The Guilty

Book 5: Will Robie Series

by David Baldacci

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Going home can kill you.

When Special Agent Will Robie gets the call to make his first visit home since he was a teenager, it's because his father, the local judge, has been arrested for murdering a man who came before him in court.

The small, remote Mississippi town hasn't changed and its residents remember Robie as a wild sports star and girl magnet. He left a lot of hearts broken, and a lot of people angry.

Will and his father, Dan, are estranged, and his mother left years ago. When he visits Dan in jail, he finds that time hasn't healed old wounds. There's too much bad blood between the men, and although Will feels no good will come of staying around, he is persuaded to confront his demons by fellow agent Jessica Reel.

But then another murder changes everything, and stone-cold killer Robie will finally have to come to grips with his toughest assignment of all. His family.

Release date: November 17, 2015

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

Chapter

1

WILL ROBIE CROUCHED shadowlike at a window in a deserted building, inside a country that was currently an ally of the United States.

Tomorrow that could change.

Robie had been alone in many vacant buildings in foreign lands over the years, tactically positioned at windows while holding a weapon. One did not normally kill from long distance with a sniper rifle chambered with brain-busting ordnance fired with the aid of world-class optics while people stood around and watched you do it.

Robie was and always would be a tactical weapon. Longer-term strategies were the professional domain of others, mostly political types. These folks made good assassins, too. Only instead of bullets, they were basically bribed to enact laws by other folks with more money than was good for them. And they harmed a lot more people than Robie ever could.

He eyed the street four stories below.

Quiet.

Well, that won’t last. Not after I do what I came here to do.

A voice spoke in his ear mic. It was a slew of last-minute intelligence, and a verification of all details of the “execution plan,” which was quite aptly named. Robie absorbed all of it, just as he had so many times in the past. He processed the information, asked a few pertinent questions, and received a standby command. It was all part of the professional equation, all normal, if such things could be in a situation where the end result was someone’s dying violently.

He had not set out to kill others on the command of an elite few. Yet here he was, part of a false-flag unit loosely attached to a clandestine intelligence agency known by its three-letter acronym that people from Bangor to Bangladesh would instantly recognize.

He had come to it by degrees.

Initially came the training where the targets were first paper, then clay, and finally mannequins that bled surprisingly realistic-looking blood housed in hard paks stuffed in torsos and heads. Where precisely plastic flesh and Hollywood blood had turned to real flesh and real corpuscles he couldn’t say. It might be that he had subconsciously set aside this most transformative of sequences. It was certainly true that he had never looked back and tried to sort out how he had arrived here.

He had pulled triggers and wielded blades and swung fists and fingers, legs and elbows, and even his head in precise motions, and ended the lives of many without questioning the basis for these actions.

Official killers who questioned were not popular. In fact, for the most part, they were unemployed. Or more likely dead.

Lately, though, he had started asking questions. Which was why he wasn’t as popular as he used to be with the acronym agency whose first letter was C and whose last letter was A. The letter in between stood for intelligence, which Robie sometimes thought was seriously lacking there.

He shook off these thoughts, because tonight he had another trigger to pull.

He gripped a pair of night-vision binoculars and took a visual sweep of the narrow building across from him. Unlike his, it was not vacant. It had lots of people inside it. People with more guns than he had. But he only needed one. There were twenty-four windows facing him, four on each of the six floors. He was concerned only about the second window over from the left on the third floor. In his mind it had a bull’s-eye painted right over it.

The curtains were currently drawn over this opening, but that would have to change. As good as he was, Robie couldn’t kill what he couldn’t see. And right now those millimeter-thick cotton drapes might as well be two-inch-thick polycarbonate sheets with a Kevlar-threaded middle.

He looked at his watch.

Five minutes to go.

Four and a half of those minutes would seem like an eternity. The last thirty seconds would seem like drawing a breath—and a quick one at that. Normal people would experience an accompanying adrenaline rush right about now. Robie was not normal. His heartbeat would actually slow, not rise. And his features would relax, not tighten.

