Edge (10 page)

“Little problem,” Maree said and laughed cynically. “That's what the captain of the
Titanic
said.” The young woman opened her large shoulder bag and pulled out and began sorting black-and-white photographs. Good, I reflected. Keep her busy. Count cows. Look for out-of-state plates.

Ryan handed the phone to his wife. Joanne too downplayed the incident to her stepdaughter, though it seemed more difficult for her to put on a cheery face. A pause as she listened. “I don't know why, honey. We'll find out. Mr. Corte . . . Agent Corte's going to find out. . . .” She listened some more and they fell into a meaningless conversation about high school, some friends, a ski vacation they had planned for Christmas.

I made a fast turn. Another scan in the mirror; nobody was following. I saw too Maree wince and I thought she'd been hurt in the escape. But then I recalled seeing an Ace bandage wrapped around her arm. She rolled up her sleeve and examined it.

“Maree, are you all right?” I asked.

“Just bumped my arm last week.”

“Is it bad?” I sounded sympathetic but I was asking because I needed to know if the injury would affect my guard job. Lifters, like wild animals, go
right for the wounded. Breaks take at least six weeks to heal.

“No. The orthopod says it's just a bad hematoma. That's a great word. Sounds so much sexier than ‘bruise.' ”

“Hurt much?”

“Some. Not too bad. But I milk it for all it's worth.” She laughed then explained, “I was shooting some images in downtown D.C. and this asshole on his mobile knocked into me and I slipped down some steps. He didn't even apologize, not really. It was like, oh, what're you doing taking pictures when people're trying to get to
real
jobs?”

I wasn't interested in the source of the injury, just her state of wellness, but Maree continued, loud and indignant, “I couldn't take pictures for a few days afterward, I was so dizzy. I should've gotten his name. And sued him.” Her voice faded. Then she looked my way. “Hey, Mr. Tour Guide? Can I call my friend? Please? Pretty please?” Singsong again.

“Who?”

“The guy I was going to be staying with. Before the Terminator screwed up my plans. I was going to meet him at six. If I don't show up, he'll be worried.”

Joanne asked, “Mar, don't you think it's better if you don't? Andrew'll figure it out. I mean, Agent Corte didn't want you to call from that pay phone.”

“No,” I said, “that was just because I didn't want to spend any time there. But if you want to call, go ahead. It's not a bad idea. We don't want him getting curious and coming to the house, now that Loving knows where it is.”

I handed her my cold phone. “Just keep it short. Don't say anything at all about where we are or what's happened. Understand?”

“Sure.”

With that, Maree dropped the giddy persona and suddenly grew reluctant—because, I guessed, she realized the conversation would be overheard by us all. Or maybe she just really didn't want to change plans. Finally she called. I glanced into the mirror and saw that her shoulders were knotted with tension. After a moment, though, her body language changed—she relaxed—and I deduced she'd got Andrew's voice mail. Her voice became that of a teenager again: “Hey, it's me . . . Um, I feel so bad. I really, really want to see you but I can't come over after all. . . . Like, something's come up. Kind of serious. With the family. It's totally important, so I can't make it tonight. I'll call you as soon as I can. Okay, have a good day. I'm sorry.”

She disconnected and handed the phone back to me. Her hand seemed to be trembling. She asked Joanne something about plans for Thanksgiving, a non sequitur, and they had a conversation that I stopped listening to.

Traffic thinned and I sped up—but now that we weren't being pursued I kept the needle no more than six miles an hour over the limit. My organization doesn't use government license plates—all the vehicles were registered to one of a dozen corporations, commercial and nonprofit—so if a cop were to speed-gun us, he'd pull us over, which could be inconvenient and dangerous.

A whisper from Ryan: “Ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“It was two of them there at the house? Loving and his partner?”

“Probably. Could have been three or even more but Loving's profile is working mostly with one partner.”

“Well, it's just that . . . there were five agents there, plus me. We could've taken him.”

