Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“No.” I considered this. “So the stolen forty thousand is a bigger hit for him to swallow than we thought.”

“Huge. I was thinking about when I went to Duke. My folks saved every penny they could for my tuition. It’d take something disastrous for them to give up and doom me to a career of memorizing specials of the day.”

“You mentioned a problem.”

Teeny …

“Actually…”

“Claire?”

DuBois came in a quirky package-her dancing mind, her bizarre observations-but she was, in her way, as much a competitor as I was and it was hard for her to admit defeat, especially if she’d made a mistake, which was what I sensed had happened.

“I got this idea. Because of his clearance, Graham would have had to take a lie detector test.”

All government employees with security clearances have to do this regularly. Some organizations have their own polygraphist; the DoD usually relies on the FBI.

“So I called up a friend at the Bureau to find out. Graham was scheduled to take one last week but he called the field office and said he was staying home. He had a bad cold. They don’t let you take the exam if you’re on medication. So it was postponed until next month.”

“You checked log-in records at the Pentagon.”

“Exactly. Graham didn’t stay home when he said he had. And nobody got the impression he was sick. He lied to avoid the test.”

“Good thinking. Go on.”

“Apparently somebody in Records let him know I’d been looking into it. Graham got my name. He called. He wasn’t happy.”

It wasn’t the best outcome, I agreed. I’d rather that Graham had been kept completely in the dark about our investigation. But I still wasn’t sure why duBois seemed so upset. Then she explained. “I figured as long as I was blown, I may as well interview him, see what he had to say about withdrawing the complaint. He got, um, uncooperative. Actually pretty insulting. He called me ‘young lady.’ Which I don’t really like.”

I was sure not.

“He told me, kind of R-rated, where I could put my warrant.”

“Warrant? How did a warrant come up?”

“That’s sort of the problem. I threatened to serve him.”

“For what?” I couldn’t see any scenario in which a warrant made sense.

“I made it up. I just got mad, the way he was talking. I said if he wasn’t going to answer my questions, I’d go to a magistrate, get paper and serve him to force him to talk.”

I was silent for a moment. Lesson time. “Claire, there’s a difference between bluffing and threatening. With a threat you have something to back it up. With a bluff you don’t. We threaten. We don’t bluff.”

“I was sort of bluffing, I guess.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where is he now?”

“His caller ID put him at home. Fairfax. I’m sorry. He’s stonewalling now.”

Young lady …

“Tell you what. Meet me at the Hyatt in Tysons. A half hour.”

“Okay.”

After disconnecting, I joined Ryan Kessler at a table in the living room, poring over documents. I told him about the trackers that Loving’s partner had slipped into my wheel wells.

“They were from the department?” he asked, surprised.

“We couldn’t source them. But they’re the same model numbers the Metropolitan Police buys.”

“Fact is, we never use them,” Ryan said. “They’re great in theory but that’s not how most tails work. Reception gets screwed up, the signals get crossed. Mostly we put ’em in buy-money bags if there’s a lot of cash and we’re afraid of losing it. But you can also get them from almost any security gadget company.”

“Anybody in the department you can think of who might be monitoring the Graham or Clarence Brown cases? Or one of your smaller ones?”

“Somebody inside working with Loving? Impossible. We don’t do that, cops don’t do that to each other.”

I said nothing, though I thought: People will do anything to anybody-if the edge is right.

I returned to my computer and, not wanting him to hear my request, wrote an email to duBois, giving her another item on her growing to-do list. She acknowledged it.

Garcia and Ahmad were making rounds. I told them I was leaving for a while to continue investigating who the primary was. I stepped outside to the detached garage and opened the door. Inside was a Honda Accord, registered to a fictional resident of Arlington, Virginia. Billy’d made some modifications to it-run-flats, better horsepower and a bit of armor-but it was still pretty much off the shelf. I started the car and drove out of the compound, cruising through the tunnel of leaves and branches glowing in the sun.

I was about ten minutes from the safe house when the phone buzzed. I recognized Westerfield’s number. I’d forgotten my promise to Aaron about keeping the prosecutor up to speed.

So I answered.

I shouldn’t have.

“CORTE, YOU’RE ON speaker here with me and Chris Teasley.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve talked to the attorney general and he’s agreed to move the Kess-lers into a slammer in the District-Hansen Detention.”

All because I hadn’t returned his call? Seemed a little excessive. “I see. Why?”

Chris Teasley came on. She said, “Um, Agent Corte.”

“Officer Corte,” I corrected. My organization is an office, not a bureau or an agency. When Congress gave Abe the money that’s what he created.

“Officer Corte,” she continued. “I backgrounded you.” She sounded uneasy; I was close to twice her age.

I concentrated on driving and looking for a tail, which shepherds do automatically, all the time. Even when we go grocery shopping. But I didn’t expect to be followed and I saw nothing. “Go on.”

“It’s routine in cases like this,” she said quickly. So I wouldn’t think I was being persecuted. “One thing that came up: an operation you ran in Newport, Rhode Island. Two years ago.”

Ah, so that was it.

“I have the whole report of the investigation here.”

She kept pausing, as if giving me the chance to confirm or deny. I remained silent.

“The assignment involved you and two associates from your organization guarding several witnesses from the same man involved in this case, Henry Loving.”

She paused again. I wondered if Westerfield was testing her the way I test duBois and Ahmad and my other protégés. It’s easy to do research. It’s hard to aim it at somebody and pull the trigger.

Apparently Teasley wasn’t firing fast enough. Her boss took over. “Corte, let me read this: ‘It was alleged that Agent Corte-’”

The Justice Department’s Internal Affairs Division had gotten the job title wrong too. Not many people know about our organization.

“‘-had a conflict of interest in running the Kowalski protection assignment, endangering the two witnesses in his care. Although a half dozen personal security professionals within three government agencies stated that standard procedure would have been to secrete the two witnesses in protective custody in the Providence, Rhode Island, federal penitentiary, Agent Corte chose not to do so but to keep the witnesses first in a motel and then to transfer them to a safe house outside of Newport, Rhode Island.’”

“I’m familiar with the report,” I told him, braking hard for a lazy deer.

But he continued to read, “‘The result was that Henry Jonathan Loving, who’d been hired to kidnap and extract information from the witnesses, injured a local police officer and a bystander. He came close to successfully kidnapping at least one of the witnesses in question.

“‘During the investigation into the handling of said matter, it came to light that Loving was the same individual who had murdered Agent Corte’s superior, Abraham Fallow, the director of… ’ It’s redacted. ‘And a personal friend of Agent Corte’s. The conclusion of the investigating panel was that Agent Corte, motivated by personal revenge, chose not to put the witnesses in question into the federal detention center but rather kept them in public, with full knowledge that Loving would attempt to kidnap them there.