He got his key and paid in cash for one night. He had one room on the third floor of a dirty-faced building that was a nine-minute uphill walk to the city center. He was not staying at the Balmoral Hotel or the Scotsman or any of the other illustrious accommodations in the ancient city. The cab ride in from the airport took fifteen more minutes of his life. The flight took forty-seven minutes to cross first the Irish Sea and then a large swath of Scotland. W ILL R OBIE HAD closely observed every one of the passengers on the short flight from Dublin to Edinburgh and confidently deduced that sixteen were returning Scots and fifty-three were tourists. Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl’s life…and perhaps his own.

Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he’s convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents’ deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can’t walk away. But she isn’t an ordinary runaway–her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and is on the run.įleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But something about this mission doesn’t seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. government operation goes horribly wrong, he must rescue a teenage runaway and investigate her parents’ murders in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. America’s best hitman was hired to kill–but when a D.C.

The Innocent by David Baldacci