The naked edge

4

"Don't you think you should try to sleep?" Jamie asked Cavanaugh from the shadowy doorway to the bedroom.

Duncan, who'd sometimes worked twenty-hour days, had put his living quarters next to his office. That Duncan's personal and professional life had been so severely joined made Cavanaugh wonder how his own life and Jamie's would change now that he'd assumed control of the corporation.

He sat at Duncan's desk, a thick computer printout spread before him.

"I doubt I could sleep." Eyes sore with fatigue, he ran his finger down the list that Kim had prepared: his former assignments.

It depressed him to realize the number and extent of the protective details he'd worked on. Politicians, corporate executives, movie celebrities, sports stars, real-estate barons, on and on. There'd been hundreds, but only a few had seemed special apart from the money, power, or fame they had. The work had been what he'd cared about. As Duncan had insisted, "Unless they're obvious moral monsters, it isn't our place to make judgments about our clients. The only thing that's important is, they're somebody's prey, and predators are always the enemy."

"That list will look fresher in the morning," Jamie said.

"But in the meantime, what if somebody dies because I didn't do my job? I have to believe, somewhere in these past assignments there's a clue about why the hit team tried to kill us and why those other agents were killed. Or maybe the attack was revenge because of an assassination or kidnapping I prevented. I don't know where else to look."

"You can't do your job if you can't think straight."

"I've gone without sleep a lot longer than this."

"I hear it makes a person psychotic."

Cavanaugh had to grin. "You say the sweetest things."

"I'm serious." Jamie massaged his shoulders. "The list will look fresher in the morning."

Cavanaugh thought about it and sighed. "All these assignments. When this is over-"

"Making me think about the future so I don't worry about the present?"

"I'm projecting myself into the future so I don't worry about the present. When this is over." Cavanaugh set down the pages. "You're right. Let's get some sleep."

He put his arm around her and guided her toward the bedroom.

The phone rang.

He paused.

It rang again.

He turned.

"Don't answer it," Jamie said.

He stared at the desk. Not Duncan's desk. Not any longer. Now it's my desk.

"Whatever it's about can wait until morning," Jamie told him.

"No," Cavanaugh decided.

But when he reached for it, the phone stopped ringing.

"Couldn't have been that important if the caller hung up," Jamie said.

Cavanaugh pointed toward a light on the elaborate phone console. "Somebody else answered. Maybe after a specific number of rings, the call gets transferred to another phone."

He stared at the constant light on the console. Next to each light was a name. In this case, the name was Brockman. "If it was a wrong number, he'd have hung up by now. I'd better go find out what's wrong."

"What makes you think something's wrong."

"Was there ever a call at three in the morning that wasn't about something wrong?"

They entered the corridor.

Cavanaugh had the feeling of being lifted, of him and Jamie being thrown through the air and striking the corridor's wall, of dropping to the floor. Immediately, his senses caught up to him. The roar behind him. From the office. No, from beyond the office. From the bedroom. The searing flash. The shockwave punching air from his lungs. Groaning, he rolled toward Jamie as chunks of plaster and wood fell over him. Despite the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard Jamie moan. Then he heard her curse, anger giving her the energy to paw rubble off her.

He smelled smoke. Struggling to his hands and knees, he peered through the doorway into what had been the office. The wall between the office and the bedroom had been ruptured. The lights had been destroyed, but flickering flames allowed him to see into the gutted bedroom. The window's bullet-resistant glass was spread across the bedroom floor. An October wind howled through the jagged opening, fueling the flames.

An alarm went off. Overhead sprinklers gushed water into the bedroom and the office.

Somebody pulled Cavanaugh away-Ali. Somebody else pulled Jamie. Belatedly, Cavanaugh realized it was Kim. Brockman had a fire extinguisher and charged into the wreckage, spraying foam where the flames resisted the water from the sprinklers.

Then Cavanaugh was clear of the smoke and the dust. Ali set him down in the conference room and turned on the lights. Jamie squirmed next to him, blood running from her nose.

Cavanaugh realized that blood ran from his nose, also.

Through blurred vision, he stared at the draperies that covered the conference room windows. "Get us out of here." His voice seemed to come from far away.

"What?" Ali asked, as if Cavanaugh spoke gibberish.

And maybe Cavanaugh did speak gibberish. He pointed toward the windows. "Get us out of this room." He tried to say it as distinctly and forcefully as possible, his throat raw, his lips numb.

"The glass from the other window," he managed to say.

"What about it?"

"… sprayed inside the bedroom. The explosion came from outside. It must have been… "

"A rocket," Kim realized.

Handheld types were only thirty inches long. At this late hour, with midtown Manhattan mostly deserted, one could have been easily launched from the opposite sidewalk.

"Hurry." Ali helped to pull Cavanaugh and Jamie from the conference room into the lobby.

But they didn't stop there. Brockman was suddenly with them again. Dropping the fire extinguisher, he helped Ali yank open doors that led to a bank of elevators.

A bell rang. An elevator opened.

Brockman, Kim, and Ali drew their guns.