David Morrell - The Protector

"We'll get a sketch artist working on the description you gave us. The airports along the coast have already been alerted," Rutherford said.

"I don't think he'll leave the area," Cavanaugh said. The overhead lights were painfully bright. "To the best of Prescott's knowledge, we're dead."

The possibility that Jamie might, in fact, be dying at that moment made Cavanaugh hesitate.

Somehow he continued. "I told Prescott that the government didn't know I'd tracked him to Carmel. He believed me. After all, if I was working with the government, I wouldn't have been alone. In his arrogance, Prescott might decide he'd finally covered his tracks. He might do the unexpected and stick close to home. Where's the list I asked you to make?" He referred to the names of men who had bought or leased property in the Carmel/Monterey area within the previous three weeks and who had also made appointments to play golf at the best courses.

Rutherford handed Cavanaugh several sheets of paper. "This is what we've got so far. It doesn't include men who've rented property without using a broker. We're checking past 'For Rent' ads in the local papers to try to contact property owners who made direct arrangements with new renters."

The overhead lights seemed harsher as Cavanaugh studied the list. "There're more than I expected."

"It's a popular area."

"How come there aren't many names in Carmel itself?"

"Expensive real estate. Not many people can afford it. The location's so prized, very few sell."

Cavanaugh kept scanning the names. Noting occupants in Pacific Grove, Monterey, Seaside, Carmel, the Carmel Valley, and the Carmel Highlands, the list went on and on.

"It's going to take a lot of personnel to check all this," Cavanaugh said. "And a lot of time and effort not to make Prescott suspicious if you get close to him."

"We were hoping we'd save some of that time and effort if any of those names caught your attention," an FBI agent said.

"When Karen was preparing Fresco It's new identity," Cavanaugh said, "she wouldn't have picked an unusual name. Nothing that stood out. And nothing that anybody would associate with Prescott's former life."

The group looked more weary.

"Unless Karen got a bad feeling about Prescott," Cavanaugh said.

They glanced up.

"If Karen knew she was in danger," Cavanaugh said, "she might have chosen a name for Prescott that meant something to me and led me to him."

"You?" an agent asked.

"She had every reason to expect I'd go after anybody who hurt her."

"You and she were that close?"

"Her brother and I were in Delta Force together. He bled to death in my arms."

The group became silent, sobered.

Cavanaugh scanned the list. "His name was…" Cavanaugh tapped his index finger on a name. "Ben."

Rutherford came over and stared at the name he indicated. "Benjamin Kramer."

"The Carmel Highlands." Cavanaugh remembered steering onto a road that led to the Highlands and asking Prescott the significance of the name. "It's a small community of houses on a bluff above the ocean," Prescott had said matter-of-factly. The bastard lives there, Cavanaugh thought. Without knowing it, I was close to Prescott's home.

"How strongly do you believe there's a connection?" Rutherford sounded like he wanted desperately to believe. "It could be a coincidence."

"I didn't notice it at the start because Ben never used the formal version of his name. He was always just Ben. But Prescott has a thing about nicknames. He insisted that his first name was Daniel, not Dan, and when he created the Joshua Carter identity, he was firm to the staff at the exercise club that his name was Joshua, not Josh. On this list, some people used abbreviations to identify themselves-Sam, Steve. In contrast, Benjamin seems awfully formal."

"What about the last name 'Kramer'?" an FBI agent asked.

"Before Karen had the car accident that put her in a wheelchair, she was engaged to a guy named Kramer. As soon as the creep found out Karen was permanently crippled, he broke the engagement. Ben said the only good thing about Karen's accident was it kept Kramer from marrying her."

"Let's find out where this address is. Who's familiar with the Highlands?" Rutherford asked.

"My aunt lives down there." A female detective grabbed a phone.

Rutherford turned toward another detective. "Does your department have detailed maps of the communities around here?"

"A computer program and a satellite image from the Internet."

"Let's get a precise location of the house."

A phone rang. As a detective answered it, Cavanaugh hoped but also dreaded that this time the call would be from the hospital, but it turned out to be about another matter.

Someone put a CD-ROM disc into a computer. A layout of the few streets in the Carmel Highlands appeared on the screen. The detective typed the address. "There. At the end of this ridge. Directly over the ocean." A magnified satellite image showed the tops of homes, the patterns of vegetation, and the contours of streets. The detective zoomed in on the property they wanted to know about.

"A big lot," Cavanaugh said.

"In the Highlands, some of them are an acre and more."

"Sprawling house."

"Compared to the shadows these other houses give off, it looks like it has only one level."

The female detective finished talking to her aunt and set down the phone. "Everybody knows everybody down there. When this guy moved in, she took him a fruit basket to welcome him. He was overweight. Gruff. Said he was dieting. Couldn't eat fruit because of the fructose in it. That's the word he used- fructose. The few times she's seen him since then, he'd slimmed down. Shaved his head. Grew a goatee. She says she can see through the trees to his house. The lights are on."

"At one-thirty in the morning?" an FBI agent asked.

"Maybe he leaves them on when he's not home."

"Or he could be packing," Rutherford said, grabbing a phone, "in which case, there isn't much time to trap him."

On edge from tension and lack of sleep, Cavanaugh stood behind one of the three police cars that formed a barricade at the entrance to the dark street. Increasingly worried about Jamie, he'd phoned the hospital before he'd arrived, but there had still been no word about her condition. Next to him, Rutherford and his team used night-vision binoculars to scan the handful of shadowy, widely separated houses and then concentrated on the one at the end of the block. Perched on a bluff, its low-sprawling profile would have been silhouetted against the whitecaps of the ocean if not for the numerous outdoor lights that glared around the house's perimeter. Several of the windows were illuminated also.

"I still don't see any shadows moving behind the curtains," an agent said.

"Maybe Prescott's gone, and the lights are supposed to make us believe he's there," someone else said.

Despite dry clothes, Cavanaugh crossed his arms over his chest, trying to generate warmth, continuing to feel the chill of what had happened to Jamie-and another chill: fear. "You don't see movement because it's not in Prescott's nature to go near windows."

Movement attracted his attention, figures emerging from trees and shadows, policemen escorting a family up the street toward the protection of the barricade. Wakened with a phone call, warned not to turn on their lights, they had been directed to leave their house via a back door, where the heavily armed officers had been waiting.

"Is that the last of them?" Rutherford asked.

"Six houses. Six families. All clear," a detective told him.

Behind the barricade, next to an open van, equipment made scraping sounds as shadowy black-clad figures put on two-way-radio gear, equipment belts, armored vests, night-vision goggles, and helmets, ten members of a SWAT team looking like starship troopers while they checked their pistols and assault rifles.