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 morepersonal 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 area pile of shit.”

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