Jeffery Deaver - Edge

His lips tightened and his eyes closed momentarily.

As he and his partner were led off, Claire duBois turned to me and actually managed to make me smile, nodding toward Alberts’s back and saying, “What you were telling me about game theory? How’s that for the Prisoners’ Dilemma?”

I WAS SITTING in Aaron Ellis’s office, again focused on one of the pictures his child had painted. Maybe it was a haystack with turrets. Maybe a yellow castle, gold or brass. Hard to say.

The time was 10:30 a.m. Claire duBois was pulling up a chair beside me. My boss said, “He’s on his way up.”

“In fact,” another voice filled the room, “voilà ! He’s here.” U.S. Attorney Jason Westerfield paused in the doorway. “Was that a dark tone you were speaking in, Aaron? Ha, just being amusing. Okay pour entrer?” Today he was dressed like an attorney, very different from his Saturday suburban-warrior guise.

Ellis waved to the chairs across from the coffee table.

The slim man entered, trailed by his assistant, Chris Teasley. Interesting, I couldn’t help but observe: Here were Westerfield and I, flanked by our seconds, attractive women both, and a decade-plus younger. I noticed that Chris Teasley slipped her eyes toward duBois’s Macy’s suit and silver bracelet. I regretted to note also that the loaded glance had also registered with my protégée.

“Well, to the matter at hand,” Westerfield said. “I was pretty surprised the whole morass rose as high as it did.” He caught that mixed metaphor, at least, and hesitated. Then: “A U.S. senator. Hm.” His voice and attitude continued to be as irritating as I remembered from the last time we met. Well, every time we’d met.

I shifted my foot gingerly. Inhaled at the pain. Focused again.

“So, Corte. Dish… s’il vous plaît.”

I explained to him what I’d told Sandy Alberts not long before: that Loving had been hired because of Amanda’s intention to blog about the death of a student Stevenson had molested.

“How’d you figure it out?”

The idea had occurred to me, I said, when I’d been speaking to Amanda last night in my car at the abandoned government facility. Of everything she’d told me about her recent life, one thing that stood out as a possible reason for Henry Loving’s assignment was her job as a student volunteer at the self-harm prevention program and the blog about Susan’s suicide.

Teasley asked, “But how’d you make the leap to Stevenson?”

“The senator himself helped me there. It just seemed a little curious that a senatorial aide would contact us about illegal eavesdropping right after we’d gotten the assignment. Last night I had Claire find out if Stevenson had actually scheduled committee hearings into wiretaps. He hadn’t.”

I’d realized that I was the one who’d speculated that Stevenson had come out against illegal surveillance from an ideological standpoint; the senator himself had never even commented on it. His speech at the college-possibly where he met Susan-was nothing more than classic rhetoric about the rule of law.

“He and Alberts had just made up the issue to look over my shoulder on the Kessler job.”

My boss and I shared a glance. Westerfield apparently didn’t know about my lapse in arranging for the illegal taps on Loving a few years ago. And perhaps Stevenson didn’t either. The issue might arise, but then again it might already be dead.

“So I thought more about Stevenson: a man with a reputation for dating younger women. And lecturing regularly at schools. He’s from Ohio, which isn’t far from Charleston, West Virginia. That’d be a good central place for Alberts and him to have met Loving. I had Claire look into it. Checked phone and travel records, incidents of complaints in the past about him groping women, paying them off afterward.” I shrugged. “It was a theory, not 100 percent certain, so I set up a sting about Global Software to see if Alberts would take the bait and try to lead us toward Peter Yu.”

“Yes, saw the alert about Global,” Westerfield said sourly, probably thinking that I’d yet again taken him in too, though in this instance it had nothing to do with keeping him off my back.

I said, “Alberts. I’m pretty sure he’s going to roll over.”

The Prisoners’ Dilemma …

Ellis said, “But kidnapping a girl, planning to torture her… and security contractors. This was a big operation, extreme. Why? And what was the deadline all about? They needed the information by last night.”

That was obvious to me. I explained, “Well, in the first place, Stevenson didn’t want to go to jail, of course, so he’d try to silence any witnesses who could tie him to Susan’s death. But there’re more people involved in this than just Stevenson and Alberts.”

This perked up Westerfield’s attention. Conspiracy theories often do. “How do you mean?”

“For one thing, the Supreme Court nominee. The confirmation vote in the Senate’s tomorrow. Amanda was going to be blogging about Susan all week, looking into her suicide.”

The U.S. attorney said, “I still don’t get the connection.”

I explained that Stevenson was the one who’d built the coalition of votes to win the confirmation of the right-wing justice. “He’d managed to get a one-vote majority. If he got arrested or even implicated in a sex abuse scandal, that coalition would fall apart and the Republican’s dream justice doesn’t get confirmed. I’m pretty sure some people from the PAC supporting Stevenson and somebody from Alberts’s lobbying firm were involved.”

A wolf’s gleam in Westerfield’s eye. “That’s good.”

I said, “Look at the anger out there, look at the partisanship. People seem willing to do whatever they need to for their side to win.”

Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere .

Westerfield looked toward Teasley, who wrote furiously in her notebook, and then he repeated, “That’s good, Corte. Good…”

But he didn’t exactly mean good. Something more was coming.

“Only…” He rocked back on his skinny butt and gazed at the ceiling momentarily. Regret-real or faux-filled his face. “How’d you like to retire in a blaze of glory?”

“Retire?” Aaron Ellis asked.

“See, you kind of played us.”

The U.S. attorney’s office, I assumed he meant.

“What’re you saying, Jason?” Ellis asked.

“That incident about sending the Kesslers to the slammer? It was pretty awkward.”

There’ll be some fallout. You outright lied to me …

I supposed that the attorney general himself had been there or some other higher-up in Justice. Perhaps hoping to interview Ryan Kessler, the hero cop. There’d been some damage to Westerfield’s career.

“I’m thinking your resignation would be in order. Letter of apology. Let the powers that be know you intentionally pulled the wool over our eyes.”

Clichés again. Did judges ever reprimand him in court for his clunky figures of speech?

Westerfield continued, “I’ll make sure you get full benefits, of course. But a slip-slide into a private security company might be a good idea. Hey, you’ll double your salary. I can even set you up with some nice prospects.”

“Jason,” Ellis began.

“I’m sorry. I really am,” Westerfield said. Again a dark face, a troubled face. “But if that doesn’t happen… hate to say it, but there is some issue I heard tell about: surveillance warrants.”

I felt several pairs of eyes slide toward me.

So, Westerfield did know about them, which meant he had an edge on me. A pretty damn good one.

The prosecutor said, “How ’bout we shake on it? Go our separate ways? Aren’t you tired of getting shot at, Corte?”