Edge (36 page)

“But what about what
I
want, Corte?”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“What if I don't want to stay safe? What's in it for me? What's back there that I could possibly want?” A nod toward the safe house.

“Your family.”

“Two people who don't care whether I live or die.”

“Of course they do. Maree, if I'm involved, that means this is the worst time people've ever gone through and ever will. They say terrible things when they're under protection. But they don't mean it. It's the fear talking. The frustration.”

A few minutes passed and I studied the river. I've had principals at this safe house maybe three dozen times and I've walked the entire perimeter, looking it over for offensive and defensive positions, ordered
trees taken down or plantings put in. But I must say that for all my love of orienteering and sign cutting and hiking, I've never actually taken time to enjoy the place.

I turned back and noticed she was rubbing her arm.

“Why did Andrew hurt you?”

Her head dipped. “Didn't buy the rude businessman thing, hm?”

“No.”

“How'd you guess?”

“I've been doing this a long time.”

I suspected she'd stonewall but I was surprised. She answered almost immediately, “The question is what
didn't
I do.” An odd laugh. Humorless and stone calm. “And you know, Corte, the scary thing is, I can't remember. I probably didn't cook the right dinner or I cooked the right dinner but the wrong way. Or I drank too much wine when his friends were over. I don't know. All I know is he grabbed me . . . grabbed and twisted. A tendon popped.” She was gripping the joint. “I cried that night, most of the night. Not because it hurt. But because I was thinking I knew some people's elbows get hurt doing things like skiing or windsurfing with the people they love. But not me. No, no. I got hurt because somebody I loved wanted to hurt me.”

Staring down at her camera. “But life's all about trade-offs, isn't it? I mean, who ever gets a hundred percent? I get excitement, energy, passion. Some women get boredom and drunks.” She didn't look back to the safe house. “I'd rather have the thrill and a bruise now and then.” A breathy laugh escaped
her narrow pink lips. “How politically incorrect is that? But there it is. I'm honest, at least.”

I debated a moment. A long moment and an intense debate. I eased down to the ledge and sat beside her. She made no effort to move away. It was a very small space and our legs touched firmly. I hated being up here and I had to admit I liked the comfort of the proximity.

I considered how much to tell her. I decided on a quantity and said, “I got married just after I graduated.”

“Jo said you're single now. I wondered if you'd ever been married. The way you looked at Amanda, it was the way a father or uncle looks at a child. You had children?”

I again hesitated and finally nodded but it was clear from my expression that I wasn't going to talk about that. Maree sensed she'd stepped over a line. She started to say something but didn't. I continued quickly, “After we'd been married a few years we had a situation. There was a man from my wife's past who became a problem.”

Maree may have noted that I said “wife” and not “ex,” which imparted some information to her. She was smarter than the package suggested. She frowned her sympathy, which I didn't respond to.

“They'd worked together.” I hesitated. “They were both single. They went out a few times . . . they spent the night once or twice.” Maree seemed almost amused at my delicate euphemism. “This was a few years before Peggy and I met.”

“Temper problem too, this guy? Like Andrew?”

“No. Nicest guy in the world. I met him.”

“You met him?”

“They were in the same profession. Saw each other occasionally.”

Peggy and he had done their residencies at the same hospital. I didn't give Maree these details, though. “They broke up and she met me. After a couple of years, he showed up again. Just called to say hi, see if they could have coffee, a drink, for old times' sake. But little by little it got to be strange. He began calling more frequently. Leaving messages. Innocent at first. Then getting slightly more aggressive when she didn't call back. Then he started calling
me.
And showing up at the house. He even called . . .” I stopped speaking for a moment. I said, “Then the serious stalking began.”

I was silent, recalling those days, seeing Peggy's face, the faces of the boys too, very young but prescient and intuitive the way children are. They'd been scared.

“I realized finally what the problem was,” I told Maree. “It wasn't him. It was my wife. She was treating him like a normal human being. Polite, giving him the benefit of the doubt, humoring him. She was a good person, just thinking about who he'd been when they'd been going out, charming and funny. But that was the past. When all this happened he wasn't a normal human being. He was something else. You can't be friends with a shark or a rabid dog, Maree. That's where you get into trouble. Andrew's a different kind of danger but that doesn't matter. Anyone who isn't good for you is as dangerous as Henry Loving.”

I felt her hand take mine. For such delicate appendages, her fingers were surprisingly warm on this chill morning.

“Can I ask what happened?”

I shrugged, looking over the water. “It finally ended.” I added, “It became a police matter.”

Neither of us moved for a long moment. Maree turned and her arms snaked around me and we were gripping each other hard. She kissed me gently at first and then with more passion and desperation. Then, with a smile, she eased back slightly and slipped my hands inside her jacket, against her breasts. I felt a complicated bra. She pressed closer and kissed me again, more playfully this time, her tongue flavored with cloves or cinnamon.

Then she sat back and took my hand in both of hers. “Jo says I like bad boys. That's one of my problems. Andrew's a bad boy.” She looked at me and I believed the sparkle in her eyes came from something other than the transit of cloud beneath the hazy sun. “You're one too, Corte. You're a bad boy. But I think you're a good bad boy.”

I recalled that I'd recently been remembering that Peggy had said much the same about me.

“Let's go back in.”

“You don't want to stay out here and enjoy the view?”

I smiled. “Duty first.” I rose and pulled her to her feet and we headed back to the house.

“You ever take time off, Corte?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do?”

“I like to play games.”

Which she seemed to think was very funny.

WHEN WE RETURNED
to the house, I punched in the code and the door unlocked.

Inside we were greeted by two solemn faces staring our way. Her face white, mouth open, Joanne looked at her sister and walked forward.

