The Naked Edge

  “I use small airports,” the stranger explained, as if Raoul understood what the hell he was talking about. “I stay below eighteen thousand feet. That way, I don't need to file an instrument flight plan, and I don't turn on my transponder, which is how radar would otherwise track me.”

  Raoul had trouble concentrating. Until now, he'd never been in a plane. Vertigo threatened to make him vomit. But there was no way he'd let the stranger realize he was afraid. Although his palms were slick with sweat, he kept them firmly on his knees. He forced himself not to tremble.

  The secret was not to look down, he decided. He began to wonder if this was some kind of sex thing, that the stranger would be like the predators Raoul had fought off in prison. But the stranger made no moves of that sort. In fact, after paying Raoul the promised two thousand dollars, all he wanted to talk about was fighting.

  “Ever want to join the military?” the stranger asked.

  “Hell, no.” The jet engines were muffled through the earphones the stranger had given him.

  “Don't you think it would be cool to carry a handgun and an assault rifle as part of your job?”

  “That part. But who wants to go through all the bullshit of taking orders?”

  “One goes with the other.” The stranger had powerful-looking forearms. His sun-darkened face was gaunt, with a crease down each cheek, and an unusual intensity in his hazel eyes. “Nobody's going to give you a gun without telling you how and when to use it.”

  “I already got a gun.”

  “That piece of junk thirty-two? Even if you'd shot me with it, I could have reached you, grabbed it out of your hand, and shoved it down your throat. We'll get you some real guns. Ever fired an MP-5?”

  “A what?”

  “A submachine gun. Do you know the difference between a submachine gun and an actual machine gun?”

  Raoul didn't even know there was a difference.

  “A submachine gun fires pistol ammunition. Nine millimeter. A machine gun fires rifle ammunition. A point two-two-three cartridge, for example. The kind that goes in an M-16. Wicked. The bullet flips end over end when it hits something. Rips the target to shreds. Ever fired a submachine gun?”

  Raoul hesitated, afraid he'd lose face if he admitted the truth. “No.”

  “We'll make up for that deficiency. There's nothing as sweet as firing an MP-5 on full auto, thirty rounds zipping through that gun in two seconds. Raoul, you might not have made love to the most beautiful woman. You might not have tasted the greatest whiskey. You might not have driven the fastest car. But I'm telling you, when you put thirty full-auto rounds through an MP-5, you can definitely say you've shot the world's best submachine gun. But to be given the chance to do that, and to get the further money I promised, you need to follow some orders. I mean, that's in any job, right?”

  “I realize nobody's gonna give me money and not expect me to do something,” Raoul said. “But you asked if I ever wanted to join the army. There's no way I'm gonna make bunk beds and bounce quarters off them and shit like they show in the movies.”

  “Movies, Raoul? You like movies?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you see any movies when you were in prison?”

  “On TV.”

  “Sounds like a cushy prison.”

  “Try it sometime. See how cushy you think it is.”

  “Oh, I've been in prison, Raoul. Believe me. But the kind I was in didn't have TVs. What they had was red-hot needles under my fingernails and electrodes on my testicles.”

  Raoul noticed the scars on the stranger's fingers.

  “When you're not learning about MP-5s and fun stuff like that, you're going to have a different kind of fun, watching a lot of movies,” the stranger said. “Quite a job, huh? To get paid three thousand dollars a month to watch movies?”

  “What movies?”

  “Action movies. I think we'll start with Thief. Michael Mann directed it. James Caan's the star. Ever seen it.”

  Raoul had no idea who the hell Michael Mann and James Caan were. “Sounds like an old movie. I don't watch old movies.”

  “I guarantee you'll love this one. At the end, Caan goes into a house and blows away a bunch of gangsters, using a handgun. It's one of the first times a gunfight had an accurate look in a movie. Mann uses terrific technical advisors. The way Caan holds the pistol. His balance. His footwork. Amazing. I've got a bunch of other movies like it. Ronin. Proof of Life. Spy Game. The Recruit. The thing is, Raoul, you need to ignore the plots and concentrate on the individual scenes, on what the characters do and the way the actors handle themselves, because those movies had terrific technical advisors too, and except for a few spots, they're accurate in their tradecraft.”

