Edge (4 page)

“His vehicle?” I asked.

“Nothing yet. The Bureau's got a team canvassing the motel and restaurants around town.”

Ellis: “This Kessler, what does he know that the primary's so interested in extracting from him?”

“No clue,” Westerfield said.

“Who exactly is he, Kessler?” I asked.

“I've got some details,” Teasley said.

As the young attorney dug through a file, I wondered why Westerfield had come to us. We're known as the bodyguards of last resort (at least Aaron Ellis refers to us that way in budgetary hearings, which I find a bit embarrassing, but apparently it plays well on the Hill). The State Department's Diplomatic Security and the Secret Service guard U.S. officials and foreign heads of state. Witness Protection cloaks the noble or the infamous with new identities and turns them loose in the world. We, on the other hand, handle situations only when there's an immediate, credible threat against a known principal. We've also been called the ER of personal security.

The criterion is vague but, given limited resources, we tend to take on cases only when the principal is involved in matters like national security—the spy I'd just delivered to the CIA gentlemen yesterday—or public health, such as our job guarding a whistle-blower in an over-the-counter tainted-drug trial last year.

But the answer became clear when Teasley gave the cop's bio. “Detective Ryan Kessler, forty-two. Married, one child. He works financial crimes in the district, fifteen years on the force, decorated. . . . You may've heard of him.”

I glanced at my boss, who shook his head for both of us.

“He's a hero. Got some media coverage a few years ago. He was working undercover in D.C. and stumbled into a robbery in a deli in North West. Saved the customers but took a slug. Was on the news, and one of those Discovery Channel cop programs did an episode about him.”

I didn't watch much TV. But I did understand the situation now. A hero cop being targeted by a lifter like Henry Loving . . . Westerfield saw a chance to be a hero of his own here—marshalling a case against the primary, presumably because of some financial scam Kessler was investigating. Even if the underlying case wasn't big—though it could be huge—targeting a heroic D.C. police officer was reason enough to end up on Westerfield's agenda. I didn't think any less of him because of this; Washington is all about personal as well as public politics. I didn't care if his career would be served by taking on the case. All that mattered to me was keeping the Kessler family alive.

And that this particular lifter was involved.

“Alors,”
Westerfield said. “There we have it. Kessler's been poking his
nez
where it doesn't belong. We need to find out where, what, who, when, why. So, let's get the Kesslers into the slammer fast and go from there.”

“Slammer?” I asked.

“Yessir,” Teasley said. “We were thinking Hansen Detention Center in D.C. I've done some research and found that HDC has just renovated their alarm systems and I've reviewed the employee files of every guard who'd be on the friendly wing. It's a good choice.”

“C'est vrai.”

“A slammer wouldn't be advisable,” I said.

“Oh?” Westerfield wondered.

Protective custody, in a secluded part of a correctional facility, makes sense in some cases but this wasn't one of them, I explained.

“Hm,” the prosecutor said, “we were thinking you could have one of your people with them inside,
non
? Efficient. Agent Fredericks and you can interview him. You'll get good information. I guarantee it. In a slammer, witnesses tend to remember things they wouldn't otherwise. They're all happy-happy.”

“That hasn't been my experience in circumstances like these.”

“No?”

“You put somebody in detention, yes, usually a lifter from the outside can't get in. And”—a nod toward Teasley, conceding her diligent homework—“I'm sure the staff's been vetted well. With any other lifter, I'd agree. But we're dealing with Henry Loving here. I know how he works. We put the Kesslers inside, he'll find an edge on one of the guards. Most of them are young, male. If I were Loving, I'd just find one with a pregnant wife—their first child, if possible—and pay her a visit.” Teasley blinked at my matter-of-fact tone. “The guard would do whatever Loving wanted. And once the family's inside there're no escape routes. The Kesslers'd be trapped.”

“Like
petits lapins,
” Westerfield said, though not as sarcastically as I'd expected. He was considering my point.

“Besides, Kessler's a cop. We'd have trouble getting him to agree. There could be a half dozen cons he's put inside HDC.”

“Where would you stash them?” Westerfield asked.

I replied, “I don't know yet. I'll have to think about it.”

Westerfield gazed up at the wall too, though I couldn't tell at which picture or certificate or diploma. Finally he said to Teasley, “Give him Kessler's address.”

The young woman jotted it in far more legible handwriting than her boss's. When she handed it to me I was hit by another blast of perfume.

I took it, thanking them both. I'm a competitive game player—all sorts of games—and I've learned to be humble and magnanimous in victory, a theory I'd carried over to my professional life. A matter of courtesy, of course, but I'd also found that being a good winner gives you a slight advantage psychologically when you play against the same opponent in the future.

They rose. The prosecutor said, “Okay, do what you can—find out who hired Loving and why.”

“Our number-one priority,” I assured him, though it wasn't.

“Au revoir. . . .”
Westerfield and Teasley breezed out of the doorway, the prosecutor giving sotto voce orders to her.

I too rose. I had to stop at the town house and pick up a few things for the assignment.

“I'll report from the location,” I told Ellis.

“Corte?”

I stopped at the door and glanced back.

“Not sending the Kesslers to the slammer . . . it makes sense, right? You'd rather get them into a safe house and run the case from there?” He'd
backed me up—Aaron Ellis was nothing if not supportive of his troops—and would go with my expertise on the question. But he wasn't, in truth, asking for reassurance that it made tactical sense not to put them in protective custody.

What he was really asking was this: Was he making the right decision in assigning me, and not someone else, to the job of guarding principals from Henry Loving? In short, could I be objective when the perp was the one who'd murdered my mentor and had apparently escaped from the trap I'd set for him several years before?

“A safe house's the most efficient approach,” I told Ellis and returned to my office, fishing for the key to unlock the desk drawer where I kept my weapon.

