The Innocent (2 page)

The others were reacting now. But they were not truly professionals. They preyed on the weak and the poorly skilled. Robie was neither. There were three of them left, but only two would be any trouble.

Robie hurled the knife and its point ended up in the third man’s chest. He dropped with a heart split nearly in half. The man behind him fired, but Robie had already moved, using the third man as a shield. The bullet hit the rock wall. Part of it stayed in the wall. Part of it ricocheted off and found purchase in the opposite wall. The man fired a second and third time, but he missed his target because his adrenaline had spiked, blown his fine motor skills and caused his aim to fail. He next executed a desperation spray and pray, emptying his mag. Bullets bounced off hard rock. One slug hit the point man in the head on a ricochet. It didn’t kill him because he’d already bled out, and the dead could not die a second time. The fifth man had thrown himself to the hard floor, hands over his head.

Robie had seen all of this. He dropped to the floor and fired one shot into the forehead of man number four. Those were the names he had given them. Numbers. Faceless. Easier to kill that way.

Man number five was now the only one left.

Five was the sole reason Will Robie had flown to Edinburgh today. The others were just collateral, their deaths meaningless in the grand scheme.

Number five rose and then backed up as Robie got to his feet. Five had no weapon. He had seen no need to carry one. Weapons were beneath him. He was no doubt rethinking that decision.

He begged. He pleaded. He would pay. An unlimited amount. Then when the pistol was pointed at him he turned to threats. What an important man he was. How powerful his friends were. What he would do to Robie. How much pain Robie would suffer. He and his whole family.

Robie did not listen to any of it. He had heard it all before.

He fired twice.

Right and left side of the brain. Always fatal. As it was tonight.

Number five kissed the stone floor, and with his last breath hurled an expletive at Robie that neither of them heard.

Robie turned and walked through the same cleft as the tour guide.

Scotland had not killed him.

He was thankful for this.

Robie slept soundly after killing five men.

He awoke at six and ate breakfast at a café around the corner from where he was staying.

Later he walked to Waverly Station next to the Balmoral Hotel, and boarded a train to London. He arrived at King’s Cross Station over four hours later and took a cab to Heathrow. The British Airways 777 lifted off later that afternoon. With a weak headwind the plane touched down seven hours later at Dulles Airport. It had been cloudy and chilly in Scotland. It was hot and dry in Virginia. The sun had long ago begun to drift low into the west. Clouds had built up during the heat of the day, but there would be no storm because there was no moisture. All Mother Nature could do was look threatening.

A car was waiting for him outside the airport terminal. There was no name on the placard.

Black SUV.

Government plates.

He got in, clicked the seat belt shut, and lifted up a copy of the
Washington Post
that sat on the seat. He gave the driver no instruction. He knew where to go.

Traffic on the Dulles Toll Road was surprisingly light.

Robie’s phone vibrated. He looked at the screen.

One word:
Congratulations
.

He put the phone back in his jacket pocket.

“Congratulations” was the wrong word, he believed. “Thanks” would be the wrong word too. He was not sure what the right one would be for killing five people.

Perhaps there was none. Perhaps silence would suffice.

He arrived at a building off Chain Bridge Road in northern Virginia. There would be no debriefing. No record of anything was better. If an investigation ensued, no one could discover a record that didn’t exist.

But if things went wrong Robie would have no official cover.

He walked to an office, not officially his, but one that he sometimes used. Even though it was late there were people working. They did not talk to Robie. They didn’t even look at him. He knew they had no idea what he did, but they also knew not to interact with him.

He sat at a desk, hit some keys on the computer, sent a few emails, and stared out a window that wasn’t really a window. It was merely a box of simulated sunlight, because an actual window was just a hole that others could get through.

An hour later a chubby man in a wrinkled suit with pasty skin walked in. They didn’t greet each other. Chubby placed a flash drive on the desk in front of Robie. Then he pivoted and left. Robie stared down at the silver object. The next assignment was already prepared. They had been coming at an increasing clip these last few years.

He pocketed the flash drive and left. This time he drove himself, in an Audi that was parked in a space in the adjacent garage. When he slid into the seat he felt comfortable. The Audi was his, had been for four years. He drove it through the security checkpoint. The guard did not look at him either.

The invisible man in Edinburgh. Robie knew how it felt.

Once he hit the public road he shifted gears and accelerated.

His phone vibrated once more. He checked the screen.

Happy Birthday.

It didn’t make him smile. It didn’t make him do anything other than drop the phone on the opposite seat and punch the gas.

There would be no cake and no candles.

As he drove, Robie thought of the underground tunnel in Edinburgh. Four of the dead men were bodyguards. They were hard, desperate men who had allegedly murdered at least fifty people over the last five years, some of them children. The fifth man with two holes in his head was Carlos Rivera. A trafficker of heroin and youngsters for prostitution, he was immensely rich and had been visiting Scotland on holiday. Robie knew, though, that Rivera actually had ostensibly been in Edinburgh to attend a high-level meeting with another criminal czar from Russia in an effort to merge their business interests. Even criminals liked to globalize.