His left hand reached over and touched the already assembled long-range, custom-built rifle lying partially inside his duffel. It was relatively lightweight as such weapons went, and the jacketed subsonic round was already chambered. He would only have one chance to fire one round. He had never needed more than that.

His hand went out and lightly rapped the wooden windowsill.

Even state-sanctioned assassins needed a bit of luck every now and then.

He knew the background of the man he was going to kill tonight. It was like so many of the others whose lives he had terminated. The target’s interests and goals were not in alignment with the United States, which had allied itself with competing—if similarly barbaric—factions that were demanding the removal of this person. Why they didn’t simply do it themselves was a good question that Robie had never bothered to ask for one simple reason.

He wouldn’t have gotten an answer.

Thus, he and his gun had been sent to do the deed, in the interests of national security, which seemed to be a catchall to justify any death, anywhere, any time.

The clipped voice came back in his ear.

“Target alone in the space other than the two bodyguards and the domestic. The curtains will be opened in three minutes.”

“Confirmed on all counts?” Robie asked, because he wanted no surprises.

“Confirmed on all counts.”

He looked over his shoulder at the window behind him. That was to be his escape route. It didn’t look like much of an escape route, and the truth was, it wasn’t. But he’d survived worse ones. He was simply a shadow tonight. Shadows were hard to catch. And harder still to kill.

He looked at his watch, synchronizing it in his head with the countdown point he’d just been given. Countdown to calm, he told himself. Countdown to the kill, he added.

The window he was kneeling in front of had already been raised two inches. The windowsill would be his rough fulcrum point. He lifted the rifle out of the duffel and slid the barrel through this opening until the muzzle cleared the glass by three inches and no more. He had drawn a thick bright red line on his barrel that constituted his stop point.

The night was black, and the ambient light meager. The attack was, hopefully, unexpected. Anyone spotting the dark metal barrel would have to be exceptionally good, and the fact was the other side didn’t have anyone of that caliber. That was the reason Robie had been able to gain access to a vacant building with a sight line directly into the target’s home. That would never have happened with the Russians. Or the Iranians.

Right on schedule the curtains parted. It was a simple movement replicated millions of times a day all over the world. However, people usually opened the curtains when it was daytime to let in natural light. At night they usually closed them to gain privacy.

That was always the hitch in this plan. And Robie would know nearly immediately if that hitch turned into total disaster.

The maid stepped back from the window.

Robie thought the woman’s gaze lifted just a bit to the building across the street. And she seemed to linger too long in front of the glass.

Move, Robie thought to himself, trying to will this message across the width of the street and into her head. It had taken considerable effort, money, and skill to place her right where she was, where she had to be for all this to work.

But if she froze now, none of that would happen. She would die and the man she worked for would not. Robie being here would all be for naught. He might die, too, since the U.S. would disavow any connection to him whatsoever. That was just how this worked.

A moment later she moved away from the opening, and his sight line once more became unobstructed.

Robie let out a long breath of relief and allowed his muscles to relax.

He rested his right cheek against the rifle stock’s carbon fiber left side. The use of this material had dropped his rifle’s weight from eight pounds to three. And as with an aircraft, weight was critical for Robie’s task, meaning the less the better. He gazed through the optics latched down on his Picatinny rail. The inches-wide crevice in the curtains came into focus. Through his scope it looked a mile across. It would be impossible for him to miss.

There was a table in view. On the table was a phone. Not a mobile phone—an old-fashioned landline with a spiral cord. The call would be coming through in less than two minutes. The stage was set, everything choreographed down to the last detail.

Part of Robie couldn’t believe the man or his bodyguards would not notice just how carefully everything had been arranged. Through the parted curtains he could see the bodyguards doing what bodyguards did. Moving, taking in details, trying to keep their deep paranoia in check long enough to carry out their job. But never once did they look toward the window. Or, presumably, think about where the phone was positioned in front of that window.

