The Innocent (11 page)

R
OBIE MADE ONE STOP
, at an all-night convenience store to get some groceries. A half hour after that the truck lights flickered across the face of the small farmhouse. Robie pulled the truck to a stop and looked across at Julie.

Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping, but after seeing her defend herself against the attacker on the bus, Robie was taking nothing for granted. He didn’t want to get blasted with pepper spray so he didn’t reach out to jostle her. He simply said quietly, “We’re here.”

Her eyes instantly opened. She didn’t yawn, stretch, or rub her face, as most people would have. She was just awake.

Robie was impressed. Because that was exactly how he woke up too.

“What is this place?” she asked, looking around.

They had driven down a gravel road. Woods starting to turn color bracketed the gravel. The drive ended at the front of the white clapboard house. Painted black front door, two front windows, a small porch. In the back a barn rose high above the apex of the house.

“Safe,” he said. “Or as safe as possible under the circumstances.”

She stared at the barn. “Was this like a farm or something?”

“Or something. Long time ago. Woods have reclaimed the fields.”

This was Robie’s fail-safe. His employer provided other safe houses for Robie and people like him. But this place was his alone. Ownership under a shell company. No way to trace back to him.

“Where are we?”

“Southwest of D.C., in Virginia. Technical term would be the boonies.”

“Do you own it?”

Robie put the truck back in drive and headed for the barn. He stopped, got out, unlocked the barn doors, and drove the truck inside. He got out again, grabbed the sack of groceries, and said, “Come on.”

Julie followed him to the house. There was an alarm system. The beeping sound stopped when Robie put in the code. He was careful to not let her see the numbers he punched in.

He closed and locked the door.

She looked around, still clutching her backpack.

“Where do I go?”

He pointed up the straight set of stairs on one side of the small entrance hall. “Spare bedroom, second door on the right. Bathroom across the hall. You hungry?”

“I’d rather sleep.”

“Okay.” He lifted his gaze to the stairs in a prompting manner.

“Good night,” said Robie.

“Good night.”

“And make sure you don’t shoot yourself with the pepper spray. It really stings the skin.”

She looked down at her hand where the small canister was hidden.

“How did you know?”

“I saw you had it pointed at me the whole drive over. Don’t blame you. Get some sleep.”

She set off. He watched her trudge up the stairs. He heard the bedroom door open and close and then the lock engage.

Smart girl
.

Robie went into the kitchen, put the groceries away, and sat down at the round table across from the sink. He set the .38 throwaway on the table and took out his cell phone. No GPS chip was in there. Company policy, because a chip could work both ways. But he had screwed up on the pinhole.

And they must have suspected he wouldn’t fire on the woman tonight. They had the tracker on him in case he gave them the slip.

A setup from the get-go. Nice. Now he needed to figure out why.

He clicked some buttons on his phone and looked at the photos he’d taken at the dead woman’s apartment.

Her driver’s license stated that her name was Jane Wind, age thirty-five. Her unsmiling photo looked back at Robie. He knew she would be lying on the D.C. medical examiner’s metal exam table shortly, her face not just unsmiling but badly disfigured by the rifle round. Her child would be autopsied too. Having taken the brunt of the round’s kinetic energy, the boy would no longer really have a face.

Robie looked at the photos of her passport pages. He enlarged the screen so he could make out the ports of entry. There were several European countries on there, including Germany. Those were usual. But then Robie saw Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Those were not so usual.

He next looked at her government ID card.

Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense.

Robie stared at the screen.

I’m screwed. I’m totally screwed.

He used his phone to access the Internet and scrolled through news sites looking for any information on Wind’s death or the bus exploding. There was nothing on Wind. They might not have found her yet. But the bus blowing up had already attracted attention. However, there were few details. Robie obviously knew more than any of the reporters out there trying to find out what had happened. According to the news accounts thus far, the authorities were not ruling out a mechanical cause for the explosion.

And that’s where it might remain
, thought Robie, unless they could find evidence to the contrary. Blowing up an old bus in the middle of the night and killing a few dozen people didn’t seem like it would be high on a jihadist’s bucket list.

His handler had not tried to contact him again. Robie was not surprised by this. They wouldn’t have expected him to answer in any event. He was safe here for now. Tomorrow? Who knew? He
glanced in the direction of the stairs. He was on the run, and he was not alone. Alone he might have a chance. But now?

Now he had Julie. She was fourteen, maybe. She didn’t trust him or anyone else. And she was running from something too.

His mind and body tired, Robie could think of nothing else to do right now. So he did what made sense. He went upstairs to the bedroom across the hall from hers, locked the door behind him, laid the .38 on his chest, and closed his eyes.

Sleep was important right now. He wasn’t sure when he would get another chance to do it.

T
HE WINDOW OPENED
and the tied-together sheets snaked down the side of the house. Julie looped the other end around the footboard of the bed and tugged on it to make sure it was secure. She slipped through the window, clambered quietly down the improvised rope, touched the ground, and darted off into the darkness.

