Edge Page 3

  "No clue," Westerfield said.

  "Who exactly is he, Kessler?" I asked.

  "I've got some details," Teasley said.

  As the young attorney dug through a file, I wondered why Westerfield had come to us. We're known as the bodyguards of last resort (at least Aaron Ellis refers to us that way in budgetary hearings, which I find a bit embarrassing, but apparently it plays well on the Hill). The State Department's Diplomatic Security and the Secret Service guard U.S. officials and foreign heads of state. Witness Protection cloaks the noble or the infamous with new identities and turns them loose in the world. We, on the other hand, handle situations only when there's an immediate, credible threat against a known principal. We've also been called the ER of personal security.

  The criterion is vague but, given limited resources, we tend to take on cases only when the principal is involved in matters like national security--the spy I'd just delivered to the CIA gentlemen yesterday--or public health, such as our job guarding a whistle-blower in an over-the-counter tainted-drug trial last year.

  But the answer became clear when Teasley gave the cop's bio. "Detective Ryan Kessler, forty-two. Married, one child. He works financial crimes in the district, fifteen years on the force, decorated. . . . You may've heard of him."

  I glanced at my boss, who shook his head for both of us.

  "He's a hero. Got some media coverage a few years ago. He was working undercover in D.C. and stumbled into a robbery in a deli in North West. Saved the customers but took a slug. Was on the news, and one of those Discovery Channel cop programs did an episode about him."

  I didn't watch much TV. But I did understand the situation now. A hero cop being targeted by a lifter like Henry Loving . . . Westerfield saw a chance to be a hero of his own here--marshalling a case against the primary, presumably because of some financial scam Kessler was investigating. Even if the underlying case wasn't big--though it could be huge--targeting a heroic D.C. police officer was reason enough to end up on Westerfield's agenda. I didn't think any less of him because of this; Washington is all about personal as well as public politics. I didn't care if his career would be served by taking on the case. All that mattered to me was keeping the Kessler family alive.

  And that this particular lifter was involved.

  "Alors," Westerfield said. "There we have it. Kessler's been poking his nez where it doesn't belong. We need to find out where, what, who, when, why. So, let's get the Kesslers into the slammer fast and go from there."

  "Slammer?" I asked.

  "Yessir," Teasley said. "We were thinking Hansen Detention Center in D.C. I've done some research and found that HDC has just renovated their alarm systems and I've reviewed the employee files of every guard who'd be on the friendly wing. It's a good choice."

  "C'est vrai."

  "A slammer wouldn't be advisable," I said.

  "Oh?" Westerfield wondered.

  Protective custody, in a secluded part of a correctional facility, makes sense in some cases but this wasn't one of them, I explained.

  "Hm," the prosecutor said, "we were thinking you could have one of your people with them inside, non? Efficient. Agent Fredericks and you can interview him. You'll get good information. I guarantee it. In a slammer, witnesses tend to remember things they wouldn't otherwise. They're all happy-happy."

  "That hasn't been my experience in circumstances like these."

  "No?"

  "You put somebody in detention, yes, usually a lifter from the outside can't get in. And"--a nod toward Teasley, conceding her diligent homework--"I'm sure the staff's been vetted well. With any other lifter, I'd agree. But we're dealing with Henry Loving here. I know how he works. We put the Kesslers inside, he'll find an edge on one of the guards. Most of them are young, male. If I were Loving, I'd just find one with a pregnant wife--their first child, if possible--and pay her a visit." Teasley blinked at my matter-of-fact tone. "The guard would do whatever Loving wanted. And once the family's inside there're no escape routes. The Kesslers'd be trapped."

  "Like petits lapins," Westerfield said, though not as sarcastically as I'd expected. He was considering my point.

  "Besides, Kessler's a cop. We'd have trouble getting him to agree. There could be a half dozen cons he's put inside HDC."

  "Where would you stash them?" Westerfield asked.

  I replied, "I don't know yet. I'll have to think about it."

