Edge (16 page)

After he left I asked Ellis, “The senator's a friend of yours?”

Ellis scoffed, shrugging his huge shoulders. “If you call going to somebody with hat in hand a friend, then I guess. Stevenson usually comes through with most of what I want for the budget. He's to the right but it's a thinking right. He's smart and he'll listen to the other side. We need more pols like him. Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.”

I recalled the turbulent demonstrations I'd just driven through. Each side really looked like they wanted to kill the other. I believed that was the gist of the
Newsweek
article, Senator Stevenson's efforts to encourage bipartisanship in Washington.

Good luck, I thought.

I regarded my boss's children's artwork on the wall. A river dominated by a very large fish. A purple airplane. Rabbits.

“And Alberts?”

“Only met him once or twice. Typical Beltway pro: political action committees, fund-raising, aide for senators on the Finance Committee, Armed Services and now Intelligence, with Stevenson.”
Ellis was shifting in his chair. “You'll follow up?”

“With Alberts? I suppose.”

“I need you to, Corte. Keep the purse-string people happy . . . though
you
don't look too happy about it.”

“I can't testify in a hearing. I'm only good because I don't exist.”

“Alberts knows that. He only needs leads to other agencies, the public ones.”

“You know what ‘lead' translates into in this line of work, don't you, Aaron?”

“Snitch?” my boss suggested.

The very word I had in mind.

I RETURNED TO
my office.

Barbara said, “Your coffee was cold so here's a new one. I just made it.”

Ah. I thanked her and sipped. It was even worse than I'd remembered.

I punched
SPEED DIAL
.

“DuBois,” the voice chirped. “You're in the building.”

“For ten minutes or so. Can you come over here?”

She appeared a moment later and I wondered how the job had disrupted her plans for the weekend.

She had two cats and a boyfriend, who seemed like a regular, I deduced from snippets of conversation, but whom she didn't live with. I'd never met him; I don't socialize with colleagues. Her boyfriend was apparently always ready to come over to feed the animals and change the litter. I sometimes felt sorry for him. On the other hand, I wondered if he wasn't better off in that sort of relationship with Claire duBois, rather than living with her, which might be an exhausting proposition.

She sat across from me.

“Principals' phones.” I handed her the bag containing
the Kesslers' Nokias and Samsungs and BlackBerrys and their respective batteries, which I'd removed. She'd put them in the sealed room up the hall, in Hermes's work area. If Ryan or Joanne absolutely needed a number from their phones in an emergency and had no other way to get it, Hermes or a wizard in Technical would go inside, power up the phone and get the information, without any risk of a telltale signal escaping.

“Loving?” duBois asked.

“His partner was there but no further description or lead except a blue four-door, probably Buick. Nothing else.”

A raised eyebrow. “Light or dark? Blue, I mean. There're about twenty-five shades of green for current passenger vehicles, I happen to know. Eighteen red. I haven't looked at blue, sorry, but it's probably the same. Oh, and they typically fade one degree of color temperature every six months. Depending.”

“Darker.”

She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.

“Now, there's this.” I handed her the plastic bag containing the trackers.

DuBois lifted a thick, dark eyebrow. “Two. Okay. You were telling me they do that sometimes. Sometimes three. In your car at the flytrap?”

I nodded. “Loving's partner did it. I need prints. And source of origin.”

“I'll track them down,” she said, without any irony at her choice of verb.

I asked, “Now, Ryan's cases?”

DuBois didn't need to glance at her notes. “First, the forgery. Graham, Eric. Forty-nine. Civilian employee of the DoD. Here's the background.
They call it the Inner Circle, where he works. I think it's Ring E or something like that. Inside the center of the Pentagon. I couldn't find out exactly what he does, even with my ID and pulling strings, but we can go with it's classified and it involves weapons development.”

“How'd you find that?” Weapons developers are very careful to make sure they never say they develop weapons.

“Checked his résumé, his clearances, correlated some times and places of meeting with a defense contractor or two. You know, sometimes you can tell more about somebody from what he doesn't tell you than what he does. I put it all together.”

DuBois was really a gem.

She tucked away strands of hair, and the charms on her bracelet jingled. I saw a sterling silver dog, an armadillo, a baguette and a tiny silver King Wenceslas, which she'd bought in Prague when we'd been on assignment there. She continued, “No security incidents involving Graham. But something's come up, something odd. I don't know what to make of it.” She was looking at my sandwich. “Is that dinner?”

I looked at my watch. It was a little after 4:30 p.m. I said, “It's more lunch. Go on. What else did you find, you were saying?”

“I went back to the Detective Bureau at the Metropolitan Police—to find out more—and it seems Graham's decided to drop the case.”

“Dropping it?”

“He called the chief of detectives, Lewis, on Friday and told them he's not going to pursue it. He wants it dropped.”

“Any reason?”

“Because of his job is what he's saying. Security issues. He doesn't want to be public.”

“Seems odd. What does getting robbed have to do with national security? Ryan told me the perp didn't get anything sensitive, no computers or files from work.”

DuBois agreed, “That's right.”

“Why now?” I wondered. “Wouldn't he have been worried about that from the beginning and not even reported the theft in the first place?”

“You'd think. And there's something else. I checked the law. He's to blame. It seems if you're careless with your checkbook or your signature, if you're negligent, then the bank doesn't have to cover a forged check. It's your own insurance company that has to pay. Which isn't going to happen unless there's a police report.”

I tried to understand this. “So essentially, he's taking a forty-thousand-dollar hit. Walking away.”

“Is the government going to reimburse him? Now, that's not likely. I've been trying to get to talk to him. Which is
not
easy, I'll tell you. Go ahead. Eat. I saw you looking at the sandwich. You ever notice in restaurants if people are with somebody, they look at their food more than at the other person? If they're not with somebody, they watch people more than the food.”

