David Morrell - The Protector

"What are you doing?" Prescott asked.

"Escobar's men didn't call just for the hell of it. They want to make certain we're with the phone."

"But why would-"

"The phone must have some kind of location transmitter in it. They'll follow it, hoping it leads them to us. Now it'll take them nowhere. For all I know, this car has a location transmitter also, but right now, there's nothing I can do about that."

"Why didn't you kill this car's driver?" Prescott asked.

"What?" Cavanaugh frowned at the unexpected question.

"Back at the mall, you took a chance when you told him to run. He might have reached for his weapon," Prescott said.

"A dead man in the car would have slowed us. I'd have had to pull him from behind the steering wheel. The other men might have found us before we could drive away."

"Would you have killed him if he hadn't been in the car?" Prescott asked.

"If he gave me a reason. Otherwise… I'm a protector, not a killer."

The rain lessened.

Cavanaugh took his phone from his jacket and pressed the recall button.

"Global Protective Services." Duncan's voice was tense.

The phone remained in scrambler mode. "I had to switch cars. We're in a black Pontiac."

"Can you make it to the Holiday Inn near the airport? I'm here with some of your friends."

"Good," Cavanaugh said. "I can always use friends."

The rain had lessened to a drizzle by the time Cavanaugh, following Duncan's instructions, reached the Holiday Inn on Route 17, a half mile from Teterboro Airport. Duncan waited under the carport at the motel's entrance. He wore a raincoat and hat. His hands were in the coat's pockets, one of them, no doubt, holding a pistol. His trim mustache emphasized how pinched his lips were. With his straight military posture and intense eyes, he exuded a focus that made Cavanaugh pleased to rely on him.

The moment Cavanaugh drove under the carport and stopped next to Duncan, a gray van suddenly appeared behind them.

Prescott flinched. "They caught us."

"No," Cavanaugh said. "It's fine."

Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw two men and a woman, all three familiar to him, all wearing rain slickers, step from the van. They kept their hands beneath the slickers, presumably on weapons, while they scanned the area around them, paying particular attention to the highway beyond the parking lot. Five seconds later, everything looking satisfactory, one of the men approached Cavanaugh's side of the car.

With that all-clear sign, Cavanaugh pressed the car's unlock button.

Instantly, Duncan opened the passenger door and looked in. "Mr. Prescott?"

Prescott looked dumbfounded.

"I'm Duncan Wentworth. Global Protective Services. We spoke on the phone. Come with me, please."

Before Prescott seemed aware of it, Duncan had guided him from the car. Meanwhile, the woman and the remaining man flanked Prescott, Duncan leading the way, escorting him to the van.

Cavanaugh got out of the car.

"How ya doing?" The trim man who waited on the driver's side chewed gum.

"Better than I was a half hour ago."

"You can relax now. Leave the show to us."

"Looking forward to it. The car might have a location transmitter."

"By the time they find it, it'll be far from the airport. They'll never suspect how you got away."

"The pistol on the seat belongs to the assault team." Cavanaugh pulled the.45 from under his belt. "This belongs to Prescott. I have no idea where else it's been."

The man, whose name was Eddie, nodded. The rule was, you never kept a weapon whose history you didn't know. If you were caught with it, ballistics might prove that the weapon had been used in various shootings. The police would have every reason to believe you were implicated in them.

"These pieces'll soon be in pieces in a sewer," Eddie said.

Amused by the pun, Cavanaugh stepped aside and let Eddie get behind the steering wheel. "They all wore gloves."

Eddie tightened his own gloves. "No way to use fingerprints to identify them. So it won't matter if I wipe down your prints."

"The only places we touched are in the front seat."

"Makes it easier. Ciao."

As the black car drove from the hotel's carport into the drizzle, Cavanaugh got into the van and closed the hatch.

"Hey, Cavanaugh." The driver, who was Hispanic, put the vehicle into gear and proceeded from the carport. The drizzle made a hissing sound on the roof.

"Hey, Roberto." Cavanaugh knew the goateed man only by his first name and assumed it was an alias. "How are the tropical fish?"

"They ate each other. I'm getting a better hobby."

"What kind?"

"Model airplanes. The kind with a motor, so the planes can actually fly. I'm gonna rig them so they have aerial dogfights and shoot at each other and stuff."

"Stuff?"

"You know, tiny rockets. Maybe they could drop little bombs."

The van was configured so that two rows of seats faced each other, with a table in the middle. Cavanaugh buckled himself into a seat in back, next to Prescott and Duncan, and looked across the table toward the man and the woman who'd escorted Prescott into the van. Their rain slickers were off now, revealing Kevlar vests and holstered pistols on their belts.

"Hey, Chad," he said to the red-haired man, who was about thirty-five and had the same strong-shouldered build that Cavanaugh had. His name, too, was probably an alias.

In some elements of the security business, Chad's red hair would have been a liability, drawing attention to him. But as a protective agent, Chad often took advantage of his hair color to act as a decoy. An assassin or a kidnapper, having studied the target long enough to determine that a red-haired man was one of the protectors, would pay attention to where Chad went, on the assumption that Chad would be near his client. Thus Chad made a specialty of pretending to protect a look-alike client while the real client slipped away under escort. When Chad wanted to be inconspicuous, he wore a hat.

"I heard you got shot," Cavanaugh said.

"Nope."

"Good. I'm glad you didn't get hurt."

"I didn't say I didn't get hurt," Chad said. "I got stabbed."

"Ouch."

"Could've been worse. It was my left shoulder. If it'd been the shoulder I bowl with…"

Cavanaugh looked at the woman next to Chad. "Hi, Tracy."

She wore a Yankees sweatshirt and concealed most of her blond hair under a Yankees baseball cap. She had the capability of making herself look plain or gorgeous at will, and if she'd been in the Holiday Inn restaurant, if she'd put on lipstick, taken off her cap, let her long hair dangle, and pulled her sweatshirt tight, everybody in the restaurant, including four-year-old kids, would have remembered her after she left.

"I heard you quit," Cavanaugh said.

"And give up these fabulous working conditions? Besides, when would I ever see lover boy if I wasn't working with him?" She meant Chad, but she was joking. Protectors who had a relationship weren't allowed to work on the same team. In an emergency, they might look after each other instead of the client. But on numerous assignments, Chad and Tracy had proven where their priorities lay.

The van reached the highway and headed toward the airport. Meanwhile, Duncan handed blankets to Prescott and Cavanaugh, then poured steaming coffee into Styrofoam cups for them. "We'll soon have dry coveralls for you."

Cavanaugh felt the coffee warm his stomach. "You did good, Mr. Prescott."

"Mr.? Now you call me Mr.? Ever since the warehouse, it's been 'Prescott do this' and 'Prescott do that.'" Duncan frowned. "Is there a problem?"

Prescott's puffy eyes crinkled. "Not in the least. This man saved my life. I'm deeply grateful." With a smile, Prescott shook Cavanaugh's hand.