The Naked Edge (9 page)

He scrambled outside, drew his Glock .40, and took a position behind the engine area, aiming toward the vehicle that sped toward him. His fellow officer did the same. If the car tried to ram them, they would flee toward the protection of the storefronts on each side. If the car stopped and its occupants decided to try shooting their way to freedom, the troopers would teach them the error of their ways.

The car sped closer, veering to the right, hoping to slip between the cruiser and the sidewalk.

It exploded, the shockwave hurling the trooper backward, slamming him onto the street. The flash seared his vision. The ringing in his head was agony. As his mind spun, he felt pressure in his chest, air being sucked from his lungs.

Wet.
Why does my face feel wet?
He pawed his cheeks.
Blood. My God, I'm bleeding.

Chunks of metal crashed around him. Something soft and wet fell on him. Beyond the ringing in his ears, he heard the other trooper screaming. Then he realized,
he
was the one who was screaming.

10

As the pickup truck worked its way up a slope, Cavanaugh heard the blast from the direction of town. Using only parking lights so that the truck would be difficult to follow, Jamie drove, Mrs. Patterson and William sitting next to her. With no more space in the cabin, Cavanaugh sat in the truck's uncovered back.

He felt the explosion as much as he heard it. In the murky distance, a fireball illuminated the night, showing him that the explosion came from the direction of town.

The truck's back window slid open. “My God, what caused
that
?” Jamie asked through the opening.

Cavanaugh was reminded of what Garth had said when he'd arrived at the ruin of Cavanaugh's home—
looks
like a war zone
. “This is beginning to feel like Bosnia did.”

He sensed Jamie thinking as the truck jounced along a deep rut. “You never told me you were there.”

“It's not something anybody who was there wants to remember. One thing you could count on—just when things got quiet, somebody'd start shooting again or blow something up.”

The lane got bumpier, sending vibrations that jostled Cavanaugh in the back of the truck. From the direction of town, he heard sirens. A lot of them. Through another break in the trees, he saw that the flames silhouetted the hills close to town.

“How much farther?” William asked, uneasy.

“Five minutes.”

The far-away sirens persisted.

“Who's Fairbairn?” William prompted nervously.

Cavanaugh studied the slope they'd been climbing. He didn't see any headlights following them. “Fairbairn invented the basis for some of those lessons you swore you were going to take.”

In the back of the truck, he turned to look inside. The faint dashboard lights revealed that the attorney's face was stark with fear.

Maybe it's time for a bedtime story
, Cavanaugh thought.

“Fairbairn was a police officer in Shanghai,” he said through the open rear window. “In the early nineteen hundreds. When Shanghai was the most dangerous city in the world.”

William raised his head and looked at him with interest.

“You're sure you want to hear about this?” Cavanaugh asked.

“For God's sake, would I ask if I didn't?”

“If
he
doesn't,
I
do,” Mrs. Patterson said.

“One night, while Fairbairn was patrolling a particularly rough district, someone attacked him. He woke up in a hospital and vowed he'd never be caught off-guard again, so when he saw an advertisement for somebody named Professor Okada, ‘master of ju-jutsu and bonesetting’—I love the bonesetting part—he decided to take lessons. Eventually, he became an expert in several Oriental martial arts and adapted those systems into a few simple deadly movements that anyone could learn in a couple of hours.”

“Hours?” William asked.

“Shanghai's violence gave Fairbairn plenty of chances to test his methods. He created the first SWAT team. He also invented the shooting house: a series of rooms with various obstacles and pop-up targets of bad guys aiming weapons. Sometimes, the pop-ups show a woman carrying an infant or a bad guy holding a hostage. The point is, as you proceed through a maze, anticipating a threat around every corner, you can't start shooting every time there's movement. Instant decisions need to be made. Control has to be maintained. Anybody who's ever gone through a shooting house . . . Fairbairn called it a mystery house; the British SAS calls it a
killing
house . . . knows how tense and draining the experience can be.”

In the darkness, the truck leveled off in what seemed to be a meadow.

“And?” William asked.