“I'm so sorry,” Joanne whispered. She tentatively touched Maree's arms and then stepped back. Maree's face was neutral. Neither accepting nor rejecting the apology.

“Mar, look, I was possessed. . . . I was so upset. . . . Amanda.”

The young woman shrugged, walked to her computer, picked it up. She flopped down on the couch and scanned through it. This was something else I'd noticed that my principals had done more and more recently, in the safe house and halfway motels: withdrawn into their cyberwombs.

Joanne continued, “Please . . . say something.”

“I'll be moving out when we get out of prison.” Her voice was eerily soft. She continued to look through the files of pictures.

Images. We call them images. . . .

Joanne lowered her head, about to say something more, but couldn't conjure the words.

It was then that my own computer pinged. I
stepped into the den. It was an email from Claire duBois, with, I hoped, an answer to what I'd had her research when Joanne had told us about the Colombian diplomat.

I was prepared for some of the contents. The rest was a bit of a shock.

I stared at the screen for some moments then printed out the documents and returned to the living room. As I did, my face must have revealed something because I found the mood in the room had changed from recrimination and contrition—in varying degrees of sincerity—to intense anticipation as they gazed at me.

I read through the four or five pages carefully once more. Then I glanced toward my principals. “It's not Maree. She has nothing to do with Loving.”

Joanne sighed. “I just thought, because of Allende . . .”

I continued, “My associate just talked to some people involved in the investigation. They know the man in the picture. He's Allende's mistress's son. Has nothing to do with any illegal operations. He was sharing music downloads on the thumb drive. Even if they saw Maree was taking pictures, they wouldn't have an interest in hiring Loving to get any information from her. And his phones and travel records are clean.”

Joanne shook her head. She may have continued to speak. I didn't know. I was reading the rest of the documents duBois had sent, a third time now, just to make sure.

They drooped in my hand.

“My associate found something else,” I told them.

“What?” Ryan wanted to know. He was absently massaging his game leg.

“The answer—why Henry Loving's been hired.” I looked up, toward Joanne.

She froze. Her eyes regarded the sheets in my hand as if she were identifying the body of a loved one.

In a low, grim voice, very different from her tone throughout the past few days, Joanne said to me, “It's not a problem, Corte. It's been looked into.”

Maree stared at her sister. Ryan took in Joanne's face, flushed, lips taut.

He asked her, “What are you talking about?”

I was the person who answered. “Henry Loving's after your wife, not you.”

“
WHAT?” HE LAUGHED.

An endless moment followed, during which no one spoke, no one moved. The only sound was the wind and the clatter of the automatic ice maker in the refrigerator.

Shaking her head, Joanne walked to the window. I studied her cool eyes as a number of mysteries fell into place.

Maree asked, “What do you mean, Corte? What does Jo have to do with this?”

I didn't answer.

“Jo,” Maree snapped. “Jo! Say something. What's he talking about?”

“Well?” I asked her firmly. I needed answers and I needed them now.

Again her voice steady and chill, she said, “I told you, Corte. It's been looked into. There's no problem. Forget it.”

Ryan muttered, “Looked into?”

She ignored him and spoke to me. “Don't you think it was the first thing that occurred to me? As soon as I heard there was a possibility of a lifter, the
minute
I heard, I made the call. There've been a dozen people looking into it. They've found nothing. Not a thing.”

“Henry Loving only works for people who make it very, very difficult to find out anything about them.”

She answered calmly, “And the people I'm talking about are very, very good too.”

“Jo, what is this?” her husband said, mystified.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her.

Her face was a mask of disgust.

“Why?” I repeated.

“I am not allowed to tell you,” she said in a raw tone.

“Somebody answer my fucking question,” Ryan snapped. His perplexed humor had evaporated.

“Honey . . . Ry, I'm so sorry. I just can't. It's very complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it. No bullshit. Tell me.”

Joanne asked, “Can I see what you have?”

I handed the pages to her. Her first reaction was professional. Squinting, she skimmed through the printouts, the header on each, “Top Secret,” a cliché, yet in fact the highest document security classification that the U.S. government uses.

A nod. “How did you get into these servers?” She shook her head. “Never mind, never mind . . .” A sigh. “I suppose I knew from the beginning that it would come to this.”

I said to her sister and husband, “It looks like someone from Joanne's past is responsible for hiring Henry Loving.”

Maree said, “You mean, like a boyfriend or something?” Thinking of our prior conversation, on the ledge, I imagined.

I glanced toward Joanne, giving her the option to talk. I sensed she was ready to surrender. No
tears—that in fact had been another clue to the truth I'd missed. I can count on my principals to cry at least a few times, especially after an assault. But not Joanne. I realized now that her expressions and demeanor of the past few days—the numbness, the blank gaze—weren't because the sheltered housewife with an abhorrence of violence had fallen into this horrific, incomprehensible situation.

She was simply unemotional because of her training or her nature. Probably both.

Joanne said evenly to her husband and sister, “He's talking about my job.”

Maree said, “Your job? You crunched numbers for the Department of Transportation.”

“No. I did work for the government. But it was with a different group.” She looked at me, grimacing. “I know how you figured it out. I mentioned Intelligence Assessment, right? I couldn't believe I said it out loud. I was mad. I was emotional. I didn't think you'd notice.”

“That's it.”

They're worried that somebody in national security—the CIA, the FBI, Intelligence Assessment—could identify who Allende's with. . . .

The government's Intelligence Assessment Department is a very small federal agency with very large computers, located in Sterling, Virginia. The IAD's purpose is to maintain files of names, faces, physical attributes and personal preferences of national security threats and to analyze data about all of the above. If anybody's ever wondered why the CIA or the military can be so certain that one bearded thirty-year-old on the streets of Kabul is an innocent businessman and, to our Western eyes, an
identical one a block away is an al Qaeda operative, IAD is the reason.