Edge

I mean.
    “It doesn’t matter. Are you in town? I need you.”
    “Do you mean did I go away for the weekend? No. Plans changed. Do you want me in?” she asked in her snappy monotone. I pictured her having breakfastas the September morning light slanted through the window of her quiet town house in Arlington, Virginia. She might have been in sweats or a slinky robe but picturing either was impossible. She might have been sitting across from a stubble-bearded young man looking at her curiously from over a sagging Washington Post . That too didn’t register.
    “He’s after a principal in Fairfax. I don’t know the details. Short time frame.”
    “Sure. Let me make some arrangements.” I heard a few brief clicks—she could type faster than any human being on earth. Half to herself: “Mrs. Glotsky, next door . . . Then the water . . . Okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
    I suspected duBois had a bit of attention deficit disorder. But that usually worked to my advantage.
    “I’ll be on the road with the principals but I’ll call you with the assignments.”
    We disconnected. I signed out a Nissan Armada from our transportation department and collected it in the large garage beneath the building. I drove up King Street and then through the quaint and narrow avenues of Old Town Alexandria, on the Potomac River, the Virginia side, not far from Washington, D.C.
    The SUV wasn’t tell-all black but a light gray, dusty and dinged. Cars are a big part of the personal security business and, like all of ours, this Nissan had been modified to incorporate bullet-resistant glass, armor on the doors, run-flat tires and a foam-filled gas tank. Billy, our vehicle man, had lowered the center of gravity for faster turning and fitted the grille with what he called a jockstrap, an armored panel to keep the engine protected.
    I double-parked and ran inside the brownstone town house, still smelling of the coffee I’d brewed on a one-cup capsule machine only an hour earlier. I hurriedly packed a large gym bag. Here, unlike at my office, the walls were filled with evidence of my past: diplomas, certificates of continuing-education course completions, recognitions from former employers and satisfied customers, including the Department of State, the CIA, the Bureau and ATF. MI5 in the UK too. Also, a few photos from my earlier years, snapped in Virginia, Ohio and Texas.
    I wasn’t sure why I put all of this gingerbread up on the walls. I rarely looked at it, and I never socialized here. I remembered thinking a few years ago that it just seemed like what you were supposed to do when you moved into a good-sized town house by yourself.
    I changed clothes, into jeans and a navy windbreaker and a black Polo shirt. Then I locked up, set the two alarms and returned to the car. I sped toward the expressway, dialing a number then plugging the hands-free into my ear.
    In thirty minutes I was at the home of my principals.
    Fairfax, Virginia, is a pleasant suburb with a range of residential properties, from two-bedroom bungalows and row town houses to sumptuous tenacre lots ringed with demilitarized-zone barriers of trees between neighbors’ houses. The Kesslers’ house, between these extremes, sat in the midst of an acre, half bald and half bristling with trees, the leaves just now losing their summer vibrancy, about to turn—trees, I noted, that would be perfect cover for a sniper backing up Henry Loving.
    I made a U, parked the Armada in the driveway, climbed out. I didn’t recognize the FBI agents across the street personally but I’d seen their pictures, uploaded from Freddy’s assistant. I approached the car. They would have my description too but I kept my hands at my sides until they saw who I was. We flashed IDs.
    One said, “Nobody paused in front of the house since we’ve been here.”
    I slipped my ID case away. “Any out-of-state tags?”
    “Didn’t notice any.”
    Different answer from “No.”
    One of the agents pointed to a wide four-lane road nearby. “We saw a couple of SUVs, big ones, there. They slowed, looked our way and then kept going.”
    I asked, “They were going north?”
    “Yeah.”
    “There’s a school a half block away. They’ve got soccer games today. It’s early in the season so I’d guess it was parents who hadn’t been to the field yet and weren’t sure where to turn.”
    They both seemed surprised I knew this. Claire duBois had fed me the information on the way over. I’d