“In nineteen thirty-nine, at the start of the Second World War, Fairbairn went back to England and joined the War Office. There, he taught what he called ‘gutterfighting’ to the British commandos. After that, he went to America and taught the OSS, which eventually became the CIA. He and his colleague Eric Sykes invented the Fairbairn-Sykes dagger that the British commandos used. His students went on to teach other students.
Those
students spread the gospel according to Fairbairn until his close-quarter-combat tactics became pretty much universal in any unit that truly knows what it's doing. Not only are Fairbairn's tactics easy to learn, but they stick with you. In the nineteen nineties, the CIA tested his theories on some behind-the-lines World War Two agents. Those eighty-year-olds hadn't forgotten any of what Fairbairn taught them. The system was so simple and logical, it came back to them automatically and proved that you didn't need to be young and strong to protect yourself.”

The truck stopped.

“We made it,” Jamie said.

“See?” Cavanaugh told William. “That five minutes didn't take long.” Wary, he climbed down from the truck, assessing the murky outline of a cabin. “Jamie, here's the key Garth gave me. While the rest of you get settled inside, I'll check the perimeter.”

“Wait,” William insisted. “You're just going to stop? What about the specifics of Fairbairn's system?”

“There's work to be done, William.”

11

Garth stepped from his cruiser into a nightmare. Ahead, on East Broadway, one of Jackson's few main streets, lingering flames as well as the headlights and flashing lights of emergency vehicles showed the wreckage of five cars. The vehicle in the middle had been ripped apart by an explosion. Fiery debris had struck and ignited the four police cars, eventually setting off the fuel in their gas tanks. Now the cars were just smoking metal frames. Paramedics put unconscious state troopers onto Gurneys, wheeling them toward two ambulances. The air smelled of cooked flesh.
Dear God
, Garth thought, watching the ambulances speed away.

Movement caught his attention. Jackson's chief of police finished an urgent conversation with a fireman and walked toward him. Jackson had about 8,200 all-year residents, with an additional 10,000 ski-season residents, and three million tourists who passed through during the summer. The huge influx of visitors meant that the area's law enforcement, emergency, and medical systems needed to be first-rate, but even so, they weren't accustomed to gunfights and explosions, let alone two in less than twelve hours.

“You radioed ahead to warn us about the pursuit,” the police chief said. “I sure hope you know what's going on.”

Sickened, Garth scanned the shattered store windows on each side of the street: Pendleton's, Jackson Mercantile, Chico's, Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The wooden sidewalks were smoldering. So were some of the cottonwoods in the town square. One of the four elk-antler arches that served as entrances to the square's small park had been blown into pieces. Thousands of chunks of gray-white antlers covered the street like dirty snow.

“This is connected to the attack on Aaron Stoddard's place.”

“And what was
that
about?”

“No one's sure.” Garth outlined the facts that were available, then asked, “What did they have in that car? A bomb? What set it off? Bullets?”

The police chief pointed toward a crowd at the far end of the square, shocked residents and tourists wearing hastily put-on clothes, some only in housecoats. “A guy walking his dog saw the whole thing. He said there were a lot of sirens and squealing tires. But no shots. Definitely no shots. Several people who live nearby and were wakened by the sirens say they didn't hear shots, either.”

“So what set off the explosive? Whoever was in that car, were they so determined not to be questioned that they blew themselves up?”

“I don't see how they could have,” the police chief said.

“What do you mean?”

“They couldn't have reached the explosive to detonate it. The blast split the chassis upward. From the middle. From underneath.”

“
Underneath?
” Garth asked in confusion.

“We'll need crime-scene investigators to confirm it, but at the moment, it looks as if the bomb was mounted under the car.”

“They didn't know it was there?”

“Seems that way. If it was their explosive, they'd have kept the bomb in the trunk or in the back seat, where they could get to it in a hurry. But this way . . .”

Garth understood. “Yes. The only reason to put the bomb
under
the car was to hide it from the people inside.”

