He slowly turned the pages, taking in every word. When he came to the middle of chapter sixteen he stopped.
The section was entitled simply “The White Rose.”
Robie read swiftly. The White Rose was the name taken by a resistance group of mostly college students in Munich during World War II who worked against the tyrann
y of the Nazis. The group had taken its name from a novel about peasant exploitation in Mexico. Most of the members of the White Rose were executed by the Nazis. But pamphlets they had printed were smuggled out of Germany and dropped by the millions from Allied bombers. After the war the members of the White Rose had been hailed as heroes.
Robie slowly closed the book and set it aside.
Once more adopting Reel’s obsession with order and logic, he went through the ordeal of the White Rose and tried to graft those elements onto her situation.
The White Rose had fought against Nazi tyranny.
They had felt betrayed.
They hadn’t killed anyone, but they had attempted to stoke anger against the Nazis in order to see them stopped.
They had been killed for their troubles.
Robie slowly turned this over in his mind and then moved forward in time.
Reel had been fighting against something.
She had felt betrayed.
She had taken action to stop whoever was against her, and that included killing. But that’s what she did. The woman was no college student writing pamphlets.
The jury was still out on whether she would sacrifice her life or not.
Then Robie thought back to DiCarlo’s words.
Personnel missing.
Equipment moved.
Missions that never should have been.
And Blue Man. According to him a different dynamic seemed to be in place.
DiCarlo had been distrustful of people within her own agency. She’d had only two bodyguards with her because of this. And she’d been both proved right and paid the price for such limited protection.
Allegedly, Reel had gone off the grid and murdered two members of her own agency. If she’d done so, again according to Blue Man, it might have been because they were on the wrong side and Reel was on the side of right.
If all that was true, then the agency was full of traitors, and they went very high in the pecking order. At least as high as Gelder and maybe higher.
And then there was the matter of Roy West.
He had been with the agency. He had written some sort of apocalypse paper. He had joined a militia. He was now dead.
Robie picked up his gun and checked his watch. He had not come here simply to read a book.
It would soon be dark, and darker still where he was, with no source of light other than the stars, which were now hidden behind a gauzy veil of clouds.
He opened his knapsack and pulled out his night optics. He put them on and fired them up. They worked fine, turning the invisible to visible.
Robie’s plan was simple.
He was going to visit Cabin 17.
The darkness would be both a benefit and danger to him.
If it wasn’t occupied, Robie would find what he could. If the cabin yielded no clues he would have wasted a lot of time and come away with nothing.
He wondered what his next step would be if that turned out to be the case. Go back to D.C.? Go back on the grid? After what he suspected? That his agency was compromised and corrupted?
His last text exchange with Reel had without doubt been picked up by others. They would want to know what Robie had deduced. They would want to know where he had gone. They might want him dead, depending on his answers.
Well, then I just won’t give them any answers until I know which side folks are really on.
He had relied on a moral compass that by some miracle he still had inside him, despite what he did for a living. That meant he couldn’t walk away from this one. That meant he had to confront it at some point.
He waited until after two in the morning before setting out. He opened the door of Cabin 14 and stepped out into the pitch black.
Next stop, Cabin 17.
CHAPTER
56
IT LOOKED JUST LIKE CABIN 14, except there was a flowerpot out front on the porch with a single drooping flower. The first frost would kill it off. The flowerpot also had a cat painted on it.
Robie was standing back at the tree line. His gaze went to the door of the cabin, to the flower, and then to the surrounding darkness.
Through his night optics, the world was presented in sharp relief. But it couldn’t show him everything. There could be something else out there that he didn’t see.
So he studied that flowerpot for a long time, wondering why it was there. Just one droopy flower. And it was one that needed sun, as many flowers did. Yet there was no sun here. Which meant there was no reason to plant it in a pot and put it on the steps.
It made no sense. And thus it made perfect sense. Everything Reel did had a purpose.
He went back over the Eastern Shore fiasco frame by frame in his head. He had fired at the door and the porch, trying to set off booby traps from a safe distance.
He twirled a suppressor onto the muzzle of his Glock, aimed, and fired twice. The pot cracked, and dirt and flower parts flew up into the air.
There was no explosion.
But through his night optics Robie did see the remains of some device whirling off into the darkness.
He moved closer and examined some of this debris: the shattered parts of a surveillance camera. He picked up a piece of the clay pot. A hole had been bored into it and then hidden by the picture of the cat.
The pot had been Reel’s eyes.
And Robie had just blinded her.
It felt good.
And he also now had confirmation that the renter of Cabin 17 was indeed Jessica Reel. She had given him the clues to get here.
But that didn’t make him trust her.
He slipped his thermal imager out of his knapsack, fired it up, and pointed it at the cabin. Nothing living inside registered on its screen.
But that had happened last time and still Robie had almost fried.
Ultimately, he decided he just had to get it done. He moved stealthily toward the cabin, knelt, and fired at the door and the porch floor.
Nothing happened other than metal ripping through old wood.
He waited, listening for sounds.
A scampering in the trees was a squirrel or deer. Humans couldn’t move like that.
He crab-walked forward some more, squatted, and studied the structure.
There wasn’t much remaining to deduce from the outside. He hoped the inside would be a lot more informative.
He moved toward the porch and hurried up the steps to the door. One kick and the wooden door flew back. Robie was in the room in the next second and had cleared it five seconds after that. He shut the door behind him, pulled his flashlight, and shined it around.
What he saw was not what he had been expecting. There was no SORRY