Edge (43 page)

About Abe Fallow too.

But then I recalled that, whatever happened in the future, the Kessler job wasn't finished yet. We still had Loving and the partner to nail. And we still had a case to make against the primary—and I'd make damn sure that it was completely buttoned up, independent of any bogus warrants.

I found the transcript of Aslan Zagaev's statement, opened it and began to read.

I led a more or less successful life here. Ah, but isn't success a moving target? I have been having some problems, financial in nature. The economy? Who needs rugs when you can't afford your mortgage payments? Who goes to eat at my wonderful restaurant when you must buy bulk frozen dinners at Sam's Club to feed your children? How could I make more money? Did I have any service I could perform? Did I have anything valuable that I could sell? Then it occurred to me. What if I could learn more about the operation behind the deaths of the Pakistanis in the deli six years ago? How valuable would that be? I remembered the
woman who was the point control officer behind the operation to kill them: Joanne Kessler. Even if she had retired she would surely have valuable information or lead me to people who did.

I made some phone calls, discreet phone calls, to a connection of mine in Damascus. I learned there was indeed an interest in information of this sort. A multimillion-dollar interest. A man there gave me Henry Loving's name.

When I finished I sat back. He seemed pathetic. More than that, though, he was a fool. Why risk prison, where he'd be spending the rest of his life, for a bit more money? It seemed like a curious motive for somebody who wasn't destitute and who had a family, whom he will see, from now on, only through bars or bullet-proof windows. I could understand it if he were a true terrorist, or if he were being blackmailed . . .

A thought occurred to me, resulting in a ping in my gut. I leaned forward fast and reread a portion of the transcript again.

I remembered the woman who was the point control officer behind the operation to kill them: Joanne Kessler.

Oh, no . . .

I grabbed my com device and called Lyle Ahmad.

“Now,” I said. “I need you now.”

The young clone showed up a moment later, his face impassive, eyes watchful.

“Yessir?”

“Close the door. Where're the principals?”

He eased the thick oak panel shut and stepped to the desk. “Ryan's in the back den, reading. Pretending to. He's been drinking. Joanne's in the bedroom. Maree's on her computer. In her room.”

“And Barr?”

“Patrolling the back perimeter.”

I lowered my voice. “We have a situation. About Barr . . . I think he's either been turned or he's a plant.”

The officer's eyes were still. He was undoubtedly as alarmed as I was but, like me, he was approaching the situation calmly. The way I'd taught him. “All right.”

I explained my thinking. “When I told you and Barr about Joanne's job with Sickle, I described her as a point control officer.”

“I remember.”

“But that's unique to our organization; Joanne called herself ‘anchor' on the hit teams. Zagaev, though, referred to her as ‘point control.' ”

Ahmad was nodding. “How did he hear that term?”

“Exactly. The only way was if somebody here had told him.”

“Barr.”

“And,” I added, “Zagaev used Joanne's name. Sure, he may have been involved with the couple killed at the deli, but how could he have learned her name? Williams and the Sickle people would've kept it secret.”

I continued, “So Loving got to somebody inside Justice and learned that Freddy was sending Tony Barr to the safe house.”

“He got to Barr and turned him.”

Another grim possibility had occurred to me. “Or he's not Barr. He's an imposter.”

“And the real Barr is dead.”

The unfortunate but logical conclusion.

I said to Ahmad, “Barr—or whoever he is—called Loving and told him we suspected Joanne was the principal and Zagaev might be the primary.”

The lifter would have realized he'd been handed the perfect misdirection. He'd tracked down Zagaev and forced him into agreeing to play the role of primary—probably using his family as an edge. Loving had briefed Zagaev about all aspects of the operation—the helicopter, for instance—and told him to convince us that Joanne was in fact the target. The Chechnyan had made calls implicating himself and then, when we caught up with him, confessed.

Taking the pressure off Loving and the real primary.

