The Innocent (39 page)

“Is it straight now? Because we have a case to work.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t have dinner. And I haven’t had breakfast. There’s
a twenty-four-hour place around the corner from WFO. You know it?”

“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes,” said Robie.

He beat her there and had already ordered them both mugs of coffee when she walked in.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been home. You’re wearing fresh clothes,” he said.

“I keep a set at the office,” she replied as she sat down and picked up her coffee and took a sip. “You don’t look good,” she said.

“Should I look good?” he shot back. He wondered for a moment if she could tell he had been with another woman.

They sat in awkward silence drinking their coffees until Robie said, “How’s Julie?”

“Fidgety, depressed. I think she believes you’ve abandoned her.”

“How did you explain things to your boss about all this?”

“I skirted the line. Told him some things, didn’t tell him others.”

The waitress came over and they ordered. After she had refilled their coffees she left.

Robie studied Vance. “I’m not looking to derail your career over this, Vance.”

“You know, you can call me Nikki, if you want.”

This offer seemed to deepen Robie’s guilt. “Okay, Nikki, at the end of the day you need to be able to walk away from this with everything in your life intact.”

“I don’t think that’s possible, Robie.”

“My point is you don’t have to cover for me. It was unfair to ask it of you.”

“And my point is if I don’t cover for you the FBI will come down like a ton of bricks. Too many questions, not enough answers.”

“I’ve got some professional cover.”

“Not enough. And quite frankly, I’m not just doing it for you. If everything does come out, my butt is probably off this investigation and it’ll get so muddled we’ll probably never figure it out. And I obviously have a real problem with that happening.”

“Just so we understand each other,” said Robie.

“I’m not sure I completely get you, but that’s neither here nor
there. I’m not your shrink. I’m just working with you to see if we can put away some killers.”

“Leo Broome,” he said. “Anything found on him that would help? He said they had gotten to his wife?”

“He had nothing on him. We’re trying to trace where he came from. There was no car parked nearby that was unaccounted for. That late at night we can rule out the Metro probably. We’re checking with cabbies to see if we can determine where he was picked up.”

“Or else he could have walked,” pointed out Robie. “But there was no hotel room key card, nothing else to show where he was staying?”

“Nothing like that. But we did find one thing.”

“What was that?”

“A hoplite tattoo on his forearm identical to the one on Rick Wind’s arm. And it has to match the one Julie said her dad had on his arm.”

“So they must’ve known each other in the Army, then,” said Robie.

“What if this isn’t connected to you after all? They were in the Army together, maybe had some secret. Now it’s come back to haunt them.”

“Still doesn’t explain me and Julie walking off that bus. Or them missing you and me in front of Donnelly’s.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t. You said they
let
him escape after they killed his wife. Part of the game, you said. They might be screwing with you, but there has to be some purpose to it all.”

“I’m certain there’s an excellent purpose. I just don’t know what it is.”

“If this is a contest of sorts between you and them, there must be something in your past to account for it. Given that any thought?”

“Some. But I have to give it a lot more.”

“What line of work were you in, Robie? DCIS isn’t your real home, but somewhere else in the federal government obviously is.”

He drank his coffee, said nothing, because there was nothing he could say.

“I’m not read in, is that why your lips aren’t moving?” asked Vance.

“I don’t make the rules. Sometimes the rules suck, like now, but they’re still the rules. I’m sorry, Nikki.”

“Okay. You don’t have to answer, but hear me out, okay?”

Robie nodded.

“I think you were at Jane Wind’s apartment to kill her as some sort of sanctioned hit. Only you didn’t pull the trigger for some reason. But someone else did, from long range. You took her youngest child to safety and then got out of there. Then you got roped into investigating a crime you were present at under the cover of a DCIS badge.” She paused, studied him. “How am I doing?”

“You’re an FBI agent, I would’ve expected no less.”

“Tell me about the hit on Wind.”

“It wasn’t really sanctioned. I never should have been dialed up, but I was. Person who did it is now a burnt pile of bone.”

“Cleaning up loose ends?”

“How I see it, yeah.”

“So someone is playing with you, digging you in deep. Seems like the start of it was your going after Jane Wind. Her hubby was already dead. So she dies. The Winds are out of the way. Point one.”

Robie finished his coffee and sat up, looked more attentive. “Keep going.”

“Point two. Julie’s parents are killed. We know they were friends with the Broomes. And Rick Wind and Curtis Getty had the same tattoo on their arms. It must be from them serving together in the military. Have your people connected them up yet?”

“Still working on it.”

“Point three. So Getty, Broome, and Wind, including their spouses—or, in Wind’s case, ex-wife—are all dead.”

Robie nodded and took up the thread. “I try and make my escape on that bus. They knew that I would. Julie gets routed to the same bus by a message supposedly from her mother. We get off, the bus blows up.”

“The attack outside of Donnelly’s where you and I should have been killed?”

“More window dressing, more playing with my mind.”

“Some playing. A lot of innocent people were killed, Robie.”

“Whoever’s behind this could care less about collateral damage. They’re chess pieces to them, nothing more.”

“Well, I’d love to slap a pair of cuffs on people who think like that.”

“But what’s the endgame? Why do all of this?”

