The naked edge

10

No one spoke for several seconds after Ali stormed from the office.

"If he's acting," Rutherford said, "he deserves an Academy Award."

"Yeah, but if he's innocent, I'll never be able to regain his trust," Cavanaugh added.

"Welcome to the world of running a corporation," Brockman said.

"Let's think about you and Duran," Rutherford told Cavanaugh. "You haven't been in contact for the past three years, and then suddenly he tries to kill you in Wyoming? Why?"

"I could make the link between the way our agents were killed and his obsession with knives. He tried to keep me from drawing suspicion to him."

"But why wait so long?" Jamie wondered. "If he was worried about you, he'd have needed to eliminate you at the start-before the agents were killed with sharp weapons."

Cavanaugh thought about it. "As long as I was out of the business, maybe Carl didn't consider me a threat. But then his contact alerted him that someone named Aaron Stoddard might inherit Global Protective Services. Carl knew who Aaron Stoddard was. At all costs, he had to stop me from getting involved."

"Because of the knives," Brockman said. "But the pattern still isn't clear. Not all our agents were killed with knives. And only a few of the government's agents. Why only those agents?"

Jamie suddenly headed toward the computer on Ali's desk. "Gerald's right. We've been studying all kinds of lists. But what we haven't looked at is what the agents killed with sharp weapons might have in common."

Jamie typed the codes Kim had given to her, accessing GPS's security files. She typed more keys, studied something, and pressed other keys. Immediately, the printer began processing pages.

Cavanaugh grabbed them and spread them over the desk. The group joined him.

"Nothing similar in their backgrounds," Rutherford concluded. "They were born and raised in various areas. They belonged to various elite military units: Eighty-Second Airborne, Marine Recon, Army Rangers, Special Forces, SEALs, Britain's SAS, South Africa's Reconnaissance Commando unit."

"But hardly any of them served at the same time and the same place," Jamie pointed out.

"And they hardly ever worked on the same protective assignments together," Brockman said. "Maybe we're going at this from the wrong direction."

"What do you mean?"

"If there's a common denominator, maybe it isn't where they'd been or the assignments they'd been on. Maybe it's where they were going."

"Going?" Jamie asked.

"Their next assignments." Brockman drew his finger along the pages. He stopped at one item, his features tensing. "Dear God."

Staring at where Brockman pointed, Cavanaugh felt sick. He grabbed the phone. "We'd better check with the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, and the Diplomatic Security Service. Their agents who were killed with sharp weapons. We need to find out where they were being assigned."

"The same place?" Jamie asked.

She and the others stared at the pages.

"New Orleans."

"The World Trade Organization."

"Two days from now."