Edge (13 page)

“You'll be staying here a few hours longer. If you want some food, Lyle or Rudy can order room service. Nobody leave the room. I won't be long.”

Ryan asked, “Corte, what's this all about?”

I gave what I thought was a nonchalant shrug. “I have a meeting with somebody about the job.”

I headed out the door fast, not explaining that that somebody happened to be Henry Loving himself.

THERE'S SOME DEBATE
about exactly what the role of a shepherd should be in personal security work.

The nickname itself is telling. “Shepherd,” to me, doesn't refer to a motley farmhand with a hooked staff, but to a very big dog.

I'm not a canine person myself but I know there are herding dogs that move sheep around a field and then there are herding dogs that both guard the flock and attack predators, however big and however numerous. Which of those two roles should we personal security officers have? Abe Fallow used to say, “A shepherd's job is to protect the principals. That's it. Let somebody else catch the lifter and hitter and their primaries.”

But—one of the few areas in which I disagreed with my mentor—I didn't subscribe to that theory. I think our task is both to move the herd to safety and rip out the throats of any wolves who're threats. Protecting the principal and neutralizing the lifter or hitter and the person who hired him are, to me, inextricably joined.

Driving fast toward the District in Garcia's Taurus, I was speaking with Freddy, who would lead up the hunting party. The one department my organization
doesn't have is tactical. I've always wanted one (and had the nickname, “gunslinger,” all ready to go) but Ellis got shot down, so to speak, in committee; tac departments are surprisingly expensive. So we rely on the FBI and, in some cases, local SWAT.

After I laid out the plan that I hoped would snare Henry Loving, Freddy said, “You think this is gonna work, Corte? Sounds like Santa Claus meets the Tooth Fairy.”

“Are you there yet?” Based out of Ninth Street, in the District, he had a shorter drive than I did.

“Make it twenty minutes.”

“Move fast. How many do you have?”

“Plenty, son. Peace through superior firepower,” he said, a quote from somewhere, I believed. We disconnected. I sped on, toward Washington, D.C.

Hermes's call had been about a flytrap, a ploy we regularly use to lure the bad guys to a takedown location. They work once in twenty, thirty times but that's no reason not to try. All of our cars and most shepherds' mobile phones have inside them an electronic device we call a squawk box, which periodically transmits a fake phone call that's encrypted but traceable. A lifter or hitter with the right equipment can pick up the number that these phones call, a landline whose location they can track down through your basic commercial reverse look-up.

According to Hermes, Loving had picked up one of these automated calls from the Armada, when it was parked at the Kesslers' house. He'd called the landline, a phone in a warehouse in North East D.C. The message he would have heard was that the place was no longer in business. The kicker was that I had recorded that message myself, so that
anyone with a print of my voice, as I imagined Loving had, would think that it was indeed the place where the Kesslers were being kept.

Given the pressure to get information from Ryan by Monday night—and avoid the “unacceptable consequences” mentioned in the email Loving had received in West Virginia—and given Loving's unrelenting drive to finish his assignments I thought it was likely that he and his partner would at least conduct some surveillance at the warehouse.

The contest between Loving and me was now about to begin in earnest.

I often put my job in terms of something that I (an otherwise dispassionate person, I've been told)
am
passionate about: board games, which I not only play but collect. (The FedEx package that had arrived that morning was an antique game I'd been looking for for years.) One of the reasons I picked the town house in Old Town Alexandria is that it's about two blocks from my favorite gaming club, just off Prince Street. The membership is reasonable and you can always be sure of finding somebody inside to play chess, bridge, Go, Wei Chi, Risk or dozens of other games. The members are a great mix: all nationalities, levels of education, ages, though most are male. All manners of dress and income. Politics vary but are irrelevant.

In the town house are sixty-seven games (and I have even more, 121, in a house near the water in Maryland), all arranged alphabetically.

