The Naked Edge (12 page)

Jamie came from the bathroom, where she'd put on a white blouse, blue blazer, and gray slacks, clothes that William had instructed the pilots to bring. Turquoise earrings brought out the deep green in her eyes. She'd undone her ponytail, her brunette hair hanging to her shoulders.

“It's actually very serious,” she told William.

“Fairbairn wanted his close-quarters combat techniques to be simple,” Cavanaugh said. “Easily taught. Easily remembered. When condensed to essentials, there are only a few moves. But just as important, Fairbairn's system ensures that the person making those moves doesn't get injured in the process.”

Mrs. Patterson stopped admiring the Gulfstream's appointments and listened.

“A punch, for example.” Jamie made a fist and pretended to hit the wall. “I'm going to hurt that person, no question about it. But I'm probably also going to hurt my hand. At the least, my fist will swell and throb and become useless if I try to keep punching. At the worst, I'll break bones, incapacitating me with pain and shock. I don't care how tough you are—you can't will yourself
not
to experience shock.”

Cavanaugh added, “So Fairbairn asked himself, ‘What are the parts of the body that can administer force with little risk of injury?’”

“Since we're talking about slaps, I assume one of them is the palm of a hand,” William said.

“Yes, but when we say a slap, we're not talking about anything dainty,” Cavanaugh told him. “We're talking about a slap that's as hard and fast as you can make it. The full force of your body. Your palm covers a lot of area, almost the entire side of someone's face. If you don't knock the opponent out, you'll daze him enough so that when you slap the
opposite
side of his face, he'll go down.”

“What are the other parts of the body that Fairbairn decided were the best to use?” William asked.

“The feet, if you wear thick-soled shoes. You can stomp down hard and break somebody's toes. Fairbairn recommended a variation in which you stomp the side of your shoe all the way down your opponent's shin before you hit the toes.”

“Ouch,” William said.

“The knee,” Jamie said.

“To the groin?” William asked.

“Definitely.”

Mrs. Patterson kept listening.

“The elbows,” Cavanaugh said. “You can break ribs with them but not hurt yourself.”

“You can chop the edge of your hand against someone's throat and not hurt yourself,” Jamie said.

William winced, imagining the damage to the other person.

Mrs. Patterson leaned forward.

“And you can shove the palm of your hand up under someone's chin, gouging their eyes with your fingers while you thrust back your opponent's head and . . .”

William looked more uncomfortable.

“Why didn't my husband teach me any of this?” Mrs. Patterson demanded. “He never taught me about the guns he kept around the house, either. He was a good husband, but he always treated me as if I was weak.”

“Now's your chance to make up for lost time.” Jamie motioned for Cavanaugh to stand. “Fairbairn recommended combinations.”

She crossed her left arm over her chest and raised her right palm to the side of her face.

“I'm defenseless?” she asked William and Mrs. Patterson.

“Pretty much,” William said while Mrs. Patterson nodded.

“That's what you want the opponent to think. The idea is to make him feel overly confident and then to engage his startle reflex when you do something he isn't expecting.”

Cavanaugh pretended to strike at her stomach.

Her right hand swept down to knock the blow away. Her left hand whipped, palm outward, in a pretended slap across Cavanaugh's face. She mimicked a kick to his groin, and when he bent forward in pretended pain, she delivered a slow-motion palm thrust to his chin, fingers near his eyes, pushing his chin back.

“The slap would have so stunned him that he couldn't defend himself,” Jamie concluded. “Fairbairn wrote a book:
Get Tough
. We'll find a copy for you.”

“Which reminds me, I have something for both of
you
,” William said.

They watched with interest as William opened a drawer in a storage compartment that resembled a side table.

He took out a briefcase. “You told me to arrange to have a bug-out bag delivered from GPS headquarters and put on the plane, but I confess I haven't the faintest idea what a bug-out bag is.”

“It's something you need when you bug-out,” Cavanaugh said.

“What?”

