The Naked Edge (36 page)

“When an enemy hears the Gurkhas are coming, the sweat starts to flow.” Cavanaugh raised the second phone and said, “Carl, you did a fabulous job on this. The engraving on the ivory handle is magnificent. I thought the Michael Price dagger at the farm was fabulous, but the craft on this one is better. Excellent work.”

“
Fossilized
ivory,” Carl's voice said from the phone.

Cavanaugh smiled slightly in victory.

“Lance taught us nothing should die in order to be used to make a knife,” Carl's voice said.

The agent in contact with the communications center gestured to indicate they were tracking the signal from the third phone.

“Mastodon ivory,” Cavanaugh said. “From Alaska, right? I like the way you put black epoxy over the main part of the blade and then let the edge of the blade retain its natural shiny metallic look. Contrasts beautifully with the ivory.”

“Coming from you, that's high praise, Aaron.”

“Nothing should die in order to be used to make a knife?”

“You heard Lance say that often enough.”

“So the killing's justified only after the knife is made?”

“Hey, don't get moralistic, Aaron. In Delta Force, you did your share of work with a blade. Did you figure out why I left you the khukri?”

“A threat?”

“Well, let's just say a warning.” Carl's voice was faint. “For all you know, I'm watching you right now. Maybe I've got a rifle trained on you. Maybe I could blow you to hell at this very moment.”

“I doubt it, Carl. You're blocks away. You made sure this phone registered the number you're using. You want us to track the signal you're using, but all we'll find is another set of phones taped together. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Just like when we were kids and pretended to be soldiers hunting one another in those woods at the bottom of our street.”

“But we're not kids any longer.”

“Exactly. Do you remember the last time we were in New Orleans? The blast we had, drinking, listening to jazz all night? Except for the club behind you, there's hardly any place that has jazz anymore. The bar down the street features karaoke, for God's sake. When I was there earlier, some kid with rings in her nose was screeching the lyrics to ‘Love Shack.’ The jazz clubs were turned into strip joints and sex-toy shops. Pitiful. This town'll destroy your memories if you don't get out as fast as you can. Ease off. Go back to Wyoming.”

“Not much there for me now. You burned my house, remember?”

“Rebuild it. Occupy your time with something constructive. Stay out of my business. Aaron, do you want to make a bet?”

“What do I get if I win?”

“I'll stop whatever I'm doing if you can tell me what's the most expensive knife in the world.”

“Then I win, Carl. The most expensive knife is the solid gold replica of King Tut's dagger that Buster Warenski made.”

“Wrong,” Carl's voice said.

“Come on,” Cavanaugh said. “When Buster made that knife in the 1980s, it was valued at fifty thousand dollars. Two years ago, the estimate was raised to a half million. But then the collector said it wasn't for sale at any price.”

“Yeah, Buster did a great job on that dagger. But it's still not the most expensive knife in the world. You want to know what
is
?”

“Sure, Carl. Go ahead and tell me.”

“The knife that costs you your life.”

Carl made the statement sound so final that Cavanaugh had the sense that the conversation was over.

“Whatever you're doing,” Cavanaugh said, “stop it. You've got so many people looking for you, you can't expect to get away. Negotiate with me. What can we give you to make this stop?”

The phone's subtle electronic hiss stretched on and on.

“Carl?”

Suddenly, Cavanaugh heard voices coming through the phone: angry men cursing.

The agent in contact with the communications center lowered his phone and said, “They tracked the signal to the Garden District. A team found two phones taped together in a flower bed outside one of those old mansions.”

“
Both
phones are active?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. Carl did it again. He relayed his voice from a further location. If I go there, he'll start talking to me through another relay phone. He'll lead me all over the city. A cemetery or the river will probably be next.”

“Anything to distract you from trying to stop whatever's going to happen tomorrow,” Jamie said.

“Oh, we're going to stop it.”

