Edge

This number?”
    “Yes.”
    “You have an alternate?”
    “No.”
    Click.
    I pulled off onto a side road and stopped. Maree gasped and looked up, alarmed, her psychic pendulum still on the hysterical side. Joanne slipped fromher coma long enough to say to her, “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
    “Why’re we stopping?” the younger woman asked, her voice on edge.
    I said, “Just checking the car. We took some hits.”
    Ryan began scanning the dark roadside like a sniper for prey.
    Ahmad climbed out of the back and joined me and we inspected the Yukon carefully. It wasn’t badly damaged from the shootout or the rough escape. The SUV was doing better than my back was.
    As we checked the tires, I glanced up and saw Joanne, still in the backseat, look at her watch and place a call. It was to Amanda. From the conversation, which I could hear through the open door, it seemed everything was fine. She caught my eye again then lowered her head and continued the call. She was struggling to be animated as her stepdaughter apparently pelted her with a report of her day in the country.
    Ryan took the phone and, his face softening, also had a conversation with the girl.
    Parents and children.
    For a moment some of those memories I’d had earlier surfaced, some children’s faces among them, memories I didn’t want. I put them away. Sometimes I was better at that than others. Tonight they vanished more slowly than usual.
    I got back inside and when the door slammed Ryan spun around, startled, and gripped his gun. I tensed for a moment but he oriented himself and relaxed.
    My Lord, did he want to shoot everybody ?
    As I started to drive, my phone buzzed and the caller ID voice announced a number I recognized as the Justice Department. My finger hovered over the ACCEPT button.
    I didn’t press it. The call went to voice mail and I steered the Yukon back to the main road.

Chapter 19
    MORE DARK, WINDING routes.
    Nobody was behind us, unless he was driving without lights, which was possible, thanks to the new night vision systems. But the way I was driving—fast then slow, occasionally abrupt stops, sharp turns down roads that I knew well but I doubted Loving would—left me convinced that no one was following.
    After forty minutes I hit Route 7 briefly then Georgetown Pike and took it to River Bend Road. Then, bypassing downtown Great Falls, I took a series of tangled roads and streets on which GPS was helpful but not definitive.
    Finally, after a drive through dense woods, during which we passed no more than three houses—three very large houses—we arrived at the safe house compound, separated from the road by a seven-foot-high stockade and, farther along, six-foot chain-link fences.
    The compound had a seven-bedroom main house, two outbuildings—one of them a panic facility—and two large garages, as well as a barn, complete with a hayloft. The grounds were nearly ten acres of rolling fields, bordering the Potomac River, the turbulent part, the narrows, where thereis indeed a series of falls and rapids, though “Great Falls” is by anyone’s estimation exaggerated; “Modest but Picturesque” would be a better name.
    The property had been a bargain. You can’t be in any government service nowadays without being aware of the bottom line. In the nineties, the compound had been the residence of Chinese diplomats, a retreat from the embassy downtown. It was also, the FBI had learned, where the People’s Republic secret police regularly met their runners and agents, who’d been collecting information from contractors and low-level government workers and taking pictures of the NSA, the CIA and other unmentionable facilities in Langley, Tysons and Centreville. Most of the work, it was learned, was commercial property theft rather than defense secrets. But it was politically naughty, not to mention illegal.
    When the Chinese got busted, the delicate negotiations involved an agreement that the diplomats and fake businessmen would leave the country without prosecution and, in exchange, the government would get the house . . . and some other, nondisclosed, treats. The property was used by a number of agencies as a hideaway until Abe had grabbed it for us about eight years ago.
    The large, brown-painted nineteenth-century house itself had been retrofitted with all the accoutrements of modern-day security that we could afford. Which wasn’t as high-tech or sexy as people might expect. There were sensors on the fence,