Edge

black coffee. I returned to the office. The boring and uninviting lobby featured an unhealthy tree, a poster of a smiling man and woman who’d apparently just been approved for a loan and a black sign containing white adhesive-letter names of a half dozen companies, all fake. I nodded at the two guards, both seriously and subtly armed, then did the eye and thumb thing at the wall panel and walked through the door. I went up a flight of stairs.
    Outside my office my shared personal assistant, Barbara, lifted her head and handed me some message slips. The slim, middle-aged woman purposefully didn’t look at my coffee and I knew she was thinking, why didn’t I like hers, which she made daily for the floor? I didn’t like it because it was reliably bad.
    Her hair was grayish dark and frozen into shape. I sometimes thought she got the hairdo about where she wanted it and then pushed it into position with gusts of hair spray.
    Since our organization never closed we had support staff all the time, though no one assistant was required to work more than forty hours a week. I hadn’t done the math but I believed Barbara was working on her second forty.
    “I like weekends,” she sometimes said. “It’s quieter.”
    Apart from lying in polluted mud and getting shot at by a talented sniper.
    I sat down at my desk and ate a pickle spear anda large bite of sandwich, a Heimlich bite. I then sipped hot and strong and very good coffee.
    I called Lyle Ahmad at the Hillside Inn.
    “What’s the status?”
    “Quiet. Garcia and I make rounds every twenty or so.”
    “Any calls? Anybody from the front desk? Anything?”
    “No,” he said crisply. Ahmad’s ancestry was Middle Eastern of some sort and he might or might not be a Muslim. Unlike some people of that faith in this country, he didn’t seem the least self-conscious or defensive about it. Nor should he have been. The vast majority of people who’ve tried to kill me have been of Christian or Jewish or agnostic leaning.
    “The principals?”
    “Doing fine,” he assured, though with a certain tone in his voice that meant they were probably impatient, bored and uneasy but he didn’t want to say so while ten feet from them. I heard the sound of a baseball game in the background and Joanne saying to her sister, “Well, sure. I just wonder. . . . If you think that’s the best idea, though, sure.”
    My mother would often sound like that.
    “I’ll be back for the move to the safe house in about forty-five.”
    “Yessir.”
    After we disconnected, I ate two more large bites of sandwich, thinking of the FedEx package I’d received, the antique game I’d been looking forward to examining on my lunch hour. I wondered if it was in good shape, if it had all the pieces and cards, as the seller had promised. I glanced at the safe behind my desk but left it where it was.
    I didn’t have it locked away because I was afraid it would be stolen. No, it was simply that I didn’t share my personal life with anybody here, even those I worked closely with. Yes, there were some security reasons for this; in reality, though, I just felt more comfortable being secretive. I couldn’t really say why.
    I reached for the phone to call duBois and have her brief me about what she’d found out so far about Ryan’s case but it buzzed first. My boss’s extension.
    “Corte.”
    “It’s Aaron. Could you come in for a moment?”
    Tone often tells more than content and I noted the uneasiness in Ellis’s voice, making the otherwise innocuous request. I expected to find Westerfield sitting in his office when I arrived but in fact it was somebody else altogether. A slim man, balding, in a suit and powder blue shirt. No tie. He looked at me with eyes that didn’t look at me. As if he was seeing what I represented, rather than who I actually was.
    We shook hands. He identified himself as Sandy Alberts.
    Ellis seemed to have met him before, but then my boss knew almost everybody in Washington, D.C. He said to me, “Sandy’s chief of staff to Senator Lionel Stevenson.”
    Moderate Republican from Ohio. I thought he’d been on the cover of Newsweek or something recently.
    “I’m not really here,” Alberts said jokingly, referring to the secret nature of our organization. We heard this a lot. “I’m sure you’re busy. I’ll tell you what’s going on, sir.”
    “Corte.”
    “Officer Corte, then. The senator is on the Intelligence Committee.”
    Which explained the security