  “Tradecraft?”

  “The way operators—professionals—do things. You'll catch on to the vocabulary as we go along. You'll watch Black Hawk Down, of course. And the TV series, The Unit, which is about Delta Force. And Dark Blue. Kurt Russell plays a corrupt cop. The director Ron Shelton got a really good technical advisor. The gun stuff is accurate. And there's a moment when Kurt gives a speech and says, ‘I'm a gunfighter. I come from a family of gunfighters.’ That's a first. I never saw a movie before in which somebody like a police detective who earns his living with a gun calls himself a gunfighter. In life, of course, privately they do call themselves that. Gunfighter. You like the sound of that word, Raoul?”

  “Sounds like an old western.”

  “A western. Good idea, Raoul. I'll make sure you look at The Wild Bunch.”

  The sun was behind them. The expanse of the landscape changed from mountains to flats, from brown to green. Sunset occurred swiftly. Soon they flew in darkness. Raoul controlled his dizziness by staring at the faint glow of the lights on the cockpit's dials.

  “You impress me,” the stranger said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You're afraid to fly.”

  “Who says I'm afraid?”

  “But you don't show it.”

  “Who says I'm afraid?”

  “Not me.”

  Raoul continued to stare ahead, surprised by how much light was on the ground. Towns glowed. Cities glared. Headlights blazed on freeways. There were seldom stretches of pure black. He hadn't realized how many people there were and how bright the night could be. When they reached one of the few sections of black, the stranger aimed the jet toward the heart of it.

  Immediately, two rows of lights appeared in the gloom. As the stranger guided the plane down toward them, Raoul's stomach rose toward his throat. He repressed the urge to be sick. But by God, he wasn't going to show the stranger any of what he felt.

  Descending, he suddenly had the sense of high trees on each side of the lights. Then the lights got big, and he felt a nudge through the plane as the wheels touched down. The stranger steered to the right, toward other lights, which were in a corrugated-metal building that had its large doors open. At once, the lights on the runway went out, but not before Raoul looked back and saw men scurrying across the runway, pulling something over it. A net. They were covering the runway with a camouflage net. The stranger shut off the plane's engines. In the blessed silence, their sound still echoed in Raoul's ears.

  When the stranger opened the exit hatch, humidity enveloped Raoul. Sweat moistened his face and threatened to make his clothes stick to his skin as they stepped from the plane. The air weighed on him.

  Where the hell was he?

  There was too much else to think about. Three men waited for the stranger and him to climb down. They wore thick-soled camping shoes, pants with numerous pockets, loose shirts hanging out, and baseball caps over what their short sideburns suggested was closely cropped hair. One was Anglo. One was Black. One was Hispanic. The latter made Raoul feel less isolated. It took him a moment before he noticed that, although he thought of them as men, two seemed younger than his twenty-three years, but something about the way they carried themselves made clear they were definitely men.

/>   “Everything's on schedule?” the stranger asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Bowie,” the black man said.

  At last, a name for the stranger.

  “This is Mr. Ramirez,” Bowie said, indicating Raoul.

  Despite his uneasiness, Raoul felt proud to have been introduced in that formal manner. Mister. No one had ever called him that before.

  “He's smart,” Bowie said.

  No one had ever spoken about Raoul in that way, either.

  “He'll be an excellent contribution to our group.” Bowie turned to him. “Won't you, Mr. Ramirez?”

  Yes.” Then an amazing thing happened. Raoul didn't think about the next thing he said. He just did it. “Yes, sir.”

  “See?” Bowie told the three men. “An excellent contributor. Get him squared away. Clothes, equipment, something to eat. Show him where he'll be bunking. Mr. Ramirez, as you can tell from these representatives of our group, this is not a white-bread operation. If you have any problem relating to various races, you'll need to get over it in a hurry. We follow the one true god here, and that is Discipline.”

