Edge

distributed to Amanda and the other students beta copies of software to try out—like the picture editing program that Amanda had given Maree.
    But the most interesting fact about Yu was that GSI did more than create commercial and consumer software. The company—and Yu’s specialty, as it turned out—happened to be developing military programs for cutting-edge battlefield imagery analysis. The software for those applications was classified at the highest level.
    I finished my email and read through it once more.
    My finger hovered for a moment. Then I clicked SEND and sent my words into the ozone.

TUESDAY

    The object of the game is to discover the answer to these three questions:
    1st. Who? Which one of the several suspects did it?
    2nd. Where?
    3rd. How?
    — FROM THE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE BOARD GAME CLUE

Chapter 69
    AT 9:00 A.M . my protégée and I were sitting in one of my organization’s SUVs on a sedate street in Fair Oaks, Virginia, a section of Fairfax.
    “And?” I asked Claire duBois, as she was moving her thumb to the DISCONNECT button on her BlackBerry. She’d been calling about Ryan Kessler.
    “He’s doing okay. The doctor said he was stable. I never understood those medical condition terms. Stable. Serious. Critical. They’re like the Homeland Security threat warnings. Orange, yellow, green, taupe. Or whatever they are. Is that really helpful? I don’t think so. Somebody sits in a room and thinks those up. Our taxpayer dollars.” She tucked her trimmed, shiny brunette strands behind an ear. The gesture was silent; she wasn’t wearing the jingling charm bracelet this morning. For safety’s sake. Jewelry and tac ops don’t mix.
    Ryan was in a federal detention hospital. Amanda, Joanne and Maree were tucked away in the new safe house, with Ahmad and the clone who’d collected Amanda last night watching over them.
    DuBois and I were on the trail of the primary.
    I returned to our surveillance. The houses around us reminded me of Ryan Kessler’s place.About every fifth one was, if not identical, then designed from the same mold. We were staring through bushes at a split-level colonial, on the other side of a dog-park-cum-playground. It was the house of Peter Yu, the part-time professor of computer science at Northern Virginia College and a software designer for Global Software Innovations. The company was headquartered along the Dulles “technology corridor,” which was really just a dozen office buildings on the tollway, housing corporations whose claim to tech fame was mostly that they were listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
    I was watching through binoculars, observing some ambiguous movement in the backyard of the house.
    I lifted the Motorola and asked Freddy, who was parked nearby, “We ready to move in?”
    “I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”
    I squinted. “It’s him. I’m sure.”
    “You’re younger than I am, son. The eyes are the first to go. Well, not the first, unfortunately, but pretty close. Hold on, our surveillance boys’re calling. . . . Okay, there’re two of them at the house.”
    “I see the second one,” I told the agent.
    “Some muscle, looks like. You in armor?”
    I glanced toward Claire duBois’s navy blue blazer, specifically her chest. It wasn’t the first time, I had to admit, but the circumstances now were such that there was nothing remotely sexual about the look. I was checking that the thick nylon plates Velcroed around her were secure. I knew that my American Body Armor vest was.
    “We’re good,” I told Freddy.
    “All right. Let’s go. My guys and gals tell me they have a visual on the evidence. Oh, and the muscle’s armed. Autoloader. In a hip holster.”
    “We’re moving.” I disconnected.
    I said to duBois, “You won’t need it but keep your jacket unbuttoned.”
    “Okay.”
    The “it” was her Glock.
    In fact, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t need it. But I remembered the men in the old military facility in Leesburg. I remembered Henry Loving. I knew from my studies—history, not my other degrees—that people can behave unpredictably at desperate times. Besides, even though we believed there were only two individuals here, this entire job had been fraught with surprise.
    Our SUV and four other cars accelerated fast and skidded up over the grass on Professor Peter Yu’s property, tearing up the lawn and destroying shrubs. I’m told that this dramatic entrance, which you’d think was made up by TV-movie