Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“I’m going to go to jail, aren’t I?”

There was something almost humorous about the kid’s wide-eyed lament. Though it occurred to me I wasn’t sure he’d actually done anything illegal.

I asked him a few questions but Loving had known the kid would be caught; the decoy had been told nothing that might be helpful to us. Freddy went over him for evidence but, while I certainly appreciate forensic science, in these circumstances the only connection between Loving and this kid was the hundred-dollar bills. If there’d been any trace evidence exchange, through shaken hands and the money, it wasn’t going to lead to Loving’s hidey-hole.

We tried to reconstruct where the real partner had been shooting from. There were dozens of high-ground vistas that would have been perfect. Nobody had seen a muzzle flash or leaf reaction from the powerful gun. The agents in the car that had crashed were all right. One of them radioed that he was canvassing some workers on the other side of the embankment who’d heard the shots. A man reported seeing somebody running to a dark blue four-door sedan. “Buick, they thought.”

I clicked TRANSMIT. “This is Corte. Ask them what he looks like.”

After a moment: “Tall, thin, blond. Green jacket.”

“Yes, that’s the partner.”

“Nobody got the tag number. Or anything else specific.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Calls came in about the search, which included a Metropolitan Police chopper. But Loving had left the immediate vicinity without being spotted.

“We gave it a try,” Freddy said.

We had. But Loving had outthought me and negated my strategy. We were playing a game, yes, but that didn’t mean it might not end in a draw.

Rock-rock. Paper-paper…

For me, though, a draw was as good as a loss.

I walked up to the car I’d driven to the warehouse and took a handheld scanner from my shoulder bag.

Freddy said, “You think the partner got to the staging area?”

I didn’t answer-why guess?-but apparently he had. I found the first tracker in my car’s wheel well in about fifteen seconds and, just after that, the second one, hidden six inches from the first, in hopes that I might stop the search after finding number one. I kept going but I didn’t find a third. At least not a third one that had switched itself on yet. I noted that removing them switched off the power, alerting Loving that they’d been found. We couldn’t use them as bait to lure him to another trap.

I searched a second time with an explosives sniffer and didn’t come up with any bombs. I hadn’t really thought that was a risk, though. Loving wanted me to lead him to the principals. He didn’t want to kill me.

That would come later.

I SWAPPED THE borrowed car for Garcia’s Taurus and drove it to Old Town Alexandria, parking in our garage next to the office.

The D.C. area is peppered with operations like this, units of various government agencies. Sometimes it’s a question of space; Langley, for instance, is extremely crowded. For meetings at the CIA I sometimes have to park a hundred yards or more from the entrance. Sometimes it’s security. Everybody, from the writers at Slate.com to the Mossad to al Qaeda, know where the NSA, NRO and CIA are located; other operations, like ours, prefer to stay off the grid as much as possible.

In the garage I greeted Billy and told him to run a full scan of Garcia’s car. It had been unattended in the garage near Union Station for several hours while I was at the flytrap.

“I stopped halfway here and ran a scan. Nothing active. But you’ll have to give it a thorough check.”

A lot of trackers have timers that turn on hours or weeks into the future. You need very sophisticated equipment that can detect not radio signals but tiny electrical sources.

“You bet, Corte,” the scrawny man said. “I’ll call a sweeper.” Billy would look right at home in the cab of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer.

I made a detour outside and bought a roast beef on whole wheat, extra mustard and two pickles, and black coffee. I returned to the office. The boring and uninviting lobby featured an unhealthy tree, a poster of a smiling man and woman who’d apparently just been approved for a loan and a black sign containing white adhesive-letter names of a half dozen companies, all fake. I nodded at the two guards, both seriously and subtly armed, then did the eye and thumb thing at the wall panel and walked through the door. I went up a flight of stairs.

Outside my office my shared personal assistant, Barbara, lifted her head and handed me some message slips. The slim, middle-aged woman purposefully didn’t look at my coffee and I knew she was thinking, why didn’t I like hers, which she made daily for the floor? I didn’t like it because it was reliably bad.

Her hair was grayish dark and frozen into shape. I sometimes thought she got the hairdo about where she wanted it and then pushed it into position with gusts of hair spray.

Since our organization never closed we had support staff all the time, though no one assistant was required to work more than forty hours a week. I hadn’t done the math but I believed Barbara was working on her second forty.

“I like weekends,” she sometimes said. “It’s quieter.”

Apart from lying in polluted mud and getting shot at by a talented sniper.

I sat down at my desk and ate a pickle spear and a large bite of sandwich, a Heimlich bite. I then sipped hot and strong and very good coffee.

I called Lyle Ahmad at the Hillside Inn.

“What’s the status?”

“Quiet. Garcia and I make rounds every twenty or so.”

“Any calls? Anybody from the front desk? Anything?”

“No,” he said crisply. Ahmad’s ancestry was Middle Eastern of some sort and he might or might not be a Muslim. Unlike some people of that faith in this country, he didn’t seem the least self-conscious or defensive about it. Nor should he have been. The vast majority of people who’ve tried to kill me have been of Christian or Jewish or agnostic leaning.

“The principals?”

“Doing fine,” he assured, though with a certain tone in his voice that meant they were probably impatient, bored and uneasy but he didn’t want to say so while ten feet from them. I heard the sound of a baseball game in the background and Joanne saying to her sister, “Well, sure. I just wonder… If you think that’s the best idea, though, sure.”

My mother would often sound like that.

“I’ll be back for the move to the safe house in about forty-five.”

“Yessir.”

After we disconnected, I ate two more large bites of sandwich, thinking of the FedEx package I’d received, the antique game I’d been looking forward to examining on my lunch hour. I wondered if it was in good shape, if it had all the pieces and cards, as the seller had promised. I glanced at the safe behind my desk but left it where it was.

I didn’t have it locked away because I was afraid it would be stolen. No, it was simply that I didn’t share my personal life with anybody here, even those I worked closely with. Yes, there were some security reasons for this; in reality, though, I just felt more comfortable being secretive. I couldn’t really say why.

I reached for the phone to call duBois and have her brief me about what she’d found out so far about Ryan’s case but it buzzed first. My boss’s extension.

“Corte.”

“It’s Aaron. Could you come in for a moment?”

Tone often tells more than content and I noted the uneasiness in Ellis’s voice, making the otherwise innocuous request. I expected to find Westerfield sitting in his office when I arrived but in fact it was somebody else altogether. A slim man, balding, in a suit and powder blue shirt. No tie. He looked at me with eyes that didn’t look at me. As if he was seeing what I represented, rather than who I actually was.