never once thought of texting an opponent like that. He usually took the more direct route to his goal. Whether it was a gender thing or not he didn’t know and didn’t care. The differences were real, that’s what was important.
It was possible Reel could have changed. But then it was also possible she was exactly who she had always been.
He got back to his apartment building, parked in the underground garage, and rode the elevator up to his floor. He checked the hallway for anything unusual, then unlocked the door and punched in the disarming code on the security panel.
He put on a pot of coffee, made a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and sat in the window seat of his living room. He drank the coffee, ate the sandwich, and studied the rain that had started to pour outside. It was surely fouling a rush hour into the city that was miserable in the sunshine, much less with slicked roads and buckets of water falling on windshields.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tiny white object. It had disintegrated more in his pocket, but it was still there. He needed to find out exactly what it was. He had found it at both kill sites.
Once could be a coincidence. Twice was a pattern.
And if Reel had left this, there had to be a reason.
He poured a second cup of coffee, sat at his desk, and clicked the keys on his laptop. Doug Jacobs’s life spread across his screen like blood on a test strip.
It would have been an interesting life to the layman, but a rather ordinary one by Robie’s standards. Jacobs had been an analyst and then a handler. He had never fired a weapon on behalf of his country. Until his violent death he had never been wounded in his line of work.
He had killed many—from a distance and using people like Robie to pull the actual trigger. There was nothing wrong with that. Men like Robie needed people like Jacobs to accomplish their missions as well.
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