He laid the photo, the book, and the gun on the table and looked at them one by one as the rain once more picked up and banged against his window.
He disassembled the gun and found it to be simply a gun. From the ease with which the elements came apart and went back together, Robie concluded that the agency had already taken it apart looking for clues as well. He had already checked the mag. It was a super-high-capacity configuration, thirty-three rounds. It was standard ammo that Robie had seen a million times, although the elongated mag wasn’t typical.
Thirty-three rounds to do the job, Reel? Who would have thought?
There was also a titanium safety plunger. It reduced friction, made the trigger pull lighter, and increased your accuracy. Robie used one on his own weapon, although it was probably overkill.
Still, Reel clearly paid attention to the details.
The grip was stippled for better tackiness. It wasn’t merely a slip-on; the frame had been altered with the embossed pattern etched right into the hardware.
Robie figured a soldering iron had been used to make the stipple on the Glock’s polymer frame. He had done the same with his weapons early on. In fact, he and Reel had learned how to stipple from a senior field agent named Ryan Marshall, who swore by the process.
He next looked at the customized sight. It was a nice piece of engineering. Robie squinted to see the name on it. It bore the initials PSAC.
He Googled it and came up with the Pennsylvania Small Arms Company. He’d never heard of them, but there were lots of such companies. Obviously, Reel had not been happy with the Glock sight for some reason. Again, details.
He laid the gun aside and studied the photo. Reel was standing next to a large man, easily six-four. He looked about fifty, built like an athlete going to pot. There was an edge of red next to the man. It might have been another person dressed in that color or a sign or a car, Robie couldn’t be sure. And unless he had the negative or the photo card it came from he couldn’t see if there was anything there that could be enlarged.
He studied Reel’s image. She was tall even in flats. And unlike her companion, there was not an ounce of fab on her. Her gaze was pointed straight at the camera. This was of course not the first image Robie had seen of the woman. But each time he did see her picture, it was like he was looking at a different person.
We were all chameleons to a certain extent.
Yet he felt like he was coming to understand Reel better each time he saw her likeness or learned a new bit of information about her. It was like layers of an onion being peeled away.
She appeared calm, self-assured without being overconfident. The limbs were held loosely, but Robie could sense an inner tightness, signaling that they could be deployed as needed in a second. She seemed to balance herself on the balls of her feet, her weight equally distributed, whereas most people stood either too far forward or back on their feet. This would delay them maybe a second or two in movement. In most people’s lives that wouldn’t matter.
In the lives of Reel and Robie it mattered a lot.
The lips were fuller in this picture. The lipstick was red, nearly as red as that edge of something in the photo. Robie turned the photo at various angles to see if it helped him to discern what the thing could be.
It didn’t.
He put the photo down and turned to the book, a history of World War II. He paged through some of it looking for marginalia that Reel might have left there, but found none.
And even if there had been something left in the book, Robie had to assume that the agency would have already deleted it somehow. That they had left the book, gun, and photo told Robie that they had found nothing in them. Otherwise the items wouldn’t have been left in the locker for Robie to examine. He was convinced that they wanted him to find and kill Jessica Reel. But he was beginning to doubt whether they wanted him to find out the truth behind her actions.
He laid the book aside, rose, and looked out the window. Reel was out there somewhere, probably working out the details of her next hit. Julie was out there somewhere, probably doing her homework. But maybe she was also thinking of their encounter yesterday.
And Nicole Vance was out there trying to find Reel, though she didn’t know it. That situation was only going to get more complicated.
Two hours later, while he was still staring down at the items he’d taken from Reel’s locker, his phone buzzed. He looked at the message on the screen. Janet DiCarlo wanted to see him. But not at the last place they met. It was out in Middleburg. Probably her house, from the look of the address.
Robie responded to the message, pulled on his jacket, locked up Reel’s gun, book, and photo in his wall safe, and headed out.
He hoped DiCarlo was ready to give him some answers. If not, he wasn’t sure what his next step would be. But he could sense Reel pulling farther and farther ahead of him.
Chapter 29
It was growing dark as he set out, and the drive took over an hour with traffic. Robie picked up speed but then had to slow down as he wound his way through some small towns on the way to DiCarlo’s house. He wondered how the woman enjoyed the commute every day from here. He assumed she didn’t. Most Washington-area commuters spent years of their lives sitting in traffic plotting intricate ways to kill their fellow rule-breaking motorists.
Robie slowed as he approached the turnoff. It was a long, winding gravel road that split two tall pine groves. The house was brick, old, and there were three cars parked in the front motor court.
Considering what had happened to Jim Gelder, Robie had expected to be stopped before now, but maybe they had seen who he was on long-range surveillance. He turned off the car and got out, making no sudden movements because he didn’t want to be shot.
