Edge

fifteen minutes ago. It’s headed for the prison now.”

Chapter 25
    AS THE SKY grew more and more overcast, I pulled into the safe house compound in Great Falls.
    I climbed out and stretched, as leaves tumbled past in the fitful wind.
    The rustic setting made me feel very much at home—the trees, brush, sloping fields of renegade grass. My early adult life was rooted in classrooms and lecture halls, and my recent professions and personal life have found me in offices and safe houses, but I have always found a way to get outside, sometimes for hours or days at a time.
    I glanced enviously at the paths that led to the Potomac or farther into the dense woods, then I turned away, looking down at another text from Billy about the progress of the armored van to the slammer in D.C. I wondered if Jason Westerfield and his associate would be there to greet it. Then I realized: Of course they would.
    Climbing the stairs, punching in the code. The door of the safe house eased open.
    And I nodded a greeting toward Maree and Joanne, who sat across a wobbly card table from each other, with tea and cookies at hand.
    Yes, an armored van was en route—a lengthy, complicated route—but it was empty.
    Inscrutable  . . .
    There was no way I was going to send the Kesslers to a slammer, especially a medium-security facility in the District. Nothing had changed from earlier, when I’d refused to incarcerate them, and if Westerfield was convinced I was using my principals as bait, that was a problem of his, not mine.
    I knew that if the stink got big enough, Aaron Ellis might fire me. But he wouldn’t fire me until the job was concluded. For one thing, he didn’t know where I was and it would take some effort to find out. Nor could he do so without risking that somebody on the outside would learn of the Kesslers’ whereabouts. Which he wouldn’t do.
    I was amused to see that the sisters were playing a board game plucked from the shelves in the living room. Backgammon. The game, where you roll dice and move markers in an attempt to remove all yours from the board first, goes back nearly five thousand years. A variation was played in Mesopotamia, and the Romans’ Game of Twelve Lines was virtually the same as the backgammon people play now.
    I left the sisters to their competition and greeted Ahmad, who stood at the back door, looking out. He assured me everything had been quiet. I made a call to the spec in West Virginia, who reported that there’d been no hint of surveillance from the outside.
    Nor had the deer, badgers or other animals been behaving oddly.
    Ahmad was standing in a way I could only describe as anticipatory, shoulders at one angle, hips at another. Eyes were scanning the windows, his job, but also avoiding mine. He said, “I heardyou ordered a transport to the Hansen Detention Center.”
    “That’s right.”
    He was nodding, understandably confused; the people supposedly inside the van were no more than thirty feet away from him.
    I asked, “Anybody call you about it?”
    “It went out over the wire.”
    I told him of my ploy. “You won’t be in trouble. You can plead ignorance.”
    The young officer nodded, curious, but I said nothing more. Like Abe Fallow, I’m always aware of my responsibility to teach protégés what I can about our business—there is so much to learn. But this was a situation I decided not to elaborate on, since I hoped he’d never find himself in one like it.
    All he said was, “It was a good call, sir. A slammer’d be wrong for this situation.”
    “Where’s Ryan?”
    “Working in his room. That accounting project of his, I think.”
    I realized the downstairs was filled with a new smell, spice, which I took to be from shampoo or perfume.
    I was struck by the domesticity, replayed hundreds of times in the safe houses where I’ve stashed my principals, and it’s always jarring to me, the contrast: the homey, even mundane routine that’s the antithesis of the reason these men and women are here.
    As it did occasionally, the comforting imagery made me feel somewhat sentimental. Certain memories again arose but I didn’t shoo them away quite so quickly this time. I recalled last Fridaynight after work, alone in the town house, eating a sandwich for dinner before I went to my gaming club up the street. I’d found the list for the party that Peggy and I had thrown years ago. I’d stared at it, my appetite gone. I’d become aware of the smell of the place, bitter from