  Sudden gunshots made Raoul flinch. In an instant, he tucked down his head, bent his knees, and raised his hands to defend himself.

  “Quick reactions,” the Anglo said.

  The shots came from behind the building.

  “He shows promise,” the Hispanic agreed.

  The shots persisted: a steady rattle. His stomach on fire, Raoul stared past the plane toward the rear of the building. He had no idea how thick its corrugated metal was, and the only thing that kept him from diving to the concrete floor was that no one else in the group seemed alarmed.

  “It's a night-training exercise,” Bowie told him. “You'll be involved in them soon enough.”

  Out there, something exploded. Again, no one else reacted.

  “And when you're not training,” Bowie said, “you'll learn to sleep despite the noise. Sleep is the operator's friends. Fatigue is among the legion of his enemies. Always sleep and eat whenever you get the chance, although you won't have much time for rest here. Do you like video games, Raoul?”

  “Uh, video games?” The seemingly weird question made Raoul frown as he glanced nervously again in the direction of the shots.

  “Video games, sir.”

  “Sir. I used to. In the joint, there weren't any.”

  “Well, that's different now. Here, when you're not in classes or watching movies, you can play video games as much as you want. The latest versions. Soldier of Fortune. Mortal Kombat. Doom. The U.S. military licenses that one and encourages its soldiers to play it. Medal of Honor. Brothers in Arms. Men of Valor. Full Spectrum Warrior. America's Army. We've got every action video game on the market. Hone your reflexes. Have a ball.”

  4

  “Don't you think you should try to sleep?” Jamie asked Cavanaugh from the shadowy doorway to the bedroom.

  Duncan, who'd sometimes worked twenty-hour days, had put his living quarters next to his office. That Duncan's personal and professional life had been so severely joined made Cavanaugh wonder how his own life and Jamie's would change now that he'd assumed control of the corporation.

  He sat at Duncan's desk, a thick computer printout spread before him.

  “I doubt I could sleep.” Eyes sore with fatigue, he ran his finger down the list that Kim had prepared: his former assignments.

  It depressed him to realize the number and extent of the protective details he'd worked on. Politicians, corporate executives, movie celebrities, sports stars, real-estate barons, on and on. There'd been hundreds, but only a few had seemed special apart from the money, power, or fame they had. The work had been what he'd cared about. As Duncan had insisted, “Unless they're obvious moral monsters, it isn't our place to make judgments about our clients. The only thing that's important is, they're somebody's prey, and predators are always the enemy.”

  “That list will look fresher in the morning,” Jamie said.

  “But in the meantime, what if somebody dies because I didn't do my job? I have to believe, somewhere in these past assignments there's a clue about why the hit team tried to kill us and why those other agents were killed. Or maybe the attack was revenge because of an assassination or kidnapping I prevented. I don't know where else to look.”

  “You can't do your job if you can't think straight.”

  “I've gone without sleep a lot longer than this.”

  “I hear it makes a person psychotic.”

  Cavanaugh had to grin. “You say the sweetest things.”

  “I'm serious.” Jamie massaged his shoulders. “The list will look fresher in the morning.”

  Cavanaugh thought about it and sighed. “All these assignments. When this is over—”

  “Making me think about the future so I don't worry about the present?”

  “I'm projecting myself into the future so I don't worry about the present. When this is over.” Cavanaugh set down the pages. “You're right. Let's get some sleep.”

  He put his arm around her and guided her toward the bedroom.

  The phone rang.

  He paused.

  It rang again.

  He turned.

  “Don't answer it,” Jamie said.

  He stared at the desk. Not Duncan's desk. Not any longer. Now it's my desk.

  “Whatever it's about can wait until morning,” Jamie told him.

  “No,” Cavanaugh decided.

  But when he reached for it, the phone stopped ringing.

