Jeffery Deaver - Edge

The Nash bargaining game, named after the famous mathematician John Nash, is a favorite among game theorists and one of my favorites too. It works this way: There are two players who each want a portion of something that can be divided. Say, two bosses who need to share an administrative assistant, who can work only forty hours a week total. Each player writes down on a slip of paper how many hours he wants the assistant to work for him, without knowing what the other is asking for. If the total amount equals forty hours or less, each gets the assistant for the time he’s asked. If the total exceeds forty hours, neither gets the assistant at all.

I was now, apparently, the subject of the bargaining game being played between Ellis and Westerfield.

But game theory only works when the rules are clearly set out ahead of time. In the Nash bargaining game here, neither of the players was aware of another rule presently at work: that what they were bargaining over-me-might be a player in the game too.

As Westerfield and Ellis were proposing some face-saving compromise-I wasn’t paying attention-I interrupted. “Jason?”

He paused and looked at me.

I said, “I’m not leaving. I’m not writing any letters of resignation. You’re going to drop the matter.”

Both my boss and Westerfield blinked. The prosecutor glanced at his equally startled assistant, who was fondling her pearls.

A cool smile parted Westerfield’s tiny lips. “Now, you’re not…”

He didn’t want to say “threatening me, are you?” But that was where his ominous sentence flared for a landing.

Ellis said, “Corte, it’s okay. We can work out something. There’s room for compromise here.”

I rose and walked to the door, closed it.

Westerfield looked mystified. Ellis wanted to be elsewhere. DuBois gave what passed for a smile. My kind of smile. “Go ahead,” I said to her and sat back. I teach my protégées about dealing with lifters and hitters and primaries. I also teach them about dealing with our compatriots.

She turned to Westerfield and said respectfully, “Sir, we thought it would be prudent-in shoring up the case against Mr. Alberts and Senator Stevenson-to find out exactly when and how they became aware that our organization was running the protection operation for the Kesslers. That was the big unanswered question that Officer Corte and I were wondering about. Of course, there are no official announcements when we take on an assignment. It’s vital that our organization remain as anonymous as possible. As you can imagine, we can hardly function efficiently if people are dropping in and poking their noses into our work. In fact, the guidelines that all law enforcement agencies are given specifically state that they’re prohibited from mentioning our existence, let alone that we’re engaged in a specific assignment.”

“Poking noses?” Westerfield lifted his hands in an irritated fashion, meaning: Your point?

“It seems, based on phone records-obtained with duly issued warrants, of course-that Sandy Alberts called your office one hour before he came here to discuss the matter of illegal surveillance with Director Ellis and Officer Corte on Saturday. Before that phone call neither Alberts or Senator Stevenson had any awareness that we were involved in the Kessler case.”

“My office? Ridiculous.”

DuBois blinked. “Actually not, sir. Here’re the phone records.” She opened the document and her charm bracelet tinkled like bells. She was bejeweled once again. “I highlighted the relevant portions in yellow. It’s a little lighter than I would have liked. Can you see them okay? I tried blue. But that was too dark.”

Chris Teasley was clutching her own notebook fiercely. Her pretty, pale face went red, the color seemingly reflected in the pearls, though that was surely my imagination. She whispered, “Alberts knew about the Kesslers. He knew the name. I just assumed… he only wanted to know who was running the protection detail. That’s all he asked. I thought… I thought it was okay.”

Claire duBois, bless her, kept her eyes steadily on Westerfield and didn’t offer so much as a millisecond of a glance toward her unfortunate counterpart.

“Ah, yes,” the U.S. attorney said slowly.

After a moment, during which the only sound in the room was that of duBois’s bracelet as she slipped the documents back into her attaché case, Westerfield jutted out his lower lip. “Looks like we better get to work putting a senator et son ami in jail.” He rose. His assistant did too. “So long, gentlemen… and lady.” The two of them left.

My edge, apparently, trumped his.

IN MY OFFICE I opened my safe and extracted the board game that I’d received on Saturday.

As I undid the bubble wrap and opened the lid the aroma of old paper and cardboard arose. The scent of cedar too, which was pleasing to me. One of the things I like about board games is their history. This particular one had been bought new in 1949. It could have passed through several generations of one family or moved laterally to another, thanks to a yard sale, or perhaps found its way to a New England inn, where it would sit in a bed-and-breakfast parlor for amusement on Saturday afternoons when the rain derailed the leaf viewing.

The smell of moth deterrent suggested that it had spent its recent days in a closet. The board itself was scuffed and stained-one of the reasons it had been such a bargain-and I wondered how many people had moved the markers from start to finish, who they were, what they were doing now, if they were still with us.

For all their cleverness and high-definition graphics, computer games can’t match the allure of their elegant, three-dimensional forebears.

I slipped the game into a shopping bag. It was 4:00 p.m. and I was about to go home.

Across my office a small TV sat on my credenza, the sound down. I glanced up at the screen and saw on CNN a flash: breaking news. That was something that duBois might comment on: breaking news versus news flashes versus news alerts.

I read the crawl. Lionel Stevenson was announcing he was going to be leaving the Senate, effective immediately. He was under investigation, it seemed, but no details were forthcoming. Sandy Alberts, his chief of staff, had been arrested, as had the head of the political action committee that Alberts was affiliated with and a partner at Alberts’s old lobbying firm.

Whatever else you could say about Jason Westerfield, grass didn’t grow under the man’s feet.

A voice from the doorway startled me and I shut the TV off. “I have it,” my personal assistant, Barbara, said. “You ready?”

I took the document from her and read through it. It was a release order, freeing the Kesslers from our care. The letter is merely a formality; if a lifter who hadn’t, say, heard the primary was in custody and made a move on our principals again, of course, we’d be there in a minute, even after the release was signed. But we’re a federal agency like any other and that means paperwork. I handed the signed document to Barbara and told her I’d be back in three days, maybe four, but she could always reach me. Which she knew but I felt better saying.

“Take some time,” she said in a motherly way, which I found heartwarming. “You’re not looking so good.”

The effects of the pepper spray were gone, as far as I felt. I frowned. She explained, “You’re still limping.”

“It’s just a scrape.”

Then she said coyly, “You have to let that toe heal.”

I laughed, thinking I never in a million years could have come up with that one. Maree and Freddy were right, I don’t joke much. But I’d try to remember the heal and toe line, though I doubted I would.