The Protector

  With a loud scrape, a lock was disengaged. Cavanaugh pressed himself closer to the wall, keeping far enough away that he couldn't be seen.

  As he expected, whoever was in there opened the door only as far as a chain would allow.

  "You ordered two medium pizzas?" Jamie looked at the piece of paper taped to the top box. "Pepperoni and black olives? The other deluxe?"

  "Usually it's a kid who delivers." The man had a European accent.

  "No shit," Jamie said. "My husband and I own the business. Three delivery kids didn't show up tonight. Lucky me, here I am."

  The man chuckled. "How much?"

  She raised the boxes tighter to her breasts while she leaned down to read him the price on the piece of paper.

  "Hang on a second." The man closed the door.

  The moment the door swung shut and the man couldn't see what was in front of it, Cavanaugh hurried from where he was pressed against the wall. He rushed the door and ducked below the peephole. Shielding Jamie, he heard the scrape and rattle of the chain being freed.

  As the door came open all the way, Cavanaugh charged toward the surprised man. Obeying instructions, Jamie upended the pizza boxes so the Kevlar vest inside protected her. The man was the same skinhead Cavanaugh had taken the black car from at the shopping mall almost two weeks earlier. Gaping, the skinhead fumbled to draw a pistol. Cavanaugh whacked his Sig's barrel hard across the man's hairless skull. Stunned, the man fell backward, pinning his gun arm. Cavanaugh leapt over him and entered the living room, aiming to the left, toward the area across from the television.

  A mustached man who looked about forty sat petrified in a chair, not knowing which way to look—toward Cavanaugh's pistol or the one that Jamie aimed from the kitchen archway. The man's own pistol was on a coffee table before him.

  Rutherford was bound and gagged in a chair in the far left corner. Blood on his face contrasted with his black skin. His eyes bulged in surprise, but Cavanaugh didn't have time for him now. He grabbed the pistol off the table. As he passed the mustached man, he whacked him over the head, as well. Then he pressed himself against a wall leading into the shadowy bedroom. After aiming in toward the side of the room that he was able to see, he darted over to the other wall and aimed in toward the opposite side of the room. When nothing alarmed him, he lunged in, shoved a bureau against the closet door, checked under the bed, and then made sure the bathroom was clear.

  When he returned to the living room, the mustached man lay on the floor, moaning.

  Cavanaugh hurried to the front door, locked it, then aimed toward the skinhead on the floor. He searched him for weapons, removed a pistol tucked at the back of his belt, and used the belt to secure the man's hands behind his back.

  He did the same to the mustached man's hands, then checked that the front closet was empty. Only then did he run over to Rutherford, removing the gag from his mouth. "Did we get them all?" "Yes."

  Cavanaugh untied rope from Rutherford's ankles and wrists. "How bad are you hurt?" He assessed the bruises and gashes on Rutherford's face.

  "1 lost a tooth." Rutherford pointed toward his swollen left cheek. "They might have cracked some ribs." He winced as he took a breath.

  Cavanaugh saw a box of tissues on a side table. He grabbed several and gave them to Rutherford. "Cough deeply and spit into these."

  Rutherford did. "Lord Almighty, that hurt." Cavanaugh inspected the spit in the tissue. "No blood. Lie down on the sofa." Cavanaugh helped him over to it and then pressed gently against Rutherford's abdomen and chest. "I don't feel any swelling. Have you got any pain you're suspicious about?"

  "It's been long enough; if they broke anything inside me, I'd have passed out by now." Rutherford massaged his wrists, where the blood circulation had been almost cut off.

  "Where's your first-aid kit?"

  "Under the sink in the bathroom."

  When Cavanaugh returned with the kit and a soapy washcloth, Rutherford was making an effort to sit up. "You haven't introduced me to your friend."

  "Meet Jennifer. Jennifer, this is John."

  Jamie showed no reaction to being introduced by a false name.

  "Pleased to meet you. Mighty glad to be alive to have the pleasure," Rutherford said.

  Cavanaugh opened the first-aid kit and paused when he found three syringes among the bandages and ointments. He held them up and then realized why they were there. "From when your wife was alive?"

