The Protector

by David Morrell

  Or watch the police stake out your house and try to catch you by surprise, Cavanaugh thought. Last night, Prescott saw every move we made from when we drove into the Highlands to when Rutherford set up the roadblock here to when the SWAT team snuck up on the house. Cavanaugh recalled how the lights in Prescott's house had gone off a few seconds after the SWAT team had started to approach it. Sure, he thought. Prescott hoped that a brightly lit house would be a deterrent and buy him some time, but when he saw the police move toward it, he proceeded to stage two, shut the lights off, set the motion detectors for the strobes and the siren, then filled the house with the hormone.

  Staying out of the camera's sight, Cavanaugh returned to the car. When he drove onto Prescott's street, he peered toward the end of the block and for the first time got a clear look at Prescott's house, which was low, modernistic in design, and made from flat sections of stone set on top of one another. Flanked by shrubs, a curved driveway led up to the front entrance. The door to the double-car garage was open. Yellow tape with police crime scene do not cross on it went from tree to tree, encircling the property. Other things caught Cavanaugh's interest. On the right, a large truck had a platform raised next to the utility pole, two workmen replacing the electrical transformer Cavanaugh had shot the night before. In the driveway, a bearded man in coveralls was removing sheets of plywood from a pickup truck. Half of the broken windows in front of the house had already been covered with the wood. To the left, parked along the street, pointing in Cavanaugh's direction, were two police cars and an unmarked car that Cavanaugh recognized as the dark sedan belonging to Rutherford and some of his fellow agents.

  Cavanaugh made a U-turn in front of the house, doing it slowly, taking the opportunity to study the corners under the house's eaves without seeming to. Small boxes with peepholes might have been birdhouses, or they might have been receptacles for miniature TV cameras hidden under the eaves.

  After parking in front of the police cars and walking toward the house, he saw Rutherford come out and study him wearily.

  "Is your wife's condition any better?" Although Rutherford had changed his suit and shaved, he looked haggard. The lingering bruises on his face made his black skin seem pale.

  "She's still unconscious." Cavanaugh made himself continue. "But the surgeon says her life signs are better than he expected. We're more hopeful."

  "Good." Rutherford sounded genuinely relieved, despite the betrayed tone in what he said next. "Incidentally, I just found out her name's Jamie, not Jennifer."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Of course."

  "I figured if I kept her real name a secret, in the long run she wouldn't be involved," Cavanaugh said.

  "But she got involved anyway, didn't she?"

  "Yes," Cavanaugh said, "she got involved."

  "Why are you here?"

  "There's nothing I can do at the hospital. The waiting ..." Unable to finish the sentence, Cavanaugh looked around. "I hoped you could use my help."

  "I don't see how. Prescott's long gone. Either he had a vehicle hidden in the area or he managed to steal one," Rutherford said. "We've got an alert out to every community north and south of here. Highway Patrol. Airports. Marinas. Train depots. Bus stations. Name it. We've staked out the car he left at the scenic lookout in Pacific Grove when he made contact with you. We're also watching the van he told you he kept in the parking garage where he stored the Porsche."

  As the repairman nailed a plywood sheet to another broken window, Cavanaugh nodded toward the open front door. "Is the lab crew finished?"

  "They didn't find anything useful. We confiscated Prescott's computer and all the documents he had. Maybe they'll point us in his direction."

  Entering, Cavanaugh heard voices from various rooms to the right and left, FBI agents and detectives presumably making a final inspection of the house. In daylight, the building's sprawl was dramatic. Its expensive modernistic furniture matched its architecture, although bullet holes had destroyed most of the chairs, sofas, tables, and lamps. The walls and framed black-and-white photographs of the Carmel region had been similarly destroyed. Broken glass lay everywhere. Through the shattered rear windows, an ocean breeze dispelled any lingering odor from the bloodstains amid the chalk outlines on the hardwood floor.

  Cavanaugh stared at the strobe lights mounted in a corner. Their variously colored compact bulbs had been discreetly arranged to look like an abstract artwork and wouldn't have attracted suspicion if seen through a window.

  "Is the casualty count still the same?" he asked. "Five dead. Five critically wounded. In stable condition. It looks like they're going to pull through." "Something to be thankful about."

  Cavanaugh crossed the living room, heading toward the French doors, then ducked under more yellow crime-scene tape and stepped out onto a flagstone terrace that had shrubs and flowers in pots. Preoccupied, he peered over the waist-high stone wall toward where a forty-foot cliff dropped sharply to the crashing surf. Spray rose toward him.

  "We have boats searching for a body in the water, in case Prescott was crazy enough to have tried climbing down there," Rutherford said.

  "It's worth checking."

  Doing his best to seem casual, Cavanaugh turned from the cliff and glimpsed two more birdhouses mounted under the eaves, one to the extreme right, one to the extreme left. They were angled toward the opposite corners. If miniature TV cameras were in them, as Cavanaugh was certain, their position would have allowed Prescott to see anyone coming around either side of the house.

  When Cavanaugh reentered the house, the repairman hammered another sheet of plywood over a broken window. Four detectives headed out the front door. Two FBI agents waited for Rutherford.

  "We'll stay and lock up after the electricity's back on and the windows are sealed," Rutherford said.

  Cavanaugh nodded.

  He checked the office, the bedrooms, and the bathrooms. He went into the garage and inspected the laundry room and the photo-developing room.

  All the while, Rutherford followed him.

  After Cavanaugh returned to the front of the house and studied it some more, he finally shook his head from side to side.

  "See, I told you," Rutherford said.

  "At least you can't blame me for trying."

  "Right. This is one time I can't blame you."

  "I should have stayed at the hospital."

  * * *

  12

  "No, sir. No change," the nurse said.