She didn’t know exactly where she was, but she had been following the truck’s route while pretending to be asleep. She figured she could get to the main road and then follow that to a store or gas station where she could make a call to a cab company to come and pick her up. She checked her stash of cash and her credit card. She was good to go.

The darkness didn’t frighten her. Sometimes the city during the day was far scarier. But she crept along silently, because as good as Will had seemed, she knew someone could still have followed them. She mapped out her plan in her head and decided that it was as good as she was going to come up with under the circumstances.

She knew her parents were dead. She wanted to lie down on the ground, curl up, and never stop crying. She would never see her mother again. She would never hear her father’s laugh. Then their killer had come after her. And then he’d been blown up in that bus.

But she couldn’t curl up and cry. She had to keep moving. The last thing her parents would have wanted was for her to die too.

She was going to survive. For them. And she was going to find out why someone had killed them. Even if the killer was now dead. She needed to know the truth.

The road was not much farther. She picked up her pace.

She had no time to react.

It just happened.

The voice said, “You know, I was going to make breakfast for you.”

She gasped, turned, and gazed at Robie, who was sitting on a tree stump staring at her. He got up. “Was it something I said?”

She glanced back at the house. She was far enough away that all she could make out was a sense of powered light through the tangle of trees and brush.

“I changed my mind,” she said. “I’m heading on.”

“Where?”

“That’s my business.”

“You sure about this?”

“Completely sure.”

“Okay. You need any money?”

“No.”

“Want another canister of pepper spray?”

“You have some?”

He pulled one from his pocket and tossed it to her.

Julie caught it.

Robie said, “That one is actually more potent than the one you have. It has a paralytic built in. It’ll lay down any assailant for at least thirty minutes.”

She put it in her backpack. “Thanks.”

He pointed to his left. “There’s a shortcut through there to the road. Just stick to the path. Get to the road, turn left. There’s a gas station half a mile up. They have a pay phone, maybe the last one in America.”

He turned to go back to the house.

“So that’s it? You just let me walk?”

He turned back. “Like you said, it’s not my business. It’s your decision. And, frankly, I’ve got my own problems. Good luck.”

He started off again.

Julie did not move.

“What were you going to make for breakfast?”

He stopped but didn’t look at her. “Eggs, bacon, grits, toast, and
coffee. But I have tea too. They say coffee stunts a kid’s growth. But then like you said, you’re not a kid.”

“Scrambled eggs?”

“Any way you like. But I do an exceptional over-hard.”

“I can leave in the morning.”

“Yes, you can.”

“That’s my plan.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing personal,” she said.

“Nothing personal,” he replied.

They walked back to the house, Julie trailing three feet behind Robie.

“I was pretty quiet getting out of the house. How did you know?”

“I do this for a living.”

“Do what?”

“Survive.”

Me too
, thought Julie.

T
HREE HOURS LATER
Robie lifted his head off the pillow. He showered, dressed, and headed to the stairs. He heard gentle snores coming from the guest bedroom. He thought about knocking but decided to just let her sleep.

He glided down the steps and into the kitchen. He kept the alarm on. He would not turn it off until he left the safe house. In addition to the house alarm, he had perimeter alerts spread around the property. One of those had been triggered by Julie’s escape. It had been easy for him to take a shortcut through the woods and intercept her.

Part of him was glad she had decided to come back. Part of him wasn’t looking forward to the added responsibility.

But more of him was glad that she had returned.

Was it guilt over letting a little kid die right in front of me? Am I making amends this way, by saving Julie from whatever and whoever is after her?

A while later he heard a door open and feet padding across the hall. Later, the toilet flushed and the water in the sink started running. It kept going for a while. She was probably doing a “sink bath” to clean up.

When she came downstairs twenty minutes later, the meal prep was far advanced.

“Coffee or tea?” he asked.

“Coffee, black,” she answered.

“It’s over there, help yourself. Cups in the cabinet by the fridge, top shelf.”

He checked the grits and then opened the carton of eggs. “Overhard, light or scrambled, or hard-boiled?”

“Who does hard-boiled eggs anymore?”

“Me.”

“Scrambled.”

He swished the eggs in a bowl and glanced up at the small TV sitting on top of the fridge. He said, “Check it out.”

Julie pushed her damp hair back over her ears and glanced up as she sipped her coffee. She had changed clothes. It was still partially dark outside. But in the light of the kitchen she looked younger and scrawnier than she had last night.

At least she wasn’t holding the pepper spray anymore. Both hands were cupped around her coffee mug. Her face was scrubbed clean but Robie could see her red, swollen eyes. She’d been crying.

“You have any cigarettes?” she asked, glancing away from his scrutiny.

“You’re too young,” he replied.

“Too young for what? To die?”

“I get the irony, but I don’t have any cigarettes.”

“Did you used to smoke?”