Edge

closer to the nation’s capital. I noticed behind me a black SUV I might have seen earlier. Westerfield? Someone else? I called Claire duBois again. “I need a crowd. Festival, parade. In the District. I don’t think I have a tail but I want to make sure of it. What do you have for me?”
    “A crowd. Okay. How big a crowd? There’s the game at the stadium—but, sorry to say, that ’s notgoing to be much of a crowd, given how they’re playing this season. Then there’s a romance author and the cover model of her books—they’re signing at a Safeway in North West.”
    How did she know this without looking anything up?
    “How many people go to romance book signings at grocery stores?”
    “You’d be surprised.”
    True. “But I want bigger. And downtown. Make it a thousand people, plus.”
    “Too bad it’s not spring. I don’t go for the cherry blossoms myself,” she told me. “If the blossoms did something while you were there, that would be one thing. But I never quite understood going to look at trees. Let’s see, let’s see. . . .” I heard typing, I heard tinkling charms.
    DuBois said, “There’s not much. A gay rights march up Connecticut in DuPont Circle. Preaching to the converted. Estimate four hundred . . . A Mexican-American parade in South East but it’s just winding down now. Oh, here we go. The biggest thing is the protesters outside of Congress. That’s about two thousand strong. I never know why they say that. ‘Strong.’ As opposed to ‘two thousand weak.’ ”
    “That sounds good.”
    The crowds were there to protest against, or support, a Supreme Court nominee, she explained. I was vaguely aware that the jurist—projected to be confirmed by one or two votes in the Senate—was conservative, so the left was busing in folks to protest, while the Republicans had marshaled their own troops to show support.
    “Where exactly?”
    She told me—near the Senate Office Building—and I disconnected and steered in that direction. In five minutes, with the sanction of my federal ID, I was easing in and around the demonstrators and past barricades that would stop anyone tailing me. The supporters of the nominee were on one side of a line, the protesters on the other. I noted the viciousness of the insults and even threats they flung back and forth at each other. The police were out in force. I recalled reading a recent series in the Post about the increasing polarization and aggressive partisanship in American politics.
    My phone buzzed. “Freddy.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Trying not to run over Supreme Court nominee protesters.”
    “Hit a few of ’em for me.”
    “You’re on site?”
    “We’re here, in the staging area.”
    “Anything?”
    “Nothing so far.”
    “I’ll be there soon.” I now emerged on the other side of the demonstration, assured that I had no tail, and sped to a small garage we sometimes used, just north of Union Station. In five minutes I’d swapped Garcia’s official car for another fake one and was heading out a different doorway from the one I’d driven into.
    Ten minutes later I was at the flytrap.
    A new round of the game against Henry Loving was about to begin.

Chapter 11
    WE’D PICKED THIS location, a scruffy portion of North East D.C., because it was a perfect takedown site.
    Some industrial parts of the District of Columbia, like this one, are as breathtakingly grim as anything Detroit or Chicago’s South Side can offer. The warehouse we leased for a song was in a marshy, weed-cluttered landfill crisscrossed with rusting railroad tracks (I’d never seen a train), crumbling access roads and a couple of sour-smelling canals. Our property was three acres of overgrown lots, filled with trash, clusters of anemic trees, pools of water the color of a sickly tropical lizard. In the center was an ancient warehouse with just enough evidence of habitation to make it seem like a credible safe house. Nearby were two small crumbling outbuildings, where tactical teams could wait for the bad guys; they offered perfect crossfire positions. The warehouse itself had bulletproof brick walls and few windows. We’ve used it a number of times, though only twice successfully. The most recent was last January, when I’d sat in a snowstorm for four hours, sipping increasingly chilly coffee from a flabby cup clutched in my stinging red fingers, until the hitterfinally made his bold and, for him, unfortunate move.
    I now drove through back alleys