Edge

Intelligence Assessment Department is a very small federal agency with very large computers, located in Sterling, Virginia. The IAD’s purpose is to maintain files of names, faces, physical attributes and personal preferences of national security threats and to analyze data about all of the above. If anybody’s ever wondered why the CIA or the military can be so certain that one bearded thirty-year-old on the streets of Kabul is an innocent businessman and, to our Western eyes, anidentical one a block away is an al Qaeda operative, IAD is the reason.
    However, nobody outside the highest levels of government security knows it exists. No news story would have reported about it. There was no way Joanne could even have heard of IAD, let alone know that it could identify the man in the pictures with Allende . . . unless she had some clandestine connection with high-level national security operations.
    It had raised my suspicions. My encrypted message to duBois after Joanne had found the picture on her sister’s computer had been not only to have ORC analyze the photos but to see if anybody had made an IAD request about Allende and his associate in the past twelve hours. And, if so, could that request somehow be linked to Joanne Kessler?
    DuBois had earlier, of course, run the basic profile of the woman—learning about her scholastic and professional histories, as well as things like her car accident. But if Joanne knew about IAD, that suggested to me the public information could be a cover and that her real job history and profile would be in classified archives and records.
    So you do your homework, do you? . . . What’d you find out about me?
    No wonder she’d asked the question.
    DuBois reported that, yes, this morning somebody with a high clearance had submitted an IAD request to identify two people in a photograph that had been uploaded from an unknown location. The analysis was pending.
    Regarding Joanne Kessler’s real résumé, well, that had taken some true finesse to find. AaronEllis had helped, duBois explained in her email, and he’d pulled in some markers from Langley and Fort Meade.
    Ryan blurted, “But your job . . . I went to see you. We had lunch. A half dozen times. We went to Air and Space, we went to the National Gallery. I walked you back to the office. The Highways Analysis Bureau. On Twenty-second Street. I was there!”
    “Honey . . .” The endearment seemed to jar. “It . . . it was a cover.”
    He asked, “You were with the CIA? Something like that?”
    “Like that.”
    Maree was getting worked up now. Nothing flighty or youthful about the woman any longer. “You’re still not giving us any details, Jo.”
    Stoic now, as if she were speaking before a congressional committee, she said, “My organization was involved in domestic national security projects.”
    “What does that mean?” Ryan was trying desperately to reconcile this information with accounts of her life she’d told him earlier. What was true and what wasn’t? How deep did the lies go? He’d be thinking of places she said she’d been, people she said she’d known. Was there some honesty in the stories that could legitimize their marriage and family? Because that’s what was at risk now, of course.
    For her part, Joanne would be considering exactly what and how much she could tell him—which, in theory, was nothing. The British have their Official Secrets Act, which forbids government employees from talking about their activities while they were in the employ of certain agencies. We don’t have quite such a grandly named law butsimilar regulations are in effect. She’d already committed federal offenses by her disclosures here in this rustic, cozy living room. If she went further, the crimes would be compounded significantly, I understood.
    But Ryan Kessler was no fool. He investigated crimes and he put people in jail for a living. The pieces were coming together—yes, slowly and in a patchwork way, but he had a clue as to where this was going. In a whisper he asked, “There was something going on when we met. You talked about a boyfriend you were breaking up with. You’d call him occasionally. Late at night. But he wasn’t your lover, was he? You worked with him, right?”
    “Yes. I called him my former boyfriend but that was part of the cover.” Joanne was slumped forward, shoulders drooping. It was a confessional pose. “We were supposed to talk about each other like ex-lovers. Those