Jeffery Deaver - Edge

The nickname itself is telling. “Shepherd,” to me, doesn’t refer to a motley farmhand with a hooked staff, but to a very big dog.

I’m not a canine person myself but I know there are herding dogs that move sheep around a field and then there are herding dogs that both guard the flock and attack predators, however big and however numerous. Which of those two roles should we personal security officers have? Abe Fallow used to say, “A shepherd’s job is to protect the principals. That’s it. Let somebody else catch the lifter and hitter and their primaries.”

But-one of the few areas in which I disagreed with my mentor-I didn’t subscribe to that theory. I think our task is both to move the herd to safety and rip out the throats of any wolves who’re threats. Protecting the principal and neutralizing the lifter or hitter and the person who hired him are, to me, inextricably joined.

Driving fast toward the District in Garcia’s Taurus, I was speaking with Freddy, who would lead up the hunting party. The one department my organization doesn’t have is tactical. I’ve always wanted one (and had the nickname, “gunslinger,” all ready to go) but Ellis got shot down, so to speak, in committee; tac departments are surprisingly expensive. So we rely on the FBI and, in some cases, local SWAT.

After I laid out the plan that I hoped would snare Henry Loving, Freddy said, “You think this is gonna work, Corte? Sounds like Santa Claus meets the Tooth Fairy.”

“Are you there yet?” Based out of Ninth Street, in the District, he had a shorter drive than I did.

“Make it twenty minutes.”

“Move fast. How many do you have?”

“Plenty, son. Peace through superior firepower,” he said, a quote from somewhere, I believed. We disconnected. I sped on, toward Washington, D.C.

Hermes’s call had been about a flytrap, a ploy we regularly use to lure the bad guys to a takedown location. They work once in twenty, thirty times but that’s no reason not to try. All of our cars and most shepherds’ mobile phones have inside them an electronic device we call a squawk box, which periodically transmits a fake phone call that’s encrypted but traceable. A lifter or hitter with the right equipment can pick up the number that these phones call, a landline whose location they can track down through your basic commercial reverse look-up.

According to Hermes, Loving had picked up one of these automated calls from the Armada, when it was parked at the Kesslers’ house. He’d called the landline, a phone in a warehouse in North East D.C. The message he would have heard was that the place was no longer in business. The kicker was that I had recorded that message myself, so that anyone with a print of my voice, as I imagined Loving had, would think that it was indeed the place where the Kesslers were being kept.

Given the pressure to get information from Ryan by Monday night-and avoid the “unacceptable consequences” mentioned in the email Loving had received in West Virginia-and given Loving’s unrelenting drive to finish his assignments I thought it was likely that he and his partner would at least conduct some surveillance at the warehouse.

The contest between Loving and me was now about to begin in earnest.

I often put my job in terms of something that I (an otherwise dispassionate person, I’ve been told) am passionate about: board games, which I not only play but collect. (The FedEx package that had arrived that morning was an antique game I’d been looking for for years.) One of the reasons I picked the town house in Old Town Alexandria is that it’s about two blocks from my favorite gaming club, just off Prince Street. The membership is reasonable and you can always be sure of finding somebody inside to play chess, bridge, Go, Wei Chi, Risk or dozens of other games. The members are a great mix: all nationalities, levels of education, ages, though most are male. All manners of dress and income. Politics vary but are irrelevant.

In the town house are sixty-seven games (and I have even more, 121, in a house near the water in Maryland), all arranged alphabetically.

Naturally I prefer the more challenging games. My present favorite is Arimaa, a recent invention and a variation on chess but so elegant and challenging that the creator’s prize to anybody who can write a program so a computer can play is as yet unclaimed. Chess itself is certainly a good game and I enjoy it. It has, though, been so written about and studied and deconstructed that when I sit down across from an experienced player I sometimes feel that I’m not playing against him but against a crowd of stuffy, eccentric ghosts.

What do I like about board games as opposed to, say, computer games, which certainly offer the same mental challenge?

For one thing I like the art. The design of the board, the playing pieces, the cards, the die, the spinners and the wooden or plastic or ivory accoutrements, like sticks and pins. The aesthetics are pleasing to me and I like it that they also serve a functional purpose, if you can call playing a game utilitarian.

I like it that a board game has longevity and is tangible, it doesn’t go away when you shut off a switch or pull a plug from the wall.

Most important, though, I like sitting across from a human being, my opponent. Much of my life involves playing a match of life and death against people like Henry Loving, who are invisible to me, and I can only imagine their expressions of consideration as they pick their strategies to capture or kill my principals. Playing chess or Go or Tigris and Euphrates-a very good game, by the way-I can watch people as they choose their strategy and note how they respond to something I’ve done.

Even über-techie Bill Gates is a devout bridge player, I’ve heard.

In any event, playing games has honed my mind and helps me as a shepherd.

So does game theory, which I became interested in while I was getting one of my graduate degrees, in math, also for the fun of it, lolling in academia and delaying entry into the real world.

Game theory was first debated in the 1940s, though the ideas have been around for years. The academics who formulated the theory originally analyzed games like bridge and poker and even simple contests like Rock, Paper, Scissors or coin flipping, with the goal not of helping win leisure-time activities but to study decision-making.

Simply put, game theory is about trying to make the best choice when presented with a conflict among participants-either opponents or partners-when neither knows what the other will do.

A classic example is the Prisoners’ Dilemma, in which two criminals are caught and held in separate cells. The police give each one a choice: to confess or not. Even though each doesn’t know what the other will pick, they do know-from the information the police give them-it will be for their mutual good to confess; they won’t go free but they’ll get a relatively short sentence.

But there’s also the chance that by not confessing, they will get an even shorter sentence, or none at all, though that’s riskier… because they could instead receive a much longer one.

Confessing is the “rational” choice.

But not confessing is acting with what’s called “rational irrationality.”

In the real world, you see game theory applied in many situations: economics, politics, psychology and military planning. For instance, customers might know that it’s better not to withdraw all their savings from a troubled bank, because if they do they’ll contribute to a panic, the bank will fail and everybody will lose. On the other hand, if they’re the first to get their money out, they won’t lose anything; to hell with the common good. By withdrawing all their funds fast, rational irrationality might save them individually, even though it will start a run on the bank and ruin it.