10

As a police car hurried Cavanaugh and Jamie through the busy night, he noted increasing signs of the trouble that was coming. More law-enforcement officers on the streets. More barricades. In several parks, large groups of demonstrators were gathered, some of them sprawled on sleeping bags, others gesturing in animated discussions. Distant sirens wailed.

Jamie looked at her watch. “Almost one o'clock. Not much time.”

They reached the Delta Queen Hotel, one of several on Canal Street. The district's proximity to the convention center made it a logical place for many of the delegates to stay, although Cavanaugh hated the idea of so many influential people being grouped so close to each other.

He and Jamie showed their ID to guards and ran past barricades into the ornate hotel's lobby. Next to the check-in desk, the concierge directed them to a banquet room on the hotel's second floor. They ran up a staircase and along a thickly carpeted corridor to where they showed their ID to more guards and entered the brightly lit command post for Global Protective Services.

Tables filled the huge room. Computers and monitors seemed everywhere, phones ringing, printers whirring, dozens of agents working to keep up with the massive influx of information. Outside the hotel, more sirens wailed.

For several weeks prior to the conference, GPS advance teams had traveled to New Orleans and studied the security layout of this and other hotels where clients were staying. They assessed possible routes to the conference as well as to various tourist spots that the delegates would insist on visiting. The agents took photographs. They made diagrams of streets and the room patterns of floors and suites. They created time charts of how long it took to get from one building to another. They did background checks on limousine services and arranged for armored cars to be available. They hired guards to make certain the limos weren't tampered with and that the guards inspected each vehicle on a regular schedule. They arranged for medical personnel to be on call and made detailed notes about how to reach the nearest hospitals. These and numerous other preparations were the hidden part of the protective world, each security measure made to look effortless when in fact everything was the result of intense planning.

Amid the organized commotion, a tall woman looked up from a printout she studied. A former Marine who was also a former member of the Defense Intelligence Agency, she wore dark slacks and a dark blouse that could be made to look formal or casual, depending on the type of client she needed to blend with. Her red hair was cut short. Her strong features had only faint makeup and were tight with fatigue. Looking as if she welcomed the distraction, she approached Cavanaugh and Jamie.

“I hear you're the new boss.”

“Just my bad luck,” Cavanaugh said. “Jamie, this is Dawn Finch, the best advance agent we have.”

“Flattery, flattery.”

“Dawn, this is my wife, Jamie.”

“Word came my way about that, also. You're full of surprises.”

“Let's hope
tomorrow
doesn't bring surprises.”

“Here's how it lays out.” Dawn led them to various charts mounted on a wall.

Cavanaugh studied them. “I don't like the pattern of the choke points.” He referred to the potential attack sites common to every route that the attendees would need to use.

“Yeah, the convention center's in a centralized area. The Warehouse/Arts district, Canal Street, the French Quarter. Everything's within a few blocks. No matter how we try to vary the routes, everybody has to pass through the bottlenecks here and here. Bombs and snipers are the big worry, of course. We tag-teamed with the police and the government agencies to reinforce security at those points, keep the protestors back, occupy roofs, watch for movement at windows, that sort of thing.”

“How many agents?”

“Eight thousand and more on the way.”

For a moment, Cavanaugh thought he hadn't heard correctly.
“Eight thousand
?”

“To hit that many people, you need a dispersive weapon, a dirty bomb, something like that,” Dawn continued. “Homeland Security has radiation and pathogen detectors all over the waterfront. Any vehicle that enters the downtown area is being scanned.”

“Give me a list of the most influential delegates.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“To make sure tomorrow doesn't happen.”

11

“Remember almost the first thing I told you when I brought you to our training camp?” Carl asked Raoul.

They paused outside the warehouse. Insects swarmed around the overhead light. A tugboat sounded from the Mississippi's gloom.

“I told you rest was the operator's friend, that you should take advantage of it whenever possible. You put in a good day, Mr. Ramirez.”

Raoul stood straighter in response to the term of respect.

