Jeffery Deaver - Edge

We shook hands. He identified himself as Sandy Alberts.

Ellis seemed to have met him before, but then my boss knew almost everybody in Washington, D.C. He said to me, “Sandy’s chief of staff to Senator Lionel Stevenson.”

Moderate Republican from Ohio. I thought he’d been on the cover of Newsweek or something recently.

“I’m not really here,” Alberts said jokingly, referring to the secret nature of our organization. We heard this a lot. I’m sure you’re busy. I’ll tell you what’s going on, sir.”

“Corte.”

“Officer Corte, then. The senator is on the Intelligence Committee.”

Which explained the security clearance allowing him inside. I’d been wondering.

“The committee’ll be holding hearings next month on domestic surveillance issues, Patriot Act, FISA warrants. It’s looking into possible privacy abuses and I’m doing some research for the senator.” He held up jovial hands. “We’re not suggesting anything’s wrong here . Just interviewing as many people as we can in federal law enforcement. Gathering information. You’re the senior protection officer in your organization and we’d like to interview you to see if you’ve been aware of instances in which there’s been, let’s say, carelessness in failing to apply for warrants for wiretaps on phone lines and emails in any agencies you’ve dealt with. The Bureau, the CIA, DEA, NSA, NRO, local law enforcement.”

“I’d be happy to help but… well, I need to run this job now.”

Alberts was nodding. “We know what you do here. The senator’s a friend of Aaron’s.” A glance toward my boss. “We don’t want to jeopardize any of your great work. It’s just that there’s a bit of time pressure.”

“Why?” Ellis asked.

“Any time committees start looking into things, the press invariably catches on and if they preempt us everybody loses.”

I couldn’t disagree with that. “There are plenty of other people you could talk to here,” I suggested.

“Oh, we want the star,” Alberts replied.

My boss backed me up. “I’m afraid I agree it’ll have to be after this case is concluded.”

Alberts wasn’t pleased but he took it in stride. “Three, four days, you think?”

“Probably something like that,” I said. “But I can’t commit. It’s a very critical time for the family in my care. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m free.”

“Sure, I understand,” Alberts said. Looking through me again, smiling that nonsmile of his. “Appreciate it.” He rose. With a nod to Ellis the man collected his briefcase. “And I meant that-about the good job you folks do.”

After he left I asked Ellis, “The senator’s a friend of yours?”

Ellis scoffed, shrugging his huge shoulders. “If you call going to somebody with hat in hand a friend, then I guess. Stevenson usually comes through with most of what I want for the budget. He’s to the right but it’s a thinking right. He’s smart and he’ll listen to the other side. We need more pols like him. Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.”

I recalled the turbulent demonstrations I’d just driven through. Each side really looked like they wanted to kill the other. I believed that was the gist of the Newsweek article, Senator Stevenson’s efforts to encourage bipartisanship in Washington.

Good luck, I thought.

I regarded my boss’s children’s artwork on the wall. A river dominated by a very large fish. A purple airplane. Rabbits.

“And Alberts?”

“Only met him once or twice. Typical Beltway pro: political action committees, fund-raising, aide for senators on the Finance Committee, Armed Services and now Intelligence, with Stevenson.” Ellis was shifting in his chair. “You’ll follow up?”

“With Alberts? I suppose.”

“I need you to, Corte. Keep the purse-string people happy… though you don’t look too happy about it.”

“I can’t testify in a hearing. I’m only good because I don’t exist.”

“Alberts knows that. He only needs leads to other agencies, the public ones.”

“You know what ‘lead’ translates into in this line of work, don’t you, Aaron?”

“Snitch?” my boss suggested.

The very word I had in mind.

I RETURNED TO my office.

Barbara said, “Your coffee was cold so here’s a new one. I just made it.”

Ah. I thanked her and sipped. It was even worse than I’d remembered.

I punched SPEED DIAL.

“DuBois,” the voice chirped. “You’re in the building.”

“For ten minutes or so. Can you come over here?”

She appeared a moment later and I wondered how the job had disrupted her plans for the weekend.

She had two cats and a boyfriend, who seemed like a regular, I deduced from snippets of conversation, but whom she didn’t live with. I’d never met him; I don’t socialize with colleagues. Her boyfriend was apparently always ready to come over to feed the animals and change the litter. I sometimes felt sorry for him. On the other hand, I wondered if he wasn’t better off in that sort of relationship with Claire duBois, rather than living with her, which might be an exhausting proposition.

She sat across from me.

“Principals’ phones.” I handed her the bag containing the Kesslers’ Nokias and Samsungs and BlackBerrys and their respective batteries, which I’d removed. She’d put them in the sealed room up the hall, in Hermes’s work area. If Ryan or Joanne absolutely needed a number from their phones in an emergency and had no other way to get it, Hermes or a wizard in Technical would go inside, power up the phone and get the information, without any risk of a telltale signal escaping.

“Loving?” duBois asked.

“His partner was there but no further description or lead except a blue four-door, probably Buick. Nothing else.”

A raised eyebrow. “Light or dark? Blue, I mean. There’re about twenty-five shades of green for current passenger vehicles, I happen to know. Eighteen red. I haven’t looked at blue, sorry, but it’s probably the same. Oh, and they typically fade one degree of color temperature every six months. Depending.”

“Darker.”

She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.

“Now, there’s this.” I handed her the plastic bag containing the trackers.

DuBois lifted a thick, dark eyebrow. “Two. Okay. You were telling me they do that sometimes. Sometimes three. In your car at the flytrap?”

I nodded. “Loving’s partner did it. I need prints. And source of origin.”

“I’ll track them down,” she said, without any irony at her choice of verb.

I asked, “Now, Ryan’s cases?”

DuBois didn’t need to glance at her notes. “First, the forgery. Graham, Eric. Forty-nine. Civilian employee of the DoD. Here’s the background. They call it the Inner Circle, where he works. I think it’s Ring E or something like that. Inside the center of the Pentagon. I couldn’t find out exactly what he does, even with my ID and pulling strings, but we can go with it’s classified and it involves weapons development.”

“How’d you find that?” Weapons developers are very careful to make sure they never say they develop weapons.

“Checked his résumé, his clearances, correlated some times and places of meeting with a defense contractor or two. You know, sometimes you can tell more about somebody from what he doesn’t tell you than what he does. I put it all together.”

DuBois was really a gem.

She tucked away strands of hair, and the charms on her bracelet jingled. I saw a sterling silver dog, an armadillo, a baguette and a tiny silver King Wenceslas, which she’d bought in Prague when we’d been on assignment there. She continued, “No security incidents involving Graham. But something’s come up, something odd. I don’t know what to make of it.” She was looking at my sandwich. “Is that dinner?”