Jeffery Deaver - Edge

Williams offered a very expected chuckle. “A lot closer than you think.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER I stepped outside, smelling the chill moist air, the aroma from a wood fire in the distance. Kids sometimes lit campfires in the park overlooking the Potomac falls.

I recalled Maree and me, sitting uneasily-in my case, at least-on the rock shelf forty feet above the raging water earlier this morning. I recalled her kissing me.

Then I forced myself to concentrate.

Because the man fronting as Tony Barr was now approaching, vigilant as ever and armed with an impressive automatic weapon. I needed him to believe I had no inkling he was a partner of Henry Loving.

“Tony,” I said, nodding. The intense, quiet man joined me. His eyes kept scanning the property. I asked, “Lyle’s inside?” So far I was keeping my voice calm and looking at him in ways I thought appropriate to these circumstance.

“Yessir… Any word from Philly?” he asked.

What the hell was Loving up to? I wondered. I said, “Nothing yet. Loving won’t be there for another half hour or so, at the earliest.” Car keys jangled in my hand. “I’m going to pick up the Kesslers’ daughter and their friend.”

A sliver of moon kept appearing and vanishing, as the thick clouds scooted by above us. Maple and oak sloughed silver leaves in the breeze and the tall hemlocks in the side yard swayed. The wind breathed easily.

I looked around the property. “It’s a lot different here now, with the primary in custody and the lifter about to be nailed. You can almost enjoy it.” I glanced at the imposter’s black angular machine gun. It wasn’t pointed near me but if he caught on that I knew who he was I’d be dead before I could move an inch.

The man said, “That’s true-except for some deer with a suicidal personality who jumped out of the bushes over there a little while ago. We almost had venison for breakfast. Just heard him again, the same place. They’re not really very bright, are they?”

“I don’t think that’s why God made them.” Was he suspicious? I couldn’t tell. I continued, “Listen, Tony, when I get back I want to coordinate getting the Kesslers to Fairfax in the morning. Loving’ll be in custody by then. But I want some protection on them for the next couple of days, until everything’s resolved. Agent Frederick said you might be willing to take that on.” I was vamping. Overdoing it? I wondered. I wasn’t sure. A bad performance would kill me.

“Yessir… if he’d like.”

I smiled. “Meaning you’re not all that crazy about baby-sitting detail.”

He grinned too. “I’m happy to be of help, sir.”

“Appreciate it.”

Then a faint snap came from the front yard.

Both of us shared a troubled look and turned toward the sound. Tense, squinting.

“What do you think that was?” I asked.

“Our deer?” he asked in a whisper.

I shook my head. “Not in the front. They don’t go there.”

The sound was repeated, louder.

We trained the muzzles of our weapons in the direction of the snap.

“The hell is it?” he asked.

We got the answer a moment later as we saw another rock sail over the house and land in the driveway.

“Diversion,” I rasped with alarm in my voice. We both spun around fast-to see a man covering us with a silenced semiautomatic pistol. He’d come up behind us quietly, as we were staring toward the sound, after flinging the stones over the roof to distract us.

The lean sandy-haired man was wearing the same green jacket he’d been wearing on Saturday at the assault on the Kesslers’ house and at the flytrap.

I whispered, “It’s Loving’s partner!”

“His-?” the Barr-imposter began to ask. But before he finished the sentence the man in the green jacket squinted, lifted his weapon toward my leg and fired three times.

I cried out and went down hard.

THE BULLETS, IN fact, hadn’t hit me at all.

And the man in the jacket wasn’t Loving’s partner.

He was Williams’s security expert, a man named Jonny Pogue-the one who was indeed closer than I would have thought, as Williams had said, after his grunting chuckle. Pogue had been stationed directly across the road and had been shadowing us for days to make certain that Joanne and her dark secrets didn’t fall into the wrong hands. That’s what he’d been doing at the Kesslers’ house and at the flytrap, but since he was operating undercover, he never contacted us and we’d assumed he was the partner.

Over the phone shortly before, Pogue and I had worked out the ruse that was now unfolding, a strategy that might get to the truth about the imposter and what Loving’s true plan was.

A strategy that might also get both Pogue and me killed.

Pogue knelt down and pretended to search me carefully; as he did so he turned his back to the imposter and was completely vulnerable. But the man, who could have shot him at any moment, was confused that Pogue was ignoring him. And further disarmed by Pogue’s picking up my Glock and handing it to the phony FBI agent. “Here.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking the weapons uncertainly, “but who the fuck are you?”

“Pogue.”

“Henry never said-”

“Loving doesn’t know about me. I work for the man who hired him.”

This was a gamble that Pogue and I had discussed. If the imposter himself worked for the primary, the whole play would end right now-maybe bloodily.

But then I heard him give a brief laugh and say, “Oh, sure. That explains it.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you and Henry just to make sure things go according to plan.” Pogue rose and extended his hand. “What’s the name?”

“McCall.”

They shook hands briefly. Then Pogue muttered, “Well, McCall, we got a problem. You know the insider-got you the info about Barr and your picture up on the Bureau website.”

McCall nodded absently, looking around. “I don’t know who it is, just somebody in that asshole Fredericks’ office.”

So the mole was in Freddy’s department. This was bad. I didn’t react, however, just clutched my leg and moaned. McCall seemed to enjoy it.

“Well, whoever they are, they changed their fucking mind,” Pogue spat out. “They’re talking.”

“Shit, no.”

“Shit, yeah.” There was a mocking quality about the comment, the sort you’d hear between two soldiers on allied armies. Pogue was acting in top form.

Sickle …

McCall asked, “They know about me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not yet but they will. It’s just a matter of time till they figure out that you clipped Barr.”

Defensively McCall said, “The body’s in a storm drain. Take ’em days to find it.”

“You can fucking hope. But the point is we’ve gotta bail. Get to Henry and warn him-we can’t use the phones or radio. They have all our numbers and frequencies.”

“What about him?” McCall pointed my own Glock at me.

“He’s coming with us. There’s things my boss wants to know. But the priority is we’ve got to get to Henry. I mean, now. Where is he?”

“Last time I talked to him he was pretty close.” McCall smirked, “They bought all that crap about him going to Philly.”

“Well, let’s get to him. Before they track him down. Where is he exactly?”

Careful, I thought to Pogue. I was worried he might be overdoing it.

“He was going to facility, after he and the crew picked up the target.”

Pogue asked, “The target? Joanne Kessler?”

McCall frowned. “No, no, man. She doesn’t have anything to do with this… I mean, the real target. Amanda, the daughter.”