  Westerfield gazed up at the wall too, though I couldn't tell at which picture or certificate or diploma. Finally he said to Teasley, "Give him Kessler's address."

  The young woman jotted it in far more legible handwriting than her boss's. When she handed it to me I was hit by another blast of perfume.

  I took it, thanking them both. I'm a competitive game player--all sorts of games--and I've learned to be humble and magnanimous in victory, a theory I'd carried over to my professional life. A matter of courtesy, of course, but I'd also found that being a good winner gives you a slight advantage psychologically when you play against the same opponent in the future.

  They rose. The prosecutor said, "Okay, do what you can--find out who hired Loving and why."

  "Our number-one priority," I assured him, though it wasn't.

  "Au revoir. . . ." Westerfield and Teasley breezed out of the doorway, the prosecutor giving sotto voce orders to her.

  I too rose. I had to stop at the town house and pick up a few things for the assignment.

  "I'll report from the location," I told Ellis.

  "Corte?"

  I stopped at the door and glanced back.

  "Not sending the Kesslers to the slammer . . . it makes sense, right? You'd rather get them into a safe house and run the case from there?" He'd backed me up--Aaron Ellis was nothing if not supportive of his troops--and would go with my expertise on the question. But he wasn't, in truth, asking for reassurance that it made tactical sense not to put them in protective custody.

  What he was really asking was this: Was he making the right decision in assigning me, and not someone else, to the job of guarding principals from Henry Loving? In short, could I be objective when the perp was the one who'd murdered my mentor and had apparently escaped from the trap I'd set for him several years before?

  "A safe house's the most efficient approach," I told Ellis and returned to my office, fishing for the key to unlock the desk drawer where I kept my weapon.

  Chapter 3

  MANY GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES are wedded to initials or acronyms to describe their employees or departments, but in ours, for some reason, nicknames are the order of the day, as with "lifter" and "hitter."

  The basic bodyguards in our organization are the close protection officers, whom we call "clones," because they're supposed to shadow their principals closely. Our Technical Support and Communications Department is staffed by "wizards." There are the "street sweepers"--our Defense Analysis and Tactics officers, who can spot a sniper a mile away and a bomb hidden in a principal's cell phone. The people in our organization running surveillance are called, not surprisingly, "spies."

  I'm in the Strategic Protection Department, the most senior of the eight SPD officers in the organization. We're the ones who come up with and execute a protection plan for the principals we've been assigned to guard. And because of the mission, and the initials of the department, we're known as shepherds.

  One department that doesn't have a nickname is Research Support, to me the most important of all our ancillary divisions. A shepherd can't run a personal security job without good investigative research. I've often lectured younger officers that if you do research up front, you'll be less likely to need tactical firepower later.

  And I was lucky to have as my protegee the person I considered the best in the department.

  I called her now.

  One ring. Then: "DuBois," came the voice from my earpiece.

  It was the woman's secure mobile I'd called, so I got her work greeting. With its French origin, you'd think the name would be pronounced d
oo-bwah but her family used doo-boys.

  "Claire. Something's come up."

  "Yes?" she asked briskly.

  "Loving's still alive."

  She processed this. "Alive? . . . I'm not sure how that could happen."

  "Well, it has."

  "I'm thinking about it," she mused, almost to herself. "The building burned. . . . There was a DNA match. I recall the report. There were some typos in it, remember?" Claire duBois was older than her adolescent intonation suggested, though not much. Short brunette hair, a heart-shaped and delicately pretty face, a figure that was probably very nice--and I was as curious about it as any man would be--but usually hidden by functional pantsuits, which I preferred her wearing over skirts and dresses. The practicality of it, I mean.

  "It doesn't matter. Are you in town? I need you."

  "Do you mean did I go away for the weekend? No. Plans changed. Do you want me in?" she asked in her snappy monotone. I pictured her having breakfast as the September morning light slanted through the window of her quiet town house in Arlington, Virginia. She might have been in sweats or a slinky robe but picturing either was impossible. She might have been sitting across from a stubble-bearded young man looking at her curiously from over a sagging Washington Post. That too didn't register.

