CHAPTER
49
OFF THE GRID.
Robie was sitting in his apartment thinking about taking this step.
The last time he had gone off the grid it had not been pleasant. In fact, it had nearly cost him his life and the lives of several other people, including Julie and Vance.
Jessica Reel was off the grid right now. She seemed to be employing a complex strategy that had her on both sides of the chessboard at the same time. What advantage she hoped to gain by this was lost on Robie. It only meant that both sides had incentives to find and kill her.
Doubling your opposition made no sense. Yet Reel didn’t strike him as lacking in the brains department. So if she was doing it her strategy had to make sense somehow.
A former agency analyst in Arkansas turned militia nut. He’d written an apocalypse paper. She was there to find out whom he had sent it to.
Then there was a federal judge in Alexandria.
If Reel had been the one in Alexandria too, what the hell was the connection?
A judge, Gelder, Jacobs, and Roy West.
Were they all in on this apocalypse?
If so, exactly what was it?
If West had a copy of it, Robie had no way to get to it. The police would be crawling all over his place, or what was left of it. Reel probably had a copy, but again, he had no way to get it from her.
Robie stared down at the text Reel had sent him previously.
Everything I do has a reason. Just open the lock.
He suddenly groaned and slapped the table with his palm. How could he have been that stupid? Literally staring him right in the damn face.
He went to his safe, opened it, and pulled out the three items that had been left in her locker.
Right, her locker. All I had to do was open it.
Okay, now that the simple part was over, it got complicated really fast.
The gun.
The book.
The photo.
The gun he had already ripped apart and found nothing. It was just a pistol with some specialized parts that pointed him in no specific direction at all.
The book had no notes in it. No marginalia. Nothing to point him to a specific part.
The photo meant nothing to him. And he didn’t know who the man standing next to Reel was.
Everything I do has a reason.
He said in exasperation, “Great, lady, next time don’t make it so damn complicated. It’s adding up to something impossible for mere mortals to figure out.”
Robie locked the items back up and stared out the window.
What Blue Man had told him was only one more disquieting piece of information on top of many others. It seemed like the agency was imploding from the top level on down. How this state of chaos could be happening to the premier intelligence organization on earth was astounding.
The world was a truly dangerous place right now. It was far more dangerous even than during the Cold War. Back then the opponents were clearly delineated and aligned across the world. The stakes were just as clearly understood. The destruction of the world was a possibility. But not really. The theory of mutual assured destruction was a great catalyst for peace. You couldn’t take over the world if there was no world left to take over.
Today’s situation was far more fluid, far subtler, and the sides kept changing with alarming frequency. And Robie didn’t know if the element of mutual assured destruction was enough anymore. Apparently some people didn’t care if there was a world left afterward. That made them dangerous at an unprecedented level.
DiCarlo’s comments came back to him: 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.
To Robie’s mind, missing personnel alone should have been enough of a warning, much less everything else that DiCarlo had described.
How had that can gotten kicked down the road?
Tucker had been director long enough to have taken care of such significant issues. Or at least addressed them.
Unless Tucker was on the other side of the chessboard. But that seemed impossible. It was hard enough to envision Jim Gelder being a traitor. But if Reel was to be believed, he was. Yet both top slots corrupted? How likely was that?
However, what other explanation was there for so many things to go awry and not be addressed by the management?
He took out his wallet. Inside the compartment where he kept his cash was a small sealed baggie. In it were the rose petals.
That was the other clue Reel had left behind.
Someone had taken the roses and who knew what else, but had missed these items. What had Reel meant by this?
If everything she did had a purpose, there had to be some explanation. And it might be significant.
The lady at the florist shop had said the pinkish marks on the rose were sometimes interpreted as blood. Well, there had been a lot of blood spilled over this. Was that the simple meaning that Reel had intended? But if so, how did that help him?
Blue Man had postulated that Reel might be on the side of right in all this. What that actually meant in the spy business Robie wasn’t sure. Right and wrong switched sides all the time. No, perhaps that was unfair. There were core elements of right and wrong.
Terrorists who killed innocent people with hidden bombs were on the side of wrong, without question. In Robie’s mind they were also cowards.
He killed from long distance, but he also risked his life to do it. And he didn’t target innocent people. All those he went after spent their lives bringing pain to others.
Does that make me permanently on the side of right?
He shook his head to clear it of these troubling thoughts. Nice fodder for a philosophy class discussion. But it was bringing him no closer to the truth.
Or to Jessica Reel.
He had told Tucker he was not going to look for her.
In part his answer was truthful.
He wasn’t going to look for her anymore. At least not on behalf of Tucker and the agency. But he was going to find her, and this time he was going to make her tell him what was going on.
Whatever else happened, he was going to get to the truth.