sent to Robie, despite her having just decided not to communicate with him again. But it was a different sort of query, one that they couldn’t hold against him.
She didn’t know if she would get an answer. She didn’t know if Robie trusted her or believed her. She remembered being part of his team early in her career. He had been the most professional among a group of consummate pros. He had taught her things, without really saying much. He sweated the little details. They were the difference, he told her, between making it or not.
She had learned some of what had happened to him earlier in the year. He had done the unthinkable for people in their profession. He hadn’t pulled the trigger. He had disobeyed orders because he believed them to be wrong.
The average citizen would think there was nothing special in that. If you thought something was wrong, why not disobey? But it wasn’t that easy. More even than regular soldiers, Robie and Reel had been trained to follow orders without question. Without that unbreakable chain of command, without that devotion to authority, the system simply didn’t work. Nothing could interfere with that.
But each of them had disobeyed orders.
Robie had refused to pull the trigger. Twice. The second time was the only reason Reel was still alive.
But she had pulled the trigger. She had killed two men who worked for the government. Both constituted crimes punishable by long imprisonment or even death.
Reel wondered if Robie was still coming after her. She wondered if right now he regretted not killing her.
Her phone buzzed. She looked down at the screen.
Will Robie had just answered her.
CHAPTER
52
ROBIE LOOKED AT HIS SCREEN. His fingers had just finished typing. He wondered how long before people from the agency would contact him.
Or kick down his door.
Alive. For now.
That’s what he had typed and sent her in response to her simple question:
DiCarlo?
Robie continued to stare at his phone screen, part of him hoping that she would text again. He had many things he wanted to ask her. Things he hadn’t had time to ask when he had seen her in Arkansas.
He had just about given up when another text from Reel dropped in:
GPB.
GPB?
Robie was certainly not up to date on the latest Internet acronyms. And he had no idea if GPB was one of those or was a coded message from Reel. If it was coded he had no idea what it meant.
But why would she think he would?
He sat back in his chair and thought back to the last mission they had done together all those years ago. It was about as routine as you could expect in their line of work. But something had gone wrong, which sometimes happened.
Robie had gone to the left and at the same second Reel had darted to the right. If they had gone in the same direction, they both would have been dead. As it stood, they neutralized the threats coming at them from two sides.
Robie had thought about it later and even asked Reel why she had gone the opposite way, because there was no visible threat on either flank yet. She really couldn’t answer him other than to say, “I knew you were going the way you did.”
“How?” Robie had asked.
She’d asked a question in answer to his. “How did you know which way I was going to go?”
And he couldn’t answer her other than to say that he had just felt it. It was that simple. Not that he could literally read her mind. But he knew what her reaction would be in that exact situation. And she knew what his would be.
That had never happened to him again. Only with Jessica Reel. He wondered if that had been her last time too.
When the call came he looked at the screen and then put his phone away. It was Langley. He didn’t feel like explaining to them why he had done what he had. In one sense he didn’t feel it was any of their business. If they could keep secrets from him, he could keep secrets from them. They were all spies, after all.
And that’s when a totally unrelated thought entered his mind. Well, part of his mind must have been thinking about it as he took this walk down memory lane.
Reel had told him few things about herself, but one had struck him.
“I’m a linear person, Robie,” she’d said after they returned from their last mission.