The Naked Edge (25 page)

“We were defending ourselves,” Cavanaugh maintained as he leaned forward with his hands against the wall.

“Sure you were.”

“They attacked us in my apartment,” Kim said. “The third floor.”

“Check that,” the man told a policeman. He studied Kim. “So if you live
up there
, how did you get
down here
?”

“Lieutenant,” an officer said, peering into the kitchen. “We've got a broken window.”

“I think we're going to be a long time sorting this out,” the lieutenant said. “Just so we don't have any misunderstandings with a judge and a jury, you have the right to remain silent. You know the drill?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want an attorney?”

“Seems like I don't have a choice.”

“You got
that
right.” The lieutenant searched him from behind, lifted Cavanaugh's jacket, and found his empty holster. “Where's the gun that goes with this?”

Cavanaugh nodded toward where it had fallen. “Near the door.”

“You better have a permit for this.”

“I do.”

“Why do you need it?”

“I'm in the security business. Global Protective Services.”

“Yeah, I saw how you were protecting this guy on the floor, leaving impressions of your shoes on his kidneys. Global Protective Services, huh? I'm impressed all to hell.”

Cavanaugh decided the conversation had just about come to an end. “How do I contact my attorney?”

“Unless you've got a supply of carrier pigeons, I suggest using
this
.” The man pulled Cavanaugh's phone from his jacket.

“Now?”

“When I'm finished.” The man patted Cavanaugh's chest and found his claw-shaped knife in a plastic sheath suspended by a break-away chain around Cavanaugh's neck.

Meanwhile, a policewoman arrived and searched Jamie, removing her knife from her hip.

The man glanced from it toward the pistol and the knives on the floor. “Between these and the automatic rifles on the stairs, we've got enough weapons to outfit the military of a Caribbean country.”

“Lieutenant,” a policeman said at the door. “The apartment upstairs is shot to pieces.”

“Just your normal Saturday night in Greenwich Village,” the lieutenant said. “Sit on the floor,” he told Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh obeyed.

“Cross your legs.”

Cavanaugh did.

“Here's your cell phone. Tell your attorney to be quick. Tell him Lt. Russell can't wait to talk to him.”

Ambulance attendants crouched next to the man Cavanaugh had subdued.

“Is he going to live?” Russell asked.

“He'll be able to answer your questions. My, my, he's got a pistol under his jacket.”

“And there'll be another knife somewhere,” Cavanaugh said.

“Yeah,” the ambulance attendant said, “on a chain around his neck.” The attendant pulled it from under his shirt. “Looks like a claw.”

“Like the one that was around
your
neck,” Russell told Cavanaugh. “Are you guys making some kind of fashion statement?”

“And what's
this
? Another fashion statement?” Using forceps, the attendant probed the man's left ear and removed a flesh-colored object.

“An earbud radio receiver,” Cavanaugh said. “If he's got one of those, he's also got a miniature microphone.” Cavanaugh studied the man's blood-spotted turtleneck. “Probably pinned to the front of his collar. A mike the size of a dime.”

“Damned if there isn't,” the attendant said.

Lt. Russell yelled down the stairs, “Does the wounded guy down there have a microphone on his collar? And something in his ear?”

“Just a second, Lieutenant, while I . . .Yeah!”

“Same with
this
guy!” someone shouted from the upper stairs, where the third gunman lay dead.

Russell inspected the microphone and pried off its back. Just before he pulled out a tiny battery, he asked Cavanaugh, “Who the hell did you take on? The CIA?”

13

“
The CIA?
”

Sprawled on a dark rooftop across the street, Carl listened to the radio transmission crackle and die. Like the men in the apartment building, he had an earbud and a miniature microphone.
Un
like them, he had a small black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. This box, a radio receiver and transmitter, had a switch that allowed him to communicate with each man separately. For the past fifteen minutes, until the microphone had failed, he'd been able to eavesdrop on the conversation.

He hadn't heard Aaron's voice in several years. It filled him with a welter of emotions: anger, regret, bitterness, a fond need to be able to return to that long-ago summer when they pretended to be soldiers caught behind enemy lines and hid among bushes, watching men and women holding hands as they strolled through the woods.