  She'd been a diabetic and had injected herself daily with insulin, Cavanaugh knew. Ironically, a car accident had been what killed her.

  "I gave away a lot of Deb's clothes to the church. I threw away a lot more stuff, old shoes and things that she knew weren't worth keeping but she'd hung on to anyhow. Except for a few of her favorite dresses, which I kept, I didn't have any trouble parting with most of it, but somehow those syringes made me think of her more fondly than anything else. I couldn't bring myself to throw them out."

  Cavanaugh put them back in the first-aid kit and began to clean Rutherford's face.

  "You got my warning—my second MSG remark?" Rutherford asked.

  "Nicely done."

  "I'd have let them kill me before I'd have sent you into a trap."

  "I know," Cavanaugh said.

  "The people I asked about Prescott and his lab said they'd never heard of him." Hours of having been gagged made Rutherford sound raspy.

  "I'll get you some water," Jamie said.

  When she returned, Rutherford took several deep swallows, wetting the dried blood on his lips and causing it to trickle. "Then I searched our computer database." Another swallow. "I came up with nothing."

  "Then how did—"

  "These guys must have an informant in the Bureau. Either that or they hacked into our computer system, looking for anybody who'd made inquiries about Prescott. When I left my office to go home, they were waiting near my car in the parking area." Wincing, Rutherford fingered the side of his jaw where his tooth had been knocked out. "Somebody called my name from the next row. I turned to see who it was. All of a sudden, a van stopped next to me. While it screened me from view, three guys grabbed me from behind and shoved me inside."

  "The man who shouted. The three men who grabbed you. The van's driver. A total of five?" Cavanaugh asked.

  "No." Rutherford swallowed more water. "There's a sixth guy, the one who runs the show. He calls himself Kline."

  "I recognize your two guards. They were with the first group that went after Prescott."

  Rutherford frowned past Cavanaugh. "Jennifer, you look sick."

  Cavanaugh turned toward her. "You're pale. You'd better sit."

  "What I had in mind was kneeling." She went through the bedroom and into the bathroom.

  A moment later, Cavanaugh heard the muffled sounds of her throwing up.

  "Her first time on an operation?" Rutherford asked.

  "Yes."

  "She did good."

  Cavanaugh nodded.

  When she came back, he held her.

  "I didn't let you down," Jamie said.

  "You didn't let me down." And I didn't let you down, he added silently.

  As the mustached man moaned on the floor, Jamie stepped over him, easing into a chair across from Rutherford. "Don't mind me. Go on with what you were saying while I try to convince myself that I'm still alive."

  Cavanaugh's hands had been steady as long as he'd had something to do. Now he had to concentrate to keep them from shaking. "Yes, what happened next?"

  "After these guys worked me over enough to prove they meant business, they put a gun to my head and gave me a choice—either I'd tell them why I wanted Prescott or they'd kill me." Rutherford held the wet washcloth to his bruised cheek. "I explained I didn't want Prescott. A friend of mine did. They gave me the same choice—tell them who my friend was or they'd kill me. I didn't use your name. All I said was 'a man who'd been part of Prescott's security.'"

  Cavanaugh nodded.

  "That got them extremely interes
ted," Rutherford said. "They couldn't wait to get their hands on you."

  "Sure. They thought I might know where Prescott had gone."

  "I told them you were trying to find him, too, that you didn't know anything more than they did."

  "But they didn't buy it?" Cavanaugh asked.

  "No way. They put the gun to my head again and ordered me to tell you Prescott's lab was at a place called Bailey's Ridge in Virginia."

  "And now four of them, including Kline, are at Bailey's Ridge, arranging a trap for me?"

  "They left as soon as your phone call was over," Rutherford said.

  Jamie leaned forward. "When nobody shows up, they'll wonder what went wrong. They'll come back here and hope you make contact again, as you promised."

  "Yes," Cavanaugh said. "They'll want to set another trap."

  Rutherford reached for the phone.

  "Hey, what are you doing?" Cavanaugh reached to stop him.

  "Getting help."

  "No."

  "But the Bureau can—"

  "We don't know who else is involved in this."