12

The man who called himself Bowie drove west over the rugged Teton Pass, leaving Wyoming. Dark mountains hulked on each side. His destination was a motel in Idaho Falls, two hours away. He'd rented a room there two days previously. He'd made his preparations and left yesterday before dawn, arriving in Jackson Hole with plenty of time to accompany the sniper on his hike to the ranch. At mid-day, the motel's maid would have cleaned his room and made the bed. There was no way for her to be aware that for much of tonight, the bed would not have been slept in. Tomorrow, after he got a few hours sleep, she would again make the bed, nothing unusual about his patterns. By then, he'd have checked out, gone to the Idaho Falls airport, and flown his plane to his next destination.

As he drove through the darkness, his tortured thoughts tugged him back to a long-ago summer when he and Aaron had played in the shadows of the trees in the park at the bottom of their street. Someone had built a new subdivision a few blocks away. To make the location more attractive, the owner had put in a lake, stocking it with goldfish. What the owner didn't count on was the effect of heavy rains. The lake overflowed, fish and water spilling into the stream that wound through the park. Aaron and Bowie had sat by that stream, spellbound by the magic of the six-inch-long fish, their speckled gold shimmering beneath the water.

“We could go home and get buckets,” Aaron had suggested. “Trap a couple of fish in each bucket.”

“And then what?”

“Try to convince our parents to buy us each a fish tank.”

“I don't think my father would go for that. He'd probably knock me on the floor for suggesting it.”

“I don't think my stepfather would go for it, either,” Aaron said. “But, hey, we could still get the buckets. What we'll do is catch the fish and carry them back to the lake.”

“It'll take all day,” Bowie said, although his name had been different back then. “Besides it wouldn't make a difference. The next rain, all these fish will flood back into the stream.” He removed his knife from his pocket and opened it. “I know what to do.”

Aaron stared uneasily at the sunlight glinting off the blade.

Bowie saw a dead branch on the ground and cut off its twigs. He was about to sharpen its tip and suggest that they use the fish for target practice, but the look on Aaron's face told him to make a different suggestion. “Let's get some string and safety pins. We'll fish. We'll pretend our helicopter crashed in the jungle.”

“Cool.” A doubt clouded Aaron's eyes. “But if we catch any, I don't want to eat them. They're not very big, and I'm not sure goldfish taste good.”

“Who said anything about eating them? We'll put them back in the lake after we catch them.”

But they never did catch any fish, no matter how hard they tried throughout that muggy summer, most of which they spent in the shade of those dense trees, pretending they were the last two members of a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines. They became so skilled at hiding from the enemy that kids bicycling past or men and women strolling hand-in-hand along the path didn't see them crouching among the bushes.

As things turned out, it didn't rain again for a long time. The stream evaporated until there were only four inches of water. Most of the fish suffocated. By then, he and Aaron had gotten tired of fishing and instead lay among the bushes, reading Bowie's knife magazines. Sometimes when Bowie's father got even drunker than usual, bragging about what a hot-shit football player he'd been and how Bowie had damned sure better be as good, Bowie went down to the park on his own. He speared a couple of the surviving fish. His knife was so sharp that it made him feel as if he cut through butter when he sliced their bellies open. After all, what did it matter? The fish would have died anyhow.

13

“By the time I concluded that you and Aaron Stoddard were the same person, I'd learned a lot about your alter-ego,” William said in the cabin. “Aaron Stoddard is part of Jackson Hole's search-and-rescue team. He volunteers to coach basketball at a local school. He teaches children's groups about wilderness camping.”

“A hell of a swell guy,” Cavanaugh said. Knowing that he'd been investigated made him feel vulnerable. If William could find him, others could. In fact, they
had
.

The cabin—a hunting retreat that Garth leased from the government—had a living/cooking area, a bedroom, a hand-pumped well, and an outdoor toilet. After scouting the perimeter, Cavanaugh had waited in the woods, listening, satisfying himself that the night was quiet.

Meanwhile, Jamie had closed and locked the interior shutters. When he entered, he saw her put a lamp in a corner, where it wouldn't help a gunman who peered through cracks in the shutters and tried to use its feeble light to guide his aim. Mrs. Patterson (tireless, wonderful Mrs. Patterson) used the cabin's Coleman stove to heat cans of soup that she found in a cupboard.