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  “I have more homework to do. The connection between Gelder and Jacobs is where I’ll start.”

  “If there is one.”

  “A word of caution, sir.”

  Tucker looked at him. “I’m listening.”

  “Reel has gone from low-level to high in one step. She could be doing a zigzag route to throw us off.”

  “That presumes she has more targets.”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt of that.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “And your word of caution?”

  “What if she decides to keep moving up the agency’s hierarchy?”

  “Then there’s only one slot left. Me.”

  “Right.”

  “I have security.”

  “So did Jim Gelder.”

  “My security is better.”

  “But so is Jessica Reel,” replied Robie.

  “Pretty damn ironic that this country gave her the skills she’s now using against us,” grumbled Tucker.

  “You gave her another set of skills, sir. The most important one she already had.”

  “And what skill was that?”

  “Nerve. Most people think they have it. Almost all of them are wrong.”

  “You have that skill too, Robie.”

  “And I’m going to need it now. Every bit I’ve got.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  THE DRIVE BACK TO HIS apartment took Robie only about thirty minutes at this time of the morning, but it felt like thirty hours.

  He had a lot on his mind.

  What he had said to Tucker and what Tucker had said back to him had commingled in his brain like a soupy mess. He really didn’t know what to make of the meeting with the DCI.

  The texts from Reel had convinced Robie that she was working alone. This was personal to the woman. You don’t miss your adversary and then say you’re half glad that was the case. It was clear, though, that she was trying to get inside his head. Her subtle references to right and wrong, advising him to watch his back, were classic manipulation techniques to make him doubt both his mission and his trust in the agency. She was good—there was no question about that.

  Robie and Reel had received the same level of training, come up through the same systems, the same ranks, had the same protocols grafted onto their professional souls. But they were different. Robie would have never once thought of texting an opponent like that. He usually took the more direct route to his goal. Whether it was a gender thing or not he didn’t know and didn’t care. The differences were real, that’s what was important.

  It was possible Reel could have changed. But then it was also possible she was exactly who she had always been.

  He got back to his apartment building, parked in the underground garage, and rode the elevator up to his floor. He checked the hallway for anything unusual, then unlocked the door and punched in the disarming code on the security panel.

  He put on a pot of coffee, made a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and sat in the window seat of his living room. He drank the coffee, ate the sandwich, and studied the rain that had started to pour outside. It was surely fouling a rush hour into the city that was miserable in the sunshine, much less with slicked roads and buckets of water falling on windshields.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tiny white object. It had disintegrated more in his pocket, but it was still there. He needed to find out exactly what it was. He had found it at both kill sites.

  Once could be a coincidence. Twice was a pattern.

  And if Reel had left this, there had to be a reason.

  He poured a second cup of coffee, sat at his desk, and clicked the keys on his laptop. Doug Jacobs’s life spread across his screen like blood on a test strip.

  It would have been an interesting life to the layman, but a rather ordinary one by Robie’s standards. Jacobs had been an analyst and then a handler. He had never fired a weapon on behalf of his country. Until his violent death he had never been wounded in his line of work.

  He had killed many—from a distance and using people like Robie to pull the actual trigger. There was nothing wrong with that. Men like Robie needed people like Jacobs to accomplish their missions as well.

  Jacobs had worked with Reel on five different occasions over three years. No problems, not even the slightest execution hiccup. All targets had been eliminated and Reel had come home safe to be deployed again.

  He wasn’t sure the pair had ever met face-to-face. There wasn’t anything in the record to show they had. That was not unusual. Robie had never met any of his handlers. The agency subscribed to the Chinese wall policy on operatives. The less people knew about each other, the less they could tell if they were captured and tortured.

  Robie discounted any issues in Jacobs’s personal life. With Reel’s being involved, this had to emanate from his professional life.

  So many successful missions. No problems. Then Reel had shot Jacobs in the back while she was supposedly on a mission in the Middle East to end the life of someone America could not tolerate being in power.

  Finding nothing in Jacobs’s file, Robie opened the far larger digital history of James Gelder.

  Gelder had been a lifelong public servant starting in the military, all in the intelligence sector. He had risen quickly and was seen as a likely successor to Evan Tucker—unless the president decided to make a political statement and appoint some Capitol Hill banger whose only connection to intelligence was that he had none.

  Evan Tucker was the public face of the agency, to the extent it had one. He was more hands-on than some of his predecessors, but at the operations level it was Gelder’s ball to carry across the goal line.

  Robie wondered who would replace him. Would anyone want the job, seeing how it had ended for Gelder?

  Robie started way back at the beginning, before Gelder had even joined the agency and was still in the Navy. Then he methodically worked his way forward. The man had had an exemplary career and the respect that Robie had for him only increased.

  He came to the end of the file and sat back.

  So why would Jessica Reel kill him? If this was personal, what would the reason be? Robie could find no connection between Reel and Gelder. As Evan Tucker had said, Gelder had had no direct hand in the Ahmadi mission other than to give it his official blessing. And Robie could find no other evidence that Gelder had worked with Reel either directly or indirectly.

  He hit some computer keys to exit out of the file, but a crack of thunder distracted him and he hit a couple of other keys by accident. The page he was looking at was instantly reformatted. Headers and footers and other electronic gibberish sprang forth.

  Shit.

  He couldn’t change the page; it was a read-only document, of course.

  He hit some keys to try and get out of this new, if accidental, format, but nothing seemed to work. He was about to try again when he looked down at the bottom of the page. In a very faint font, so faint he needed to turn on his desk lamp to see it better, was one word in brackets.

  [Deleted]

  Robie stared at the faded word like it was a ghost appearing on his screen.

  Shit again.

  He immediately paged back through Gelder’s file and found twenty-one instances of [Deleted].