  Rutherford hesitated.

  "You said Kline might have an informant in the Bureau," Cavanaugh said. "Suppose Kline got word we were waiting for him. This'd be the last place he'd come near."

  * * *

  17

  When the intercom buzzed, Cavanaugh waited a few seconds, then pressed the button. "Yes?"

  The security guard's voice was tinny. "Mr. Kline and another gentleman to see you."

  "Send them up." Cavanaugh released the button and went back into the living room.

  "Two of them," Rutherford said. "The other two must have stayed at Bailey's Ridge in case you showed up."

  Jamie glanced at her watch. "Just past noon. Earlier than you expected."

  "After being on a stakeout all night, Kline must really be annoyed that I didn't do what I said I would. Now he wants another heart-to-heart with John. Are we ready for guests?" Cavanaugh directed his question toward the skinhead and the mustached man, who were tied to chairs. It had taken the men an hour to regain consciousness. Insistent questioning had revealed only that they were contract operators and knew nothing about why Prescott was important.

  On two occasions, the skinhead's cell phone had rung, Kline angrily checking in. Cavanaugh had rehearsed with the two captives, making sure they knew exactly how to respond if either of their cell phones rang. With his pistol to the skinhead's temple, Cavanaugh had watched the man's eyes as he spoke into his phone. If Cavanaugh had detected even the slightest attempt to warn Kline, he'd have shown keen displeasure.

  The skinhead now wore a baseball cap to hide his gashed scalp. "I asked you"—Cavanaugh tapped the cap—"if you're ready to receive guests."

  The skinhead winced and nodded.

  "I'll see you in a few minutes," Jamie said. Following instructions that they'd worked out earlier, she left the apartment. Rutherford locked the door.

  Cavanaugh nervously imagined her moving along the corridor, opening the door to the stairwell near the elevator, and waiting behind it. When Jamie heard the ding of the elevator, she would count to twenty, the length of time they had calculated it took to walk from the elevator to Rutherford's condo. Then she would open the door and step from the stairwell, fumbling in her purse for what was presumably the key to her unit, never once looking down the hallway at the two men outside Rutherford's door. The men would notice her, but with no reason to be suspicious of a trap—after all, they were the ones setting a trap—they would soon be distracted by what happened when Rutherford's door opened. Jamie had looked steady as she left, having used the intervening time to practice visualization techniques that Cavanaugh taught her, imagining possible variations to the scenario they had planned, replaying them in her mind, preparing herself not to be surprised. To give her more confidence, she wore the Kevlar vest under her blouse and jacket. It made her look overweight, her clothes too tight, but her appearance was the last thing she was worried about.

  "Okay," Cavanaugh told the skinhead, aiming his pistol at him. "Be a good host."

  Rutherford had already freed the man's ankles and wrists. Now he untied the ropes that held the hostage to the chair. "Remember," Cavanaugh told the man. "You'll be the first one in our line of fire." He motioned for him to cross the living room. Following, he watched the man go down the corridor and pause at the front door.

  "Now all you have to do is make sure you don't give us a reason to shoot you," Cavanaugh said.

  Rutherford took his position in the kitchen, ready with a pistol.

  Sweat trickling down his sides, Cavanaugh waited.

  Fifteen seconds. Thirty. Fifty. Cavanaugh recalled how slowly the elevator had seemed to rise. That the men hadn't yet knocked on the door didn't mean something was wrong, he tried to assure himself. Be patient. Everything's going to be—

  Knock, knock. Pause. Knock, knock. That was the pattern John had heard the team agree on—the code that signaled it was okay to open the door.

  Cavanaugh's stomach constricted as he motioned for the skinhead to let them in.

  At that point, the start of a carefully rehearsed sequence, Cavanaugh stepped back into the living room, out of sight of the doorway. The skinhead would be very aware that Rutherford was aiming at him from the kitchen. Having opened the door, the skinhead would say, "He hasn't called," then turn and walk toward the living room, directly into Cavanaugh's line of fire. Meanwhile, Rutherford would have taken cover beside the refrigerator. Only when the men came inside and started along the corridor would Rutherford again show himself, aiming at them through the kitchen archway. The second man would notice Rutherford about the same time the first man noticed Cavanaugh in the living room. Simultaneously, Jamie would have come up behind them, drawing her pistol, saying, "Into the living room," which she did now.