“An emergency kit for when you expect you'll be on the run. Most operators have a bug-out bag stashed somewhere.”

Cavanaugh opened the case and revealed knives, nine millimeter ammunition, an extra magazine, an easy-to-conceal SIG Sauer 229 pistol, lock picks, a miniature flashlight, an ample supply of twenty-dollar bills, fake ID, small rolls of duct tape, and assorted seemingly non-tactical items such as safety pins and zip ties, the thin, supple plastic strips that were used to bundle wires or close garbage bags.

“What are
they
for?” William asked.

“Pinning things and tying things.”

William gave him an unamused look. “Right. And I suppose the duct tape is for sealing leaky pipes.”

“Or veins.”

“Some day, you'll need to teach me about
that
.” William turned to Jamie. “This is for
you
.” He handed her a black plastic case the size of a laptop computer. SIGARMS was stenciled on it.

“How thoughtful,” Jamie said. “Everybody wants to give me firearms.”

“You'll also need
this
.” William handed her a holster.

“No,” Cavanaugh said.

Jamie looked at him.

“You're not in danger if you're not with me,” he said.

“You're suggesting . . .”

“Stay with Mrs. Patterson. Keep away from me.”

“The attack team might still try to find where I am and use me to get at you,” Jamie said.

“You'll be well guarded.”

“See this ring on my finger,” Jamie said. “I'm in this as much as you are, babe. There's no way I'm going to hide while you're out making yourself a target.”

“It's the safest thing for you.”

“I don't give a damn about what's safe for me. If this were reversed, if I were the target, would
you
hide?”

“Of course not. But that would be—”

“Different? How? Because I'm a woman and you're a man?”

“You know I don't think that way. It's just . . . if we do this together, if things go wrong and something happens to you . . . I couldn't bear losing you.”

“You think I could bear losing
you
? You won't get a better, more motivated protector than me.”

“I know.”

“And I'm good at it, as you often told me. Together?”

Cavanaugh's emotions made it difficult for him to speak. “Yes. Together.”

1

Oaxaca, Mexico.

The movie star surprised Dominic by being polite and compliant, not at all what he was used to when protecting celebrities. Her name was Shana Lane. Twenty-one, with a knock-’em-dead figure, she'd had five hit movies, one of them good enough to earn her an Oscar nomination. But then she disappeared for a long, hot summer. After police, private investigators, and the media looked everywhere, she finally turned up drugged out of her mind, staggering down the main drag of a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she was on her way, she thought, to buy a race horse. Nobody, including herself, was ever able to figure
that
out. The authorities did some investigative backtracking and found the cottage where she was staying with her boyfriend.

A
possessive
boyfriend, who was also a crack addict. They returned to Los Angeles after paying fines and listening to a judge's lecture about the pointlessness of wasting a talented life. But despite Shana's determination to clean up her life and sever their relationship, the boyfriend persisted in wanting to see her. He showed his love and determination by burning her BMW and strangling her cat, then vanished and waited until the police became weary of guarding her.

That was where Dominic came in. For an enormous fee paid by a movie studio desperate to protect its investment, Dominic and five other protectors went to Shana's film location in Mexico. Working in shifts of two, they made sure the boyfriend didn't show up. They made sure of something else—that, in keeping with the plot line of a movie about drug smugglers, Shana didn't get tempted to go back to sampling the real stuff.

To Dominic's amazement, Shana behaved in an exemplary fashion, following instructions, arriving at the set on time, with her lines prepared, never once complaining about the twelve-hour shooting schedule and the rigid control of her time off the set. Sundays were her only free days, and she used them (accompanied by Dominic and another protector) to buy rugs, pottery, and carved animals from nearby towns or to visit Oaxaca's baroque cathedral, the vaulted interior of which had dazzling gold ornaments.

On this, his second-last evening of the assignment, Dominic and another protector stood separately at the shadowy sides of the Hotel Victoria's patio restaurant, watching the various approaches to it as Shana and the film's director ate dinner together. On a lower level, cast members splashed in a swimming pool.