Two men appeared from the shadows. They were Robie’s height, hard and muscled like tree knots. They checked his ID, let him keep his weapon, and escorted him into the house. They led him down a narrow, dark hall to a door and then departed.
Robie knocked and a voice inside told him to enter.
He opened the door and walked in. DiCarlo sat behind her desk. She looked worried and disheveled.
That was the first thing Robie noticed.
The second thing he noticed was the pistol resting on top of the desk.
He paused at the doorway. “Everything okay?” he asked, although he knew it clearly wasn’t.
“Please sit down, Mr. Robie.”
He closed the door behind him, walked across a small square oriental rug, and sat in the chair opposite her.
“Your security perimeter is a little soft,” he noted.
Her expression told him that she was aware of this. “The two men out there I would trust with my life,” she said.
Robie quickly read between those lines. “And they’re the only ones you trust?”
“Intelligence is not a simple field in which to work, it’s always changing.”
“Today your friend, tomorrow your enemy,” translated Robie. “I get that. I’ve actually lived that.” He put his hands over his stomach. He did so to allow his right hand to inch closer to the gun in his holster. His gaze went to her weapon and then to DiCarlo’s face.
“You want to talk about it?” he said. “If the number two is worried about her security and can’t trust folks outside her immediate protection circle, that’s probably something I should know about.”
DiCarlo’s hand went to her pistol, but Robie got there first.
“I was going to put it away,” she said.
“Leave it where it is,” said Robie. “And don’t reach for it again unless someone is shooting at you.”
She sat back, clearly upset at what she probably deemed insubordination on his part. But then her features cleared.
“I guess if I’m paranoid, why shouldn’t you be?” she said.
“We can agree to agree on that. But why the paranoia?”
“Gelder and Jacobs are dead,” she replied.
“Reel did it. She’s on the outside
.”
“Is she?”
“What do you know that makes you think she isn’t? When we spoke last you were more her advocate than anything else.”
“Was I?”
DiCarlo rose and went over to the window. The drapes were closed and she made no move to part them.
Robie began to wonder if there was long-range surveillance out there.
“You tell me,” he said.
She turned back to him. “You’re probably too young to remember much about the Cold War. And you’re certainly too young to have worked for the agency during it.”
“Okay. Is that what we’re back to here, the Cold War? Where people are constantly switching sides?”
“I can’t answer that definitively, Mr. Robie. I wish I could. What I can tell you is that there have been troubling developments over the last few years.”
“Like what?”
She blurted out, “Missions that never should have been. Missing personnel. Money moved from here to there and then it disappeared. Equipment sent to places it should not have been sent to and it also disappeared. And that’s not all. These things happened in discreet quantities over long periods of time. Taken singly they didn’t seem to be all that remarkable. But when one looks at them together…” She stopped talking, seemingly exhausted by her outburst.
“And are you the only one who’s done that?” asked Robie. “Looked at them collectively?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Missing personnel. Like Reel?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What are you sure of?”
She sat back down. “That something insidious is going on, Mr. Robie. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Jessica Reel. What I do know is that it’s reached a crisis point.”
“Does Evan Tucker share your concerns?”
DiCarlo passed a hand over her forehead. She was about to answer when Robie heard the sounds. He pulled his gun with one hand and hit the table light with the other, knocking it off the desk and plunging them into darkness.
He reached across the desk and grabbed hold of DiCarlo’s arm. “Get under the kneehole of your desk and stay there.”
He groped on the desk, found her gun, and handed it to her. “Kept up with your certifications?”
“Yes,” she gasped.
“Good,” he said tersely. “Good.”
The next moment Robie was on the move.
He knew exactly what the sounds had represented. He had heard them many times over his career.
Two muzzle blasts equaled two long-distance rifle shots.
This was followed by the sonic signatures of the rounds in the air.
Two thunks represented the impact of those rounds hitting flesh. The last two thunks were the dead bodies of DiCarlo’s trusted security team hitting the dirt.
Her secure perimeter was gone.
Now it was just Robie between DiCarlo and whoever else was out there.
He thumbed a number on his phone but the call didn’t go through. He looked at the bars. He had four. But the call wouldn’t go through.
Because they were jamming the signal. Which meant there was more out there to confront than a single sniper.
He opened the door to the room, shot through the opening, and moved down the hall.
Chapter 30
Robie peeked out the front window. Lying facedown in the motor court were the two guards who had admitted him to the house. He backtracked down the hall, through the kitchen, found a hard-line phone, and punched in Blue Man’s number. It rang twice and was picked up.
“Ms. DiCarlo?” said Blue Man, who was obviously seeing the number on his caller ID.
“It’s Robie. I was meeting with DiCarlo at her house when shots were fired. Her security team is dead. I’m the only thing between her and whatever is out there. I need backup now.”
“Done,” said Blue Man, and he clicked off.
