Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“Kessler.”

“Who’s had all this trouble. He seemed like a nice guy when he interviewed me. I know”-another nonglaring glare at duBois-“that some hit man or somebody was curious about him because of something.”

Interesting way to phrase it.

“I’m sorry about that. But there’s no way my situation could have anything to do with it. You’re thinking that whoever stole my checkbook wants to kill him? That just doesn’t make sense.”

I held up my hands. “Like I said, we’re not here about that. We’re here…” My voice faded and I glanced at Claire duBois.

She took a deep breath. Her eyes down. “I’m here to apologize, Mr. Graham.”

“To… what?”

“When my supervisor,” she began, looking at me, “learned what I’d said and done in our conversation-”

“ “Conversation ,,” Graham said sardonically.

“He advised me that I’d acted in an unprofessional manner.”

“To put it mildly.”

I merely observed; I said nothing but turned and studied the room.

Graham was smugly pleased I wasn’t defending my aide. He looked to duBois. She explained, “See, we have profiling software. When I ran the situation through the computers, the scenario that was number one on our list was that Detective Kessler had been targeted because he’d learned something about your check fraud situation. What it laid out for us was that somebody, possibly a security threat, had stolen your checkbook and used the funds for something that might compromise you. They then blackmailed you into either handing over secrets or maybe sabotaging some of your designs for the DoD. It was a credible scenario.”

He snapped, “Except it wasn’t.”

Nodding, duBois said, “I’m fairly new to this position. I don’t know if you’ve worked in any place other than the federal government.”

“I was in the private sector for a while.”

She said, “I was too. I was a security consultant for a major software developer. I can’t really mention which one but we had a huge piracy problem. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. You’re into computers, you know source codes.”

“Of course.” He gave a subtle eye roll.

I heard duBois say, “We had a situation where an employee was being blackmailed into giving important parts of source codes to a competitor. I managed to track him down. There were some similarities between that situation and your case. I kind of leapt on that.”

“I told you there wasn’t a problem. You kept pushing.”

“Yes, I know. I got a little focused.”

“Or blinded, you could say.”

“Blinded,” duBois agreed.

“So you had a taste of success at your other company and you wanted to relive it.”

“I… that’s about right.”

“You’re an ambitious little thing, aren’t you?”

She was silent.

“Ambition’s fine. But you need the goods, you need to deliver.”

“Yessir. I didn’t have the goods.”

“If you don’t have them, you can’t deliver.”

“Right.”

“No delivery.” He offered her a drippy, condescending smile. “I’ll give you two pieces of advice. First, and this is from somebody in the business: Computers can only do so much. They point you in a certain direction. You need to use that pretty little brain of yours in deciding where to go from there. How do you learn that?”

“Well…”

“From life experience. The most important thing in the world. You can’t bottle it, you can’t buy it.”

“Yessir. What’s the second bit of advice?”

“Give people the respect they deserve. You’re young, you’re spunky. But you’ll go further faster if you keep in mind where you fit in the scheme of things.”

“That’s true. I sometimes don’t remember where I fit.”

I glanced at Graham. “Anything else we can do?”

“Your little lady and I’ve come to an understanding. I don’t think the matter needs to go any further.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“You keep that attitude in check,” he said to my protégée.

A fraction of a moment’s silence, as duBois nodded slowly. Her skin turned ruddy. “My teacher in seventh grade said the same thing once. Of course, he-”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Graham,” I interrupted quickly. “And your generosity. We’ll leave you alone now.”

We walked out the door, then climbed into the Honda. As we pulled out, watching a smug Eric Graham close the door, I said to duBois, “That was helpful.”

My highest compliment. It didn’t seem to wash today, however.

She nodded, glum.

“I know it was tough.”

“Yeah.”

The clipped one-word response meant duBois was very upset. I couldn’t blame her. I supposed she would have preferred a rolling, four-person tactical entry against an armed hostile to the humiliation she’d just suffered.

But I’d had to ask her to do it. There was absolutely no logical explanation for Graham’s dropping the case, and the fact that “somebody powerful” had gone to the MPD to make sure the investigation died suggested all the more that this was a likely motive for Ryan Kessler being targeted. I needed to do whatever I could to find out what was going on with Graham, even if it meant my protégée had to suffer.

Pretty little brain …

Claire duBois’s prostrating herself to an arrogant chauvinist like Graham was bitterly hard for her, especially since her star shone a thousand times brighter than his. But I’d remembered what Abe Fallow had told me.

Keeping people safe is a business, like any other. You ask yourself, What’s my goal and what’s the most efficient way to go about achieving it? If that means you beg, you beg. Grovel, you grovel. If that means you bust heads, get out the brass knuckles. Cry if you need to. A shepherd doesn’t exist outside the context of his mission .

So I’d had to put duBois in play-to beg forgiveness-while I had become invisible and studied Graham’s reaction when duBois told him again about our theory that he was being blackmailed. I’d noted his mannerisms, his eyes, his verbal and body language. I’d also gazed around his study for anything helpful.

Which I believed I might have found.

I plucked the video camera pen from my breast pocket and handed it to her. “I captured about a dozen pictures of people on Graham’s wall. Upload them to our server. I want facial recognition on everybody. Run all the data you get, along with the facts of the case, through ORC.”

This was the computer that duBois had alluded to in her mea culpa performance with Graham. The official name of the impressive program, residing on our tech wizard Hermes’s massive servers, is the Obscure Relationship Pattern and Connection Determiner. But we shorthand it to Obscure Relationship Connector and tighten it even more to the evil creatures in Tolkien’s fantasy novels, a thought of mine after a marathon bout of playing Lord of the Rings, which is a very good board game.

The algorithm at ORC’s heart was elegant-the mathematician in me was truly impressed with how it worked-and if there was any relevance to be found in the evidence I’d gathered, ORC could do so. “And run a facial and kinesics profile on him. A lie-detector scan.”

DuBois took the pen, hooked up a USB cable and sent the video into the stratosphere. She stared out the window. I wondered for how long I’d lost her.

I wondered too if this had changed something permanently between us.

As we drove back to the Hyatt in silence to collect her car, I heard my phone buzz. It was still in her hand. She started to hand it back, saying, “You’ve got a text.”

“Read it.”

“It’s from Transport. A copy of a message to Westerfield.”