She took another sip of coffee. “So where’d you spend last night?”

The image of a naked Annie Lambert sitting astride him flashed into Robie’s mind before Vance had even finished her question.

“I didn’t sleep much,” he admitted truthfully.

Their plates of food came and they spent some time digging their way through eggs, bacon, toast, and hash browns.

When they were through, Vance pushed her plate away and said, “How do you want to attack this?”

“Priority one is keeping Julie safe. We obviously had a mole in our operation and I have to count on the Bureau.”

“We will do all we can to make sure no harm comes to her, Robie. What’s the second priority?”

“I have to find out who in my past wants me this bad.”

“You have lots of possibilities.”

“Too many. But I have to narrow it down and I have to do it fast.”

“You think this thing is on a timer?”

“Actually, I think the timer is just about up.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Take a trip, far away from here.”

Vance looked astonished. “You’re leaving?”

“No, I’m not.”

R
OBIE SAT IN
the small room that he had used as an office for the last five years. No chubby middle-aged man in a rumpled suit came to bring him yet another flash drive. He was not here for another mission. He was here to see what had come before.

The trip he had referred to with Vance had been one taken in his mind. He stared at the computer screen in front of him. Staring back at him were the reports on his last five missions that had carried him back a full year in time.

He had eliminated, at least for now, three of them. The last two had captured his attention for a couple of reasons: They were the most recent ones, and they involved targets with long arms and many friends.

He clicked a few computer keys and an image of the deceased Carlos Rivera appeared on the screen. The last time Robie had seen the Latino, he had been screaming obscenities at Robie in Underground Edinburgh. Robie had killed Rivera and the man’s bodyguards and made what he thought had been an undetected escape.

Rivera had a younger brother, Donato, who had taken over much of his brother’s cartel operations. The book on Donato was that he was every bit as ruthless as his late brother, but with far less ambition. He was content to run his drug empire without inserting himself into the political situation in Mexico. Perhaps this was also due to what had happened to his big brother. Still, he might want to avenge Carlos’s death. And if he had found out Robie’s identity through Robie’s handler, he might have the necessary information to do so.

In his mind’s eye Robie went through the events leading up to the killing of Carlos and company. After completing this process he thought,
Do I fly to Mexico and attempt to kill Donato?

Something deep in his gut told Robie that the man’s relations could care less who had gunned Rivera down. Little brother was alive and doing very well without big brother around.

So Robie moved on to the next target of interest.

Khalid bin Talal, one of the Saudi princes, a fixture on the Forbes 400 list, richer even than Rivera.

Once more Robie closed his eyes, and this time transported himself back to the Costa del Sol.

On the third night the target had walked right into his crosshairs along with the Palestinian and the Russian, geopolitically an odd couple. Talal had exited his motorcade, walked up the steps to the hulking plane. Robie had lost visual on him for a few seconds. But then Talal had sat down across from his fellow conspirators.

Robie’s shot had hit the man dead center in the head. No possibility of survival. Robie had gunned down two bodyguards, disabled the plane, executed his escape, and been on the slow ferry to Barcelona within the hour.

Clean kill, clean exit. And the truth was, bin Talal was not popular in the Muslim world. His ideas were too radical for the moderates. The ruling family was well aware that he desired to overthrow it, and it was largely at the family’s behest that Robie had been sent out on this mission. And even the Islamic fundamentalists tended to give Talal a wide berth because they did not trust his close business ties to Western capitalists.

He sat back in his chair and rubbed his temples. If he still smoked he would have lit up right now. He needed something to take his mind off a deep sense of failure. Something was staring him in the face. Perhaps it was the truth, the answer he needed. But it wouldn’t come.

He went back through the three missions previous to Rivera and bin Talal. Every step, like he had with the Latino and the Muslim. Clean executions, clean exits, all of them.

And yet if not one of them, who?

He took out his pistol and laid it on the desk in front of him, the muzzle facing away from him. He stared down at the Glock. A fine weapon, it almost always performed flawlessly. This was not a mass-produced piece. This was customized to fit his hand, his grip, and his way of shooting. Every piece was meticulously crafted to make success a foregone conclusion. But it wasn’t just about aiming straight. There were a million parts to every mission, and if any one of them failed, so did the mission. For Robie the easiest part was the actual killing. He was good at it, and had some semblance of control over events. The other parts of the puzzles often came down to others doing their job, totally outside of his control.

He had not always killed on behalf of the U.S. government. He had worked for others, all allies of the Americans. That’s what had gotten their attention. The pay was better on this side of the Atlantic, but if it had solely been about money Robie would have moved into another line of work a long time ago.

There was a reason he kept taking these assignments, kept pulling the trigger on one monster after another. He had never talked to anyone about it, and doubted he ever would. It wasn’t that the memories were too painful. It was that he had frozen that part of his mind. He was incapable of articulating a single sentence about it. That was the way he wanted it. Anything less would not allow him to function.

He rose from behind the desk, the sense of failure now profound.

His phone was buzzing as he reached the door of his car.

It was Blue Man.

They had tracked down the military ties among Curtis Getty, Rick Wind, and Leo Broome. They had all served together.

“I’m on my way,” said Robie.