Edge (19 page)

They acknowledged the orders.

The feint car hood edged slowly into view from the alley.

Ahmad shot out the tire and immediately lifted his weapon's muzzle, staring past the vehicle. “Can't see clearly but think there's somebody in the woods. Solo.”

“Brick wall,” Garcia called. “It's Loving's car. They're flanking us.”

“Covering fire,” I shouted. “Both directions. Mind innocents.”

Both men fired, driving Loving back. The partner too vanished under cover in the woods.

“They're going to try again,” Maree said, still crying. “We're trapped here!”

Now they knew we were ready for them. I dropped the transmission into four-wheel low gear and turned directly toward the stockade fence.

“What're you doing?” Maree gasped. “No! We'll get stuck!”

I nosed the Yukon against the wood and, a slight nudge, the panel of fencing broke free. I drove over it and into the farm field on the other side.

I ordered, “Target the gap in the fence. But
don't fire unless you're sure it's them. There'll be spectators now.” I was heading slowly down the hill toward a line of trees.

Surprisingly it was Joanne Kessler who caught on. “You had that escape route planned. You cut mostly through the fence posts, so you could drive over it if you needed to. When?”

“A couple years ago.”

I pick all my halfway houses for escape as well as defensibility and I do a lot of work on the properties late at night. The Hillside Inn people never knew I'd vandalized their fence.

“I don't see anything,” Ryan said. “Not yet.”

We rolled slowly down the hill, slick with dew, then through a series of soft dirt rows of recently harvested corn husks and stems. You could measure the progress in feet but we were moving steadily.

“Still nobody,” Ahmad said.

I ordered them to keep targeting the opening in the fence we'd just eased through, though I knew that Loving would take one look at the ground we were traversing and know that his sedan couldn't possibly pursue us.

He'd make the only rational decision he could: to retreat as fast as possible.

A HALF HOUR
later we were on the highway again, heading for the safe house.

It was a little after 8:00 p.m. and I'd been driving a fast, complicated and unpredictable route generally north though Loudoun and Fairfax counties.

In the back Ryan Kessler sat brooding, looking through his canvas bag. For ammo? Or booze? Joanne was quiet, staring out the window. Maree, calm finally, fidgeted with a pacifier, her computer. She was coming out of her hysteria but hadn't yet returned to referring flippantly to me as a tour guide.

Principals get terrified, of course. Disoriented too, and a little bit crazy. I need the people in my organization to be 100 percent with me. My principals, though? If they can be 75 or 80, if they can do what I ask with a measure of promptness and intelligence, I'm content. A sizable portion of my task is fixing as many of their inevitable mistakes as I can and minimizing the principals' more destructive foibles and habits.

Which is not a bad philosophy of life, I'd decided.

In fact, this was a typical sampling of principals' behavior. From experience I found Joanne's numbness
more worrisome than her husband's bluster and her sister's juvenile banter and hysteria. Principals like her could melt down suddenly and explosively, and usually it happened at exactly the wrong time.

I glanced back in the mirror and my eyes met hers, which were blank and unfocused, and we simultaneously looked away.

Now that I was comfortable that there were no tails—it would be purest coincidence that Loving would find us—I made the call.

“Hello?” the deep voice answered.

“Aaron.”

My boss responded, “Corte, I heard from Fredericks, at the Hillside Inn. He said you were okay. I assumed you were on the run and I didn't want to call.”

“Thanks.” This was one of his best attributes: He might have no instinctive feel for shepherding but he understood how we operated and he accommodated his job to ours. I said, “I haven't talked to Freddy yet. Any casualties there?”

He answered, “No, but it's a mess. They picked up a lot of brass, must've been forty, fifty shots fired. Two slugs hit guest rooms with people inside. I can't keep the lid on this one.”

“What'll it be?”

“Loving gave us an out with the press, believe it or not. We'll springboard on what he said in his fax—that there was talk of a kidnapping and some organized crime involvement. I'll trot out Bad Hector. I don't have much choice.”

