Edge (24 page)

I sipped the bitter coffee. I summarized, “So investors aren't getting their money out because it's being used to fund terror operations by Hezbollah, the Taliban, Hamas, al Qaeda.”

“That's what I was thinking.”

It was a clever idea, using a Ponzi scam to produce revenue for terrorists. And, if true, it was doubly effective. The money Pamuk raised would not only fund operations but would also have secondary
consequences: destroying the lives of people in the West who'd invested their savings with Pamuk.

“Where are we now?”

“The Saudis aren't being cooperative. No surprise there. State and Interpol and local FBI're doing some digging, trying to see who specifically is getting the money.”

I guessed that Pamuk could be a front man, picked probably because he had connections with the neighborhood—and his sympathies to fundamentalism. I wondered if he'd been the one who'd hired Henry Loving or if that had been someone in the Middle East.

“Any word about when they'll know something?” I asked.

“By tomorrow, they hope.”

They hope. . . .

“Now, about Graham,” I said.

She grimaced. “Sorry.”

We threaten. We don't bluff. . . .

I shrugged. She'd learned the lesson. The question was what to do about the situation.

I finished my coffee. I said in my mentor voice, “In this line of work?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes we've got to do things that test us. Push us to the extreme.”

She'd gone quiet. Unusual for her. But she was looking me in the eye, nodding slightly.

“That's what we have to do now. . . . But it's really above and beyond the call of duty. I can't order you to do it.”

DuBois touched the single button closing her jacket, subconsciously, I believed. Tucked in her
waistband was a pistol similar to mine, the compact Glock. I'd seen her scores. She was a good shot and I remembered the image of her at our range, eyes focused and intense, beneath the yellow-lensed glasses, her short dark hair puffed out comically around the thick ear protectors. Always getting a tight grouping in the fifty-yard targets.

She'd be thinking, possible terrorist connection, possible New Jersey syndicate connection, even a Department of Defense conspiracy of some sort. Would there be a firefight?

She cleared her throat. “Whatever you need, Corte.”

I sized her up. Her still blue eyes, taut lips, steady breathing. She was ready for what we were about to do, I decided.

“Let's go.”

“
MR. GRAHAM?”

I was displaying my ID, which the man had glanced at as if he'd been expecting it all day, which he probably had been.

Trim-haired Eric Graham was about fifty, solidly built, though not overweight. He was in jeans and a sweater and he hadn't shaved since rising for work on Friday.

He looked at me without interest and at duBois with sheerly veiled contempt, once he learned her name.

“Agent Corte, there's nothing to talk about. The forgery case has been withdrawn. I really don't understand what the federal government is doing, involved in this.”

“That's not what I'm here about, sir. . . . You mind if we come in just for a minute or two? It's important.”

“I don't see—”

“It won't be long.” I was looking grim.

He shrugged and motioned us inside. He directed us to the den, whose walls were covered with photos, diplomas, certificates of achievement and memorabilia from his scholastic and athletic endeavors thirty years ago.

“As I explained to
her,
” Graham said icily, “I'm in a very sensitive job. It's unfortunate that the money was stolen. But on the whole, in the interests of national security, I decided not to pursue a criminal case.” He gave a tight, insincere smile. “Why burden the D.C. police department anyway? They've got more important things to do than deal with a careless computer jockey who left his checkbook where it shouldn't've been.”

We sat down around a circular coffee table with a glass top and a recess in the middle. Inside were pictures of Graham's sports successes—college football and tennis. On the walls were some family photos: vacation, school pageants, holidays. I saw a few of his son, presumably the one whose future education had been derailed. I noted too photos of the daughters, also in college. They were twins. Many were of Graham with what looked like wealthy business associates and a politician or two.

There were no sights or sounds of family, though I saw two nearly empty coffee cups on the dining room table, around the remains of the Sunday
Washington Post
, and heard NPR talk radio on the stereo, the volume in the netherworld portion of the dial. I heard creaks coming from upstairs. A door closed. He'd sent the women and children off to the hills when the marauders arrived.

“I'm sorry about Detective Keller.”

“Kessler.”

“Who's had all this trouble. He seemed like a nice guy when he interviewed me. I know”—another nonglaring glare at duBois—“that some hit man or somebody was curious about him because of something.”

Interesting way to phrase it.

“I'm sorry about that. But there's no way my situation could have anything to do with it. You're thinking that whoever stole my checkbook wants to kill him? That just doesn't make sense.”

I held up my hands. “Like I said, we're not here about that. We're here . . .” My voice faded and I glanced at Claire duBois.

She took a deep breath. Her eyes down. “I'm here to apologize, Mr. Graham.”

“To . . . what?”

“When my supervisor,” she began, looking at me, “learned what I'd said and done in our conversation—”

“
Conversation,
” Graham said sardonically.

“He advised me that I'd acted in an unprofessional manner.”

“To put it mildly.”

I merely observed; I said nothing but turned and studied the room.

Graham was smugly pleased I wasn't defending my aide. He looked to duBois. She explained, “See, we have profiling software. When I ran the situation through the computers, the scenario that was number one on our list was that Detective Kessler had been targeted because he'd learned something about your check fraud situation. What it laid out for us was that somebody, possibly a security threat, had stolen your checkbook and used the funds for something that might compromise you. They then blackmailed you into either handing over secrets or maybe sabotaging some of your designs for the DoD. It was a credible scenario.”

He snapped, “Except it wasn't.”

Nodding, duBois said, “I'm fairly new to this position. I don't know if you've worked in any place other than the federal government.”

“I was in the private sector for a while.”