Naturally I prefer the more challenging games. My present favorite is Arimaa, a recent invention and a variation on chess but so elegant and challenging that the creator's prize to anybody who can
write a program so a computer can play is as yet unclaimed. Chess itself is certainly a good game and I enjoy it. It has, though, been so written about and studied and deconstructed that when I sit down across from an experienced player I sometimes feel that I'm not playing against him but against a crowd of stuffy, eccentric ghosts.

What do I like about board games as opposed to, say, computer games, which certainly offer the same mental challenge?

For one thing I like the art. The design of the board, the playing pieces, the cards, the die, the spinners and the wooden or plastic or ivory accoutrements, like sticks and pins. The aesthetics are pleasing to me and I like it that they also serve a functional purpose, if you can call playing a game utilitarian.

I like it that a board game has longevity and is tangible, it doesn't go away when you shut off a switch or pull a plug from the wall.

Most important, though, I like sitting across from a human being, my opponent. Much of my life involves playing a match of life and death against people like Henry Loving, who are invisible to me, and I can only imagine their expressions of consideration as they pick their strategies to capture or kill my principals. Playing chess or Go or Tigris and Euphrates—a very good game, by the way—I can watch people as they choose their strategy and note how they respond to something I've done.

Even über-techie Bill Gates is a devout bridge player, I've heard.

In any event, playing games has honed my mind and helps me as a shepherd.

So does game theory, which I became interested
in while I was getting one of my graduate degrees, in math, also for the fun of it, lolling in academia and delaying entry into the real world.

Game theory was first debated in the 1940s, though the ideas have been around for years. The academics who formulated the theory originally analyzed games like bridge and poker and even simple contests like Rock, Paper, Scissors or coin flipping, with the goal not of helping win leisure-time activities but to study decision-making.

Simply put, game theory is about trying to make the best choice when presented with a conflict among participants—either opponents or partners—when neither knows what the other will do.

A classic example is the Prisoners' Dilemma, in which two criminals are caught and held in separate cells. The police give each one a choice: to confess or not. Even though each doesn't know what the other will pick, they do know—from the information the police give them—it will be for their mutual good to confess; they won't go free but they'll get a relatively short sentence.

But there's also the chance that by
not
confessing, they will get an even shorter sentence, or none at all, though that's riskier . . . because they could instead receive a much longer one.

Confessing is the “rational” choice.

But not confessing is acting with what's called “rational irrationality.”

In the real world, you see game theory applied in many situations: economics, politics, psychology and military planning. For instance, customers might know that it's better not to withdraw all their savings from a troubled bank, because if they do
they'll contribute to a panic, the bank will fail and everybody will lose. On the other hand, if they're the first to get their money out, they won't lose anything; to hell with the common good. By withdrawing all their funds fast, rational irrationality might save them individually, even though it will start a run on the bank and ruin it.

How does this affect my job as a shepherd?

Since neither I nor opponents like Henry Loving know what moves the other will make, I continually apply game theory in trying to pick the best strategy to win—strategy being not an overall approach to a contest but a specific move, like “Pawn to Rook Seven” or selecting a fist in Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Here, my strategy was to play the flytrap, believing that Henry Loving was more likely than not to make a rational choice: to go for the bait.

But game theory exists because of uncertainty—on gaming boards and in real life. Perhaps Loving would sense this was a trap and, knowing that I was preoccupied there, would use this opportunity to find the real safe house the Kesslers were in, while I was busy here.

Or would he try a different strategy altogether, something I couldn't figure out but which was even now brilliantly outmaneuvering me?

I was getting closer to the nation's capital. I noticed behind me a black SUV I might have seen earlier. Westerfield? Someone else? I called Claire duBois again. “I need a crowd. Festival, parade. In the District. I don't think I have a tail but I want to make sure of it. What do you have for me?”

“A crowd. Okay. How big a crowd? There's the game at the stadium—but, sorry to say,
that
's not
going to be much of a crowd, given how they're playing this season. Then there's a romance author and the cover model of her books—they're signing at a Safeway in North West.”

