, this one was intentionally bland. There was no American flag flown out front and there were no snappy Marines standing post at the main gate. This was a black site where the more unpleasant aspects of the war had been coordinated. Langley didnt want any official records of the comings and goings of the drug dealers, warlords, arms dealers, local politicians, police, and Afghan Army officers who were on the take.

The house looked like your run-of-the-mill two-story blockhouse in Jalalabad. There were quite a few upgrades that made it unique, but from the outside it looked dingy and run-down just like all the other houses in the neighborhood. The cinderblock wall that surrounded the property was coated with a special resin designed to prevent it from exploding into a million pieces and shredding the house in the event of a car bomb. The simple-looking front door contained a one-inch steel plate and a reinforced steel frame. All of the windows were bulletproof Plexiglas and the high-tech security cameras and sensors were concealed so as to not attract the attention of the neighbors. Langley had even taken the unusual precaution of buying the houses on each side and moving in the bodyguards and their families. All to protect one man.

Joe Rickman was the most cunning and brilliant operative Rapp had ever worked with. Theyd known each other for sixteen years. At first Rapp didnt know what to think of him. Rickman was pure vanilla. There wasnt a single physical characteristic about him that was memorable. At five-feet-ten he was neither tall nor short. His mousy brown hair matched his dull brown eyes, and his weak chin completed the bland lines of his roundish face. On the rare occasion that you heard him speak, he was never animated and his voice was pure monotonethe kind of thing that could put the most restless baby to sleep.

Rickmans forgettable face allowed him to blend in and those who met him were almost underwhelmed by his presence. For Rickman that was just fine. Much of his success was built on fools underestimating him. Hed worked for the CIA for twenty-three years and it was rumored that he had never set foot inside headquarters. Only a few months earlier Rapp had asked him if the rumor was true. Rickman responded with a soft smile and said that hed never been invited.

At the time, Rapp took the comment as a self-deprecating attempt at a little levity. Later he realized Rickman was dead serious. Rickman was one of those people who were tolerated only during tough timesusually war. For the last eight years hed run Americas clandestine war in Afghanistan. More than a billion dollars in cash had passed through his hands. Most of it was used to bribe people into playing on the right team, but a fair amount of the money was used to kill enemies and for a laundry list of other unpleasant things that went with the territory. People back at Langley didnt want to know what Rickman was up to. They only wanted results, and that was something Rickman was exceedingly good at. Underneath Rickmans bland faade was a cunning mind that was perfectly suited to the duplicitous, infinitely complicated world of espionage.