The naked edge

11

Jamie looked at him. "Knives?"

"This was before those two kids shot up that high school in Colorado and suddenly every school had a zero-tolerance policy about bringing anything that might be a weapon onto campus. Carl was obsessed about knives. He carried one in his pocket every day he went to school. Or under his sweater. Or in his knapsack. He showed them to me when nobody was looking. Once, he even hid one under his uniform when he was playing football."

"And this was your friend?"

"It's hard to explain. We lived on the same street." Cavanaugh's memory was painful. "Hafor Drive. He was the first kid I met when my mother and I moved to my stepfather's house. There was a soccer field at the end of the street. Woods. A creek. Carl and I used to play in those woods a lot. He didn't like to go home. Neither did I. The thing about a friendship is, once it's formed, you get used to how your friend behaves. No matter how strange he acts, you think it's normal."

"You mean the knives."

"Folders. Fixed blades. Utility knives. Tactical knives. Fishing knives. Skinning knives. Carl and I had jobs delivering for one of the local morning newspapers, the Gazette. This was before newspapers decided it was safer and cheaper to have adults deliver them by throwing them from cars. My stepfather insisted I put the money I earned in a bank account. But Carl's father-at the time, I thought this was cool-let Carl spend his money however he wanted. I didn't think the knives themselves were cool. The truth is, they made me nervous. But Carl's father was really pleased with the knives, as if they proved Carl was macho enough to have a chance at being a pro-football player. So Carl played with knives, and because he was my friend, I joined him. We had contests to see how fast we could pull them from our pockets and open them. We practiced throwing them. We imagined scenarios in which we saved somebody's life with one. Then Carl discovered in a knife magazine that a top knife maker lived right outside town, on a farm near a place called West Liberty."

"You're talking about a hammer and anvil and forge?" Jamie asked.

"The old-time real deal. One day, Carl showed up at my house to say that he'd phoned this knife maker and convinced the old guy to teach us how to forge blades. He was more excited than I'd ever seen him, so I thought, 'What the hell, I'll go along and see what it's like.' My mom wound up driving us every Sunday afternoon. It turned out that the old knife maker belonged to something called the American Bladesmith Society. He had the rank of 'master,' a big deal when you realize there are only about ninety masters in the world. Making knives was the old man's life. His name was Lance Sawyer. The first time I heard it, I thought that name was hilarious. A knife expert whose name was Lance. He was seventy-five years old. He wore bib overalls. He was stooped and scrawny and bald and had brown tobacco juice on his white beard, but his arms were as muscular and strong as anybody's I've ever seen. For a year and a half, until Carl's father moved the family out of state, Carl and I learned how to stoke a forge, how to use a hammer and an anvil to shape a blade, how to cool the metal and then do the reverse, heat-tempering it. The old man made us use leaf springs from old pickup trucks as our rough material. It was hard, heavy work. My arms used to ache all week. But I must say we turned out some awfully fine-looking knives."

"Did you continue the lessons after Carl moved away?"

"For a while. But it wasn't the same without Carl's enthusiasm, and then the old man died. I wasn't there, but I heard he keeled over in the middle of hammering a blade. Went out happy, doing what he liked." Cavanaugh smiled wistfully to himself. "After that, I went to the University of Iowa. I'm pretty sure my stepfather wanted me to be what he was: an attorney. But I surprised him and my mom by leaving school before my first year ended and joining the military. That hatred-of-bullies thing I told you about. Eventually, I got into Delta Force." Cavanaugh paused. "And not long after, Carl showed up."

Jamie, who'd resumed aiming her pistol, now stopped and looked at him again. "Seems a hell of a coincidence, don't you think?"

"Except it wasn't a coincidence. From bits and pieces of what Carl told me, I eventually realized what happened. As his father's alcoholism got worse and the family's fortunes disintegrated, Carl kept looking back on Iowa City and his friendship with me and the lessons with the old knife maker as the best time of his life. He never went to college as his father planned. He never played football. He never had a chance for the big career his father wanted for him. He used to phone me a lot. The calls always felt as if they came from a ghost. I didn't talk long. Then one day he phoned, and my mother told him I was in the Army. As near as I can figure, he joined the Army shortly afterward. I realize now that he was hoping to get stationed with me and continue the ideal friendship he imagined we had. He kept following my career, taking special-ops training, eventually trying to get into Delta Force as he knew I had. Suddenly one day, there he was at the Fort Bragg Delta compound. I turned from completing a training exercise and saw him grinning at me. That was one of the few times in my life when somebody took me totally by surprise."

"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: