The Innocent

Chapter





96


IT WAS STILL early in the morning.

Robie was in the other apartment. He stared through the telescope to where Annie Lambert had lived. The place would be swarming soon with federal personnel. They would go through every inch of her life. They would find out why she had tried to kill the president. They would discover why she was doing the bidding of a fanatic from the desert world who possessed limitless petrodollars.

Robie thought about what she had told him of her past.

She was adopted. An only child. Parents lived in England. But were they English? What had her upbringing been like?

Again the words of the Palestinian came back to him: We own that person. Decades in the making.

Did they own you, Annie Lambert?

Were you decades in the making?

And now you’re dead. On a metal slab a few miles from here. Dead from my round fired into your head.

And I slept with her right across the street. I had drinks with her. I liked her. I felt sorry for her. I could have maybe come to love her.

Robie knew that Annie Lambert living in the same building as he did was not a coincidence.

This is still about me. She came to live there because of me.

Prince Talal wants his revenge. He wanted to mess with my mind, screw my life every way he could. And he’ll want it even more since I destroyed his plan.

The phone rang.

He looked at the screen.

It was Nicole Vance’s cell phone.

He hit the answer button.

He knew what was coming.

“Hello?”

“The package will be delivered to your door in thirty seconds.”

“Okay,” said Robie evenly.

“You will do what it says to do.”

“I hear you.”

“You will follow the instructions completely.”

“Uh-huh.”

The connection went dead.

He put the phone away.

Blue Man had already told him, although Robie had figured it out previously.

Vance and Julie had never made it to the WFO.

They had been taken. This was Talal’s fail-safe. All the really good ones had such a plan.

He counted off the seconds in his head. At thirty the manila envelope was slid under his door. He did not rush to it. He would not attempt to capture the messenger. That person would be able to tell him nothing.

He walked slowly to the door, bent down, and picked up the envelope.

He fingered open the clasp and took out the pages.

The first ten were glossy photos.

Him having drinks with Annie Lambert.

Him being kissed by Annie Lambert outside the White House.

Finally, him having sex with Annie Lambert in her bed. He wondered briefly where the camera had been placed for that shot.

Robie dropped the photos on the coffee table and looked at the other pages.

He sifted through them. There was nothing surprising here. He had anticipated most if not all of it.

It is still very much about me.

And Talal wants me. He wants me back where it all started.

The offer was crystal clear.

Him for Julie and Vance.

He considered it a fair trade. If Talal could be trusted. Which he could not, of course.

Yet Robie would still have to accept it. There was one advantage. This would render unnecessary the need for him to search the world hunting for Talal. The prince was summoning him right to where he would be.

Robie had already killed the double. He doubted that Talal had another one in reserve. And as much as Talal wanted to end his life, Robie wanted to end Talal’s life even more.

Using Annie Lambert as a vicious tool, Talal had taken something from Robie, something precious, perhaps even inviolate.

He’s taken away my ability to ever really trust myself again.

He took the photos over to where the light was better and looked at them again, one by one. Annie Lambert looked like what she might have been under vastly different circumstances: a beautiful woman with a bright future ahead of her. A nice person, wanting to do some good in the world.

She had not been born a killer. She had been raised to become one. An extraordinary one because he had never once suspected, until he had seen those swollen pupils.

I was not born to be a killer either, thought Robie. But I am one now.

He pulled out a Zippo from a drawer, carried the photos into the kitchen, and burned them to blackness in the kitchen sink. He ran water over them, let the smoke rise up and wash over his face. He watched as Annie Lambert disintegrated into the bowels of his sink. Then he rinsed the residue down the drain.

Annie Lambert vanished.

Like she had never even existed.

And the Annie Lambert he thought he knew never had.

Robie left the kitchen and started to pack.

The instructions had been explicit. He intended to follow them. At least most of them. For certain key elements he intended to create his own rules.

He assumed that Talal would expect this.

He had beaten Robie in Morocco.

Robie had bested him in Washington.

The next two days would determine who would be the winner of the third and final round.