Edge

Chapter 12

LOVING NOTED A bit of body armor protruding from beneath my jacket. He lifted his gun and aimed at my exposed neck.

Then his pale left hand moved slightly, delivering instructions.

I stood. I was to remove the radio mike bud from one ear and the listening device earpiece from the other. And to pull my weapon from the holster with thumb and index finger.

I complied with all of his requests, assessing him calmly.

The way the game was moving was now clear. Loving had guessed that this was a trap and had decided to engage me personally. A rational decision. Which explained why he’d ordered the partner to hold back, near the Dodge, and not approach the warehouse itself, which he would have done if Loving had fallen for the setup.

He’d known it was a trap but he’d taken the risk. Not to get Ryan Kessler, of course, but to kidnap me. Who, after sufficient coercion, would tell him where exactly the Kesslers were. I had suddenly become a principal.

Loving’s murky eyes in the fleshy, nondescript face of a businessman approaching middle age took in the scene quickly and noticed no threat around him, here at a distance from the command post and the warehouse.

I realized that this was the closest I’d ever gotten to the man who’d tortured and killed my mentor. In Rhode Island, in the botched takedown, I’d never been nearer than a hundred feet or so. Close enough to see him squint slightly as he pulled the trigger-an instant before realizing that he’d walked into a trap and the principal was really an undercover agent, behind an invisible bulletproof shield.

Neither of us said anything now. His plan was that we would talk, of course, but later and in the back of his vehicle or in another grim abandoned warehouse somewhere far away. He’d be thinking how long I could last before I told him where Ryan Kessler was.

Because, Henry Loving knew, I would talk. Everybody talks sooner or later.

With my weapon, the radio and cell phone on the ground and knowing he had limited time, Henry Loving gestured me toward him.

Walking forward, I lifted my hands to shoulder level to show I was no threat, my gaze riveted to his. I couldn’t look away. This was not because his eyes were intense or focused, though they were, but because they were the last thing that Abe Fallow had seen as he died. I knew this because the bullet had been fired from close range and had struck Abe in his forehead. The men would have been looking at one another. I often wondered, sometimes for hours before I fell asleep, about Abe’s last moments. He’d given up the locations of the five principals he’d been guarding. But I’d been listening on the still-connected mobile. Between the moment Abe whispered the address of the last witness and the fatal gunshot thirty seconds or so had passed. What had happened during that time? What had their expressions been?

This was perhaps the reason I was so obsessed with catching Henry Loving: not only because he’d killed Abe Fallow, but because he’d forced the man to spend his last few moments in agony and despair.

Hands submissively out to the sides, I began to wonder what shepherds always wonder under such circumstances: How long can I hold out under torture?

Loving’s low-tech. Usually he uses sandpaper and alcohol on sensitive parts of the body. Doesn’t sound too bad but it works real well.

This question, though, was merely theoretical, something that popped into my mind as I stepped forward.

Because, despite appearances, I wasn’t the losing player at the moment.

Henry Loving was.

The real bait here wasn’t the warehouse and the suggestion that Ryan Kessler was inside.

The real bait was me.

The trap was something altogether different from what it appeared to be.

And the moment had come to spring it.

Squinting, I lifted my hands over my shoulders. This was the signal to the two FBI teams hiding nearby, my backup.

And, as I dropped to the ground, I caught a glimpse of the shock in Loving’s face as the explosions began. They were stunning. I felt the blast wave and heat slam into my face as I rolled on the dirt to retrieve my weapon, radio and phone. The powerful remote-controlled flash-bang grenades continued to detonate along the line I’d ordered them set up fifteen minutes before by the agents covering me, Teams Three and Four. They’d been told to set them off when I raised my hands above the level of my shoulders.

Or if Loving shot me.

“Move in, move in!” I shouted from the ground, plugging the earbuds in and grabbing my weapon. “He’s headed for the canal.”

I heard Freddy’s voice, “Team Two, take down the partner!”

The agents on Teams Three and Four-the ones who’d been with me the whole time, hidden only thirty or so feet away-were on the move now, heading after Loving. I joined them, sprinting. We ran in pursuit, through the brush and weeds, around tires and abandoned washers and refrigerators. The lifter was ignoring us, concentrating on speed, not turning to fire.

I’d decided that Loving would probably guess that this was a trap but I also believed that he’d figure I’d be present and he’d take the risk to kidnap me. And extract the location of Ryan Kessler.

Then kill me afterward.

I am, of course, the Henry Loving of his life.

My strategy had been to put the agents around me and rig explosive charges nearby, then set up the microphone and turn my back to where I believed he’d come at me. I became the most obvious target I could be. Like a suspect in the Prisoners’ Dilemma, I’d made a risky choice. Rational irrationality. I’d bet that Loving wouldn’t kill me outright but would try to extract information about the Kesslers’ whereabouts. I wondered if he’d arrived by that boat in the canal and possibly he had, but he was now heading the other way-toward an open field. There was very little cover and it seemed a strange choice. But then I spotted, a hundred yards away, an embankment on top of which was a road. He had a getaway car there waiting, I saw.

We’d stop him easily before he got halfway there, though. The four agents who’d been guarding me were gaining on him-I was holding my own. I called Freddy to tell him that Loving was heading for the road and to send a car to intercept him.

