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.
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.
Chapter 14
I RETURNED TO my office.
Barbara said, "Your coffee was cold so here's a new one. I just made it."
Ah. I thanked her and sipped. It was even worse than I'd remembered.
I punched SPEED DIAL.
"DuBois," the voice chirped. "You're in the building."
"For ten minutes or so. Can you come over here?"
She appeared a moment later and I wondered how the job had disrupted her plans for the weekend.
She had two cats and a boyfriend, who seemed like a regular, I deduced from snippets of conversation, but whom she didn't live with. I'd never met him; I don't socialize with colleagues. Her boyfriend was apparently always ready to come over to feed the animals and change the litter. I sometimes felt sorry for him. On the other hand, I wondered if he wasn't better off in that sort of relationship with Claire duBois, rather than living with her, which might be an exhausting proposition.
She sat across from me.
"Principals' phones." I handed her the bag containing the Kesslers' Nokias and Samsungs and BlackBerrys and their respective batteries, which I'd removed. She'd put them in the sealed room up the hall, in Hermes's work area. If Ryan or Joanne absolutely needed a number from their phones in an emergency and had no other way to get it, Hermes or a wizard in Technical would go inside, power up the phone and get the information, without any risk of a telltale signal escaping.
"Loving?" duBois asked.
"His partner was there but no further description or lead except a blue four-door, probably Buick. Nothing else."
A raised eyebrow. "Light or dark? Blue, I mean. There're about twenty-five shades of green for current passenger vehicles, I happen to know. Eighteen red. I haven't looked at blue, sorry, but it's probably the same. Oh, and they typically fade one degree of color temperature every six months. Depending."
"Darker."
She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.