How did she know this without looking anything up?

“How many people go to romance book signings at grocery stores?”

“You'd be surprised.”

True. “But I want bigger. And downtown. Make it a thousand people, plus.”

“Too bad it's not spring. I don't go for the cherry blossoms myself,” she told me. “If the blossoms
did
something while you were there, that would be one thing. But I never quite understood going to look at trees. Let's see, let's see. . . .” I heard typing, I heard tinkling charms.

DuBois said, “There's not much. A gay rights march up Connecticut in DuPont Circle. Preaching to the converted. Estimate four hundred . . . A Mexican-American parade in South East but it's just winding down now. Oh, here we go. The biggest thing is the protesters outside of Congress. That's about two thousand strong. I never know why they say that. ‘Strong.' As opposed to ‘two thousand weak.' ”

“That sounds good.”

The crowds were there to protest against, or support, a Supreme Court nominee, she explained. I was vaguely aware that the jurist—projected to be confirmed by one or two votes in the Senate—was conservative, so the left was busing in folks to protest, while the Republicans had marshaled their own troops to show support.

“Where exactly?”

She told me—near the Senate Office Building—and I disconnected and steered in that direction. In five minutes, with the sanction of my federal ID, I was easing in and around the demonstrators and past barricades that would stop anyone tailing me. The supporters of the nominee were on one side of a line, the protesters on the other. I noted the viciousness of the insults and even threats they flung back and forth at each other. The police were out in force. I recalled reading a recent series in the
Post
about the increasing polarization and aggressive partisanship in American politics.

My phone buzzed. “Freddy.”

“Where are you?”

“Trying not to run over Supreme Court nominee protesters.”

“Hit a few of 'em for me.”

“You're on site?”

“We're here, in the staging area.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing so far.”

“I'll be there soon.” I now emerged on the other side of the demonstration, assured that I had no tail, and sped to a small garage we sometimes used, just north of Union Station. In five minutes I'd swapped Garcia's official car for another fake one and was heading out a different doorway from the one I'd driven into.

Ten minutes later I was at the flytrap.

A new round of the game against Henry Loving was about to begin.

WE'D PICKED THIS
location, a scruffy portion of North East D.C., because it was a perfect takedown site.

Some industrial parts of the District of Columbia, like this one, are as breathtakingly grim as anything Detroit or Chicago's South Side can offer. The warehouse we leased for a song was in a marshy, weed-cluttered landfill crisscrossed with rusting railroad tracks (I'd never seen a train), crumbling access roads and a couple of sour-smelling canals. Our property was three acres of overgrown lots, filled with trash, clusters of anemic trees, pools of water the color of a sickly tropical lizard. In the center was an ancient warehouse with just enough evidence of habitation to make it seem like a credible safe house. Nearby were two small crumbling outbuildings, where tactical teams could wait for the bad guys; they offered perfect crossfire positions. The warehouse itself had bulletproof brick walls and few windows. We've used it a number of times, though only twice successfully. The most recent was last January, when I'd sat in a snowstorm for four hours, sipping increasingly chilly coffee from a flabby cup clutched in my stinging red fingers, until the hitter
finally made his bold and, for him, unfortunate move.

I now drove through back alleys and fields, largely invisible to any surveillance from the perimeter. I parked some distance from the warehouse, beside the other federal cars, out of sight of the nearby driveways and roads. Then, my shoulder bag bouncing on my back, I walked through a stand of brush and beneath a rusting railroad bridge that was graffiti-free; even the gangbangers had no interest in this prime example of urban decay. I surveyed the area again, saw no sign of hostile surveillance and slipped through tall weeds toward the staging area. A glance at the ground—the broken twigs, overturned leaves and stones—told me that Freddy had brought with him at least six agents (all of them seemingly unconcerned that they left such clear evidence of their presence; I spent some time obscuring the most obvious signs).