Edge

Chapter 44

“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.

However, nobody outside the highest levels of government security knows it exists. No news story would have reported about it. There was no way Joanne could even have heard of IAD, let alone know that it could identify the man in the pictures with Allende… unless she had some clandestine connection with high-level national security operations.

It had raised my suspicions. My encrypted message to duBois after Joanne had found the picture on her sister’s computer had been not only to have ORC analyze the photos but to see if anybody had made an IAD request about Allende and his associate in the past twelve hours. And, if so, could that request somehow be linked to Joanne Kessler?

DuBois had earlier, of course, run the basic profile of the woman-learning about her scholastic and professional histories, as well as things like her car accident. But if Joanne knew about IAD, that suggested to me the public information could be a cover and that her real job history and profile would be in classified archives and records.

So you do your homework, do you?… What’d you find out about me?

No wonder she’d asked the question.

DuBois reported that, yes, this morning somebody with a high clearance had submitted an IAD request to identify two people in a photograph that had been uploaded from an unknown location. The analysis was pending.

Regarding Joanne Kessler’s real résumé, well, that had taken some true finesse to find. Aaron Ellis had helped, duBois explained in her email, and he’d pulled in some markers from Langley and Fort Meade.

Ryan blurted, “But your job… I went to see you. We had lunch. A half dozen times. We went to Air and Space, we went to the National Gallery. I walked you back to the office. The Highways Analysis Bureau. On Twenty-second Street. I was there!”

“Honey…” The endearment seemed to jar. “It… it was a cover.”

He asked, “You were with the CIA? Something like that?”

“Like that.”

Maree was getting worked up now. Nothing flighty or youthful about the woman any longer. “You’re still not giving us any details, Jo.”

Stoic now, as if she were speaking before a congressional committee, she said, “My organization was involved in domestic national security projects.”

“What does that mean?” Ryan was trying desperately to reconcile this information with accounts of her life she’d told him earlier. What was true and what wasn’t? How deep did the lies go? He’d be thinking of places she said she’d been, people she said she’d known. Was there some honesty in the stories that could legitimize their marriage and family? Because that’s what was at risk now, of course.

For her part, Joanne would be considering exactly what and how much she could tell him-which, in theory, was nothing. The British have their Official Secrets Act, which forbids government employees from talking about their activities while they were in the employ of certain agencies. We don’t have quite such a grandly named law but similar regulations are in effect. She’d already committed federal offenses by her disclosures here in this rustic, cozy living room. If she went further, the crimes would be compounded significantly, I understood.

But Ryan Kessler was no fool. He investigated crimes and he put people in jail for a living. The pieces were coming together-yes, slowly and in a patchwork way, but he had a clue as to where this was going. In a whisper he asked, “There was something going on when we met. You talked about a boyfriend you were breaking up with. You’d call him occasionally. Late at night. But he wasn’t your lover, was he? You worked with him, right?”

“Yes. I called him my former boyfriend but that was part of the cover.” Joanne was slumped forward, shoulders drooping. It was a confessional pose. “We were supposed to talk about each other like ex-lovers. Those were operational rules.”

Her sister broke in. “I don’t understand any of this, Jo. You’re talking like you were in the army. Like Dad used to talk.”

Joanne surprised me, at least, by laughing. “Dad… funny you should mention him. He’s the one who helped me get into my organization. Right after college.”

“But you backpacked through Europe.”

“No, Mar. The post cards were fake. I went to a training center in the States. I can’t say anything more about it.”

As often happened in this line of work, I realized that one of my principals was speaking to someone else in the room through a third party. Doing this seems easier. It was safer for Joanne to confess to her sister than to her husband-the person she was really communicating with. I’d learned that when it comes to deception, we believe that the gravity of the sin depends not on the nature of the lie but on the person lied to.

But Ryan asked directly, “Projects, Jo? National security projects?”

She finally turned to face him, held his eyes. “We did risk assessment.” Then she took a deep breath and I knew that the complete truth was about to come out. She added in a voice that was barely audible, “And we did risk elimination.”

“You and your partner?”

“Partners,” she corrected. “I was active for eight years. I had a number of partners.”

Maree said, “For God’s sake, Jo, tell me in English what you mean. Risk assessment, risk elimination?”

Ryan Kessler said evenly, “Maree, your sister killed people.”