I said, “But Ryan didn't say anything about the case being dropped. I just talked to him about it at the Hillside.”

“He probably didn't know. His assistant told me he was working out of the office all Thursday and Friday on some administrative thing. There's some
big meeting next week about revamping accounting procedures in the department.”

I recalled that Ryan had mentioned an internal assignment of some sort.

She asked, “So does that cross the Graham case off our primary list?”

“No. Just the opposite. Nobody ignores forty thousand dollars, unless they're being forced to.” I ate some more of my sandwich.

“Dunch or linner,” duBois was saying. “There's no meal in the afternoon corresponding to brunch.” She wasn't making a joke.

I asked, “Your impressions of him, of Graham?”

DuBois considered. “Upset, evasive.”

“Somebody's leveraging him to drop the case?”

“Possible. They don't make a lot of money, the Graham family. Without the forty K, his kid's not going back to Princeton. If that was me, I'd go allout to nail the perp.”

Some scenarios unfolded in my mind. “Okay, the primary forges the check, buys the gold and launders himself some cash. He spends it on something compromising—donation to a radical mosque, a big coke buy, prostitution, who knows? Maybe fronts that he's Graham. The money can be traced back. The primary says, Give me access to secure files or sabotage the system you're working on, or I ruin your life forever and get you arrested. Graham agrees. Only Ryan's still on the case. The primary hires Henry Loving to find out what he knows.”

“Plausible,” duBois said.

“Now the other case. The Ponzi scheme.”

Her azure eyes, framed by shiny dark hair, now dipped to her notes.

I'd Googled “Ponzi.” I knew a bit about the scams from the Madoff thing, of course, you couldn't watch the news without learning something. The theory was that a scam artist would pose as an investment advisor and take people's money, which he would claim to invest. He'd keep the money for himself but would send out statements reporting that the fund had increased in value. If the early investors wanted to cash out, the thief would pay them off with more recent investment money—a scam that works fine as long as not all the investors want their money at the same time. They were usually discovered when customers got nervous and there was a run on the fund. In the Prisoners' Dilemma analysis of the depositors: acting with rational irrationality.

DuBois explained, “Now, the suspect, Clarence Brown—”

“The mail-order reverend.”

“Not exactly. I checked his online church and—”

“Online?” That was a new one.

“Yep. Mail's not involved at all. You can download and print out your divinity degree. New Zion Church of the Brethren dot com. Anybody can do it. You could, I could. I wanted to see if it was as much of a scam as it seemed, and I got halfway to being a priest. Well, priestess, I guess. They wanted big money, though, and I logged off.” On her bracelet were cross, Star of David and Islamic crescent charms. A cat with an excessively arched back and a witch's hat too. DuBois was not easy to define.

“Go on, Claire.”

“He's a fake reverend but that's not the most interesting part. What I found out is that ‘Clarence Brown' is an alias. He's really Ali Pamuk.”

“He have a record?”

“Don't think so. Nothing in the standard databases. But I've got some friends looking into his history a little more closely. I'm particularly interested in doing-business-as records. I've got to correlate social security number, address, phone records, accounting statements, SEC filings.”

I'd noted the reference to “friends,” hardly an official U.S. government designation for an investigator. But, however duBois was doing this, it would be by the book. You could break all the rules you wanted in bodyguarding your principals—my job. But the task of finding the primary required us to be cops like any other, marshalling evidence and not giving the defense attorneys any windows through which the bird could escape.

“Any more details?”

“Turkish father, mother from Nigeria. Both naturalized. A few years ago he seems to have converted to Christianity, before he became a reverend. But he contributed a lot of money to a mosque in Virginia last year and the year before. Not on any watchlists. He's kind of a player,” duBois said. “Has that small place in the South East tenement, sure. But he also lives in the Watergate. Which he doesn't talk about much. State tells me he's been to Dubai, Jeddah and Jordan in the past two years.”

This was a portrait very different from the one Ryan Kessler had uncovered.

“That's helpful.” It was my highest compliment. “What about those smaller cases Ryan was running?” The cop had dismissed these but I'd asked her to talk to Chief of Detectives Lewis and check them out anyway.

“Oh, the stolen credit cards?” duBois continued. “They were all pretty small. Most of them got pled out. The identity thefts were bigger, low-class felonies. Most were pled. The big one was some kids ordering electronics online. They picked the wrong vic—a computer security expert with Advanced Circuit Design.”

One of Intel's big competitors.

“The victim traced the perp and turned them in. But they got off with probation and fines. That's pretty neat. Somebody who got hacked got revenge by hacking in after the hackers. Rough justice.”

I finished my sandwich, reflecting: some leads, yes, but nothing golden. I was frustrated. “Keep digging.”

“Got my shovel.”

“Both cases.”

“Got my Indian clubs.”

I gave her a smile. I hoped Cat Man treated her right.

Flipping through my phone, I jotted some information. “A few more things to look into.” I slipped the note to her and gave her some more instructions. “A priority,” I added.

“Sure.”

“I've got to get the Kesslers to the safe house.”

She rose. Hesitating.

I glanced at her, a gaze of curiosity.

“I heard, at the flytrap . . . Loving got pretty close.”

She fell into a rare bout of silence.

But there was nothing to talk about regarding the topic of my brush with mortality. It was in the past, and what might have happened—Loving's death or
mine—hadn't. There were no lessons to be learned from it, nothing for me to file away for future strategies, nothing to impart to her.

Speculation about the past is inefficient. And therefore irrelevant to achieving your goal.

So I simply regarded her with a neutral gaze.

“I'll get right on these, Corte,” she said, using my name for what I believed was the first time in all the years we'd worked together.