“But if it's true,” the young officer pointed out, “why hasn't Barr done anything more than give information to Loving? He could've told him where the safe house is. He could've shot us all in the back.”

This was true. “I don't know. I've got to find out more. But for now, we've got to assume we have a hostile on the premises. Get all the principals into the den and stay with them. And call the detention center and get a message to Bill Carter. Tell them I'm not going to pick him and Amanda up yet. I want them back in the slammer until I figure out what's going on.”

“Yessir.” He headed out the door.

I stared at the transcript.

Point control officer . . .

How could I verify my theory? In order to get into the safe house Barr had passed fingerprint and facial recognition scans. So either he really was Tony Barr or somebody had gotten into the Justice Department's security servers—possibly an FBI employee or someone from any law-enforcement-related federal organization. I logged on to the Bureau personnel server, punched in the appropriate pass codes and looked over Barr's profile. The picture was identical, distinguishing characteristics, age. His prints were there—they were the sample that Geoff would have used to verify his identity. Everything pointed to the fact that the man here in the compound was Tony Barr.

I called up another screen and began searching social networking sites, typing in “Tony Barr” along with relevant demographic information.

The world of Google . . .

It took no more than three minutes to verify that we indeed had an imposter. The real Barr bore only a faint resemblance to the man in our back-forty at the moment.

So Barr was dead and the imposter was one of Loving's partners. I tucked away the shock at this confirmation and tried to figure out what his purpose here was or what Loving was really up to. I had no answers.

And to learn this I decided I needed some help.

I debated for a moment and then placed a call.

“This's Williams,” rasped the voice.

“It's Corte.”

“I know. Saw the number. I'm watching the dispatches. You got things taken care of.”

Meaning: Why're you bothering me?

“There's a possibility they're not as taken care of as we'd hoped.”

A grunt.

I explained the situation.

Williams took this in silently. “You're still alive. So what's your fake agent up to?”

“That's the question. I need to find out. But I can't trust anybody in the Bureau. There's a mole there, and they're probably monitoring what's going on at my outfit. . . . Do you have somebody we can use?”

I found it curious he didn't hesitate. “Matter of fact, I do.” He gave me a phone number. “Call him.”

“Time's critical,” I said. “How close are they?”

Williams offered a very expected chuckle. “A lot closer than you think.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
I stepped outside, smelling the chill moist air, the aroma from a wood fire in the distance. Kids sometimes lit campfires in the park overlooking the Potomac falls.

I recalled Maree and me, sitting uneasily—in my case, at least—on the rock shelf forty feet above the raging water earlier this morning. I recalled her kissing me.

Then I forced myself to concentrate.

Because the man fronting as Tony Barr was now approaching, vigilant as ever and armed with an impressive automatic weapon. I needed him to believe I had no inkling he was a partner of Henry Loving.

“Tony,” I said, nodding. The intense, quiet man joined me. His eyes kept scanning the property. I asked, “Lyle's inside?” So far I was keeping my voice calm and looking at him in ways I thought appropriate to these circumstance.

“Yessir. . . . Any word from Philly?” he asked.

What the hell was Loving up to? I wondered. I said, “Nothing yet. Loving won't be there for another half hour or so, at the earliest.” Car keys jangled in my hand. “I'm going to pick up the Kesslers' daughter and their friend.”

A sliver of moon kept appearing and vanishing, as the thick clouds scooted by above us. Maple and oak sloughed silver leaves in the breeze and the tall hemlocks in the side yard swayed. The wind breathed easily.

I looked around the property. “It's a lot different here now, with the primary in custody and the lifter about to be nailed. You can almost enjoy it.” I glanced at the imposter's black angular machine gun. It wasn't pointed near me but if he caught on that I knew who he was I'd be dead before I could move an inch.

The man said, “That's true—except for some deer with a suicidal personality who jumped out of the bushes over there a little while ago. We almost had venison for breakfast. Just heard him again, the same place. They're not really very bright, are they?”

