Consent to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

city. The second stories consisted of offices and a few apartments. Coleman and his team had done a good job. This was a perfect site for the takedown.
    Rapp stepped around a foul-smelling puddle of liquid and checked the windows on the second story. Only two lights were on. They were both near the middle of the block. The street lights at both ends had been taken care of earlier in the week along with seven other lights in the neighborhood. One of Coleman’s men had walked around with a .22-caliber silenced pistol and shot them out. It was Urban Espionage 101. Their way of prepping the battlefield. They’d monitored the police scanner while doing it to make sure no one had called it in. In a big city like this it would take months before the lights would get fixed. And in the meantime someone like Khalil would have a few days to adjust to the change in his environment.
    Coleman reported that they’d watched Khalil walk home that first night after they’d shot out the lights. He didn’t even notice the change. Rapp couldn’t believe it. This guy was incredibly stupid. Had no concept of the gravity of the situation he’d involved himself in. Here he was recruiting young men to go off and fight for his extremist arcane view of Islam, and he honestly thought he was safe just because a liberal Canadian official was afraid of being labeled intolerant.
    Rapp was a soldier in a war, and this Khalil was an enemy combatant. No, that wasn’t right. If he’d gone into battle himself he would’ve been a combatant and maybe Rapp could have given the man an ounce of respect. Like suicide bombers. Politics aside, calling them cowards couldn’t be further from the truth. It took a pair of balls to strap on a vest filled with explosives, walk into a crowd, and blow yourself up. It also took a sick, twisted, and warped mind, but they weren’t cowards.
    Rapp would not lose any sleep over this one. Not that he normally did anyway. Khalil was a coward. He stood up in his minbar, the pulpit in a mosque, every Friday and spewed his vitriolic hatred for the West and especially America. He poisoned the young minds of impressionable men and duped them into joining his jihad. Then he and his fellow cowards enslaved these young men and turned them into human bombs. Khalil risked nothing, and Rapp would feel nothing.
    Rapp reached the other end of the alley. It was perfectly dark. A sliver of a moon was rising in the east, barely adding to the ambient light of the city itself. The wall where he wanted to stage the incident was just as Coleman had said. A good ten feet of brick and then a Dumpster. The concealment was ideal. Even a worthy adversary would have little chance against an ambush like this. Of course if it was a worthy adversary, he’d skip the knife and use the silenced gun. Rapp’s eyes adjusted to the extremely faint light. He squatted down to get a better look at the ground and found a soda can and several beer bottles. He quietly picked them up with his gloved hands and set them under the Dumpster. The last thing he needed was to kick something like a beer bottle and alert the target that he was behind him.
    Rapp settled in against the brick wall. Any minute now. He’d timed his arrival so he wouldn’t be left standing around exposed for too long. Coleman’s voice came over his earpiece and announced that Khalil was locking the front door to the mosque. Several men were standing outside talking to him. Nothing unusual, reported Coleman. Now Khalil was on the move and headed Rapp’s way.
    Rapp leaned against the wall. Flexed his legs and hands. Cracked his neck to the left and then the right. The blood was flowing, his heart rate was right where he wanted it to be. He was at that perfect equilibrium between being too loose or too tight. He was poised on the balls of his feet, ready to get it over with.
    The first sign of trouble came almost immediately. Coleman’s gravelly voice came over Rapp’s earpiece with a tone of