Gathers made his final calculations, focusing on the wind tunnel and the flag between the two buildings. He fed this information to Robie, who made the slight, nearly imperceptible changes to his optics.
“Dialed in and locked,” said Robie. He would make no more changes. With his naked eye he looked once more at the flag. Then he settled down with his scope. From this point until the shot fired, his optics were his only eyes. He had to trust in them, like a pilot did his navigation instruments while flying through fog.
His finger slid to the trigger guard.
In his mind he mouthed the term, True Vee One.
The target had picked up a glass of red wine. He was raising it up, as though to toast himself. He wore a tuxedo. The white shirt with the silver studs represented a huge bull’s-eye for Robie, but he would not be aiming there. Because ordnance dropped over distance, he was actually aiming at a spot above the target’s head. Everything was dialed in. Everything was ready to go. Gathers would tell him if the man moved from this spot.
Everything about Robie began to relax: his blood pressure dropped, his heartbeat slowed, his respiration grew even and deep as he reached cold zero.
Or rather all of those things should have happened.
But they didn’t. Not a single one.
His blood pressure was amped, his heart raced, and his breaths were more like gasps. He was stunned when, despite the coolness of the air, a drop of sweat slid down his forehead and leached into his left eye.
He could not rub it away. Not now. He refocused. His finger moved to the trigger. Right before he touched the thinnest and most important piece of metal on his weapon—
He saw the child.
The little boy ran across the room and held his arms up to the man. He wanted to be picked up. The man did so, cradling the little boy against his chest.
“Fire, Robie. Fire.”
He thought the voice was coming from his head. But it wasn’t. It was coming from his ear mic.
“Fire, now!”
This order was not coming from his head or his ear mic.
It was coming from Gathers, who squatted next to him.
But the little boy was in his daddy’s arms. To kill him, Robie would have to kill the child.
“Fire, Robie, fire!”
Robie’s finger was frozen, a millimeter from the trigger.
The shot rang out.
Seconds later the glass tinkled and the man fell out of his chair, mortally wounded.
Robie took his eye away from the optics and looked down at his finger. It had never touched the trigger.
“Egress, egress!” the voice in his ear mic called out.
Gathers was already pulling Robie to his feet.
“Move, Robie, move.”
In a daze Robie still managed to follow Gathers down the metal steps, their duffels over their shoulders. The next moment they were running pell-mell down narrow, dark streets toward the water.
Robie remembered getting in the RIB.
It took off fast and shot through the darkened water at a furious clip.
Then came the ride in the chopper. It was brief and turbulent as hell as the storm kicked it up a notch higher.
Ten minutes later they were hustling up the gangplank of the freighter.
Three minutes after that the huge ship moved away from the pier and gathered speed as it headed across the bay and into vast and open ocean waters.
Robie looked over at Gathers, who sat opposite him on the bunk in their cramped quarters.
“The shot?”
Gathers said, “They had a backup team in place. Just in case.”
He had royally screwed up a mission. He had seen a child where there was no child. He had apparently hallucinated in the middle of a mission—a first for him. Hell, probably a first in Agency history.
And, inexplicably, cold zero had never materialized for him. He stared down at his hands. They were trembling. He touched his forehead where the sweat bead had meandered before hitting him in the eye. Unless he figured this out, he was done. He couldn’t do his job. Which meant he was nothing.
Officially, he had been placed on leave. Until he got things straightened out in his head, if he ever did, Robie would not be going back into the field.
He stared down at the waters, and in their murky depths he once more saw the face. Only now he realized he had taken Sasha and, in his mind, changed her gender, moved her a thousand miles away, and given her another father, and along with it a reason for him not to take the shot.
He should have known something was wrong. How could he have seen a little boy in his father’s arms if his scope was aimed at a spot above the man’s head?