Robie put down the phone and looked around. He was debating whether to go back and stay with DiCarlo—to form an inner hardened circle around her—and wait for help to arrive. That seemed like a sound plan, only they were in the middle of nowhere and help would take some time in coming.
If he retreated to DiCarlo he would give a clear tactical advantage to the opponent. They could encircle them, close in, and with superior firepower it would quickly be over. A grenade tossed through the window would be enough.
So other things being equal, that meant Robie had to go on the offensive. That was okay. He was more comfortable attacking than defending.
Dead men out front meant the shooter had to be positioned there. But with the men dead that position could have changed.
Robie put himself in the mind of the shooter.
What would I do?
It was what Robie would call a plus-one situation. You think one tactical step ahead but you don’t try to be too cute about it.
Dead out front. Use the rear. They do the plus-one analysis and conclude that Robie would think that far ahead and opt to go out the front.
So Robie did the plus-two and headed out the rear.
Of course, if there were two snipers, front and back, his chess playing was useless and he was dead.
No shots came as he exited the house. He moved away from the door and behind a tree where he could gain a bit of surveillance time while being somewhat shielded. It was dark, so he wouldn’t be able to see much except for perhaps movement. Yet even if he did see the shooters it would be nearly impossible to hit them with a pistol shot if they were any real distance away.
After seeing nothing out there he slipped out from behind the tree and made his way to the right side of the house. In his mind he fixed the dead men’s positions. From there he reverse engineered the trajectory lines necessary to kill them.
The only spot was the knoll about a quarter mile away. He had seen it when he’d driven up. There was a break in the trees there.
High ground was good ground for long-distance murdering. Any competent sniper could have made those kill shots.
He peered up toward the knoll, looking for any sign of the shooter.
Could it be Jessica Reel on the other end of that sniper rifle?
He got down on his belly and slid forward until he was behind his car. From there he could see the two bodies. He was able to grab the leg of the closest dead man and pulled the body behind the car. Robie saw that the round had gone right through the man’s neck, severing the spine on the way out.
Instant kill.
He only glanced over at the other body, but he knew the man had probably suffered the same sort of mortal wound.
Hitting a torso at this distance was not hard if you knew what you were doing. Nailing the spine on an in-and-out was a little more problematic, especially at night. Whoever was out there knew his way around a long barrel and scope. Which meant he could nail Robie just as easily.
He opened the car door and slipped inside.
A plan had hit him in the last few seconds.
He intended to execute it in the next few seconds.
Keeping low, he slid over to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and put the car in gear.
Then what he thought might happen did.
A round slammed through the driver’s-side window, sending shards of glass over him.
They were waiting for him in front. Which meant they had stopped at the plus-one analysis. That lifted his spirits a bit. Now if he could only survive the next few minutes.
He revved the engine and popped it into reverse.
A round hit the front tire, exploding it.
The car backed up, bumping along with the ruined tire, which quickly shed rubber until he was basically running on the rim.
But he didn’t have to go fast. He just needed to go.
Using his side mirror as a guide, he made the turn and sped along the side of the house. At the same time he was dialing the number in DiCarlo’s house, which he had memorized from the hard-line phone’s screen.
&n
bsp; “Yes?” DiCarlo’s voice was shaky and Robie could hardly blame her.
He told her the situation and what he was attempting to do. “The signal will be me blowing the horn,” he said.
With the shooters out front, probably at the knoll, he had some time. He backed the car to the rear door of the house, shielding it from the sight line of any gunner who might be back here.
He blew the horn. The back door instantly opened and DiCarlo appeared. As Robie had instructed her, she kept low and scuttled over to the car, getting in the rear door and slamming it shut behind her.
“Stay down,” Robie called out.
He put the car in gear and drove back around to the front. He was exposing himself to fire here, but he had no choice. There was only one road in and out.
The rounds started pinging off the car’s frame and shattering windows as soon as they reached the front. Robie heard DiCarlo gasp and then groan. He poked his head over the seat.
Blood was pouring from a wound in her chest. She’d been hit, probably by a ricochet.
Another shot tore up his left rear tire. Now he had two bad wheels.
He also sensed the shots getting closer and more accurate. That meant the shooters had left the knoll and were moving in for the kill.
Robie pulled up next to the Range Rover and parked beside it. He got out, searched the body of the guard lying next to it, and found the keys. He looked at the Rover’s frame, glass, and tires.
Armored, bulletproof, and run-flats, he concluded.
He opened the rear door of his car and managed to drag out DiCarlo. Her breathing was ragged. He lifted her into the Rover’s backseat as shots started clanging off the vehicle’s frame.
He pulled his pistol and fired some shots back. He knew he couldn’t hit anything at this distance, but it might slow their advance a bit.
He climbed in the passenger side, slid over to the driver’s seat, and started the truck.
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