She said, “I was too. I was a security consultant for a major software developer. I can't really mention which one but we had a huge piracy problem. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. You're into computers, you know source codes.”

“Of course.” He gave a subtle eye roll.

I heard duBois say, “We had a situation where an employee was being blackmailed into giving important parts of source codes to a competitor. I managed to track him down. There were some similarities between that situation and your case. I kind of leapt on that.”

“I told you there wasn't a problem. You kept pushing.”

“Yes, I know. I got a little focused.”

“Or blinded, you could say.”

“Blinded,” duBois agreed.

“So you had a taste of success at your other company and you wanted to relive it.”

“I . . . that's about right.”

“You're an ambitious little thing, aren't you?”

She was silent.

“Ambition's fine. But you need the goods, you need to deliver.”

“Yessir. I didn't have the goods.”

“If you don't have them, you can't deliver.”

“Right.”

“No delivery.” He offered her a drippy, condescending
smile. “I'll give you two pieces of advice. First, and this is from somebody in the business: Computers can only do so much. They point you in a certain direction. You need to use that pretty little brain of yours in deciding where to go from there. How do you learn that?”

“Well . . .”

“From life experience. The most important thing in the world. You can't bottle it, you can't buy it.”

“Yessir. What's the second bit of advice?”

“Give people the respect they deserve. You're young, you're spunky. But you'll go further faster if you keep in mind where you fit in the scheme of things.”

“That's true. I sometimes don't remember where I fit.”

I glanced at Graham. “Anything else we can do?”

“Your little lady and I've come to an understanding. I don't think the matter needs to go any further.”

“That's kind of you.”

“You keep that attitude in check,” he said to my protégée.

A fraction of a moment's silence, as duBois nodded slowly. Her skin turned ruddy. “My teacher in seventh grade said the same thing once. Of course, he—”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Graham,” I interrupted quickly. “And your generosity. We'll leave you alone now.”

We walked out the door, then climbed into the Honda. As we pulled out, watching a smug Eric Graham close the door, I said to duBois, “That was helpful.”

My highest compliment. It didn't seem to wash today, however.

She nodded, glum.

“I know it was tough.”

“Yeah.”

The clipped one-word response meant duBois was very upset. I couldn't blame her. I supposed she would have preferred a rolling, four-person tactical entry against an armed hostile to the humiliation she'd just suffered.

But I'd had to ask her to do it. There was absolutely no logical explanation for Graham's dropping the case, and the fact that “somebody powerful” had gone to the MPD to make sure the investigation died suggested all the more that this was a likely motive for Ryan Kessler being targeted. I needed to do whatever I could to find out what was going on with Graham, even if it meant my protégée had to suffer.

Pretty little brain . . .

Claire duBois's prostrating herself to an arrogant chauvinist like Graham was bitterly hard for her, especially since her star shone a thousand times brighter than his. But I'd remembered what Abe Fallow had told me.

Keeping people safe is a business, like any other. You ask yourself, What's my goal and what's the most efficient way to go about achieving it? If that means you beg, you beg. Grovel, you grovel. If that means you bust heads, get out the brass knuckles. Cry if you need to. A shepherd doesn't exist outside the context of his mission.

So I'd had to put duBois in play—to beg forgiveness—while I had become invisible and studied
Graham's reaction when duBois told him again about our theory that he was being blackmailed. I'd noted his mannerisms, his eyes, his verbal and body language. I'd also gazed around his study for anything helpful.

Which I believed I might have found.

I plucked the video camera pen from my breast pocket and handed it to her. “I captured about a dozen pictures of people on Graham's wall. Upload them to our server. I want facial recognition on everybody. Run all the data you get, along with the facts of the case, through ORC.”

This was the computer that duBois had alluded to in her mea culpa performance with Graham. The official name of the impressive program, residing on our tech wizard Hermes's massive servers, is the Obscure Relationship Pattern and Connection Determiner. But we shorthand it to Obscure Relationship Connector and tighten it even more to the evil creatures in Tolkien's fantasy novels, a thought of mine after a marathon bout of playing Lord of the Rings, which is a very good board game.

The algorithm at ORC's heart was elegant—the mathematician in me was truly impressed with how it worked—and if there was any relevance to be found in the evidence I'd gathered, ORC could do so. “And run a facial and kinesics profile on him. A lie-detector scan.”

DuBois took the pen, hooked up a USB cable and sent the video into the stratosphere. She stared out the window. I wondered for how long I'd lost her.

I wondered too if this had changed something permanently between us.

As we drove back to the Hyatt in silence to collect her car, I heard my phone buzz. It was still in her hand. She started to hand it back, saying, “You've got a text.”

“Read it.”

“It's from Transport. A copy of a message to Westerfield.”

“Go on.”

She sighed. “The armored van you'd ordered left the safe house fifteen minutes ago. It's headed for the prison now.”

AS THE SKY
grew more and more overcast, I pulled into the safe house compound in Great Falls.

I climbed out and stretched, as leaves tumbled past in the fitful wind.

The rustic setting made me feel very much at home—the trees, brush, sloping fields of renegade grass. My early adult life was rooted in classrooms and lecture halls, and my recent professions and personal life have found me in offices and safe houses, but I have always found a way to get outside, sometimes for hours or days at a time.

I glanced enviously at the paths that led to the Potomac or farther into the dense woods, then I turned away, looking down at another text from Billy about the progress of the armored van to the slammer in D.C. I wondered if Jason Westerfield and his associate would be there to greet it. Then I realized: Of course they would.

Climbing the stairs, punching in the code. The door of the safe house eased open.