  He went back through Jacobs’s file, hit the same key combo, and found nineteen such deletions.

  He sat back.

  He had expected some censorship, but they had basically electronically redacted the whole damn thing. Who “they” were could include either only certain unknown persons, or the entire agency from Tucker on down.

  He opened Reel’s official file, and after performing the same keystrokes on this document, he found it littered with the [Deleted] mark.

  They want me to investigate this, but they’ve tied my arms and my legs together. They’ve lied to me by not telling me the whole story.

  He grabbed his phone to call
Blue Man, but stopped, his finger hovering over the keypad.

  Blue Man had sounded very unusual during their last call. He had wanted Robie to come in, ostensibly so his burns could be attended to. But he had given Robie another location, and this made him wonder if the burns were uppermost on Blue Man’s agenda.

  There was clearly something going on here to which Robie was not attuned.

  He rose and went to the window and stared out at the rain, as though the messy weather would somehow clear his thinking.

  It did and it didn’t.

  It did in that Robie decided he would go in to see Blue Man. But he would not mention what he had just discovered. He would see how it played out. He would see if Blue Man brought it up or whether he was playing for a side other than Robie’s. Yesterday this would have been unthinkable. But yesterday what Robie had just seen on the screen would have been unthinkable too.

  His thinking was far less clear when it came to Jessica Reel. He was beginning to have doubts there. Severe ones.

  Nothing personal, she had said.

  Yet Robie was beginning to think that somehow this couldn’t get any more personal for the woman. And if that were the case he had to find out why.

  CHAPTER

  18

  AS HE WAS PULLING OUT of his garage Robie heard his phone ring. He looked at the screen and groaned. She had called many times and he had never called back. He was hoping she would just stop phoning. But it didn’t seem she was getting the message.

  On impulse he hit the answer button. “Yeah?”

  “What the hell game are you playing, Robie?”

  Julie Getty sounded just like she had the last time they had spoken. Slightly ticked off. Slightly mistrustful. Well, she actually sounded really pissed off and vastly mistrustful.

  And he couldn’t really blame her.

  “Not sure what you mean?”

  “I mean, when someone leaves you twenty-six voice mails, it ‘might’ be a sign they want to talk to you.”

  “So how’s life treating you?”

  “Shitty.”

  “Seriously?” Robie said cautiously.

  “No, not seriously. Jerome’s been everything as advertised. In fact, maybe too good. I feel like I’m Huck Finn back living with the Widow Douglas.”

  “I wouldn’t hold that against him. A normal, boring life is severely underrated.”

  “But you’d know all about how I was doing if you’d called me back!”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “You wimped out on me and you know it. I even went by your place, but you moved out. I waited for hours five separate times until I figured that out. Then I kept looking in the obits for your picture because I figured you were a man who kept his word. And if you didn’t contact me it was because you must be dead. I only tried to call one more time for the hell of it.”

  “Look, Julie.”

  She snapped, “You promised me. I normally discount shit like that, but I trusted you. I really trusted you. And you let me down.”

  “You do not need someone like me in your life. I think past events showed you that was the case.”

  “Past events showed me that you were a man who did what he said he would do. Only then you stopped.”

  “It was for your own good,” Robie said.

  “Why don’t you let me decide stuff like that?”

  “You’re fourteen. You don’t get to make those sorts of choices.”

  “So you say.”

  “You can hate me and curse me and think I’m a pile of shit. But in the end it’s for the best.”

  “No thinking needed. You are a pile of shit.”

  The line went dead and Robie dropped the phone on the seat.

  He shouldn’t feel bad about this, he really shouldn’t. Everything he had told Julie Getty was the truth.

  So why do I feel like the world’s biggest asshole?

  A half mile from his apartment he pulled to the curb and got out. He opened the door of the shop and went inside. He was instantly hit by a thick wall of scents. If he’d had allergies he would have started sneezing.

  He walked to the counter where a young woman was working. He pulled out the tiny white fragments and set them on the counter as she turned to him.

  “Strange question, I know,” he began. “Could you tell me what kind of flower this is?”

  The young woman peered down at the fragments of petals. “That’s not really a flower, sir.”

  “It’s all that was left.”

  She poked it with a finger and held it up to her nose. She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I only work here part-time.”

  “Is there anybody else who can help me?”

  “Give me a sec.”

  She stepped into a back room and a few moments later a woman wearing spectacles came out. She was older and heavier and for some reason Robie concluded that she was the owner of this florist shop.

  “Can I help you?” she asked politely.

  Robie repeated his question. The woman picked up what remained of the petal, held it close to her eyes, took off her glasses, examined it more closely, and then took a whiff.

  “White rose,” she said decisively. “A Madame Alfred Carriere.” She pointed to a spot on the petal. “You can see just a hint of pink blush there. And the smell is strong spicy-sweet. The Madame Plantier by comparison is all white and the smell is quite different—at least it is to someone who knows roses. I’ve got some Carriere in stock if you’d like to see them.”

  “Maybe another time.” Robie paused, thinking how best to phrase this. “What would you buy white flowers for? I mean, what sort of an occasion?”

  “Oh, well, white roses are a traditional wedding flower. They symbolize innocence, purity, virginity, you know, those sorts of things.”

  Robie glanced over at the young woman and found her rolling her eyes.

  “Although it is interesting,” said the older woman.

  Robie refocused on her. “What is?”

  “Well, white roses are often used at funeral services too. They represent peacefulness, spiritual love, that sort of thing.” She glanced down at the petal Robie had brought in. She put her finger on the pinkish smudge. “Although that’s another sort of symbol that I wouldn’t associate with peace.”

  “The pink part? What do you mean?”

  “Well, some people associate it with something entirely different from peace and love.”

  “What?”

  “Blood.”

  CHAPTER