  "He's after a principal in Fairfax. I don't know the details. Short time frame."

  "Sure. Let me make some arrangements." I heard a few brief clicks--she could type faster than any human being on earth. Half to herself: "Mrs. Glotsky, next door . . . Then the water . . . Okay. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

  I suspected duBois had a bit of attention deficit disorder. But that usually worked to my advantage.

  "I'll be on the road with the principals but I'll call you with the assignments."

  We disconnected. I signed out a Nissan Armada from our transportation department and collected it in the large garage beneath the building. I drove up King Street and then through the quaint and narrow avenues of Old Town Alexandria, on the Potomac River, the Virginia side, not far from Washington, D.C.

  The SUV wasn't tell-all black but a light gray, dusty and dinged. Cars are a big part of the personal security business and, like all of ours, this Nissan had been modified to incorporate bullet-resistant glass, armor on the doors, run-flat tires and a foam-filled gas tank. Billy, our vehicle man, had lowered the center of gravity for faster turning and fitted the grille with what he called a jockstrap, an armored panel to keep the engine protected.

  I double-parked and ran inside the brownstone town house, still smelling of the coffee I'd brewed on a one-cup capsule machine only an hour earlier. I hurriedly packed a large gym bag. Here, unlike at my office, the walls were filled with evidence of my past: diplomas, certificates of continuing-education course completions, recognitions from former employers and satisfied customers, including the Department of State, the CIA, the Bureau and ATF. MI5 in the UK too. Also, a few photos from my earlier years, snapped in Virginia, Ohio and Texas.

  I wasn't sure why I put all of this gingerbread up on the walls. I rarely looked at it, and I never socialized here. I remembered thinking a few years ago that it just seemed like what you were supposed to do when you moved into a good-sized town house by yourself.

  I changed clothes, into jeans and a navy windbreaker and a black Polo shirt. Then I locked up, set the two alarms and returned to the car. I sped toward the expressway, dialing a number then plugging the hands-free into my ear.

  In thirty minutes I was at the home of my principals.

  Fairfax, Virginia, is a pleasant suburb with a range of residential properties, from two-bedroom bungalows and row town houses to sumptuous tenacre lots ringed with demilitarized-zone barriers of trees between neighbors' houses. The Kesslers' house, between these extremes, sat in the midst of an acre, half bald and half bristling with trees, the leaves just now losing their summer vibrancy, about to turn--trees, I noted, that would be perfect cover for a sniper backing up Henry Loving.

  I made a U, parked the Armada in the driveway, climbed out. I didn't recognize the FBI agents across the street personally but I'd seen their pictures, uploaded from Freddy's assistant. I approached the car. They would have my description too but I kept my hands at my sides until they saw who I was. We flashed IDs.

  One said, "Nobody paused in front of the house since we've been here."

  I slipped my ID case away. "Any out-of-state tags?"

  "Didn't notice any."

  Different answer from "No."

  One of the agents pointed to a wide four-lane road nearby. "We saw a couple of SUVs, big ones, there. They slowed, looked our way and then kept going."

  I asked, "They were going north?"

  "Yeah."

  "There's a school a half block away. They've got soccer games today. It's early in the season so I'd guess it was parents who hadn't been to the field yet and weren't sure where to turn."

  They both seemed surprised I knew this. Claire duBois had fed me the information on the way over. I'd asked her about events in the area.

  "But let me know right away if you see them again."

  Up the street I saw homeowners mowing late-season grass or raking early leaves. The day was warm, the air crisp. I scanned the entire area twice. I'm often described as paranoid. And I probably am. But the opponent here was Henry Loving, an expert at being invisible . . . until the last minute, of course, at which time he becomes all too present. Thinking of Rhode Island again, two years ago, when he'd just materialized, armed, from a car that he simply couldn't have been inside.

  Except that he was.

