The Edge of Doom by Amanda Cross

Clara, even Banny for all I know, if there had been any sign of a man around our apartment, visiting us, staying with us, anything. They were all able to assure him that there was no such person. I got the impression the men were convinced by these sturdy denials.”
    “I don’t know why they might have been getting an idea of the layout, in addition to finding out if Jay were with us or had been with us; that’s what I want to know, or at least to figure out. I’ll be done here in a while, and I’ll head home and talk to the men before their shift ends, just to satisfy myself about what questions were asked.”
    “Good,” Kate said. “I’ll see you there then. Ought I to worry? I will worry in any case, but have I grounds for serious worry or only generalized anxiety?”
    “Somewhere in between, I think. When will you be home?”
    “I’ll try to make it by five. No doubt I shall listen with less than my usual patience and sympathy to whoever comes in my office hour.”
    “Unlikely. The question is, really, why do these unofficial men want Jay, and how did they know to look for him at our house?”
    “So many questions; so few answers.” Kate sighed and hung up.

    “What I suspect,” Reed said later, when they were sitting with their drinks, “is that these chaps who didn’t get in here know that Jay has left the Witness Protection Program and want him now, before he can tell the authorities anything. Which leaves even more questions: what did he do? Why was he in the Witness Protection Program? Why did he leave it? What is it he could tell that would endanger our visitors and has them so frightened?”
    “Reed, I know it sounds naive, foolish, and unbefitting my professional station in life, but what the hell
is
the Witness Protection Program? I do gather, I really do, that it consists of hiding people who have given information to the police or the FBI or someone for which they could be killed. But how often does that happen outside of television cop shows?”
    “Since you had already uttered this same disbelief concerning the Witness Protection Program, I made use today of LexisNexis and found that someone had written about the program for the
New York Times Magazine
. *1 Here, I’ll leave it for you to read on your own. Just to note that the wife of the man being moved into the Witness Protection Program as described in this article agrees with your disbelief. When she realizes that she must abandon her life for another one utterly different, she says: ‘I couldn’t believe it was real. All that time I didn’t think that this type of organization really existed. I thought it was just in the movies.’ It was real enough. She and her husband, together with their three children, would begin a new life in a new place where they knew no one, would have different names, and be permitted to take virtually nothing of their past with them into their new existence. The woman who had thought this organization existed only in the movies would never see her parents and her siblings again.”
    “Could they leave the program?”
    “Yes. But at least by 1996 when this article was published, no one in the program had been murdered, but thirty who had left the program had been murdered.”
    “So the odds are that Jay will be murdered.”
    “The odds are that he is in danger; serious danger.”
    Kate shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening; the normal reaction under the circumstances, no doubt. One has to accept that Jay was either a criminal testifying against another criminal, or that at the least, he was involved with criminals, testified against them, and was thus in danger for his life and went into the Witness Protection Program. Does that seem a fair statement of the facts?”
    “It does to me,” Reed said. “But we are talking about a program, or organization, which is hardly open about its operations or any facts about those taken into it. I don’t think it’s quite time to conclude