“You did what you were instructed. You executed your orders perfectly. Now it's time to reward yourself with sleep. It'll be difficult. Plenty of exciting things going on. But tomorrow's where we're headed, and the most important thing you can do now is stretch out. Even if all you manage to do is keep your eyes shut, you'll still get the benefit. Clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Bowie.”

“Okay then.” Carl slapped him on the back and gave an approving nod to guards near the door. Then he opened it and ushered Raoul inside.

The warehouse was in shadow, only a few dim lights near the lavatories. A male smell filled the area, the musky odor of men primed for action. Bodies shifted on cots, occasionally snoring and coughing.

Carl gave Raoul another reassuring slap on the back and watched him go to his cot, where the young man obediently closed his eyes. Carl surveyed the other men, then switched his attention to the knapsacks against the wall to his right. Sixty of them.

*

“Nerve gas,” Carl had told the swarthy man weeks earlier. Blazing noon. They were at the training camp, far from the shots and explosions of the conditioning exercises at the main part of the facility.

Sweating from the heat and humidity, his suit sticking to him, the man peered into a corrugated metal structure large enough to hold one hundred chickens. The birds clucked, pecked at each other, and scratched the dirt floor, looking for food.

“I got these from a farm-supply outlet a hundred miles from here,” Carl explained. “Just another customer. Nobody paid attention.”

Stepping among the chickens, sending them scurrying noisily, Carl set a knapsack in their midst. “As you know from your experiences in Iraq, detonation devices of this sort require a two-step process, one to arm them, the other to set them off. The two stages guarantee that the devices won't go off prematurely—in our hands, for instance.”

The man eyed the knapsack and took several steps back from it.

“After all, we want to make sure the detonations occur at the scheduled time and place. So this is step one.” Carl pulled a cord on the side of the knapsack. Then he made his way through the clucking chickens, emerged from the structure, and shut the door. He walked around the building and lowered metal panels over the screened windows.

The van was a hundred yards away through ferns and weeds. Some of the ground was spongy and caused the man to look annoyed at the seeds on his pants and the mud on his dress shoes.

Carl opened the van's side hatch and indicated a television that received signals from a camera in the concrete-block structure. The image came from high in a corner, angling down toward the chickens.

“The pull-cord on the knapsack activates a radio receiver attached to the detonator,” Carl said. “On the day of the event, all the receivers—sixty of them—will be calibrated to a common frequency used by law enforcement. God knows, there'll be plenty of law enforcement in the area, all of them eager to stay in radio contact with each other. One of them will inadvertently set off the detonators. But just in case, I'll send a radio signal of my own. For the safety of this demonstration, I chose an uncommon frequency so a radio broadcast from a police car that happens to be in the area won't get us killed. Ready?”

The man nodded.

Carl pressed a button on a transmitter and drew the man's attention toward the television.

A black cloud billowed from the knapsack. Ominously silent, it filled the structure so thickly that the chickens could no longer be seen.

“Of course, the nerve gas is colorless,” Carl said. “The smoke is for dramatic effect. For the TV cameras. Otherwise, all the viewers at home would see is people falling down. Terrifying enough. But this way, the cameras will see mysterious black clouds spreading and joining. The viewers will watch with rapt attention as the clouds clear, and then the thousands of corpses will slowly come into view. Bear in mind, there won't be any on-site announcer to describe what's happening. Everybody in the area will be dead.”

On the screen, the black cloud continued to be all that was visible.

Carl pressed another button. At the distant structure, metal clanked. The window coverings opened. The black cloud emerged from the gaps. On the TV screen, daylight struggled through the black haze.

“The gas kills only when breathed,” Carl said. “This particular batch isn't full strength. It'll lose its potency by the time it disperses this far. Even so, you might want to put on
this
.”

He gave the man a gas mask. Then he too put on a mask.

A bird flew over the structure. Skirting the edge of the dispersing black cloud, it folded and fell, crashing onto the building's roof.

Another bird fell.

Then another.

“As you see,” Carl said, pointing toward the screen, where the black cloud dispersed enough to reveal that all the chickens were dead, “it's extremely effective.”