MANY GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES
are wedded to initials or acronyms to describe their employees or departments, but in ours, for some reason, nicknames are the order of the day, as with “lifter” and “hitter.”

The basic bodyguards in our organization are the close protection officers, whom we call “clones,” because they're supposed to shadow their principals closely. Our Technical Support and Communications Department is staffed by “wizards.” There are the “street sweepers”—our Defense Analysis and Tactics officers, who can spot a sniper a mile away and a bomb hidden in a principal's cell phone. The people in our organization running surveillance are called, not surprisingly, “spies.”

I'm in the Strategic Protection Department, the most senior of the eight SPD officers in the organization. We're the ones who come up with and execute a protection plan for the principals we've been assigned to guard. And because of the mission, and the initials of the department, we're known as shepherds.

One department that doesn't have a nickname is Research Support, to me the most important of all our ancillary divisions. A shepherd can't run a
personal security job without good investigative research. I've often lectured younger officers that if you do research up front, you'll be less likely to need tactical firepower later.

And I was lucky to have as my protégée the person I considered the best in the department.

I called her now.

One ring. Then: “DuBois,” came the voice from my earpiece.

It was the woman's secure mobile I'd called, so I got her work greeting. With its French origin, you'd think the name would be pronounced
doo-bwah
but her family used
doo-boys.

“Claire. Something's come up.”

“Yes?” she asked briskly.

“Loving's still alive.”

She processed this. “Alive? . . . I'm not sure how that could happen.”

“Well, it has.”

“I'm thinking about it,” she mused, almost to herself. “The building burned. . . . There was a DNA match. I recall the report. There were some typos in it, remember?” Claire duBois was older than her adolescent intonation suggested, though not much. Short brunette hair, a heart-shaped and delicately pretty face, a figure that was probably very nice—and I was as curious about it as any man would be—but usually hidden by functional pantsuits, which I preferred her wearing over skirts and dresses. The practicality of it, I mean.

“It doesn't matter. Are you in town? I need you.”

“Do you mean did I go away for the weekend? No. Plans changed. Do you want me in?” she asked in her snappy monotone. I pictured her having breakfast
as the September morning light slanted through the window of her quiet town house in Arlington, Virginia. She might have been in sweats or a slinky robe but picturing either was impossible. She might have been sitting across from a stubble-bearded young man looking at her curiously from over a sagging
Washington Post
. That too didn't register.

“He's after a principal in Fairfax. I don't know the details. Short time frame.”

“Sure. Let me make some arrangements.” I heard a few brief clicks—she could type faster than any human being on earth. Half to herself: “Mrs. Glotsky, next door . . . Then the water . . . Okay. I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

I suspected duBois had a bit of attention deficit disorder. But that usually worked to my advantage.

“I'll be on the road with the principals but I'll call you with the assignments.”

We disconnected. I signed out a Nissan Armada from our transportation department and collected it in the large garage beneath the building. I drove up King Street and then through the quaint and narrow avenues of Old Town Alexandria, on the Potomac River, the Virginia side, not far from Washington, D.C.

The SUV wasn't tell-all black but a light gray, dusty and dinged. Cars are a big part of the personal security business and, like all of ours, this Nissan had been modified to incorporate bullet-resistant glass, armor on the doors, run-flat tires and a foam-filled gas tank. Billy, our vehicle man, had lowered the center of gravity for faster turning and fitted the grille with what he called a jockstrap, an armored panel to keep the engine protected.

I double-parked and ran inside the brownstone town house, still smelling of the coffee I'd brewed on a one-cup capsule machine only an hour earlier. I hurriedly packed a large gym bag. Here, unlike at my office, the walls were filled with evidence of my past: diplomas, certificates of continuing-education course completions, recognitions from former employers and satisfied customers, including the Department of State, the CIA, the Bureau and ATF. MI5 in the UK too. Also, a few photos from my earlier years, snapped in Virginia, Ohio and Texas.

I wasn't sure why I put all of this gingerbread up on the walls. I rarely looked at it, and I never socialized here. I remembered thinking a few years ago that it just seemed like what you were supposed to do when you moved into a good-sized town house by yourself.

I changed clothes, into jeans and a navy windbreaker and a black Polo shirt. Then I locked up, set the two alarms and returned to the car. I sped toward the expressway, dialing a number then plugging the hands-free into my ear.

In thirty minutes I was at the home of my principals.

Fairfax, Virginia, is a pleasant suburb with a range of residential properties, from two-bedroom bungalows and row town houses to sumptuous tenacre lots ringed with demilitarized-zone barriers of trees between neighbors' houses. The Kesslers' house, between these extremes, sat in the midst of an acre, half bald and half bristling with trees, the leaves just now losing their summer vibrancy, about to turn—trees, I noted, that would be perfect cover for a sniper backing up Henry Loving.

I made a U, parked the Armada in the driveway, climbed out. I didn't recognize the FBI agents across the street personally but I'd seen their pictures, uploaded from Freddy's assistant. I approached the car. They would have my description too but I kept my hands at my sides until they saw who I was. We flashed IDs.

One said, “Nobody paused in front of the house since we've been here.”

I slipped my ID case away. “Any out-of-state tags?”

“Didn't notice any.”

Different answer from “No.”

One of the agents pointed to a wide four-lane road nearby. “We saw a couple of SUVs, big ones, there. They slowed, looked our way and then kept going.”

I asked, “They were going north?”

“Yeah.”

“There's a school a half block away. They've got soccer games today. It's early in the season so I'd guess it was parents who hadn't been to the field yet and weren't sure where to turn.”

They both seemed surprised I knew this. Claire duBois had fed me the information on the way over. I'd asked her about events in the area.