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I’m glad Ian is okay. But now that he’s healthy you have to consider what you’ve done and the damage that it’s caused. Because you opened the door for them. You and Susan. We need to meet.
Robinson stared down at the little screen and then, after looking around to make sure no one was watching him, thumbed in a brief response.
How? They’re everywhere.
As Robinson read the reply his opinion of Robert Puller was once more validated. He was a very smart man.
Union Station was busy at this time of day. Robinson parked in the upper deck and rode the escalator down to the station. He walked inside and over to a bank of phones set against one wall. In a world of cell phones, there was no one using these antiquated tools of communication.
Across from him some scaffolding enclosed with a tall curtain had been set up around repair work being done on the ceiling.
Robinson parked himself at the phone farthest from the door he’d come in and waited. A few seconds later it rang.
He picked it up and said hello.
“You’re looking good, Niles. Trim as ever.”
Robinson didn’t bother to look around. He doubted he could have spotted the man.
“How did you get out of DB, Bobby?”
“Nothing planned. Just taking advantage of an opportunity.”
“Your brother came by to see me.”
“I’m sure.”
“I don’t think he believed me.”
“It’s pretty much impossible to lie to him.”
“I know you went to see Susan. She said you tried to kill her. That she finally got away and got to her gun and that you ran.”
“I’m sure she did. Not exactly how it went down, but that’s Susan for you.”
“Meaning she’s a lying sack of shit.”
“That’s sort of what I meant, but I like the way you said it better.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to do it, Bobby. But they had me cornered. No way out. Ian was going to—” Here, Robinson faltered.
“I’m not here to judge you, Niles. Given the circumstances, I might’ve done the same thing. But now we have to make this right.”
“How?”
“For beginners, you need to tell me who paid you off to do what you did.”
“I never met anyone. It was all emails and they never deposited any money in my account. They just paid for the medical care in Germany directly. That way no one would be the wiser. We explained away the treatment in Germany as a charity case because the company running the clinical trials needed bodies to try it on.”
“Okay, but what exactly did they want you to do? Backdoor them into STRATCOM and from there everywhere else?”
“That might have been their plan. But that’s not what they told me to do. I just had to finger you meeting with the Iranian. They provided the doctored photos.”
“Okay, Niles, but there had to be some endgame on this.”
“You ever wonder why they specifically targeted you out of everybody at STRATCOM?”
“Of course I did.”
“And did you ever find an answer?”
“Not a good one, no.”
“Well, I asked myself that question many times.”
“And did an answer ever hit you?” asked Puller.
“About a year ago, when I was at work.”
“And what was it?”
“You were being groomed to go all the way to the top, Bobby. General Able was pretty clear on that.”
“So what?” asked Puller.
“There were some who might not have liked that.”
“Who exactly are you talking about?”
“I tried to make it right, Bobby. I really did. This has been eating me from the inside out for over two damn years.”
“Give me a name, Niles,” urged Puller.
The shot hit Niles Robinson right in the base of his neck and severed his medulla. With that core destroyed, so was he. He stood there for an instant, a look of intense surprise on his now bloody face where the round had exited and struck the wall. Then he fell face first into the phone bank and slid to the floor, the wall smeared with his blood, his hand still clutched around the receiver.
The shooter, dressed as a police officer, was behind the enclosed repair site. He had aimed and fired his suppressed pistol through a slit in the curtain. He holstered his weapon, exited out the other side of the work site, and started yelling at people not to panic but to move away from the site of the shooting. Most people obeyed since he was in uniform.
Still, hundreds of people were screaming and fleeing in all directions, abandoning their luggage and trying to get away from the murdered man. Police, guns out, rushed toward him. Union Station was instantly transformed into a nightmare scenario.
Only two people walked calmly out of the station that day.
One was Robert Puller.
The other was the person who had just killed Niles Robinson.
CHAPTER
42
AT SEVEN A.M. the next morning Knox and Puller sat at breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Rays of cheery sunlight were coming through the window facing the street. People walked in and out of the restaurant, and cars motored on their way. It seemed improbable that someone had tried to murder them a few hours ago and only a short distance from here, but improbable or not, it had happened.
She said, “I have to tell you I had trouble going to sleep, at least for the three hours of sack time I had.”
“Why?”
“I shot a man, Puller. Maybe that’s routine for you. Not so much for me.”
“Shooting someone is never routine. At least I hope it never becomes routine.”
“We’re on the same page there. But we must be making some people nervous. That’s progress.”
Puller paused with his cup of tea halfway to his lips. “We’ve covered a lot of ground but we have no answers, Knox. That is not progress. Not in my book.”
“I disagree. We’ve discovered that two people were lying their asses off and got your brother sent to prison wrongly. We figured out–well, you did–that some Croatian snuck a bogey into Fort Leavenworth who was sent there to kill your brother. We’ve accomplished a lot. We really have.”
“But we really don’t have answers yet. Not for the important questions. Namely, who and why?”
She fiddled with her spoon. “Obviously your brother is out there right now trying to figure it all out.”
“You sound like you’ve been giving that some thought.”
“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, actually.”
“And what do you think?”
“That he’s maybe ahead of us on some things.”
“Why?”
“He’s super smart. He was set up. He was in the intelligence field. And he’s trying to prove his innocence. Lots of motivation there.”
“I’ve started to think that he was the one who saved my butt when those goons snatched me. It’s really the only thing that makes sense.”
Knox looked at him in surprise. “I hadn’t even considered that. But I guess that would make sense. So you might have been a few feet from him that night?”
“I might have been, yeah. As it turned out, it might as well have been a few miles. He’s gone, and I’m no closer to finding him.”
“You were really tight with your brother, weren’t you?”
