The Guilty

Chapter 3

Robie walked down the metal steps, and his feet hit American soil for the first time in a month. He looked straight ahead and saw the man in a rumpled trench coat standing next to the rear door of the black Suburban. It was as though a Cold War — era movie was unspooling in front of him in clickety-clack black-and-white film.

The vehicles were always black, and they always seemed to be Suburbans. And the people were always wearing rumpled trench coats, as though they felt inclined to confirm the stereotype.

He walked over to the SUV and climbed inside. The door closed, the trench coat got in the driver’s seat, and the Suburban pulled off.

Only then did Robie look to his right.

Blue Man gazed back at him.

His real name was Roger Walton.

But to Robie he would always be Blue Man, which had to do with his color level of leadership at the Agency. Not the highest there was, but plenty high enough for Blue Man to know all, or at least nearly all, that was going on.

As usual he wore an off-the-rack blue suit with a red tie and a collar tab. His silver hair was neatly combed, his face freshly shaved. Blue Man was old school, professional every second of his life. Nothing rattled him. Nothing altered the ingrained habits of a long career that frequently involved killing the few to keep safe the many.

By comparison, after an eleven-hour flight in the back of an air freighter piled high with cardboard boxes filled with products made by penny labor in faraway lands, Robie looked like a corpse. He didn’t feel professional. He really didn’t feel anything.

Robie didn’t break the silence. He had nothing to say. Yet. He wanted to hear it from Blue Man first.

The other man cleared his throat and said, “Obviously, it did not all go according to plan.”

Robie still didn’t speak.

Blue Man continued, “The intelligence was flawed. It often is over there, as you well know. But we have to work with what we have. The child was supposed to be with her mother. There was apparently a last-minute snafu. The mother abruptly changed her plans. The daughter was left at home. There was no time to abort without suspicion falling on our inside operative.”

Everything that Blue Man had just uttered was perfectly reasonable and, Robie knew, perfectly true. And it didn’t make him feel better in the least.

They drove for a while longer in silence.

Finally, Robie said, “How old was she?”

“Robie, you had no way of—”

“How old!”

Robie had kept his gaze on the back of the driver’s head and he saw the man’s neck muscles tighten.

“Four,” replied Blue Man. “And her name was Sasha.”

Robie knew she was young. So this should have come as no surprise. But the waves of nausea, of an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, hit him like the round he’d fired around twelve hours ago. The round that had killed four-year-old Sasha.

“Stop the car.”

“What?” This came from the driver.

“Stop the car.” Robie didn’t say this in a raised voice. His tone was level and calm yet managed to sound more deadly than if he had screamed his guts out and pulled an MP5.

The driver’s gaze hit the rearview mirror and he saw Blue Man nod.

The driver eased off the road and put the SUV in park.

Robie had opened the door before the truck had even stopped rolling. He got out on the side of the highway and started walking along the shoulder.

Blue Man reached over and closed the door. He eyed the driver, who was still watching him in the rearview obviously waiting for an order, perhaps to speed up and run over Robie.

“Just follow on the shoulder, Bennett. Put your flashers on. We don’t want any accidents.”

Bennett did so and the vehicle slowly followed Robie down the shoulder as cars and trucks whizzed by.

“Let’s hope a cop doesn’t stop us,” muttered Bennett.

“If one does I will handle it,” said Blue Man impassively.

Robie walked slowly, his muscles tight, the torn skin on his arm aching like he’d been slashed with a Ka-Bar knife. He had been told sometime ago that he would need a skin graft. It looked as if that prediction had been right.

A stiff wind pummeled him as he lumbered on; his feet felt clumsy, his senses slow. But then he hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-six hours. He had just crossed quite a few time zones and was also jet-lagged.

And he’d killed a kid.

He looked neither right nor left. He didn’t react when eighty-thousand-pound semis blew past him at seventy miles an hour, whipping his coat around him.

The SUV followed Robie for a quarter of a mile before he walked back to it and climbed into the truck, and Bennett pulled onto the highway.

“Where’s Jessica?” Robie asked.

“She’s on assignment out of the country,” said Blue Man.

“When will she be back?”

“Not for a while.”

Robie looked out the window. He needed to talk this out with Jessica Reel. She alone would be able to understand what was going on inside his head. Not even Blue Man could get all the way there.

But there was something else. Something that needed doing as soon as possible. He could feel it in every pore of his skin, in every fired synapse of his brain.

He blurted, “I need to get out in the field again. Fast. Whatever you have, let me do it.”

“I’m not sure that is advisable.”

“I need to pull the trigger again,” said Robie, his gaze now dead on Blue Man. “I need to. You must have something ready to go.”

Blue Man cleared his throat again. “We actually have a mission that we thought would be scrubbed, but is now back on.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You don’t know what it is yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take it.”

Blue Man let out a shallow breath and straightened his tie. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better to—”

Robie held up his hand and his trigger finger made the pull. “This is what I do, sir. If I can’t do this, then I am nothing. I need to know that I still can.”

“Then you’ll get the briefing papers tomorrow.” Blue Man paused. “While what happened was terribly tragic, that was not the only reason I wanted to meet with you.”

Robie turned to look at him. “What was the other reason?”

“It’s personal.” He glanced at the driver. “Bennett? The glass, please.”

Bennett hit a button on the console and an inch-thick sheet of glass slid into place, sealing off the front compartment from the back.

“Personal?” said Robie. He had nothing personal if Jessica Reel was okay.

But no, that was wrong.

He stiffened. “Julie? Is it Julie?”

Julie Getty was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been catapulted into Robie’s life sometime ago in the most violent way possible. They had both nearly died in a bus explosion. Julie’s life had been put in danger more than once because of her connection to Robie. And also to Jessica Reel.

If anything had happened to her…

But Blue Man was already holding up his hand.

“Ms. Getty is perfectly fine. It has nothing to do with her.”

“Then I don’t understand what you mean by personal. Beyond them I—”

“It’s your father,” interjected Blue Man.

Robie tried to focus on these three words. It wasn’t working. All he saw was a face transposed over Blue Man’s.

His father’s.

A hard, unrelenting countenance that Robie thought he would never, ever see again. In fact, Robie had not seen his father in over twenty years. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of memories he had not thought about for a long time. Yet now, with Blue Man’s words, they were charging at him from all corners.

“Is he dead?”

Robie’s father was at an age now where a heart attack or stroke could have claimed him.

“No.”

“What then?” said Robie sharply, tired of how Blue Man was drawing this out. It was not like the man. He was normally terse and precisely to the point. And that’s what Robie needed now.

“He’s been arrested.”

“Arrested? For what?”

“For murder.” Blue Man paused, but when Robie said nothing he added, “I thought you’d like to know.”

Robie looked away and replied, “Well, you thought wrong.”