Never once.

Which meant they were idiots. Robie’s people had long since discovered that convenient truth. Because of that they had not even attempted to buy these folks off. They weren’t worth the price.

Robie started exhaling longer and longer breaths, getting his physiological markers down to levels acceptable for a shot of this kind: cold zero. In reality the actual shot would not be that difficult. The narrow street including its curbs was barely a hundred feet wide, which was the reason he was using the quieter subsonic round; it was an ordnance perfectly acceptable for a shot over such a short distance. His shot was angled down one story—again, not a problem. It was true he would be firing through glass at the other end, but at this range, glass was not a factor. There was no wind and no ancillary light sources that could possibly blind him.

In short, it should be an easy kill.

But Robie had found that there was really no such thing.

The voice in his ear spoke two words.

“Vee one.”

It was the same terminology that pilots in the cockpit used. V-1 meant that the takeoff roll could no longer be safely aborted. Your butt was going up into the sky whether you wanted it to or not.

There was one small difference here, though, and Robie well knew it. So did the person on the other end of his secure line.

I can abort this mission all the way up until my finger pulls the trigger.

“Thirty seconds,” said the voice.

Robie gave one more sweeping glance left, then right. Then he looked only through his optics, his gaze and aim dead on the opening between the curtains.

Place empty except for target, two bodyguards, and the maid.

Check, check, and check.

“Ten seconds.”

The call on the phone would be the catalyst for all.

“Five seconds.”

Robie counted off the remaining moments in his head.

“Call engaged,” said the voice.

It was being done via remote computer link. There would be no living person on the other end.

A man moved into view between the curtains.

He was of medium height and build, but that was all that was average about him. Like Hitler before him, he had the extraordinary ability to whip his followers into a frenzy of such devotion that they would commit any atrocity he ordered. That skill had led him to be deemed a Category Alpha enemy of an important if fluid ally of the United States. And that category was reserved only for those who would eventually suffer violent deaths, as the United States played the role of global wrecking ball for those willing to pony up allegiance to it, however briefly.

Robie’s finger slid to the trigger guard and then to the real V-1 point for him—the trigger.

He saw motion to the right of the target but still fired, pulling the trigger with a clean, measured sweep as he had done countless times before.

As was his custom, after the muzzle recoil, he kept his gaze aimed squarely on the target through his optics. He would see this to the end of the bullet’s flight path. The only way to confirm a kill was to see it. He had been tricked once before. He would never be tricked again.

The glass cracked and the jacketed round slammed into and then through the target. The man fell where he stood, the phone receiver still clutched in his dead hand.

There was no one alive on either end of the call now.

Right as Robie was about to look away, the target disappeared completely from sight. And revealed behind him was the child—obviously the blur of motion Robie had seen right as he fired.

The jacketed round had cleared the target’s skull and still had enough velocity to hit and kill the second, far smaller target.

Through his optics Robie saw the girl, the bullet hole dead center of her small chest, crumple to the floor.

One shot, two dead.

One intended.

One never contemplated.

Will Robie grabbed his gear and ran for it.

Chapter

2

HIS ESCAPE ROUTE took Robie out the fourth-floor window opposite where he had fired the shot that had killed one male adult and one female child. With his duffel over his shoulder he jumped and his booted feet landed on the gravel roof of the adjacent three-story building. He heard gunshots and then the breaking of glass.

The bodyguards had just fired their salvos at the building he’d been in.

Then he heard two more rapid-fire shots: bang-bang.

The maid had just dispatched the guards, or so Robie hoped.

And then she had better run like hell because Robie could already hear tires squealing on pavement.