  Caught by surprise in a three-way vise, their weapons beneath their jackets, the men had little choice but to comply.

  "On the floor,"

  Rutherford said. "Hands behind your head." "Now," Cavanaugh said.

  The skinhead did what he was told, sinking chest-down onto the carpet. The other two hesitated only briefly before they imitated him, putting their hands behind their heads. Jamie stepped in, locking the door.

  "Was anybody else in the hallway?" Cavanaugh asked, aiming at the men. "Did they see your pistol?"

  "Two people got off the elevator as I came in here. My pistol was next to my purse. Nobody saw it."

  Cavanaugh felt a measure of relief. John had assured him that the people who lived in the building were mostly professional types, not likely to be home early in the afternoon on a weekday. Even so, someone coming along the hallway at the wrong time had been a liability Cavanaugh couldn't plan for.

  "Cute," the first man said, peering up from the carpet. He was of medium height, wiry, with a thin face and military-style hair. Cavanaugh recognized the sandpapery voice. "We've spoken before. On this guy's cell phone." Cavanaugh meant the skinhead. "After I took the car from him outside the shopping mall." "You figured out the phone contained a homing device." Like the skinhead, the man had a European accent. "We followed it for hours, until we realized you'd thrown it into the back of a passing pickup truck."

  "Hey, if you can't take a joke." A thought occurred to Cavanaugh. "You followed the truck? Why did you bother if you already knew we'd used a helicopter to leave the area?" "Helicopter? I don't know what you're talking about." The man's confusion looked spontaneous enough to be convincing, reinforcing Cavanaugh's suspicion that the team who'd tried to grab Prescott at the warehouse had not been the same team that had used helicopters to attack the bunker.

  While he and Jamie continued to aim at the men on the floor, Rutherford tied their ankles and wrists.

  Cavanaugh removed a 9-mm Beretta from beneath the second man's loose pullover. He felt beneath the first man's black leather jacket and found a 9-mm Browning Hi-Power. He also found a folding knife clipped to the inside of his
pants pocket. Only the clip showed on the outside. By pulling upward on the clip, the owner could draw the knife instantaneously from concealment. A small ribbed projection on the back of the blade allowed it to be thumbed open one-handed in the same motion as the knife was being drawn. When open, it was almost eight inches long.

  Knives had once been considered inferior weapons ("Dummy, you brought a knife to a gunfight"), but a graphic self-defense video released in the 1990s, Surviving Sharp-Edged Weapon Attacks, had shown law-enforcement and security personnel that an assailant with a knife could race across a distance of twenty feet and cause lethal wounds before someone with a concealed handgun could overcome his startle reflex, draw, and fire. Now some operators considered a knife as prudent a backup weapon as a pistol and carried as many as three. The knife Cavanaugh held had a nonreflective flat-black surface and had been manufactured by one of the best self-defense instructors and knife makers: Ernest Emerson. It was called the CQC-7, the initials representing "close-quarter combat." Its weave-patterned epoxy handle was designed not to be slippery when covered with water, sweat, or blood. Its serrated steel was hard and sharp enough to punch through a car door.

  "Cute," Cavanaugh said, echoing what the first man had said. He closed the knife and clipped it into his pants pocket. He sat cross-legged on the floor, at the first man's eye level. "You're using the name Kline?"

  "It's as good as anything."

  "Tell me about Prescott."

  Kline didn't answer.

  "I'll tell you what I know about him," Cavanaugh said. "Feel free to chime in any time you feel like it."

  Cavanaugh told Kline what had happened after the car chase: the arrival at the bunker, the instructions to Prescott about how to disappear, the fire, the helicopter attack, and the other fire at Karen's house. "So, you see, I want him as much as you do. Probably worse. We'd accomplish more if we worked together."

  "But our purposes conflict."

  "I'm sure we can work around our differences." Cavanaugh studied him. "You look like your arms are starting to hurt. Why don't I make you more comfortable?"