  Hefting my shoulder bag higher, I returned to the Nissan and noted my reflection in the window. I'd decided that since Ryan Kessler was a police detective, what it took to win his confidence was looking more like an undercover cop than the humorless federal agent that I pretty much am. With my casual clothes, my trim, thinning brownish hair and a clean-shaven face, I probably resembled one of the dozens of fortyish businessmen dads shouting encouragement to their sons or daughters at the soccer game up the street at that moment.

  I made a call on my cold phone.

  "That you?" Freddy asked.

  "I'm here, at Kessler's."

  "You see my guys?"

  "Yes. They're good and obvious."

  "What're they going to do, hide behind the lawn gnomes? It's the suburbs, son."

  "It's not a criticism. If Loving's got a spotter on site, I want him to know we're on to him."

  "You think somebody's there already?"

  "Possibly. But nobody'll make a move until Loving's here. Anything more on his position or ETA?"

  "No."

  Where was Loving now? I wondered, picturing the highway from West Virginia. We had a safe house, a good one, out in Luray. I wondered if he was driving near it at the moment.

  Freddy said, "Hold on, just getting something . . . Funny you asked, Corte. Got some details from the team at the motel. Okay, he's in a light-colored sedan. No year, no make, no model that anybody saw."

  Henry Loving stimulates the amnesia gene. But it's also true most people are simply extremely unobservant.

  Freddy continued, "I say at least three hours before he's even in the area. And he's going to spend some time staging before he gets to the Kessler place."

  I said, "Are you owed any favors--the Virginia State troopers?"

  "No, but I'm such a lovable guy, they'll do what I ask."

  I have trouble with Freddy's flippancy. But whatever gets you through the day in this difficult business.

  "Can you get his picture to the state police? Have it sent to all the cars between here and West Virginia on an orange notice." The officers on patrol would get a flash on their computers and they'd be on the lookout for light-colored cars and a driver who fit Loving's description. The orange code meant he was dangerous.

  "I'll do it but I know you're a math wizard, Corte."

  "And?"

  "Divide a million cars by forty troopers. Wh
atta you get?"

  "Thanks, Freddy."

  We disconnected and I called Ryan Kessler.

  "Hello?"

  I told him who I was and that I'd arrived. I'd be at his door in a moment or two. I wanted him to call Freddy and check on my appearance. This was a good security measure but I also did it to increase his paranoia. I knew Kessler, as a cop--and a decorated street cop at that--would be a reluctant principal and I wanted him to sense the reality of the danger.

  Silence.

  "Are you there, Detective Kessler?"

  "Well, sir, I told Agent Fredericks and those men outside . . . I see you out there too, Agent Corte. I told them this isn't necessary."

  "I'd still like to talk to you, please. If you don't mind."

  He made no attempt to mask his irritation. "It's really a waste of time."

  "I'd appreciate it," I said pleasantly. I tend to be overly polite--stiff, many people say. But a calm, structured attitude gets people's cooperation better than bluster, which I'm not very good at anyway.

  "All right, fine. I'll call Agent Fredericks."

  I also asked him if he was armed.

  "Yes. That a problem?" Testy.

  "No," I said. "Not at all."

  I would rather he wasn't, but as a police officer he was entitled, and asking a cop to give up his weapon was a battle rarely worth fighting.

  I gave him some time to call Freddy, while I considered the house.

  Nearly all single-family residences are indefensible.

  Visibility, permeable construction, susceptibility to fire. They're naked to thermal sensors and have limited escape routes. Tactical cover is a joke. A single bullet can take out the power. A proudly advertised five-minute response time by central station security companies simply means the lifter knows he has a guaranteed window for a leisurely kidnapping. Not to mention that the paper trail of home ownership, automobiles and financial documents will lead the perp directly to even the most reclusive citizen's front door in no time at all.

  Principals, of course, always want the security blanket of their homes but I remove them from their beloved residence as fast as possible.

  Seeing Ryan Kessler's house I was determined to spirit him and his family away from the insubstantial two-story colonial as soon as I could.

  I walked to the front door, checking windows. Ryan opened it. I knew what he looked like from personnel files and my other research. I glanced past him at the empty downstairs and moved my hand away from the small of my back.