Edge

East and asked him to help score some drugs at the warehouse. Loving had explained that he wanted some heroin but was too scared to buy it himself. There was a dealer operating out of an old derelict Dodge van on the premises here. He’d slipped him cash and told him to buy four hundred dollars’ worth for Loving and a hundred for himself. He was to be careful—“Go up slow”—because sometimes the cops checked it out.
    “I’m going to go to jail, aren’t I?”
    There was something almost humorous about the kid’s wide-eyed lament. Though it occurred to me I wasn’t sure he’d actually done anything illegal.
    I asked him a few questions but Loving had known the kid would be caught; the decoy had been told nothing that might be helpful to us. Freddy went over him for evidence but, while I certainly appreciate forensic science, in these circumstances the only connection between Loving and this kid was the hundred-dollar bills. If there’d been any trace evidence exchange, through shaken hands and the money, it wasn’t going to lead to Loving’s hidey-hole.
    We tried to reconstruct where the real partner had been shooting from. There were dozens of high-ground vistas that would have been perfect. Nobody had seen a muzzle flash or leaf reaction from the powerful gun. The agents in the car that had crashed were all right. One of them radioed that he was canvassing some workers on the other side of the embankment who’d heard the shots. A man reported seeing somebody running to a dark blue four-door sedan. “Buick, they thought.”
    I clicked TRANSMIT . “This is Corte. Ask them what he looks like.”
    After a moment: “Tall, thin, blond. Green jacket.”
    “Yes, that’s the partner.”
    “Nobody got the tag number. Or anything else specific.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    Calls came in about the search, which included a Metropolitan Police chopper. But Loving had left the immediate vicinity without being spotted.
    “We gave it a try,” Freddy said.
    We had. But Loving had outthought me and negated my strategy. We were playing a game, yes, but that didn’t mean it might not end in a draw.
    Rock-rock. Paper-paper . . .
    For me, though, a draw was as good as a loss.
    I walked up to the car I’d driven to the warehouse and took a handheld scanner from my shoulder bag.
    Freddy said, “You think the partner got to the staging area?”
    I didn’t answer—why guess?—but apparently he had. I found the first tracker in my car’s wheel well in about fifteen seconds and, just after that, the second one, hidden six inches from the first, in hopes that I might stop the search after finding number one. I kept going but I didn’t find a third. At least not a third one that had switched itself on yet. I noted that removing them switched off the power, alerting Loving that they’d been found. We couldn’t use them as bait to lure him to another trap.
    I searched a second time with an explosives sniffer and didn’t come up with any bombs. I hadn’t really thought that was a risk, though. Loving wanted me to lead him to the principals. He didn’t want to kill me.
    That would come later.

Chapter 13
    I SWAPPED THE borrowed car for Garcia’s Taurus and drove it to Old Town Alexandria, parking in our garage next to the office.
    The D.C. area is peppered with operations like this, units of various government agencies. Sometimes it’s a question of space; Langley, for instance, is extremely crowded. For meetings at the CIA I sometimes have to park a hundred yards or more from the entrance. Sometimes it’s security. Everybody, from the writers at Slate.com to the Mossad to al Qaeda, know where the NSA, NRO and CIA are located; other operations, like ours, prefer to stay off the grid as much as possible.
    In the garage I greeted Billy and told him to run a full scan of Garcia’s car. It had been unattended in the garage near Union Station for several hours while I was at the flytrap.
    “I stopped halfway here and ran a scan. Nothing active. But you’ll have to give it a thorough check.”
    A lot of trackers have timers that turn on hours or weeks into the future. You need very sophisticated equipment that can detect not radio signals but tiny electrical sources.
    “You bet, Corte,” the scrawny man said. “I’ll calla sweeper.” Billy would look right at home in the cab of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer.
    I made a detour outside and bought a roast beef on whole wheat, extra mustard and two pickles, and