Jeffery Deaver - Edge

A moment of dense silence. My eyes needed only to slip toward Lyle Ahmad, and the former marine stepped up behind, easing Ryan to the floor with a basic wrist grip on his gun hand. There was a countermove, by which Ryan, the larger of the men, could have escaped but, if he’d ever known it, he’d forgotten.

His eyes on mine, he growled, “Fucking coward. You couldn’t even take me yourself, could you? Had to have somebody get me from behind.”

I stepped forward and slipped nylon restraints around his wrists.

“No!” he cried.

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s my daughter!”

It was Joanne I was looking at, though. For the first time since I’d met her, tears were now streaking down her cheeks.

Ahmad got Ryan into a sitting position. I leaned down toward his thick, damp face, dark with anger. I said firmly, “I’m going to bring her back to you. This is what I do. I’ll bring her back safe.”

ROUTE 15 IS a hilly road through the heart of Civil War Virginia, forty miles outside of Washington. Large, private estates on the capillaries of horse country fight against the encroaching cookie-cutter developments with streets named according to themes, like Camelot, flora, colonial New England.

You’ll find oddities along the highway. Decrepit, abandoned farms whose owners aren’t willing to sell to salivating developers or who have simply disappeared-often because they prefer staying off the grid for any number of reasons. There are also ominous structures, stained concrete or rusting steel, ringed with dire warning signs and sharp, equally rusty wire, blanketed with kudzu. They once supported various attempts at defense systems during the Cold War. We can’t take down intercontinental ballistic missiles nowadays, much less fifty years ago, but that didn’t stop the army or air force from trying. Some of these buildings were actually for sale but since most of them had served as weapons storage facilities, the toxic cleanup costs would be prohibitive.

I’d done a thorough run-down of our destination, USAF-LC Facility 193, a large concrete building only thirty or forty minutes from the safe house in Great Falls.

I piloted my car past the facility now and noted the concrete facade and the forty- or fifty-foot mound of earth, grass covered, that the building disappeared into. It was, as McCall had told Joanne, set back about one hundred yards. The gate was closed but the fences around the front and sides weren’t imposing and didn’t appear to be electrified or mounted with sensors.

I eased to a stop. Examining the place through my Xenonics night vision monocular, Pogue said, “Two SUVs, can’t tell the tags. Some lights inside the building. One person outside, can’t tell if he’s armed. Assume he is.”

I continued, pulling off the shoulder into bushes, then shut the engine off. It was 8:45 and dark. Normally the stars were striking here but tonight they were invisible, thanks to the blanketing clouds. Pogue and I climbed out, waited for a semi to burn along the road, spinning up dust and limp leaves in its wake. We crossed the road and moved toward the facility, using the dense brush and trees for cover. Pogue studied the place again through the monocular and held up a single index finger. Only one guard still.

I looked too. A youngish man with a close crew cut. He wore dark jeans and a sweatshirt. He kept his hand at his side and when he turned and made some brief rounds, I could see that he wore a semiautomatic pistol on his hip.

Still thirty yards away, Pogue slipped an earpiece in and spoke into his collar. I couldn’t hear the words clearly but I deduced he was reporting in to Williams, Joanne’s former boss.

If McCall was right about the times, the primary had not yet arrived. This conclusion was reasonable since there were only two vehicles here-Loving’s and the SUV the minders had used to kidnap the girl. Amanda would be held for the time being, until the primary who wanted the information from her arrived.

The reason they hired Loving was that nobody else was willing to torture a teenager, if it came to that …

What on earth could she possibly know? Something she’d learned about one of her father’s earlier cases? Or something else? Like all teens in the D.C. area she’d have friends whose mothers or fathers worked for the government and for government contractors. Had she and a girlfriend read through files in a parent’s computer, something classified?

But that question would have to wait.

Our job now was simple: Save the girl.

Pogue listened for a moment and whispered a few more words. Then he signed off. He eased closer to me and whispered, “Williams says you’re in charge. How do we handle it?”

“I don’t want to wait for the primary. I want to extract her now. Use nonlethal if possible… at least on one of them.”

I wanted somebody alive to learn who was behind this.

“All right.” He glanced at my gun. “You tapped?”

Meaning: Was my Glock threaded for a silencer? I rarely had reason even to draw my weapon, let alone make sure it fired in a whisper. “No.”

He handed me his. “One in the bedroom. Safety’s on.”

He’d tell me this because Glocks don’t have a safety lever; they have a double trigger that prevents accidental discharges. I was familiar with the Beretta, though, and slid the lever smoothly to the fire position. The Italians made as efficient weapons as the Austrians.

I was curious why he’d given me his gun. Then he said, “Cover me.”

He opened his backpack and extracted some metal and plastic pieces. He assembled them into a small crossbow, steel.

The evolution of weapons …

It took two strokes to cock it. The bolt he loaded didn’t have a sharp tip but instead an elongated tube.

“I should be a little closer,” he whispered.

We moved forward. I was in the lead, using my training as an orienteer and amateur sign cutter yet again to keep our transit silent. I thought back briefly to that very long, very hot day outside San Antonio, leading the illegals to safety as quietly and as unobtrusively as I could.

Pogue and I eased into a compacted stand of weeds about forty feet from the guard. With a nod at the bow, Pogue said, “Stun gun. It’ll immobilize him for about twenty seconds, so we’ll have to get to him fast. I’ll go first, you come behind and cover me with the Beretta. You’re okay with that, right?”

Meaning killing somebody. I said, “Yes.”

I aimed toward the doorway, where any reinforcements would come from.

“Go,” I whispered.

POGUE LIFTED THE weapon, looking completely at ease, like a man about to cast a fly into a clear stream.

He was compensating for gravity and the slight breeze. When the guard turned away from us, Pogue pulled the trigger. With a faint snap, the bolt zipped into the air in a perfect arc, hitting the man somewhere in the middle of the back. I didn’t know how many volts the flying Taser had but it was enough. The guard went down, shivering.

Then we were on our feet, running in tandem. Pogue had dropped the bow and had a backup pistol in his hand. With the silenced automatic, I scanned the doorway, the building’s windows and the area around us for signs of hostiles. There were none. Pogue hog-tied the guard with plastic restraints and slapped an adhesive gag over his mouth. He bent down and pocketed the man’s phone and radio, after shutting them off, as well as his pistol, while I patted him down for other weapons. Even though tactical ops aren’t my specialty, I knew you never left weapons for the other side to pick up later.

Take or trash, the saying went.

I dug the man’s wallet out of his pocket. I was disappointed but not surprised to see he was a pro and there was no evidence of his employer or affiliation. He had four driver’s licenses-different names, same picture-money and credit cards in those various names.