His landing had been awkward, and he had felt the scarred skin on his arm from a past injury pull and then partially tear as it took the impact of the landing. He leapt up and ran for the roof doorway that led into the building. He took the stairs down three at a time. He cleared the building and found himself in an alley. There were two vehicles parked there. Into one he threw his gear and his outer layer of clothes and his boots. Now he had on only skivvies. The driver sped off without even looking at him.

He climbed into the rear of the other vehicle. It was an ambulance. A man dressed in blue scrubs was in the back. Robie climbed up on the gurney, where he was covered with a sheet and a surgical cap was placed on his head. He was hooked up to several drip lines, and an oxygen mask was placed on his face. The man injected a solution into Robie’s cheek that swelled his face and a few moments later turned his skin a brick red and would keep it that way for another thirty minutes.

The ambulance drove off, its singsong siren and rack lights going full bore.

They turned onto a road that ran parallel to the street that separated Robie’s shooter’s nest from the target’s building.

Two minutes later the ambulance lurched to a stop and the back doors were thrown open. Robie closed his eyes and let his breathing run shallow.

Men with guns appeared. One climbed in and barked at the man in scrubs. He replied in his native language with just the right amount of professional indignation, and then pointed at Robie. The man with the gun drew very close to Robie’s face. Then he examined the IV lines and the oxygen mask and Robie’s swollen and flaming-red face. He asked another question, which the scrubs man answered.

Then the armed man climbed out and the ambulance doors closed. The vehicle started up again.

But Robie kept his eyes shut. He didn’t open them until thirty minutes later when the ambulance stopped next to a chain-link fence.

The scrubs man tapped Robie on the shoulder and then pulled the IV lines and took off the mask. Robie climbed out, his bare feet touching cold pavement. A car was waiting next to the ambulance. He climbed inside, was handed clothes and shoes, and quickly dressed.

Thirty minutes later he was wheels up in a jump seat in the back of a UPS Boeing 777 freighter that had counted him as an extra package on board. The jumbo jet banked sharply north and then west, and started its climb out on the long flight back to America.

Robie sat in his jump seat and pulled out the secure phone the scrubs man back in the ambulance had tossed him right before he’d exited the vehicle.

The message was waiting for him in the form of a text.

TARGET DOWN. OP EXIT SUCCESSFUL ON ALL COUNTS.

Well, Robie knew the first part. And now he knew the maid had carried out her role and gotten away, too. And he also knew that the folks on the other end of this communication were trying to put a positive spin on the whole mess.

He typed in a message on the phone and fired it off.

All he could see in his mind was the face of the little girl with curly dark hair whom he’d killed tonight. Unintentional or not, she was still dead. Nothing on earth could bring her back. And he wanted to know how the hell it had happened.

The ding signaled the answer to his query.

UNCLEAR. HIS DAUGHTER. CLASSIFIED AS COLLATERAL DAMAGE.

Collateral Damage? They were really going to try to spin that one? On me?

His finger poised over the phone’s keypad, Robie was set to fire back a response that matched the fury he was feeling. Then he slipped the phone into his pocket and slumped back against the plane’s inner wall.

He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. Burned seemingly on the insides of his eyeballs was the little face. She had looked surprised at being dead. And who could blame her? Running to her daddy, seeing him die at the same moment she too perished?

He had come close to killing a child once, but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. That had nearly cost him his career and with it his life. But this time, this time, he had done it.

He opened his eyes and bent over as the jet hit a rough patch of air and he was jostled roughly around. He turned to the side and threw up. It had nothing to do with unsettled air, and everything to do with the small face burning a hole in his brain and his belly.

He hung his head between his knees. The unflappable man he always was, always had to be, was coming apart at important seams, like the torn scar tissue on his arm.

I just killed a little girl. I murdered a little girl. She’s dead because of me.

He looked down at his trigger finger, heavily callused from all the practice rounds fired over the years. He had wondered when and if he would know it was time to walk away from all this.

He might just have found his answer.

His phone dinged again. He picked it up and looked at the screen.

BLUE MAN.