Then dusk thickened. Dominic and his fellow protector escorted Shana to her room, one of a series in a long low building next to the restaurant. Pleasant-smelling flowers lined the softly lit walkway. While his partner watched the approaches to the building, Dominic unlocked and entered Shana's room, making certain that it was safe for her.

Only when they heard Shana secure the numerous locks on her door did the two protectors relax.

“After we escort her back to the States, do you have another assignment?” Dominic asked his partner.

“No. I'm thinking about coming back here with my wife. What are
your
plans?”

“New Orleans. I'm scheduled to be part of the security at the World Trade Organization conference. After the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the WTO wants to show support for the New Orleans recovery effort by meeting there.”

“The last time I worked at a World Trade conference, the protestors rioted and shut down the city. Talk about an elevated threat level. I was on Condition Orange for a week. Then I
slept
for a week.”

They pulled out their room keys and unlocked the units that flanked Shana's. From there, they could easily get to her if she pressed a button linked to alarms in their rooms. When they opened their separate doors, they encountered the embodiment of a local proverb,
You won't find a doctor to cure a bite from this snake
, as a machete hissed toward each of them, slicing off their heads.

2

The fourth major airport in the New York City area (after Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark International) was Teterboro, a so-called “reliever” airstrip that catered to charter, corporate, and private jets, relieving congestion from the larger airports. From there, a twelve-mile drive via the George Washington Bridge could have taken Cavanaugh to Global Protective Services’ corporate offices in midtown Manhattan. But because the attack team might have anticipated that he was headed in that direction and might have put Teterboro under surveillance, he decided against the risk of using an automobile and instead took a helicopter.

Manhattan had three heliports. Cavanaugh chose the one farthest from GPS headquarters, reasoning that it was the least likely to be under surveillance. An armored van drove him and the others through sparse midnight traffic to the secure garage under the Madison Avenue building in which GPS had its fortieth-floor offices. A team was expecting the van's arrival. They escorted Cavanaugh and his group into the elevator and through the upper security checkpoints.

The view from the conference room was spectacular, lights gleaming throughout the city. But even though the windows had bullet-resistant glass, Cavanaugh pressed a button that closed the draperies the moment he and the group entered the room, the draperies so thick that silhouettes couldn't be seen through them. He glanced at the plush carpeting and oak-paneled walls. Every chair at the long conference table had its own computer terminal and phone console, one of which he used to summon three GPS officers who'd been alerted to remain after business hours.

“Looks like you're settling into authority nicely,” William said.

“How do we make it official? Don't you have documents for me to sign?”

“I instructed my assistant to go to my office and bring them,” William answered. “He ought to arrive shortly.”

“It can't happen soon enough.”

“Mrs. Patterson, if you want to get some sleep, we can find an empty office that has a couch,” Jamie offered.

“Thanks, but I napped on the plane.” Mrs. Patterson clearly didn't want to miss anything.

But Cavanaugh couldn't allow it. “This is where you need to step out of the loop. The less you know, the better it is for you.”

She looked crestfallen.

“Think of it this way,” Jamie said. “You had an interesting ride while it lasted.”

“Interesting? I'm having trouble understanding why, as frightened as I was, it was just about the most exciting time of my life.”

“Winston Churchill once said, ‘There's nothing more exciting than to be shot at and to survive.’ The thing is,” Cavanaugh added, “we don't want to get excited like that too often. William, when did Duncan put me in his will?”

“A month before he died. Why do you ask?”

Three people entered the office.

The first was from East Indian parentage, born in Akron, Ohio. Late-thirties. Short, thick, black hair. Compact build. Strong, square face. Steady, dark eyes. Muscular shoulders. His name was Ali Karim, and when he'd served on a Special Forces team, his specialties were languages, medicine, and explosives, as well as the ability to blend into an Asian environment. He was currently in charge of recruiting, training, and monitoring GPS's protective agents.