David Morrell - The naked edge

His handcrafted knife was different from the one with the polished ebony handle that he liked to play with. This knife was for business. Its action was butter-slick as he thumbed the button at the back of the blade, flipping it open. Anodized black, forged from 440 C steel, it was sharp enough to slip between the fibers of a Kevlar vest. Its handle was made from a grooved, laminated, almost indestructible plastic called Micarta. The grooves were important because they allowed Bowie to keep a tight grip, even if his fingers were slippery with blood.

"Where the hell did that come from?" a kid exclaimed.

Raoul raised his pistol.

"Take it easy," Bowie said. "I just need this for the bet. If you kill me, it needs to look as if you're defending yourself."

"If? There's no 'if' about it." Raoul's eyelids lowered. "The bet was fifty feet. Right?" He took another ten steps back.

"Aw, come on," Bowie complained. "You want this to be fair, don't you?"

"Fifty feet is fair."

"But you need to keep the gun at your side. You can't raise it until the bet starts," Bowie said.

"Sure." Across the vast distance, Raoul smirked. "At my side." He lowered the gun.

Bowie lowered his knife and braced himself without seeming to. "Who's going to do the counting?"

"Counting? Nobody said anything about-"

Screaming at the top of his voice, Bowie charged. "I'm going to rip your guts out, cocksucker!" he shouted. "Cocksucker! Cocksucker!" Reaching full speed almost immediately, he hurtled across the distance, his motion so violent, his face so contorted with fury, that Raoul flinched. Instead of raising the gun, aiming, and pulling the trigger, he lurched backward. Off-balance to begin with, he became more off-balance when his knees bent with a will of their own. His arms jerked protectively up toward his chest. The instinctive motion caused the gun to point upward instead of toward the target who rushed at him, screaming, "Killyoukillyoukillyou!"

The scenario was a worst-case nightmare for anyone who earned a living with a gun. Law-enforcement officers, special-operations personnel, protective agents-any professional knew that someone with a knife could scream and race across those fifty feet and kill you before you overcame your surprise and defended yourself. The only defense was to avoid the scenario and shoot that s.o.b. dead the moment you saw the knife. Then, if you were in law enforcement, you had to justify your actions to a review board and maybe a grand jury. Almost certainly the relatives of the dead piece of shit would complain tearfully, "It wasn't fair. A gun against a knife. The cop had the advantage. He didn't need to shoot." And you'd think, "I damned well did need to shoot. And if I needed to do it again, I'd nail that sucker just as dead as he is now." Because, in the popular imagination, the person with the knife stops running, gets set, and then jabs with the knife, wasting a valuable second or two in which time the person with the gun overcomes the startle reflex and starts blasting. But in reality, the person with the knife doesn't stop but keeps rushing, using all that raging momentum to slam into the person with the gun and send him or her flying backward, crashing against a wall or onto the ground, and then the assailant drops onto the victim and goes to work with the knife.

That was close to what happened now. Raoul gaped, knees bent, arms thrust uselessly upward, as Bowie seemed to cross the no-longer-vast distance in hardly any time at all. Using his shoulder, he rammed into Raoul with such power that Raoul's lungs emptied. His feet left the ground. His body arched backward. His head made a sickening crunching sound when he landed.

At that moment, Bowie could have used a curving downward motion to slice Raoul's throat. Instead, he yanked the gun from Raoul's hand and spun toward his gaping pals, ready with the knife and the pistol.

"Want to make a bet?" Bowie asked.

"Jesus, man, don't shoot me," the kid with the knife begged.

"Farthest thing from my mind." Bowie put the gun under his belt. "Raoul, are you watching this? I want to make sure you see it."

"Uh," Raoul murmured. "What?"

"Damn it, are you watching this?"

"Uh, yeah, uh."

Bowie folded his knife and clipped it onto a pants pocket.

"You," Bowie told the kid with the knife. "I asked you if you want to make a bet."

"Bet?"

"That the three of you can't take me."

The three kids kept gaping.

Bowie again assumed his absolutely non-threatening position, folding his left arm across his chest, raising his right palm and pressing it against the side of his face. "Come on, for God's sake, do something!"

The kid with the knife took his chance. As he lunged with the knife, Bowie whipped his right hand down and deflected the knife. At the same time, he turned his left hand so that his palm was outward and slapped the kid as hard as he could, the blow so powerful and covering so large a portion of the kid's face that his eyes rolled up.

In the same motion, Bowie spun so that the edge of one of his thick-soled shoes caught the side of the second kid's leg, hitting a nerve that temporarily disabled the leg and sent the kid screaming onto the dirt. Meanwhile, the kid with the knife sagged to his knees. Bowie thrust his right palm upward under the kid's chin, holding back just enough force that he didn't break the kid's neck when he struck. He kicked the third kid in the testicles, and when that kid pitched his head reflexively forward, Bowie jabbed a palm to his exposed chin also. Both dropped, unconscious.

That left the one whose leg was paralyzed, the pain so intense that he could barely make himself fumble for something in a pants pocket. As the kid pulled out a shitty, short-barreled.22 revolver, Bowie kicked him in the chin, taking care that he only broke the jaw and didn't kill him.

Raoul lay on the ground, struggling to catch his breath, blinking in disbelief.

"And what did you think of that?" Bowie asked.

"Uh."

"How'd you like a job?"

"Uh."

"How'd you like to learn to do that? Be an operator. Win friends and cause a world of pain."

"Job? What kind of-"

"Working for me." Bowie pulled a money clip from his pocket. The steel clip, handcrafted by him, had a knife so skillfully concealed along the side that he never had trouble taking it through security checkpoints. "Two thousand dollars as a sign-up fee."

"Two thousand?"

"You get room and board, free clothing and equipment."

"Two thousand?"

"The sign-up fee. Then you get three thousand a month. You never got that much robbing liquor stores."

"What do I need to do?"

"Prove you can learn. And then…"

"Yes?"

"Do what you're told."

"A slap?" William asked, as if Cavanaugh were joking.

Cavanaugh felt subtle pressure in his stomach as the Gulfstream G-200 soared away from the airport in Casper, Wyoming. Jackson Hole's airport could have handled the jet, but there was too great a chance that the attack team would watch that airport. Better to use the helicopter to fly 240 miles east to Casper, where the Gulfstream had been instructed to land and wait for them. GLOBAL PROTECTIVE SERVICES was stenciled across the side. Club chairs, a conference table, living-room-style sitting for up to ten passengers, a spacious galley, a sophisticated entertainment system, a transcontinental fuel range, quiet engines, one hundred percent filtered air, plenty of natural light.

"You think a slap sounds like a sissy kind of thing?" Cavanaugh asked.

"Well, certainly," William said.

Jamie came from the bathroom, where she'd put on a white blouse, blue blazer, and gray slacks, clothes that William had instructed the pilots to bring. Turquoise earrings brought out the deep green in her eyes. She'd undone her ponytail, her brunette hair hanging to her shoulders.