Дэвид Балдаччи - The Guilty

“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.”

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.