David Morrell - The naked edge

"Creepy," Jamie said. "It's like he was stalking you."

"Yeah. And it didn't help that the other Delta operators associated him with me. When he got too competitive, I could sense they wanted me to tell him to cool it. But Carl was in competition with me more than anyone. He wasn't about to let me give him advice. He knew enough to be a team player when it came to our missions. One time, in Iraq, in the first Gulf War, he saved my life. I made up for that by saving his life in Bosnia. The knives, though. He couldn't stop his fixation on the knives. In an effort to buy the team's friendship, he even went to the trouble of making tactical folders for everybody. But then he sabotaged any good will he created. Our team went on a mission to the Philippines to retrieve an American diplomat who'd been kidnapped by terrorists. Carl was supposed to take out an enemy sentry, using a sound-suppressed pistol. Instead, he crawled up to the guy and killed him with a knife. Almost jeopardized the assignment. Later, after we extracted the diplomat, our CO was furious. Carl claimed his pistol malfunctioned. He said his only option was to take out the sentry hand-to-hand. The CO seemed to accept his explanation. But Carl never got sent on another mission, and three months later, he was dismissed from the unit."

"So how did he get hired by Global Protective Services?"

Cavanaugh hesitated. "After Duncan retired from Delta Force and set up his business, Carl came to me, asking if I'd put in a good word. Even if it was sometimes strained, the friendship was there. He'd never done anything against me. To the contrary, he'd kept me from coming home in a body bag. Maybe his pistol had malfunctioned on that extraction assignment. For sure, his courage was never in doubt. Duncan and I talked about it. Duncan tried him on some low-level assignments. No problem. Some mid-level assignments. Again, no problem. Then Carl and I got assigned to protect a teenage female rock star who was getting death threats from a fan. The rock star was dating a sports celebrity, and the fan got jealous."

"I notice you haven't told me her name."

When Cavanaugh mentioned who she was, Jamie nodded. "Yeah, a knockout. The kind that flashes a lot of skin but claims to be a virgin."

"You can see how this nut-case fan felt conflicted. The singer had the money for a full-scale nine-operator team, including two female agents made up to look like her."

"Which is really twenty-seven operators, divided in shifts of three." Jamie did some rapid arithmetic. "That's a budget for some Third World countries."

"Then the police caught a man they were sure was the stalker. He even confessed."

"To get attention," Jamie said, anticipating where Cavanaugh was going. "But the real stalker-"

"Came at her after she'd reduced the protection detail to five operators. It happened outside her hotel. I was the agent in charge. I tried to convince her to use a hotel that had an underground parking garage so she could get into her limousine where there weren't any crowds."

"No anonymous car for her," Jamie said.

"Exactly. She needed to see her fans, she told me, and they needed to see her. It was great publicity, she said. Entertainment Tonight wanted to show her interacting bravely with her admirers. So we came out of the hotel, trying to part the crowd. I never would have agreed to the set-up if I hadn't believed what the police told me-that they had the stalker. We moved in a standard square formation: two agents in back, two in front. The singer was in the middle with me next to her. The deal was, if somebody came at her, I was to shield her with my body and get her into the hotel or into the limo, whichever was closer. Meanwhile, the rest of the team was to surround us, to provide a barrier between her and the stalker and make sure he wasn't acting alone. The idea was to protect the client first and disable the attacker second. So when this man charged out of the crowd, thrusting a knife at her, I went into my covering mode. The rest of the team formed a ring as we backed toward the hotel. And that son of a bitch Carl broke ranks to have a knife fight with the guy."

"What?"

"Yeah, there they were in front of the Plaza hotel, a couple of thousand fans, a ton of TV cameras, everybody screaming as the team and I hurried the singer back into the hotel, and Carl's out there, showing the guy how the business end of a knife works. Flash, flash, slash. Before the stalker died, I bet he was astonished by the enormous quantity of blood he lost. Carl was standing over the trembling corpse. Meanwhile, the crowd's in a panic, and the TV cameras are taking it all in, getting Carl's face in close-up. A little too much recognition factor for someone in the protection business. The grand jury called it a justified killing. Carl claimed that the guy was coming at him, to drop him and get through to the client. 'No choice,' Carl said. Privately, the members of the team knew that was bullshit. We knew Carl was so highly trained, he could have disarmed and disabled the guy before the situation got lethal. He killed the guy because-"

"He wanted to have a knife fight," Jamie said.

Cavanaugh nodded. "Not that it was much of a knife fight, but yeah, I'm sure that was half his motive. And the other half? We're trained not to look at our clients when we're protecting them. The idea is to watch away from them, to see if there's a threat coming. But I noticed Carl giving the singer glances, checking her out, enjoying the view. I think the knife fight was Carl's way of trying to impress her, to earn a permanent gig protecting her."

"Did he get what he wanted?"

"What he got was fired, and this time, when he begged me to put in a good word, to persuade Duncan to rehire him, I told him to go to hell. The friendship had been strained for a long time. That broke it. I wanted nothing to do with him, even on a professional basis, because as far as I was concerned, he'd stopped being dependable. I wasn't the only operator who felt that way. No reputable protection agency would hire him. The last I heard, he was working for a Colombian drug lord."

"But now you think he's back?"

"Whoever arranged for all those protective agents to be killed with sharp weapons couldn't have done it without a thorough knowledge of how the protection business works. Combine that with a knife obsession-"

"And you get Carl Duran," Jamie said. "Maybe it wasn't the female rock singer he was trying to impress with the knife fight."

"Not her? Who else would he-"

"You. He has to assume you've made the connection between him and the blade attacks. He'll hunt you as hard as he can." PART FIVE:

Rutherford almost drove past the place before he noticed it. It was in a seedy section of Alexandria, Virginia, a locale so unexpected that he was sure he'd misunderstood the address he'd been given. But then he looked harder and spotted the Hideaway Motel between a massage parlor and a porn-video shop. Shaking his head at what he hoped wasn't a practical joke, he turned left at the next intersection. He went up and down several streets at random and watched his rearview mirror to check if he was being followed. Finally, he headed back to the motel and steered into its lot, where he parked next to a Dumpster and knocked on a door.

Winos, drug dealers, and gang members watched as it opened and Jamie smiled.

Stepping in, Rutherford surveyed the grimy floor, cracked mirror, and sunken mattress. Years of cigarette smoke permeated the walls. He nodded to Cavanaugh, who stood behind the door, ready with his pistol in case Rutherford had unfriendly escorts.

"Homey," Rutherford said.

"Nobody here thinks it's strange if we pay with cash instead of a credit card," Jamie said, locking the door.