The naked edge

9

Cavanaugh sat in a corner of William's office. Away from the draped windows. On the floor. A desk lamp was next to him, the light so dim and sheltered that it couldn't be seen from a building across the street. Eyes scratchy, he read the printout: the details of his Global Protective Service assignments.

Despite the windows, he heard faint commotion outside. Below on the street. Sirens. The rumble of what might have been fire trucks. Vehicle doors being slammed. Voices. He imagined what was happening in the opposite direction, ten floors above him in what was left of the GPS offices. Police officers and fire-department personnel would be questioning Brockman, Kim, and Ali about the explosion. The authorities' frowns would deepen when they learned about the number of GPS operators who'd been recently killed. Teams would be rushing into buildings across the street, searching for an indication of where the attackers had placed themselves, hoping to find whoever was responsible for the explosion.

He concentrated on the printout. So many assignments. Hundreds and hundreds. They'd accumulated, blending in his memory until many of the names of clients were meaningless to him. How was it possible to devote oneself to protecting somebody to the point of being ready to risk dying for that person and not have the faintest mental image of what that person looked like?

He read about the powerful, the wealthy, and the famous, or else about average people under terrible threats, the helpless, the preyed-upon. As far as Cavanaugh was concerned, GPS didn't accept enough of those latter cases. The victims couldn't afford the company's services unless they attracted a protector's attention and the work was done pro bono, but if Cavanaugh survived this, he was determined to change things. Take from the rich and give to the poor.

He suddenly realized that he was projecting himself into the future to distract himself from the present. No, he warned himself. The only way to survive was to concentrate on now, but that meant concentrating on the past, and regardless of how much he tried, no summary of his former assignments jogged his memory about anything he might have seen or heard that would have made him a liability to a former client. His employers had always been careful to guard their secrets. As for the revenge theory, Cavanaugh had prevented so many assassinations and kidnappings that he found it impossible to single out any one incident for which an opponent might be determined to get even.

Even so, there was something about one of his assignments that nudged at the back of his mind, something that connected with the way the GPS operators had been killed, something about knives.

At once, Eddie came into the office. "Somebody's trying to get in the front door."