The Edge

Devine watched them for a bit and then walked around the cottage. He was pretending it was part of an enclave of mud shacks outside of Kabul where they’d found a meticulously hidden IED processing operation. Or twenty clicks to the north of Dohuk, where an entire rural village had banded together to hide a top leader of ISIS. A thorough search had rooted him out and a shoot-out had followed, the intensity of which Devine had seldom seen. Every villager, even grandmothers and kids, had produced a variety of weapons, from old Soviet AK-47 assault rifles to Stechkin machine pistols, and opened fire. Devine’s team leader had had to call in reinforcements to eventually win the battle. And the ISIS leader had been killed in the ensuing melee, so they got no intel from him. And the confrontation had cost two American soldiers their lives, along with four kids and three elderly women.

Devine had thrown up after seeing the torn-apart bodies of the children and women. And he had not been alone.

He eyed the small desk set against the window, a duplicate of the one in his room. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the glass, and he stood directly in its path to gain some warmth. When he looked down at the desktop he saw it.

A slight dust pattern. The shape sure looked like the size of a laptop.

He ran the possibilities through in his head: Had Jenny taken it with her? Had her killer taken it from her? Or had her killer come here and taken it after she was dead, as he had speculated the previous night?

If they had taken her laptop and phone, he knew the security on each would be pretty much unbeatable.

But if they somehow got the passwords from her before they killed her?

There was up to several hours between Silkwell’s last being seen alive and her death occurring. A lot could have happened during that time.

Guillaume didn’t mention any traces of torture in the postmortem, but still. If our enemies now possess what she had on her laptop or phone?

He knew there were strict protocols and procedures for keeping classified information on government devices. And just like the private sector, much of it was stored in the cloud. But he also knew that some government employees took shortcuts, or didn’t always adhere strictly to the protocols.

He glanced over to see Fuss eyeing him cagily where he stood in the sunlight.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Just trying to stay warm.”

Fuss scoffed. “Try coming here in January.” She went back to work.

And Devine stared back down at a dust pattern that was making his gut churn.

Chapter 16

After parting company with the local police, Devine walked to his cottage, where he composed and sent off a long email to Campbell, filling him in on everything that had happened since they last communicated, including Silkwell’s laptop possibly having been taken and there being no sign of her phone. As Devine wrote it all out, he could see that it was a lot to report, in a short period of time. And his instincts were telling him that there was a lot more to come.

He got into the Tahoe and drove along the coast highway. He had the dinner with Dak tonight, but he’d decided he’d first have a follow-up meeting with his sister, though the initial encounter had hardly been a meeting. He checked his watch and noted that Dak would have been at his tattoo shop for a couple of hours.

Devine arrived at Jocelyn Point and headed up the cracked and pitted asphalt driveway, past landscaping that had once been elegant and substantial but now was just a ruinous mass as nature reclaimed its territory. He parked in front of the house and took in the structure.

It was not in as bad a shape as he had expected. Parts of the exterior, while grungy and ill-used by the elements, looked like they had been power-washed fairly recently. The front entrance foundation’s veneer had some new stone and fresh mortar, and the wooden columns holding up the pitched roof over the front door looked new.

The glass in some of the windows seemed to have been replaced. And though the lawn was now dormant, the sod looked to maybe have been put in during the fall. He eyed one of the tall brick chimney stacks and saw smoke curling out of it.