He was thinking of the plan I'd laid out earlier, to nail Loving.

I gave him a knowing look, then back to the road. “The agents in the car? They were out of commission.”

“True. But . . .”

I continued, “I considered a takedown but it wasn't an advantageous playing field. I was worried he'd involve Mrs. Knox or maybe some other hostages from the neighborhood. He puts innocents into play all the time. It's one of his trademarks.”

He said slowly, “I guess. I didn't think about that.”

Ryan went back to riding shotgun. I glanced his way and concluded that he had no clue he was being conned.

As my mentor taught me and I teach duBois, you always ask yourself: What's my goal and what's the most efficient way to achieve it? Nothing else matters. That's the rule in the business world, medicine, science, academia. And it's the rule in the protection field, which is a business like any other, Abe Fallow regularly had said. Frustration, hurt feelings, vindictiveness, elation, pride . . . they're all irrelevant.

You disappear. You don't have feelings, you don't have lust, you don't get insulted. You're nothing. You're vapor.

Part of being efficient as a shepherd was calmly picking the best strategy to get your principals to do what you wanted. Some you have to order around; they're more comfortable that way. Some you reason with.

Others you just plain trick.

The story I'd given Ryan Kessler about having him help me capture Henry Loving was nonsense. Though rooted in the truth—of course, I wanted Loving collared—it was just a strategy I was playing to win Ryan over. I'd decided on my approach after meeting him and learning, from duBois, details of the incident at the deli, from which he'd emerged a hero. The rescue of the customers and the ensuing love story were in themselves irrelevant to me; what was important was how the event had affected Ryan. A formerly active man, he was now off the street he loved, with a bad leg and relegated to investigating financial crimes, mostly from a desk, I supposed, and poring over balance sheets. I needed to play to where his heart was: his macho, cowboy side.

So I'd given him the role of partner. Since I'd make sure he'd never have to act out that part, you could make the argument that my strategy was condescending, even mean. In a way it was.

But: What's the goal, what's the most efficient way to achieve it?

I had to make him believe that I couldn't take Loving on my own. I thought I'd been overacting but apparently he'd bought the whole story. This trick—exploiting the desires and weaknesses of the principals to get them to do as we wish—was called bait-and-switch. Abe Fallow had taught me the
technique. It was, of course, inconceivable to enlist a principal to help us engage a hostile but the difference between the Detective Ryan Kessler I'd met at the front door just an hour and a half ago and the man sitting beside me was significant.

Just then I sensed him tense. I glanced in the rearview mirror. The, or
a,
beige car was behind us once again. It was going about our speed, which was only three miles over the limit now.

Maree saw us both looking backward as much as toward the road ahead. “What?” she asked, her addled voice resurrected as she sat up, eyes wide.

“There was a car that might have been following us earlier. Vanished for a while. It's back now.”

Ryan was regarding me impatiently.

It was time for a decision.

I made one. Easing off the gas, I slowed, so that the beige car moved closer. Then, glancing behind me, I said firmly, “Go ahead, now! Shoot!”

RYAN KESSLER BLINKED
,
drawing his pistol. “Should I aim for the wheels? The driver?”

“No, no!” I said quickly. I hadn't been speaking to him but to the woman who'd been looking into my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Maree, with your
camera.
Shoot the license plate.”

The woman had a serious telephoto lens mounted on her Canon. I wanted the tag of the car. It was too far behind to get a visual with naked eyes.

“Oh.” Ryan sat back. He seemed disappointed.

Maree played with the camera's controls, spun around and shot, with the
click-buzz
of single-lens reflex cameras. I wondered, with the digital models, like they all were nowadays, if that was just sound effects and speakers.

A moment later she was looking at the screen. “I can read the plate.”

“Good job. Hold on a minute.” I called Freddy and told him I needed a tag run immediately.

Maree gave me the letters and numbers and I recited them into the phone.

Ryan was looking around, gripping his gun again.