Hector Carranzo was a small-time Colombian drug figure who was named in a number of felony
warrants both here and in various Latin American countries. The reports gave mixed descriptions and vague background but all included warnings of his dangerous nature and the admonition to be on the lookout for him anywhere in the country. He was known to pop up unexpectedly.

He was also a complete fiction. When we had a shootout like the one at the Hillside Inn, under circumstances where we wanted to keep the truth quiet, we blamed the incident on Señor Hector and “possible drug or other illegal activity we have yet to identify with specificity.” After we collared the primary in the Ryan Kessler case, Ellis might come back in a few days with: Ooops, we were wrong; the real perp was actually so-and-so. But Bad Hector would keep the press busy for a time.

“We're on the way to the safe house now.”

“Good. Get there and stay there.” A pause. I knew what he'd say next. “We all want to get him, Corte. But I want you to sit tight in the safe house. No more attempts to engage Loving.”

He'd be thinking of Rhode Island.

“Only the flytrap was offensive. What happened at the Hillside was pure defense. We were trying to get away.”

“I understand that. . . . But there may be some issue raised of why you used a halfway in this situation. Why you didn't go directly to the safe house.”

Meaning, I supposed, was I subconsciously—or perhaps very consciously—trying to draw Loving to us? He wanted a reason. But, even though he was my boss, I wasn't going to answer.

He caught this and continued, “It was your call
and I'm not questioning it. Just telling you that the question could come up.”

I told him, “If I do anything at all, it'll just be to help Claire track down the primary.”

“Fine,” he muttered. Ellis was having a tough Saturday, so he wasn't treading softly any longer. “You didn't call Westerfield. You said you would.”

“I will. It's been busy.”

Which, though true, sounded lame.

We disconnected and I was scrolling through numbers to find Westerfield's. But then Freddy's name was recited on my audible caller ID.

I clicked
ACCEPT
and asked, “You get
anything
at the Hillside?”

Freddy said, “No trace. He vanished—real fast. Like Houdini. Or the allowance I give my kids. Thin air.”

“Aaron said no injuries.”

“Right. People're shaken up. But so what? Life shakes you up. Nothing wrong with getting shook once in a while. Aaron's handling the press? There're more reporters than you can shake a stick at.”

“He'll do what he can.”

Freddy added that the hostage Loving had taken, to coerce her husband to drive his car after us as a diversion, was safe. “Not that it mattered but she said she couldn't identify her kidnapper. The husband got amnesia too.”

I asked, “Any indication which way Loving went?”

“None.”

“We take out their Dodge?”

“Yup. Fan and a tire. They left it fifty yards west, where they had switch wheels hidden. The abandoned
one was clean. And the new one? No tire treads our boys and girls could find. And you know them. . . . If there's a pubic hair, they'll get it.”

“So was there a fax with Ryan's picture on it?”

“Yep.”

“Who was it supposed to be from? You guys?”

“Federal Department of Tax Investigation.”

I nearly smiled. An outfit as phony as Artesian Computer Design. You had to hand it to Loving.

I told him, “It said the typical: Don't try to apprehend, just give a call if you see him? And an eight hundred number?”

“Prepaid mobile.”

“Now deactivated,” I said.

Freddy didn't need to confirm this.

“What was the incoming fax number?”

“Sent from a computer through a Swedish proxy.”

Naturally.

Freddy wondered, “How'd he tip to the Hillside specifically and send the fax there?”

“I think he went fishing. Sent faxes to dozens of possible halfway houses. I'll bet they're sitting in front lobbies all over the area.”

“Jesus,” he exhaled, pronouncing the name with an initial
H.
Maybe he was worried about being sacrilegious. I knew he went to church at least once a week. “This guy's earning his fee. What the hell does Kessler know that's so friggin' important?”

Just what Claire duBois and I were going to find out in the next few hours, I hoped.

Then Freddy got my attention, asking, “You know somebody named Sandy Alberts?”

“He give you a call?”

“Came to the office. Works for that senator from Indiana or Ohio, Stevenson.”

“I know who he is. Ohio. What'd Alberts want?”