Concealing himself behind a chimney, Carl raised an AR-15, sighted through its holographic scope, and waited.

14

The cell-phone numbers Cavanaugh pressed were for the landline at William's safe site. As the phone buzzed on the other end, he heard more sirens outside. Red and blue lights flashed beyond the window.

“Hello.”

“This is Cavanaugh. Put William on.”

“Maybe he'll talk nicer to you than he does to us.”

The phone made a bumping sound. Then William's voice said, “I hope this means everything's back to normal and I can get out of here.”

“Afraid not,” Cavanaugh said. “There's been some shooting and—”

“
Some
shooting?” the lieutenant said in the background. “I was with the Marines in the first Iraq war. I think we used less ammunition.”

“Why don't I let Lt. Russell explain it to you so I don't say anything I shouldn't.”

“Name, rank, and serial number,” William's voice cautioned. “Nothing else. Put him on the phone.”

Cavanaugh handed the phone to the lieutenant, then looked at Jamie and Kim against the wall. Jamie impressed him with her composure, as if she'd been an operator all her life.

But Kim was another matter. The pupils of her eyes resembled pencil points. Her brow was beaded with sweat, her withdrawal symptoms accelerating.

Cavanaugh gave her a firm nod of assurance.

“At the precinct in half an hour,” Russell said to the phone, then gave it back to Cavanaugh.

“Yes, William?” Cavanaugh asked into it.

“Name, rank, and serial number. No exceptions.”

“I want you to call somebody.” Cavanaugh gave William a name and a phone number. “Tell him I need help.”

When William heard the name, his response was, “
He'll
get their attention.”

“Okay, we're ready to move this guy,” the ambulance attendant said.

The attendant and his partner lifted the semiconscious man onto a Gurney and wheeled him from the apartment. Below, a clatter of equipment indicated that the gunman Jamie had wounded was being lifted onto a similar Gurney.

“Hands behind your back,” Russell told Cavanaugh

The lieutenant clicked handcuffs onto him.

The policewoman did the same to Jamie and Kim.

“Is the van here?” Russell asked a policeman.

Cavanaugh managed to stand.

Preceded and followed by police officers, he, Jamie, and Kim left the apartment. On the stairs, a camera flashed, a medical examiner and his team inspecting the other gunman Jamie had shot.

Cavanaugh descended. The smell of burnt gunpowder widened his nostrils. He stepped over empty ammunition casings and left the building, confronted by the chaos of flashing lights, police cars, ambulances, and several hundred onlookers.

15

As Aaron emerged from the building into the kaleidoscope of lights, Carl almost pulled the trigger. Aaron had his hands cuffed behind him. He had policemen ahead of him, policemen behind him, and two women next to him. One of the women, Chinese, was the GPS computer expert whose apartment Carl had ordered watched. The other woman was the one he'd seen in Jackson Hole. Aaron's wife.

Carl studied her. Tall, wearing slacks, with legs that drew his gaze from her ankles to her inviting hips. Athletically trim, with upward-tilted breasts that made him imagine standing behind her, cupping his hands over them. Glossy brunette hair that he wanted to stroke. Eyes so intense Carl felt their power even on the roof across the street.
Aaron, you and I always had the same great taste.

Do it
, Carl told himself.
Shoot
. But no matter how much he wanted to, he mustered the discipline that he had not possessed while he and Aaron had been in Delta Force and later when they'd worked for Global Protective Services.
No “I” in “team”? I understand that now
, he thought.

No self-control? Not then. Not when I took out that sentry with a knife instead of obeying the order to kill him with a sound-suppressed pistol. Not when I stabbed that crazy fan when he pulled out a knife and attacked that rock-star babe. No, I learned my lesson, Aaron. You and Duncan taught me that lesson. I spent a lot of time on shit jobs learning that lesson. Stay cool. Keep the mission in mind. Don't get distracted. Don't screw things up for a moment's satisfaction. I learned that lesson so well, I could teach you. But if I shoot, I'll never get off this rooftop and make it to where Raoul's waiting with the car. Right now, there's only one thing more important than killing you, and I'm so cool, so disciplined, so in control, that's what I'm going to do.