The one person other than his sometime partner Jessica Reel whom Robie could count on at an agency that would never officially recognize he even existed. Blue Man always told it to him straight, whether Robie wanted to hear it or not.

WILL BE STANDING BY WHEN YOU LAND. WE’LL TALK.

He tried to interpret the meaning behind those few words.

What was there to talk about? His trigger pull was done. The op was completed. The official response at the senseless death of a child was “collateral damage.” Robie could imagine that explanation being input on a form and that form being filed away wherever they kept such records.

On this day in a foreign land shot dead by Will Robie, one megalomaniac and one daughter of said megalomaniac.

He would be on to his next assignment, expected to forget what he had just done. Like a cornerback giving up a long touchdown pass. You shook it off, picked yourself back up, and moved on to the next play.

Only there, nobody died.

In Will Robie’s world, somebody always died.

Always.

Chapter

3

ROBIE WALKED DOWN the metal steps, and his feet hit American soil for the first time in a month. He looked straight ahead and saw the man in a rumpled trench coat standing next to the rear door of the black Suburban. It was as though a Cold War–era movie was unspooling in front of him in clickety-clack black-and-white film.

The vehicles were always black, and they always seemed to be Suburbans. And the people were always wearing rumpled trench coats, as though they felt inclined to confirm the stereotype.

He walked over to the SUV and climbed inside. The door closed, the trench coat got in the driver’s seat, and the Suburban pulled off.

Only then did Robie look to his right.

Blue Man gazed back at him.

His real name was Roger Walton.

But to Robie he would always be Blue Man, which had to do with his color level of leadership at the Agency. Not the highest there was, but plenty high enough for Blue Man to know all, or at least nearly all, that was going on.

As usual he wore an off-the-rack blue suit with a red tie and a collar tab. His silver hair was neatly combed, his face freshly shaved. Blue Man was old school, professional every second of his life. Nothing rattled him. Nothing altered the ingrained habits of a long career that frequently involved killing the few to keep safe the many.

By comparison, after an eleven-hour flight in the back of an air freighter piled high with cardboard boxes filled with products made by penny labor in faraway lands, Robie looked like a corpse. He didn’t feel professional. He really didn’t feel anything.

Robie didn’t break the silence. He had nothing to say. Yet. He wanted to hear it from Blue Man first.

The other man cleared his throat and said, “Obviously, it did not all go according to plan.”

Robie still didn’t speak.

Blue Man continued, “The intelligence was flawed. It often is over there, as you well know. But we have to work with what we have. The child was supposed to be with her mother. There was apparently a last-minute snafu. The mother abruptly changed her plans. The daughter was left at home. There was no time to abort without suspicion falling on our inside operative.”

Everything that Blue Man had just uttered was perfectly reasonable and, Robie knew, perfectly true. And it didn’t make him feel better in the least.

They drove for a while longer in silence.

Finally, Robie said, “How old was she?”

“Robie, you had no way of—”

“How old!”

Robie had kept his gaze on the back of the driver’s head and he saw the man’s neck muscles tighten.

“Four,” replied Blue Man. “And her name was Sasha.”

Robie knew she was young. So this should have come as no surprise. But the waves of nausea, of an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, hit him like the round he’d fired around twelve hours ago. The round that had killed four-year-old Sasha.

“Stop the car.”

“What?” This came from the driver.

“Stop the car.” Robie didn’t say this in a raised voice. His tone was level and calm yet managed to sound more deadly than if he had screamed his guts out and pulled an MP5.

The driver’s gaze hit the rearview mirror and he saw Blue Man nod.

The driver eased off the road and put the SUV in park.

Robie had opened the door before the truck had even stopped rolling. He got out on the side of the highway and started walking along the shoulder.

Blue Man reached over and closed the door. He eyed the driver, who was still watching him in the rearview obviously waiting for an order, perhaps to speed up and run over Robie.

“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.”

Chapter

4

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 troubl