He had been surveilling Reilly ever since the agent’s aborted meeting with Padley. The train journey from New York City to DC had been uneventful. As advised, there had been a car waiting for him at Union Station, its key in a magnetized case stuck to the underside of the chassis. The car had been parked in such a position as to allow Sandman to tail his target as he left the station.
The moment it was clear which house Reilly was interested in, he sent the address via encrypted email to one of his employers’ data geeks. The surprising response, less than a minute later, told him the house belonged to one of their co-workers, a career analyst at the CIA named Stan Kirby. The man had spent twenty-five years at Langley and was currently a senior intelligence analyst with Level 2-B clearance. Despite two disciplinary warnings for timekeeping, he still had full benefits and was due the company’s top-tier pension package.
Sandman focused on the sound coming through his earbuds as Kirby gave his reply.
“Something else? No. Fuck you. You said we were done last time.”
“I know, and that was what I’d hoped,” he heard Reilly say. “But something new came up, and I have no choice.”
“No choice, no choice,” the analyst mocked. “Don’t give me that crap again. You love doing this.”
I tensed up. This wasn’t going well. “I don’t. But I’m willing to do what I need to do to get answers.”
“Yeah, well, screw you. Screw. You. I’m done with this bullshit. You wanna tell my wife, go ahead. Hell, her sister was the best thing that happened to me-until you ruined it.”
I held his scowl, then shrugged and pulled out my phone. “Fine. That’s the way you want to play it.”
I feigned dialing a number, then brought the phone up to my ear.
Kirby’s face sank. “What are you doing?”
“Calling your wife. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He dropped the flowers and shopping bag and leapt at me, his hands swatting at the phone. “Are you fucking nuts? Hang up. Kill the God damn call.”
I brought the phone down and stared him down.
“What is it this time?” he asked, beaten down and angry.
“My father. I want to know what the agency has on him.”
Sandman had already guessed at the history here. The agent had blackmailed someone inside the CIA. He had his own personal mole there. And that presented his superiors with a problem. If Reilly had been fed classified information relating to anything that involved them, he was a direct threat. Especially seeing as the call from Padley would have confirmed for the agent that there were layers he had yet to peel back.
“Your father?” Kirby said. “Who the hell is your father?”
“Colin Reilly. He’s dead. He died in 1980. There’s a mention of him in one of the Corrigan files you got me.”
Sandman shook his head at Reilly’s impetuous nature. In the morning, he fails to get hold of information he thinks might unlock an impenetrable mystery, and by the evening he’s attempting to reactivate a relationship of coercion from which he’d already got out completely clean. It was exactly the kind of reckless behavior that was liable to get you killed.
The reckless behavior that presented Sandman with an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
He hurriedly typed another encrypted message:
KIRBY FED CLASSIFIED FILES TO REILLY. FIND WHICH. REED CORRIGAN + COLIN REILLY NAMECHECKED.
He pressed send, pulled out the earbuds, placed the scope, mic and buds on the passenger seat and climbed out of the car, pocketing his handset as he straightened. He’d already thought out how to deal with Reilly while having Kirby at their mercy until they’d found out everything they needed to know. At that point, Stan Kirby would meet a tragic, but entirely accidental end.
Sandman walked toward the open garage.
I watched as Kirby racked his brains as he knelt down and picked the bouquet of flowers off the garage floor.
“I don’t remember seeing any mention of him.”
“It was only his initials, CR.” I said it louder than I meant to, my frustration boiling over.
“Pipe down, will you? She’ll hear us.” He set the flowers on his car.
I could hear the desperation in his voice and see the dread in his face as he pictured everything he thought he’d resolved about to unravel. I was in no mood to cut him any slack.
“Same exercise, different name,” I told him. “Get me everything on file about my dad and we’re done.”
He scoffed. “Why am I having a déjà vu here?”
There was the faintest sound behind me. I spun to find a gun pointed right at me. The man holding it wore a black unbadged baseball cap, which along with the thick-framed glasses he had on pretty much obscured his eyes. A short, but full dark beard covered the lower half of his face and his hands were sheathed by black leather gloves.
The guy was a pro.
I watched as he took in the entire situation in one sweep, then raised his left hand and pulled on a red plastic T-bar suspended from the garage door by a short rope, thus disengaging the door from the motor and ensuring he couldn’t be shut inside.
I glanced over at Kirby. He seemed thoroughly spooked. He didn’t know him.
The bearded man finally spoke, addressing me first and waving his gun as a conductor’s stick.
“Reilly, take out your gun and put it on the ground. Easy.”
So he knew who I was. That told me most of what I needed to know right now. I paused for a couple of seconds, assessing the immediate situation, then slowly took out my Glock and placed it carefully on the garage floor.
“Stan, bring it over to me. Pick it up from its barrel. Two fingers. Gently.”
Kirby complied and handed it over to him. The bearded man took it carefully, also from the edge of its barrel, then he moved his hand so he gripped it the right way around, but by the tip of his gloved fingers.
Like he didn’t want to wipe my prints off it.
“Stan, do you have a gun in the house?”
“Yes. In the bedroom. It’s in a lockbox.”
The man thought about it for a second. “Not very convenient, Stan. Not when the guy who’s blackmailed you before comes back to threaten you again. Comes to your own house and asks you to break the law and commit high treason. This armed motherfucker walks into your garage without invitation and waves his gun in your face to make you betray your country. What do you do, Stan? Do you just sit back and watch? Or do you do something about it?”
Kirby just stood there, nailed to his spot, like a silent pressure cooker on the verge of blowing.
“I’ll tell you what you do, Stan.”
The bearded man aimed my own gun at me.
“You jump the bastard and you kill him.”
12
“Makes sense, doesn’t it, Stan? Besides, I don’t see how you have a choice here. You’ve got a family to protect. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison, do you?”
Kirby looked like he was about to have a full-blown heart attack. The bearded man kept my gun pointed directly at me, clearly having decided that Kirby represented zero threat.
“Take a breath and answer me, Stan, because in about ten seconds I’ll just shoot you both where you stand and let your friends at Langley worry about cleaning up this mess. The mess you put them in.”
Kirby’s eyes lit up. I could see him processing: the agency knew about everything. Somehow, they knew that he’d leaked the files to me, and there was something in them so dangerous that the leak had to be plugged indefinitely. But they were offering him a way out. A way to keep his job and his pension. All he had to do was kill me.
“They’ll kill you too,” I told him. “He’s already got the narrative they’re going with.”
Kirby glared at me. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? You see many choices here?”