Fewer than sixty seconds later, Freddy came back on. He was laughing. “Registered to one Jimmy Chung. Owns a restaurant in Prince William. His
son's driving around, dropping off flyers for the restaurant. I got his number and talked to the kid. He said he's behind a gray SUV—that needs washing, by the way—and it looks like somebody just took his picture, which he's not too happy about. They have a good menu, Corte. The General Tso's chicken is a specialty. Was there really a General Tso?”

“Thanks, Freddy.”

I disconnected and noted the passengers were staring at me.

“It's safe, there's no problem. Chinese food delivery.”

After a moment Maree said, “Let's order out.”

A fragment of a laugh from her sister. Ryan seemed not to hear.

Now that the vehicle had turned out to be harmless, I relaxed somewhat and fell into the rhythm of the road. I enjoyed driving. I never had a car as a teenager. But my father, a lawyer for an insurance company and a good one, made sure I learned to drive safely and well. Once you realized that most of the other people on the road were idiots—he knew this firsthand from his job—and took appropriate precautions you could enjoy the process of tooling around the roads quite a bit.

He himself drove a Volvo, claiming it was the safest thing on the highway.

In any event I liked the act of driving. I wasn't sure why. It certainly wasn't speed. I was quite a cautious driver. Maybe it was that, as a shepherd, when I was driving, my principals and I were moving targets and therefore, incrementally at least, safer. Though not always, of course. Abe Fallow had been captured by Henry Loving and killed during
a convoy transport. The chicken truck incident in North Carolina.

I pushed the thought away.

At the moment we were on a road heading west, dancing in and out of Fairfax and Prince William counties. We moved past the Tudor turrets of strip malls with their assembly-line chain outlets and busy fast food franchises, manned by teen clerks counting down the hours, the glistening humps of used cars in rows, their features touted with exclamation points, doctors' offices and insurance agencies, the occasional antiques store in a fifty-year-old single-story building, gun shops, ABC stores. A sagging barn or two. Some high-rise wannabes in office parks.

Northern Virginia could never decide whether it was a suburb of New York or a part of the Confederacy.

I checked the time. It was a little after 1:30 p.m. We'd been on the road for less than two hours. I'd decided not to go directly to the safe house but to stop at a way station—a nearby motel—to confuse the trail and switch cars. I often moved my principals in stages. We'd stay there for three or four hours, then continue to the safe house. My organization had a list of about a dozen hotels or motels in the area that were secure and out of the way; the one I had in mind was perhaps the best.

Checking traffic, I hit
SPEED DIAL
.

“DuBois.”

I asked her, “Who are we at the Hillside?”

We have different covers for the various halfway houses we use. Even if I'm sure I know, I always ask.

There came the clatter of a keyboard, the jingle of her charm bracelet. The young woman said, “You're Frank Roberts, sales director of Artesian Computer Design. You were there eight months ago for two days with Pietr Smolitz and his friend.” The last word was delivered frostily; duBois had formed an indelible opinion about the whistle-blower's condescending mistress, who'd accompanied him. “Roberts, that is,
you,
was making sales calls in Tysons and Reston, along with your associate from Moscow. The bullet hole in the wall got repaired before they knew about it.”

“That, I remember.” We hadn't been attacked. The crazy Russian had a hidden gun that had emerged after significant consumption of equally clandestine vodka. The discharge of the silenced weapon was accidental but the Taser hit to his back, compliments of me, had not been.

I told duBois, “I'm checking in now. I'll call in twenty.”

“In twenty. Okay.”

In a few miles I slowed, signaled and turned into the long drive of the Hillside Inn. The white colonial buildings, stuccoed and gabled, squatted in the middle of five acres of attractive landscaping: geometric lawns, trimmed trees, English gardens, roses still in abundant bloom. Though I doubted she was in the mood to appreciate it, I hoped Joanne would enjoy a brief glance at the grounds, given her interest in gardening. Despite Maree's sarcasm earlier, I
am
a bit of a tour guide, in that it works to my advantage to keep my principals occupied and content.