Edge

Chapter 13

I SWAPPED THE borrowed car for Garcia’s Taurus and drove it to Old Town Alexandria, parking in our garage next to the office.

The D.C. area is peppered with operations like this, units of various government agencies. Sometimes it’s a question of space; Langley, for instance, is extremely crowded. For meetings at the CIA I sometimes have to park a hundred yards or more from the entrance. Sometimes it’s security. Everybody, from the writers at Slate.com to the Mossad to al Qaeda, know where the NSA, NRO and CIA are located; other operations, like ours, prefer to stay off the grid as much as possible.

In the garage I greeted Billy and told him to run a full scan of Garcia’s car. It had been unattended in the garage near Union Station for several hours while I was at the flytrap.

“I stopped halfway here and ran a scan. Nothing active. But you’ll have to give it a thorough check.”

A lot of trackers have timers that turn on hours or weeks into the future. You need very sophisticated equipment that can detect not radio signals but tiny electrical sources.

“You bet, Corte,” the scrawny man said. “I’ll call a sweeper.” Billy would look right at home in the cab of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer.

I made a detour outside and bought a roast beef on whole wheat, extra mustard and two pickles, and black coffee. I returned to the office. The boring and uninviting lobby featured an unhealthy tree, a poster of a smiling man and woman who’d apparently just been approved for a loan and a black sign containing white adhesive-letter names of a half dozen companies, all fake. I nodded at the two guards, both seriously and subtly armed, then did the eye and thumb thing at the wall panel and walked through the door. I went up a flight of stairs.

Outside my office my shared personal assistant, Barbara, lifted her head and handed me some message slips. The slim, middle-aged woman purposefully didn’t look at my coffee and I knew she was thinking, why didn’t I like hers, which she made daily for the floor? I didn’t like it because it was reliably bad.

Her hair was grayish dark and frozen into shape. I sometimes thought she got the hairdo about where she wanted it and then pushed it into position with gusts of hair spray.

Since our organization never closed we had support staff all the time, though no one assistant was required to work more than forty hours a week. I hadn’t done the math but I believed Barbara was working on her second forty.

“I like weekends,” she sometimes said. “It’s quieter.”

Apart from lying in polluted mud and getting shot at by a talented sniper.

I sat down at my desk and ate a pickle spear and a large bite of sandwich, a Heimlich bite. I then sipped hot and strong and very good coffee.

I called Lyle Ahmad at the Hillside Inn.

“What’s the status?”

“Quiet. Garcia and I make rounds every twenty or so.”

“Any calls? Anybody from the front desk? Anything?”

“No,” he said crisply. Ahmad’s ancestry was Middle Eastern of some sort and he might or might not be a Muslim. Unlike some people of that faith in this country, he didn’t seem the least self-conscious or defensive about it. Nor should he have been. The vast majority of people who’ve tried to kill me have been of Christian or Jewish or agnostic leaning.

“The principals?”

“Doing fine,” he assured, though with a certain tone in his voice that meant they were probably impatient, bored and uneasy but he didn’t want to say so while ten feet from them. I heard the sound of a baseball game in the background and Joanne saying to her sister, “Well, sure. I just wonder… If you think that’s the best idea, though, sure.”

My mother would often sound like that.

“I’ll be back for the move to the safe house in about forty-five.”

“Yessir.”

After we disconnected, I ate two more large bites of sandwich, thinking of the FedEx package I’d received, the antique game I’d been looking forward to examining on my lunch hour. I wondered if it was in good shape, if it had all the pieces and cards, as the seller had promised. I glanced at the safe behind my desk but left it where it was.

I didn’t have it locked away because I was afraid it would be stolen. No, it was simply that I didn’t share my personal life with anybody here, even those I worked closely with. Yes, there were some security reasons for this; in reality, though, I just felt more comfortable being secretive. I couldn’t really say why.

I reached for the phone to call duBois and have her brief me about what she’d found out so far about Ryan’s case but it buzzed first. My boss’s extension.

“Corte.”