Carl pulled a transmitter from his pocket. When he pressed a button, a green light flashed. Then he pressed a second button.

16

Uneasy, Cavanaugh stood at the entrance to the building. Partially blinded by the flashing lights, he watched attendants wheel the injured gunmen toward two ambulances.
We got what we need
, he thought.
When they're conscious, we can question them. We can find out where Carl trains his men.

“I want an officer in each ambulance,” Lt. Russell said.

Two policemen stepped toward the vehicles as the attendants shut the doors, and suddenly the ambulances heaved, explosions shattering their windows, blasting their rear doors open. The shockwaves knocked the ambulance attendants and the policemen to the pavement. Others stumbled back. Bystanders ran. Many screamed.

“
Bombs?
” Russell spun toward Cavanaugh. “What the hell's going on? How did—”

“Wyoming,” Cavanaugh said, trying to recover from his shock. His skin itching from wariness, he nudged Jamie back with him into the cover of the building's vestibule. Kim noticed and retreated with them as Cavanaugh scanned the roof on the opposite side of the street. He lowered his gaze toward the windows and the entrances to the brownstones, but the emergency vehicles and the flashing lights made it difficult to see much of anything at street level.

“Wyoming? What are you talking about?” Russell demanded.

Emergency personnel ran toward the ambulances. Smoke drifted from the open doors.

“That's where this started.” Cavanaugh stepped deeper into the building, Jamie and Kim following. “A hit team tried to kill me there, also.”

Russell stared.

“When two members of the team were about to be captured, their car blew apart,” Cavanaugh told him.

Russell stared harder.

“We think the team's leader planted a bomb under the car and used a remote control to detonate it—to keep them from being questioned. Earlier, somebody on the team shot a sniper working for them, presumably because he couldn't be counted on to keep his mouth shut.”

“You're telling me, the guy who organized this attack watched from down the street and blew up his men when he saw them being carried out alive?” Russell asked in dismay.

“He might be out there even now,” Cavanaugh said, prompting Russell to turn and scan the street with the intensity that Cavanaugh did.

“How the hell could he put a bomb on his men without them knowing about it or us finding it?”

A frenzied voice shouted from one of the ambulances, “They're blown in half at the waist.”

“The plastic sheaths,” Cavanaugh said.

“Sheaths?” Russell's voice was raw.

“For the knife each man had. Your people took the knives but left the sheaths. The plastic must have had explosive in it, along with a miniature detonator.”

For the first time, Russell was speechless.

“Carl was here, watching us go into the building.” Cavanaugh felt a chill. From the building's vestibule, he stared toward the crowd across the street. “Maybe he's
still
watching. Maybe he's up on a roof with a rifle. Lieutenant, have you still got that earbud and microphone?”

Russell pulled them from a suit pocket.

“Put the radio receiver in my ear,” Cavanaugh said, feeling helpless with his hands cuffed behind him.

Russell hesitated, then did what Cavanaugh wanted.

“Please put the battery back in the microphone and raise it to my mouth,” Cavanaugh said.

After less hesitation, Russell did.

“Carl?” Cavanaugh asked.

All he heard was static.

“Carl, I know you're out there. You're probably watching the entrance to this building.”

More static.

“Carl, I think I know how you've been training your recruits. Remember those visualization courses our special-ops instructors arranged for us to take. We couldn't get over how fast visualization accelerates the learning curve. You used that technique reinforced by movies and video games, right? It's an efficient way to program someone.”

Only static.

“I don't know what your objective is,” Cavanaugh said into the microphone Russell held in front of him. “But I know you're behind all this, so there's no point in continuing to try to kill me. It won't make a difference. Nothing's going to divert suspicion from you. So quit taking the risk. I'm a worthless target.”

Cavanaugh strained to listen to the plug in his ear, to ignore all the distracting shouts, doors slamming, the drone of automobile engines before him, the rumble of footsteps on stairs behind him.

The static changed subtly. Carl's voice, unheard for so many years, said, “You should have been a better friend.”