The radio transmissions were flying like shrapnel, as our voices stepped on each other.

Gasping, I continued to race after our prey.

We got some good news.

“Team Two. Got one in custody. Loving’s partner.”

That was something, I reflected. We could learn valuable information from him, his phone, forensics. He might even confess.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma…

But then an agent from Team Two said, “We’ve got him down. No weapons.”

Not armed? I wondered. He’d had a semi-automatic pistol at the Kesslers’.

Oh, no…

I stopped fast as the stark understanding came home. I forced myself to speak clearly as I radioed the message, meant for the four agents ahead of me: “Teams Three and Four; get down! Find cover immediately. The man in custody’s not the partner! It’s a setup!”

I dropped to the ground like a rag doll.

Which was probably what saved my life.

As I landed in a stand of brush, I heard a snap over my head and nearby dirt and rocks flew up. A moment later the rolling boom of a distant rifle shot filled the field.

I called, “Incoming sniper fire!”

“What?” somebody transmitted.

The agents ahead of me similarly rolled to the ground as dirt and bits of trash leapt up around them.

Loving’s partner was a talented shot but the agents managed to find suitable cover. Nothing would protect them from a direct hit but the weeds were tall enough so that the partner couldn’t spot them.

Loving was now only about forty feet from the embankment and the car. The agents tried a few shots his way but the moment they rose, the partner would let go with three shot bursts-he had an automatic weapon-and the teams dropped again to cover.

I looked for a target and saw nothing.

The car Freddy had sent was speeding along the embankment and would get to the escape vehicle about the same time Loving did.

I sighed and hit TRANSMIT. “Freddy, get the car back! Now!”

“It’s our only chance, Corte.”

“No, no. Call it back. They’re sitting ducks.”

“Shit… Okay.”

Would it be in time?

Then I saw the car swerve and I was watching bits of asphalt and debris pop up on the road beside the vehicle as the partner turned his long gun their way. The driver steered off the road fast; the car disappeared down the embankment on the other side and I heard a crash.

Loving reappeared and jumped into his car, which sped off.

A light-colored sedan.

Tan or gray…

I heard Freddy radioing the Bureau and the MPD to order a search for the car.

The sniper fire ceased.

But we knew the drill and duck-walked back toward the staging area, low, presenting no target, as we assumed the partner might be holding in shooting position.

Finally, with no more shots fired, we arrived at the command post. I looked over the man that Team Two had collared. I didn’t have much hope that this scared kid could be helpful but still, you go through the motions. The diversion was a young meth head. He explained that somebody-Loving, to hear his description-had picked him up near a club in South East and asked him to help score some drugs at the warehouse. Loving had explained that he wanted some heroin but was too scared to buy it himself. There was a dealer operating out of an old derelict Dodge van on the premises here. He’d slipped him cash and told him to buy four hundred dollars’ worth for Loving and a hundred for himself. He was to be careful-“Go up slow”-because sometimes the cops checked it out.

“I’m going to go to jail, aren’t I?”

There was something almost humorous about the kid’s wide-eyed lament. Though it occurred to me I wasn’t sure he’d actually done anything illegal.

I asked him a few questions but Loving had known the kid would be caught; the decoy had been told nothing that might be helpful to us. Freddy went over him for evidence but, while I certainly appreciate forensic science, in these circumstances the only connection between Loving and this kid was the hundred-dollar bills. If there’d been any trace evidence exchange, through shaken hands and the money, it wasn’t going to lead to Loving’s hidey-hole.

We tried to reconstruct where the real partner had been shooting from. There were dozens of high-ground vistas that would have been perfect. Nobody had seen a muzzle flash or leaf reaction from the powerful gun. The agents in the car that had crashed were all right. One of them radioed that he was canvassing some workers on the other side of the embankment who’d heard the shots. A man reported seeing somebody running to a dark blue four-door sedan. “Buick, they thought.”

I clicked TRANSMIT. “This is Corte. Ask them what he looks like.”

After a moment: “Tall, thin, blond. Green jacket.”

“Yes, that’s the partner.”

“Nobody got the tag number. Or anything else specific.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Calls came in about the search, which included a Metropolitan Police chopper. But Loving had left the immediate vicinity without being spotted.

“We gave it a try,” Freddy said.

We had. But Loving had outthought me and negated my strategy. We were playing a game, yes, but that didn’t mean it might not end in a draw.

Rock-rock. Paper-paper…

For me, though, a draw was as good as a loss.

I walked up to the car I’d driven to the warehouse and took a handheld scanner from my shoulder bag.

Freddy said, “You think the partner got to the staging area?”

I didn’t answer-why guess?-but apparently he had. I found the first tracker in my car’s wheel well in about fifteen seconds and, just after that, the second one, hidden six inches from the first, in hopes that I might stop the search after finding number one. I kept going but I didn’t find a third. At least not a third one that had switched itself on yet. I noted that removing them switched off the power, alerting Loving that they’d been found. We couldn’t use them as bait to lure him to another trap.

I searched a second time with an explosives sniffer and didn’t come up with any bombs. I hadn’t really thought that was a risk, though. Loving wanted me to lead him to the principals. He didn’t want to kill me.

That would come later.