Edge

himself.

Chapter 10
    THERE’S SOME DEBATE about exactly what the role of a shepherd should be in personal security work.
    The nickname itself is telling. “Shepherd,” to me, doesn’t refer to a motley farmhand with a hooked staff, but to a very big dog.
    I’m not a canine person myself but I know there are herding dogs that move sheep around a field and then there are herding dogs that both guard the flock and attack predators, however big and however numerous. Which of those two roles should we personal security officers have? Abe Fallow used to say, “A shepherd’s job is to protect the principals. That’s it. Let somebody else catch the lifter and hitter and their primaries.”
    But—one of the few areas in which I disagreed with my mentor—I didn’t subscribe to that theory. I think our task is both to move the herd to safety and rip out the throats of any wolves who’re threats. Protecting the principal and neutralizing the lifter or hitter and the person who hired him are, to me, inextricably joined.
    Driving fast toward the District in Garcia’s Taurus, I was speaking with Freddy, who would lead up the hunting party. The one department my organizationdoesn’t have is tactical. I’ve always wanted one (and had the nickname, “gunslinger,” all ready to go) but Ellis got shot down, so to speak, in committee; tac departments are surprisingly expensive. So we rely on the FBI and, in some cases, local SWAT.
    After I laid out the plan that I hoped would snare Henry Loving, Freddy said, “You think this is gonna work, Corte? Sounds like Santa Claus meets the Tooth Fairy.”
    “Are you there yet?” Based out of Ninth Street, in the District, he had a shorter drive than I did.
    “Make it twenty minutes.”
    “Move fast. How many do you have?”
    “Plenty, son. Peace through superior firepower,” he said, a quote from somewhere, I believed. We disconnected. I sped on, toward Washington, D.C.
    Hermes’s call had been about a flytrap, a ploy we regularly use to lure the bad guys to a takedown location. They work once in twenty, thirty times but that’s no reason not to try. All of our cars and most shepherds’ mobile phones have inside them an electronic device we call a squawk box, which periodically transmits a fake phone call that’s encrypted but traceable. A lifter or hitter with the right equipment can pick up the number that these phones call, a landline whose location they can track down through your basic commercial reverse look-up.
    According to Hermes, Loving had picked up one of these automated calls from the Armada, when it was parked at the Kesslers’ house. He’d called the landline, a phone in a warehouse in North East D.C. The message he would have heard was that the place was no longer in business. The kicker was that I had recorded that message myself, so thatanyone with a print of my voice, as I imagined Loving had, would think that it was indeed the place where the Kesslers were being kept.
    Given the pressure to get information from Ryan by Monday night—and avoid the “unacceptable consequences” mentioned in the email Loving had received in West Virginia—and given Loving’s unrelenting drive to finish his assignments I thought it was likely that he and his partner would at least conduct some surveillance at the warehouse.
    The contest between Loving and me was now about to begin in earnest.
    I often put my job in terms of something that I (an otherwise dispassionate person, I’ve been told) am passionate about: board games, which I not only play but collect. (The FedEx package that had arrived that morning was an antique game I’d been looking for for years.) One of the reasons I picked the town house in Old Town Alexandria is that it’s about two blocks from my favorite gaming club, just off Prince Street. The membership is reasonable and you can always be sure of finding somebody inside to play chess, bridge, Go, Wei Chi, Risk or dozens of other games. The members are a great mix: all nationalities, levels of education, ages, though most are male. All manners of dress and income. Politics vary but are irrelevant.
    In the town house are sixty-seven games (and I have even more, 121, in a house near the water in Maryland), all arranged alphabetically.
    Naturally I prefer the more challenging games. My present favorite is Arimaa, a recent invention and a variation on chess but so elegant and challenging that the creator’s prize to anybody who canwrite a