“I don't think that's why God made them.” Was he suspicious? I couldn't tell. I continued, “Listen, Tony, when I get back I want to coordinate getting the Kesslers to Fairfax in the morning. Loving'll be in custody by then. But I want some protection on them for the next couple of days, until everything's resolved. Agent Frederick said you might be willing to take that on.” I was vamping. Overdoing it? I wondered. I wasn't sure. A bad performance would kill me.

“Yessir . . . if he'd like.”

I smiled. “Meaning you're not all that crazy about baby-sitting detail.”

He grinned too. “I'm happy to be of help, sir.”

“Appreciate it.”

Then a faint snap came from the front yard.

Both of us shared a troubled look and turned toward the sound. Tense, squinting.

“What do you think that was?” I asked.

“Our deer?” he asked in a whisper.

I shook my head. “Not in the front. They don't go there.”

The sound was repeated, louder.

We trained the muzzles of our weapons in the direction of the snap.

“The hell is it?” he asked.

We got the answer a moment later as we saw another rock sail over the house and land in the driveway.

“Diversion,” I rasped with alarm in my voice. We both spun around fast—to see a man covering us with a silenced semiautomatic pistol. He'd come up behind us quietly, as we were staring toward the sound, after flinging the stones over the roof to distract us.

The lean sandy-haired man was wearing the same green jacket he'd been wearing on Saturday at the assault on the Kesslers' house and at the flytrap.

I whispered, “It's Loving's partner!”

“His—?” the Barr-imposter began to ask. But before he finished the sentence the man in the green jacket squinted, lifted his weapon toward my leg and fired three times.

I cried out and went down hard.

THE BULLETS, IN
fact, hadn't hit me at all.

And the man in the jacket wasn't Loving's partner.

He was Williams's security expert, a man named Jonny Pogue—the one who was indeed closer than I would have thought, as Williams had said, after his grunting chuckle. Pogue had been stationed directly across the road and had been shadowing us for days to make certain that Joanne and her dark secrets didn't fall into the wrong hands. That's what he'd been doing at the Kesslers' house and at the flytrap, but since he was operating undercover, he never contacted us and we'd assumed he was the partner.

Over the phone shortly before, Pogue and I had worked out the ruse that was now unfolding, a strategy that might get to the truth about the imposter and what Loving's true plan was.

A strategy that might also get both Pogue and me killed.

Pogue knelt down and pretended to search me carefully; as he did so he turned his back to the imposter and was completely vulnerable. But the man, who could have shot him at any moment, was confused that Pogue was ignoring him. And further
disarmed by Pogue's picking up my Glock and handing it to the phony FBI agent. “Here.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, taking the weapon uncertainly, “but who the fuck are you?”

“Pogue.”

“Henry never said—”

“Loving doesn't know about me. I work for the man who hired him.”

This was a gamble that Pogue and I had discussed. If the imposter himself worked for the primary, the whole play would end right now—maybe bloodily.

But then I heard him give a brief laugh and say, “Oh, sure. That explains it.”

“I've been keeping an eye on you and Henry just to make sure things go according to plan.” Pogue rose and extended his hand. “What's the name?”

“McCall.”

They shook hands briefly. Then Pogue muttered, “Well, McCall, we got a problem. You know the insider—got you the info about Barr and your picture up on the Bureau website.”

McCall nodded absently, looking around. “I don't know who it is, just somebody in that asshole Fredericks' office.”

So the mole
was
in Freddy's department. This was bad. I didn't react, however, just clutched my leg and moaned. McCall seemed to enjoy it.

“Well, whoever they are, they changed their fucking mind,” Pogue spat out. “They're talking.”

“Shit, no.”

“Shit, yeah.” There was a mocking quality about the comment, the sort you'd hear between two soldiers on allied armies. Pogue was acting in top form.