The Guilty

by David Baldacci

  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.

  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.”

  Chapter

  4

  ROBIE SWAYED WITH the motion of the truck in which he was riding. Dust caught at his throat. The heat of the day seared through the canvas top. He felt like an egg about to be overcooked in a skillet.

  He rode with one other man. His spotter. Robie didn’t usually use a spotter, but Blue Man had insisted on one for this mission. And Robie had not felt up to challenging him.

  In the military, snipers were almost always deployed in two-person teams. A spotter added security and firepower, set up and calculated shots, kept on top of elements like wind that could vary shots. When the shooter got tired, which often happened because waiting to kill was an exhausting exercise, the team would switch roles and spotter would become sniper.

  But in Robie’s line of work, spotters were rarely used. The reasons were many, but mainly it was because he was not being sent into combat zones with other soldiers, where the two-person team made tactical sense. Rather, he was acting in a clandestine manner, dropped behind enemy lines with a cover story and localized assets. It was hard enough to do that with one person, much less two, particularly when you were going to parts of the world where no one else looked like you.

  Robie looked over at his spotter. Randy Gathers was in his early thirties with sandy hair and a freckled complexion. He was lean and compact, with a wiry build. He was also former military, as almost all of them were. He had met Robie and gone over the assignment in excruciating detail beforehand. It was in some ways like a golfer and his caddy, except the hole-in-one had a vastly different meaning in Robie’s world than it did on the PGA tour.

  Their plan was set, their cover story intact. They had arrived here on a freighter with a Turkish provenance, had left the harbor on a rickety bus and then switched to this truck while it was still dark.

  Now it was light and they would be at their next location in twenty minutes.

  Robie inched up the tent flap and peered out. His gaze went to the sky where it was partially clear, but a troublesome storm front was approaching.

  He looked at Gathers, who had his iPad out.

  “Supposed to hit tonight,” Gathers said. “Wind, rain, thunder.”

  “How much wind?” asked Robie.

  “Enough. Do we scrap it?”

  Robie shook his head. “Not our call. At least not yet.”

  The truck rumbled along and then deposited them at their next stop. They climbed into a car that was waiting for them. The trunk held the items they would need to perform the mission.

  Robie took the wheel and drove along routes he’d memorized as part of the mission brief. If they were stopped, which was a possibility, they had the necessary papers to get them through most roadblocks, without the trunk’s being searched. If that didn’t work, they had one option. To kill the people who had stopped them.

  Two roadblocks and no trunk searches later, they arrived at their destination.

  It was now growing dark, and the wind was picking up even more.

  Robie drove up to the overhead door of a large warehouse situated next to a river. Gathers jumped out, keyed in a code on a panel next to the door, and the overhead lumbered up. Robie pulled the car inside while Gathers closed the overhead door and secured it by sliding a locking arm through the roller track. They pulled out their equipment from the car’s trunk, and then Robie and Gathers scrubbed the vehicle down, removing all traces of their presence.

  After that Robie looked around the two-story warehouse. The place was cavernous and, except for them, empty. And most important, they were completely hidden from view.

  Rain started to ping off the warehouse’s metal roof.

  Robie looked up and his gaze seemed to pierce the roof and venture to the outside. He glanced over at Gathers, who was checking their equipment, his manner subdued probably by the prospect of having to perform in such adverse conditions.

  Robie glanced at his watch and then sent off a secure communication from his phone. The answer came back as he was halfway up a ladder that led to a catwalk on the warehouse’s second story.

  IT’S A GO.

  He put his phone away and continued his climb, reaching the catwalk and skirting down the narrow metal path until he reached the front side of the facility.