  “Couldn't have been that important if the caller hung up,” Jamie said.

  Cavanaugh pointed toward a light on the elaborate phone console. “Somebody else answered. Maybe after a specific number of rings, the call gets transferred to another phone.”

  He stared at the constant light on the console. Next to each light was a name. In this case, the name was Brockman. “If it was a wrong number, he'd have hung up by now. I'd better go find out what's wrong.”

  “What makes you think something's wrong.”

  “Was there ever a call at three in the morning that wasn't about something wrong?”

  They entered the corridor.

  Cavanaugh had the feeling of being lifted, of him and Jamie being thrown through the air and striking the corridor's wall, of dropping to the floor. Immediately, his senses caught up to him. The roar behind him. From the office. No, from beyond the office. From the bedroom. The searing flash. The shockwave punching air from his lungs. Groaning, he rolled toward Jamie as chunks of plaster and wood fell over him. Despite the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard Jamie moan. Then he heard her curse, anger giving her the energy to paw rubble off her.

  He smelled smoke. Struggling to his hands and knees, he peered through the doorway into what had been the office. The wall between the office and the bedroom had been ruptured. The lights had been destroyed, but flickering flames allowed him to see into the gutted bedroom. The window's bullet-resistant glass was spread across the bedroom floor. An October wind howled through the jagged opening, fueling the flames.

  An alarm went off. Overhead sprinklers gushed water into the bedroom and the office.

  Somebody pulled Cavanaugh away—Ali. Somebody else pulled Jamie. Belatedly, Cavanaugh realized it was Kim. Brockman had a fire extinguisher and charged into the wreckage, spraying foam where the flames resisted the water from the sprinklers.

  Then Cavanaugh was clear of the smoke and the dust. Ali set him down in the conference room and turned on the lights. Jamie squirmed next to him, blood running from her nose.

  Cavanaugh realized that blood ran from his nose, also.

  Through blurred vision, he stared at the draperies that covered the conference room windows. “Get us out of here.” His voice seemed to come from far away.

  “What?” Ali asked, as if Cavanaugh spoke gibberish.

  And maybe Cavanaugh did speak gibberish. He pointed toward the windows. “Get us out of this room.” He tried to say it as distinctly and forcefully
as possible, his throat raw, his lips numb.

  “The glass from the other window,” he managed to say.

  “What about it?”

  “. . . sprayed inside the bedroom. The explosion came from outside. It must have been . . . ”

  “A rocket,” Kim realized.

  Handheld types were only thirty inches long. At this late hour, with midtown Manhattan mostly deserted, one could have been easily launched from the opposite sidewalk.

  “Hurry.” Ali helped to pull Cavanaugh and Jamie from the conference room into the lobby.

  But they didn't stop there. Brockman was suddenly with them again. Dropping the fire extinguisher, he helped Ali yank open doors that led to a bank of elevators.

  A bell rang. An elevator opened.

  Brockman, Kim, and Ali drew their guns.

  5

  The man who emerged from the elevator wore black pants and a black leather jacket. He stared at the weapons, stopped chewing gum, and raised his hands. “Whoa,” he said.

  Slowly, the pistols were lowered.

  The man was Eddie Macintosh, one of the protectors Cavanaugh had sent for. He studied the blood trickling from Cavanaugh's nose. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Have you got a car?”

  “In the parking garage downstairs.”

  From the gaping window down the hall, they heard the wail of approaching sirens.

  Jamie sat up. “Get us out of here.”

  “To the hospital?”

  “No. We'd be targets there.”

  “And we'd be defenseless at a police precinct.” Cavanaugh forced himself to stand. “We can't assume every police officer and fireman who arrives is genuine.”

  Through the shattered window, the sirens sounded closer.

  Cavanaugh wavered, then helped Jamie up. “How did they know to hit our bedroom?”

  “Maybe they saw its light go on,” Brockman said.

  “No. That light was off,” Jamie insisted. “What was that phone call about?”