Traffic on the Dulles Toll Road was surprisingly light.
Robie’s phone vibrated. He looked at the screen.
One word: Congratulations.
He put the phone back in his jacket pocket.
“Congratulations” was the wrong word, he believed. “Thanks” would be the wrong word too. He was not sure what the right one would be for killing five people.
Perhaps there was none. Perhaps silence would suffice.
He arrived at a building off Chain Bridge Road in northern Virginia. There would be no debriefing. No record of anything was better. If an investigation ensued, no one could discover a record that didn’t exist.
But if things went wrong Robie would have no official cover.
He walked to an office, not officially his, but one that he sometimes used. Even though it was late there were people working. They did not talk to Robie. They didn’t even look at him. He knew they had no idea what he did, but they also knew not to interact with him.
He sat at a desk, hit some keys on the computer, sent a few emails, and stared out a window that wasn’t really a window. It was merely a box of simulated sunlight, because an actual window was just a hole that others could get through.
An hour later a chubby man in a wrinkled suit with pasty skin walked in. They didn’t greet each other. Chubby placed a flash drive on the desk in front of Robie. Then he pivoted and left. Robie stared down at the silver object. The next assignment was already prepared. They had been coming at an increasing clip these last few years.
He pocketed the flash drive and left. This time he drove himself, in an Audi that was parked in a space in the adjacent garage. When he slid into the seat he felt comfortable. The Audi was his, had been for four years. He drove it through the security checkpoint. The guard did not look at him either.
The invisible man in Edinburgh. Robie knew how it felt.
Once he hit the public road he shifted gears and accelerated.
His phone vibrated once more. He checked the screen.
Happy Birthday.
It didn’t make him smile. It didn’t make him do anything other than drop the phone on the opposite seat and punch the gas.
There would be no cake and no candles.
As he drove, Robie thought of the underground tunnel in Edinburgh. Four of the dead men were bodyguards. They were hard, desperate men who had allegedly murdered at least fifty people over the last five years, some of them children. The fifth man with two holes in his head was Carlos Rivera. A trafficker of heroin and youngsters for prostitution, he was immensely rich and had been visiting Scotland on holiday. Robie knew, though, that Rivera actually had ostensibly been in Edinburgh to attend a high-level meeting with another criminal czar from Russia in an effort to merge their business interests. Even criminals liked to globalize.
Robie had been ordered to kill Rivera, but not because of his human and drug trafficking businesses. Rivera had to die because the United States had learned that he was planning a coup in Mexico with the aid of several high-ranking generals in the Mexican army. The resulting government would have been no friend of America, so this could not be allowed to happen. The meeting with the Russian crime czar had been the setup, the carrot. There was no czar and no meeting. The offending Mexican generals were also dead, killed by men like Robie.
When Robie arrived home he walked for two hours through the darkened streets. He ventured down by the river and watched the headlights on the Virginia side cut through the night. A police patrol boat slid past on the calm surface of the Potomac.
He stared up at the drab, moonless sky; a cake without candles.
Happy Birthday to me.
CHAPTER
3
IT WAS THREE A.M.
Will Robie had been awake for two hours. The mission set forth on the flash drive he’d been given would cause him to travel well past Edinburgh. The target was yet another well-protected man with more money than morals. Robie had been working on the task for nearly a month. The details were numerous, the margin of error was even less than with Rivera. The preparation was arduous and had taken its toll on Robie. He could not sleep. He was also not eating very much.
But he was trying to relax now. He was sitting in the small kitchen of his apartment. It was located in an affluent area