Robie had been ordered to kill Rivera, but not because of his human and drug trafficking businesses. Rivera had to die because the United States had learned that he was planning a coup in Mexico with the aid of several high-ranking generals in the Mexican army. The resulting government would have been no friend of America, so this could not be allowed to happen. The meeting with the Russian crime czar had been the setup, the carrot. There was no czar and no meeting. The offending Mexican generals were also dead, killed by men like Robie.

When Robie arrived home he walked for two hours through the darkened streets. He ventured down by the river and watched the headlights on the Virginia side cut through the night. A police patrol boat slid past on the calm surface of the Potomac.

He stared up at the drab, moonless sky; a cake without candles.

Happy Birthday to me.

I
T WAS THREE A.M.

Will Robie had been awake for two hours. The mission set forth on the flash drive he’d been given would cause him to travel well past Edinburgh. The target was yet another well-protected man with more money than morals. Robie had been working on the task for nearly a month. The details were numerous, the margin of error was even less than with Rivera. The preparation was arduous and had taken its toll on Robie. He could not sleep. He was also not eating very much.

But he was trying to relax now. He was sitting in the small kitchen of his apartment. It was located in an affluent area with many magnificent dwellings. Robie’s building was not one of them. It was old, utilitarian in design, with noisy pipes, odd smells, and tacky carpet. Its occupants were diverse and hardworking, most just starting out in life. They left early every morning to take their place at law firms, accounting practices, and investment concerns spread over the city.

Some had chosen the public-sector route and took the subway or bus, biked, or even walked to the large government buildings housing the likes of the FBI, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve.

Robie did not know any of them, though he saw all of them from time to time. He had been briefed on all of them. They all kept to themselves, immersed in their careers, their ambitions. Robie kept to himself too. He prepared for the next job. He sweated the details because it was the only way he could survive.

He rose and stared out the window, down to the street where
only one car passed by. Robie had traveled the world for a dozen years now. And everywhere he went someone died. He could no longer remember the names of all the people whose lives he had ended. They didn’t matter to him when he was killing them and they didn’t matter to him now.

The man who had previously held Robie’s position had operated during a particularly busy time for Robie’s clandestine agency. Shane Connors had terminated nearly thirty percent more targets than Robie had in the same amount of time. Connors had been a good, sound mentor to the man who would replace him. After his “retirement” Connors had been assigned to a desk job. Robie had had little contact with him over the last five years. But there were few men Robie respected more. And thinking about Connors made Robie dwell for a bit on his own retirement. A number of years off, it would eventually happen.

If I survive.

Robie’s line of work was a young man’s game. Even at forty Robie knew he couldn’t do it another dozen years. His skills would erode too much. One of his targets would be better than he was.

He would die.

And then his thoughts came back to Shane Connors sitting behind his desk.

Robie supposed that was death too, simply by another name.

He walked to the front door, placed his eye against the peephole. Though he didn’t personally know any of his neighbors, that did not mean he wasn’t curious about them. He was, in fact,
very
curious. It wasn’t hard to explain why.

Their lives were
normal
.

Robie’s was not.

Seeing them going about their everyday lives was his only way to stay connected to reality.

He had even thought about starting to socialize with some of them. Not only would it provide good cover for him—attempting to blend in—but also it would help prepare him for the day when he would no longer do what he did now. When he might have a normal life of sorts.

Then his thoughts turned, as they inevitably did, back to the upcoming mission.

One more trip.

One more kill.

It would be difficult, but then they all were.

He could very easily die.

But that was also always the case.

It was a strange way to spend one’s life, he knew.

But it was
his
way.

T
HE
C
OSTA DEL
Sol had lived up to its name today.

Robie wore a straw-colored narrow-brim hat, a white T-shirt, a blue jacket, faded jeans, and sandals. There was three days’ worth of stubble on his tanned face. He was on holiday, or at least looked to be.

Robie boarded the large, bulky ferry to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. He looked back to the mountains rising along the rugged and imposing Spanish coastline. The juxtaposition of the high rock to the blue Med was captivating. He admired it for a few seconds and then turned away, forgetting the image just as quickly. He had other things occupying his mind.

The high-speed ferry headed to Morocco. It pitched and swayed like a metronome as it left Tarifa Harbor on its way to Tangier. Once it gathered speed and hit the open waters, the ride smoothed out. The belly of the ferry was filled with cars, buses, and tractor-trailers. The rest was crammed with passengers eating, playing video games in an arcade, and purchasing duty-free cigarettes and perfume by the carload.

Robie sat in his seat and admired the view, or at least pretended to. The strait was only nine miles wide and the ride would take only about forty minutes. Not a lot of time to contemplate anything. He spent it alternately gazing out at the waters of the Med and studying the other passengers. They were mostly tourists, eager to say they had been to Africa, although Robie knew that Morocco was very different from what most people probably would think when they imagined Africa.