“Just asking questions. About wiretaps, Patriot Act, so on and so forth. Got to say, Corte, your name came up. All happy, cheerful, good things. But, well, like I said, your name came up. Find that interesting.”

Interesting, I reflected glumly. “And?”

“No ‘and.' I told him I was busy. Had to go.”

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“For what?”

“I'm not sure.”

We disconnected and I considered Albert's visit to Freddy.

Then I decided I could no longer delay the inevitable. I scrolled down and found Westerfield's number. Hit
SEND
.

The man answered on the second ring. My heart sank; I'd been hoping for voice mail. “Corte,” he said and didn't slip into French. “Listen, we need to talk. But I'm in with the AG right now.”

He was sitting in the U.S. attorney general's office on Saturday night . . . and he'd taken my call?

“I'll get back to you when we're through. This number?”

“Yes.”

“You have an alternate?”

“No.”

Click.

I pulled off onto a side road and stopped. Maree gasped and looked up, alarmed, her psychic pendulum still on the hysterical side. Joanne slipped from
her coma long enough to say to her, “It's okay. It'll be okay.”

“Why're we stopping?” the younger woman asked, her voice on edge.

I said, “Just checking the car. We took some hits.”

Ryan began scanning the dark roadside like a sniper for prey.

Ahmad climbed out of the back and joined me and we inspected the Yukon carefully. It wasn't badly damaged from the shootout or the rough escape. The SUV was doing better than my back was.

As we checked the tires, I glanced up and saw Joanne, still in the backseat, look at her watch and place a call. It was to Amanda. From the conversation, which I could hear through the open door, it seemed everything was fine. She caught my eye again then lowered her head and continued the call. She was struggling to be animated as her stepdaughter apparently pelted her with a report of her day in the country.

Ryan took the phone and, his face softening, also had a conversation with the girl.

Parents and children.

For a moment some of those memories I'd had earlier surfaced, some children's faces among them, memories I didn't want. I put them away. Sometimes I was better at that than others. Tonight they vanished more slowly than usual.

I got back inside and when the door slammed Ryan spun around, startled, and gripped his gun. I tensed for a moment but he oriented himself and relaxed.

My Lord, did he want to shoot
everybody
?

As I started to drive, my phone buzzed and the caller ID voice announced a number I recognized as the Justice Department. My finger hovered over the
ACCEPT
button.

I didn't press it. The call went to voice mail and I steered the Yukon back to the main road.

MORE DARK, WINDING
routes.

Nobody was behind us, unless he was driving without lights, which was possible, thanks to the new night vision systems. But the way I was driving—fast then slow, occasionally abrupt stops, sharp turns down roads that I knew well but I doubted Loving would—left me convinced that no one was following.

After forty minutes I hit Route 7 briefly then Georgetown Pike and took it to River Bend Road. Then, bypassing downtown Great Falls, I took a series of tangled roads and streets on which GPS was helpful but not definitive.

Finally, after a drive through dense woods, during which we passed no more than three houses—three very large houses—we arrived at the safe house compound, separated from the road by a seven-foot-high stockade and, farther along, six-foot chain-link fences.

The compound had a seven-bedroom main house, two outbuildings—one of them a panic facility—and two large garages, as well as a barn, complete with a hayloft. The grounds were nearly ten acres of rolling fields, bordering the Potomac River, the turbulent part, the narrows, where there
is indeed a series of falls and rapids, though “Great Falls” is by anyone's estimation exaggerated; “Modest but Picturesque” would be a better name.

The property had been a bargain. You can't be in any government service nowadays without being aware of the bottom line. In the nineties, the compound had been the residence of Chinese diplomats, a retreat from the embassy downtown. It was also, the FBI had learned, where the People's Republic secret police regularly met their runners and agents, who'd been collecting information from contractors and low-level government workers and taking pictures of the NSA, the CIA and other unmentionable facilities in Langley, Tysons and Centreville. Most of the work, it was learned, was commercial property theft rather than defense secrets. But it was politically naughty, not to mention illegal.