Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“Oh, Christ,” Maree said. “He could’ve killed us. While we were asleep he could’ve, like, cut our throats.”

Ryan asked, “Who’s the other one, the tall guy?”

It was Joanne who spoke. “His name’s Jon Pogue. He works for my organization.” Then her voice faded, as she looked at me. “Why would they need a feint, though, Corte? Getting a mole inside here should’ve been enough. What else is going on?”

I inhaled a little deeper than usual. “It’s Amanda they’re after. And they’ve got her.”

Joanne’s mouth tightened and Ryan growled, “Where, where is she?”

“We don’t know. But there’s no doubt. Amanda was the Kessler they wanted.”

“No, no,” Maree whispered.

Joanne said in a voice as calm as mine, “Why? What does she know?”

I shook my head.

Ryan’s face was red. “Those pricks! My little girl… what…?” Then, it seemed, forming words became too much for him.

“And Bill?” Joanne asked.

“Minor injuries. He’ll be okay. They killed the detention center guard who was with them. We believe they’ve taken Amanda to a rendezvous site nearby. Loving’s on his way there. But we don’t know where. We tried to find out from McCall but he caught on and he’s not saying anything.”

Ryan muttered, “Well, Jesus, what’re we going to do?”

I said, “I could use some help.” My eyes on Joanne.

She lifted an eyebrow.

I said, “Part of McCall wants to cooperate. I can tell. He’s on the borderline. I’m thinking if you could talk to him, he might help us out.”

“Appeal to his sense of decency?” she asked.

“As Amanda’s stepmother, yes.”

Her eyes swung to the wedge of light falling on the grass from the open door of the panic building. “I’ll give it a try.”

POGUE AND I stood outside the closed door to the outbuilding.

I observed him closely for the first time.

The head beneath that sandy hair was long, a predator’s skull. His features were pinched-they’d circled in on themselves-and a scar curved forward from his chin, short and narrow, from a knife, not shrapnel. He didn’t smile or offer much expression and I doubted that he ever did. No wedding ring, no jewelry. I noted remnants of stitching where insignias had been removed from his green jacket. I supposed that it was a personal favorite and that he’d had the garment for years.

His narrow hips were encircled by a worn canvas belt. It held a special holster-a clamp basically, fitted for a silenced pistol-and a number of magazine holders, along with a knife and several small boxes whose purpose I couldn’t guess.

Unlike Ryan Kessler, Pogue didn’t constantly tap or fidget with his weapons. He knew where they were if he needed them. On the ground beside him was a battered dark nylon rucksack, whose contents were heavy. I’d heard a clank when he’d set it down.

He stood with his arms crossed, looking over the property with the eye of a shepherd, as if he weren’t aware of my presence. Finally he said, “Missed this one.”

Meaning Barr, I assumed.

He continued, “I had information. Bits of it. But nothing fit together.”

Though that wasn’t completely true. The bits did fit together, like a machine-cut jigsaw puzzle. I’d been focused on the individual pieces, though. Not the image as a whole. I’m not much of a jigsaw player-it’s not really a game-but I know the strategy generally is to do the outer border first, so that you have a framework, and then fill in.

Exactly what I hadn’t done here. I’d made a lot of assumptions.

He looked at my back. “You like that Glock?”

“I do.”

“They’re fine firearms.” Then, with a hint of criticism: “Prefer a little longer barrel myself.”

“Interesting holster.” Nodding down at his hip.

“Hmm,” he replied.

More silence. Pogue said, “Evolution.” There was some thoughtfulness in his voice.

While pursuing my various college degrees I usually found time to take some courses for no reason other than that I was curious about the topic. Once I’d taken a very good class in medical school, called Darwin and the History of Biology (also because the lecture hall was next to where Peggy was taking Anatomy). I was curious what Pogue meant and I glanced his way.

“Weapons reflect efficient evolution more than anything else in society, don’t you think?”

Survival of the fittest, in a way, but not quite what Darwin was thinking of.

But it proved to be an interesting idea. Pogue continued, “You’ve got medicine and vehicles and paint and clocks, computers, processed food, you name it. Think about them. Giving mercury as medicine or leaching blood out of people. Or making airplanes that crash and bridges that collapse. Engineers and scientists just flailing around, trying to get it right, killing people, themselves included, in the process. Failure after failure after failure.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“But weapons? They’re efficient from the git-go.” An accent, slightly Southern, protruded.

Efficient …

“You couldn’t have a sword that broke the first time you used it. You couldn’t have a musket that blew up in your face-the men who made those made ’em right the first time. No luxury for error. That’s why you can still shoot guns’re two hundred years old and some of ’em are pretty damn accurate.”

“Natural selection.”

Pogue said, “Darwinian gunsmithing.”

Some heady thinking from a man who, even if he wasn’t technically a government killer, protected them for a living.

We fell silent, not because of the conversation, but because Ryan Kess-ler was limping down from the house like a bear just out of hibernation.

Pogue and I nodded toward him.

“Anything?” The detective eyed the outbuilding.

“Not yet.”

We stood in silence. Ryan’s hands were in his pockets. He stared down. His eyes were red.

“How’s Maree?”

“Holding up okay.”

More silence.

Then came the snap of a lock as the door opened. Ryan jumped. Pogue and I did not.

Joanne stepped out and announced, “I’ve got it. I know where Amanda is.”

Without another word she started for the house, walking ahead of us, as she used disinfectant wipes to clean the blood off her hands.

IN GAME THEORY the concept of the grim trigger is an interesting one.

This occurs in “iterated” games-those in which the same opponents play the same game against each other over and over again. Eventually players settle into strategies that achieve the best common good, even if it’s less than perfect for their own self-interest. For instance, they learn in the Prisoners’ Dilemma the best outcome is to refuse to confess.

But sometimes Player A “defects,” breaks the pattern, by confessing, which means he gets off scot-free while Prisoner B gets a much longer sentence.

Player B then might play grim trigger, abandoning any semblance of cooperation and defecting forever.

Another way to put it is that if one player decides even one time not to play by the rules, the opponent from then on plays exclusively-and ruthlessly-for his own self-interest.

There was no cooperation involved between Henry Loving and me, of course, in this deadly game we were playing but the same theory applied. By kidnapping a teenager to torture her and extract information, as far as I was concerned, Loving had defected.

I was now playing grim trigger.

Which meant unleashing Joanne Kessler-in her incarnation as Lily Hawthorne-on Loving’s associate, McCall, to lift the information from him. Whatever that took. My interrogation skills are good but it would take time to get somebody like McCall, terrified of Henry Loving, to talk.