“It’s Aaron. Could you come in for a moment?”

Tone often tells more than content and I noted the uneasiness in Ellis’s voice, making the otherwise innocuous request. I expected to find Westerfield sitting in his office when I arrived but in fact it was somebody else altogether. A slim man, balding, in a suit and powder blue shirt. No tie. He looked at me with eyes that didn’t look at me. As if he was seeing what I represented, rather than who I actually was.

We shook hands. He identified himself as Sandy Alberts.

Ellis seemed to have met him before, but then my boss knew almost everybody in Washington, D.C. He said to me, “Sandy’s chief of staff to Senator Lionel Stevenson.”

Moderate Republican from Ohio. I thought he’d been on the cover of Newsweek or something recently.

“I’m not really here,” Alberts said jokingly, referring to the secret nature of our organization. We heard this a lot. I’m sure you’re busy. I’ll tell you what’s going on, sir.”

“Corte.”

“Officer Corte, then. The senator is on the Intelligence Committee.”

Which explained the security clearance allowing him inside. I’d been wondering.

“The committee’ll be holding hearings next month on domestic surveillance issues, Patriot Act, FISA warrants. It’s looking into possible privacy abuses and I’m doing some research for the senator.” He held up jovial hands. “We’re not suggesting anything’s wrong here. Just interviewing as many people as we can in federal law enforcement. Gathering information. You’re the senior protection officer in your organization and we’d like to interview you to see if you’ve been aware of instances in which there’s been, let’s say, carelessness in failing to apply for warrants for wiretaps on phone lines and emails in any agencies you’ve dealt with. The Bureau, the CIA, DEA, NSA, NRO, local law enforcement.”

“I’d be happy to help but… well, I need to run this job now.”

Alberts was nodding. “We know what you do here. The senator’s a friend of Aaron’s.” A glance toward my boss. “We don’t want to jeopardize any of your great work. It’s just that there’s a bit of time pressure.”

“Why?” Ellis asked.

“Any time committees start looking into things, the press invariably catches on and if they preempt us everybody loses.”

I couldn’t disagree with that. “There are plenty of other people you could talk to here,” I suggested.

“Oh, we want the star,” Alberts replied.

My boss backed me up. “I’m afraid I agree it’ll have to be after this case is concluded.”

Alberts wasn’t pleased but he took it in stride. “Three, four days, you think?”

“Probably something like that,” I said. “But I can’t commit. It’s a very critical time for the family in my care. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m free.”

“Sure, I understand,” Alberts said. Looking through me again, smiling that nonsmile of his. “Appreciate it.” He rose. With a nod to Ellis the man collected his briefcase. “And I meant that-about the good job you folks do.”

After he left I asked Ellis, “The senator’s a friend of yours?”

Ellis scoffed, shrugging his huge shoulders. “If you call going to somebody with hat in hand a friend, then I guess. Stevenson usually comes through with most of what I want for the budget. He’s to the right but it’s a thinking right. He’s smart and he’ll listen to the other side. We need more pols like him. Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.”

I recalled the turbulent demonstrations I’d just driven through. Each side really looked like they wanted to kill the other. I believed that was the gist of the Newsweek article, Senator Stevenson’s efforts to encourage bipartisanship in Washington.

Good luck, I thought.

I regarded my boss’s children’s artwork on the wall. A river dominated by a very large fish. A purple airplane. Rabbits.

“And Alberts?”

“Only met him once or twice. Typical Beltway pro: political action committees, fund-raising, aide for senators on the Finance Committee, Armed Services and now Intelligence, with Stevenson.” Ellis was shifting in his chair. “You’ll follow up?”

“With Alberts? I suppose.”

“I need you to, Corte. Keep the purse-string people happy… though you don’t look too happy about it.”

“I can’t testify in a hearing. I’m only good because I don’t exist.”

“Alberts knows that. He only needs leads to other agencies, the public ones.”

“You know what ‘lead’ translates into in this line of work, don’t you, Aaron?”

“Snitch?” my boss suggested.

The very word I had in mind.