Edge

through the fence posts, so you could drive over it if you needed to. When?”
    “A couple years ago.”
    I pick all my halfway houses for escape as well as defensibility and I do a lot of work on the properties late at night. The Hillside Inn people never knew I’d vandalized their fence.
    “I don’t see anything,” Ryan said. “Not yet.”
    We rolled slowly down the hill, slick with dew, then through a series of soft dirt rows of recently harvested corn husks and stems. You could measure the progress in feet but we were moving steadily.
    “Still nobody,” Ahmad said.
    I ordered them to keep targeting the opening in the fence we’d just eased through, though I knew that Loving would take one look at the ground we were traversing and know that his sedan couldn’t possibly pursue us.
    He’d make the only rational decision he could: to retreat as fast as possible.

Chapter 18
    A HALF HOUR later we were on the highway again, heading for the safe house.
    It was a little after 8:00 p.m. and I’d been driving a fast, complicated and unpredictable route generally north though Loudoun and Fairfax counties.
    In the back Ryan Kessler sat brooding, looking through his canvas bag. For ammo? Or booze? Joanne was quiet, staring out the window. Maree, calm finally, fidgeted with a pacifier, her computer. She was coming out of her hysteria but hadn’t yet returned to referring flippantly to me as a tour guide.
    Principals get terrified, of course. Disoriented too, and a little bit crazy. I need the people in my organization to be 100 percent with me. My principals, though? If they can be 75 or 80, if they can do what I ask with a measure of promptness and intelligence, I’m content. A sizable portion of my task is fixing as many of their inevitable mistakes as I can and minimizing the principals’ more destructive foibles and habits.
    Which is not a bad philosophy of life, I’d decided.
    In fact, this was a typical sampling of principals’ behavior. From experience I found Joanne’s numbnessmore worrisome than her husband’s bluster and her sister’s juvenile banter and hysteria. Principals like her could melt down suddenly and explosively, and usually it happened at exactly the wrong time.
    I glanced back in the mirror and my eyes met hers, which were blank and unfocused, and we simultaneously looked away.
    Now that I was comfortable that there were no tails—it would be purest coincidence that Loving would find us—I made the call.
    “Hello?” the deep voice answered.
    “Aaron.”
    My boss responded, “Corte, I heard from Fredericks, at the Hillside Inn. He said you were okay. I assumed you were on the run and I didn’t want to call.”
    “Thanks.” This was one of his best attributes: He might have no instinctive feel for shepherding but he understood how we operated and he accommodated his job to ours. I said, “I haven’t talked to Freddy yet. Any casualties there?”
    He answered, “No, but it’s a mess. They picked up a lot of brass, must’ve been forty, fifty shots fired. Two slugs hit guest rooms with people inside. I can’t keep the lid on this one.”
    “What’ll it be?”
    “Loving gave us an out with the press, believe it or not. We’ll springboard on what he said in his fax—that there was talk of a kidnapping and some organized crime involvement. I’ll trot out Bad Hector. I don’t have much choice.”
    Hector Carranzo was a small-time Colombian drug figure who was named in a number of felonywarrants both here and in various Latin American countries. The reports gave mixed descriptions and vague background but all included warnings of his dangerous nature and the admonition to be on the lookout for him anywhere in the country. He was known to pop up unexpectedly.
    He was also a complete fiction. When we had a shootout like the one at the Hillside Inn, under circumstances where we wanted to keep the truth quiet, we blamed the incident on Señor Hector and “possible drug or other illegal activity we have yet to identify with specificity.” After we collared the primary in the Ryan Kessler case, Ellis might come back in a few days with: Ooops, we were wrong; the real perp was actually so-and-so. But Bad Hector would keep the press busy for a time.
    “We’re on the way to the safe house now.”
    “Good. Get there and stay there.” A pause. I knew what he’d say next. “We all want to get him, Corte. But I want you to sit tight in the safe house. No more attempts to engage