He climbed into the rear of the other vehicle. It was an ambulance. A man dressed in blue scrubs was in the back. Robie climbed up on the gurney, where he was covered with a sheet and a surgical cap was placed on his head. He was hooked up to several drip lines, and an oxygen mask was placed on his face. The man injected a solution into Robie’s cheek that swelled his face and a few moments later turned his skin a brick red and would keep it that way for another thirty minutes.
The ambulance drove off, its singsong siren and rack lights going full bore.
They turned onto a road that ran parallel to the street that separated Robie’s shooter’s nest from the target’s building.
Two minutes later the ambulance lurched to a stop and the back doors were thrown open. Robie closed his eyes and let his breathing run shallow.
Men with guns appeared. One climbed in and barked at the man in scrubs. He replied in his native language with just the right amount of professional indignation, and then pointed at Robie. The man with the gun drew very close to Robie’s face. Then he examined the IV lines and the oxygen mask and Robie’s swollen and flaming-red face. He asked another question, which the scrubs man answered.
Then the armed man climbed out and the ambulance doors closed. The vehicle started up again.
But Robie kept his eyes shut. He didn’t open them until thirty minutes later when the ambulance stopped next to a chain-link fence.
The scrubs man tapped Robie on the shoulder and then pulled the IV lines and took off the mask. Robie climbed out, his bare feet touching cold pavement. A car was waiting next to the ambulance. He climbed inside, was handed clothes and shoes, and quickly dressed.
Thirty minutes later he was wheels up in a jump seat in the back of a UPS Boeing 777 freighter that had counted him as an extra package on board. The jumbo jet banked sharply
north and then west, and started its climb out on the long flight back to America.
Robie sat in his jump seat and pulled out the secure phone the scrubs man back in the ambulance had tossed him right before he’d exited the vehicle.
The message was waiting for him in the form of a text.
TARGET DOWN. OP EXIT SUCCESSFUL ON ALL COUNTS.
Well, Robie knew the first part. And now he knew the maid had carried out her role and gotten away, too. And he also knew that the folks on the other end of this communication were trying to put a positive spin on the whole mess.
He typed in a message on the phone and fired it off.
All he could see in his mind was the face of the little girl with curly dark hair whom he’d killed tonight. Unintentional or not, she was still dead. Nothing on earth could bring her back. And he wanted to know how the hell it had happened.
The ding signaled the answer to his query.
UNCLEAR. HIS DAUGHTER. CLASSIFIED AS COLLATERAL DAMAGE.
Collateral Damage? They were really going to try to spin that one? On me?
His finger poised over the phone’s keypad, Robie was set to fire back a response that matched the fury he was feeling. Then he slipped the phone into his pocket and slumped back against the plane’s inner wall.
He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. Burned seemingly on the insides of his eyeballs was the little face. She had looked surprised at being dead. And who could blame her? Running to her daddy, seeing him die at the same moment she too perished?
He had come close to killing a child once, but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. That had nearly cost him his career and with it his life. But this time, this time, he had done it.
He opened his eyes and bent over as the jet hit a rough patch of air and he was jostled roughly around. He turned to the side and threw up. It had nothing to do with unsettled air, and everything to do with the small face burning a hole in his brain and his belly.
He hung his head between his knees. The unflappable man he always was, always had to be, was coming apart at important seams, like the torn scar tissue on his arm.
I just killed a little girl. I murdered a little girl. She’s dead because of me.
He looked down at his trigger finger, heavily callused from all the practice rounds fired over the years. He had wondered when and if he would know it was time to walk away from all this.
He might just have found his answer.
His phone dinged again. He picked it up and looked at the screen.
BLUE MAN.
The one person other than his sometime partner Jessica Reel whom Robie could count on at an agency that would never officially recognize he even existed. Blue Man always told it to him straight, whether Robie wanted to hear it or not.
WILL BE STANDING BY WHEN YOU LAND. WE’LL TALK.
He tried to interpret the meaning behind those few words.
What was there to talk about? His trigger pull was done. The op was completed. The official response at the senseless death of a child was “collateral damage.” Robie could imagine that explanation being input on a form and that form being filed away wherever they kept such records.
On this day in a foreign land shot dead by Will Robie, one megalomaniac and one daughter of said megalomaniac.
He would be on to his next assignment, expected to forget what he had just done. Like a cornerback giving up a long touchdown pass. You shook it off, picked yourself back up, and moved on to the next play.
Only there, nobody died.
In Will Robie’s world, somebody always died.
Always.
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.