  * * *

  "May I help you?" the sinewy, mustached gun-store clerk asked. "I need a shotgun." "Any specific kind?" "A Remington 870 twelve-gauge pump."

  "Yeah, that's certainly specific. You wouldn't happen to be with law enforcement?"

  "No. What makes you ask?"

  "Just that most police departments prefer that model. It's also the shotgun of choice for U.S. special operations."

  "Is that a fact," Cavanaugh said.

  * * *

  "I need the strongest hacksaw you've got and several blades for it," Cavanaugh told the clerk at the hardware store.

  * * *

  "I need a wet suit," Cavanaugh told the clerk at the diving shop.

  * * *

  "I need an inflatable boat that'll accommodate an outboard motor," Cavanaugh told the clerk at the military-surplus store.

  * * *

  13

  In the motel room, Cavanaugh stared at the makeup kit Jamie had left on the bureau. When he phoned the hospital, he was again told there was no change.

  He pulled the mattress off the bed and used clamps that he'd bought in the hardware store to secure the shotgun to the bed frame, stabilizing it so the barrel protruded. Then he picked up the hacksaw and started sawing four inches off the barrel's eighteen-inch length, reducing it to the compactness that many police departments preferred. The effort took him an hour and several blades, but he wasn't conscious of the time passing—he had a great deal to think about.

  After another phone call to the hos
pital ("No change"), Cavanaugh opened two boxes of federal double-aught "tactical"

  buckshot. He liked that ammunition because the large pellets gave him a compact pattern over a long distance.

  To make the pattern even tighter, he thumbed open a new Emerson CQC-7 knife that he'd bought at the gun store and used its blade to cut around the plastic shaft of each shell. He chose a spot about two-thirds down each of them, at the dividing line between the gunpowder and the pellets that would be discharged when the gunpowder was ignited. He had to be careful not to cut so deeply that the plastic cylinder would break in two while he worked on it. At the same time, his cut had to be deep enough that two-thirds of the shell would break away when the shotgun was fired. The blast would thus propel not only the pellets but the plastic shaft in which they were contained. The consequence would be that the pellets would not spread but would remain in a tight clump, causing near-explosive force when they hit their target.

  * * *

  14

  After dark, Cavanaugh drove along Highway 1 to a low bridge located just south of Point Lobos, near the Highlands. The terrain there suited his needs. It was also where Prescott had forced the Taurus into the water. He parked along the side of the road, waited for a break in the passing headlights of traffic, then lugged the collapsed rubber boat down the slope to the water. After using a pressurized canister to inflate the boat, he anchored it to a rock and made two more cautious trips back and forth from the car, bringing the small outboard motor and a buoyant waterproof bag containing his equipment. He had put on his wet suit in the motel room. Now all he had to do was take off the sport coat that disguised what he was wearing. Rubber gloves and diver's boots protected his hands and feet as he pushed off from the rocks. He started the motor and headed out to the moonlit sea, staying a hundred yards offshore, following the contour of the bluffs of the Highlands, the speckled lights of houses guiding him.

  When he came abreast of the bluff upon which Prescott's house was positioned, he shut off the motor and switched to a paddle, heading in silently. With the electricity restored, several lights around the outside of Prescott's house provided a beacon. But the waves and the undertow made it difficult to control the boat. Sweating from exertion, he had to alternate between port and starboard as he paddled closer to the cliff.

  Then he got so close to the surf pounding the rocks that the boat would crash and overturn if he went any nearer. Spray chilled his face. After putting on the wet suit's rubber hood, along with flippers and a face mask equipped with a snorkel, he gripped the buoyant bag that contained his equipment and eased over the side. For an instant, the water was shockingly cold, nearly robbing him of the ability to move. Then the water seeped into his wet suit and formed a thin layer between the wet suit and his skin. Almost immediately, his body heated the water to its own temperature, so that only his face felt cold. The undertow was frighteningly strong, however. Using all the power in his arms and legs, he struggled through the turbulent waves, tugging his equipment bag via a strong nylon cord looped around his left wrist. A wave lifted him, threatening to smash him against the looming rocks. His heart raced sickeningly fast, making him almost change his mind and thrash back to the boat before the current could carry the boat away.

  But he couldn't allow himself to back off, couldn't give in to his fear. If he did, he knew it would be the first of many times when he would give in to it. The surf took him under, lifted him, dropped him. With a mighty exhale, he blew water from his snorkel and stared through his water-beaded face mask. Judging the surf, he worked his legs and his arms, straining to avoid rocks projecting from the ocean. A wave slammed him against the cliff.

  If not for the buffer of his wet suit, the granite would have flayed his shoulder. Wincing from the impact, he grabbed for an outcrop, was swept away, then was caught by another wave and again slammed against the cliff; but this time, as he groaned, his gloved hand caught a fissure in the rock. He gripped harder and pawed with his other glove. Finding a higher fissure, he pulled himself up before the next wave struck his legs and almost tugged him off the cliff.

  As he dangled above the thunderous water, Cavanaugh released one hand from the cliff and pulled off his face mask and snorkel. Breathing greedily, he dropped the mask into the waves, then kicked off his flippers and dropped them also. He crammed his rubber-protected feet into a niche, hung for a moment, sucked more air into his lungs, then slowly began his ascent through the darkness. Spray flew around him. He'd cut off the tips of his rubber gloves so that his fingers would be better able to grip outcrops, but the remainder of the gloves interfered with his mobility. He soon had to release his hands, one at a time, use his teeth to pull off each glove, then drop them to the waves beneath him. Instantly, his palms were cold, but not enough to immobilize his grip, his fingers continuing to grab and hold.

  He pulled himself higher. The cord looped around his left wrist was attached to a spool that had a release switch. He'd pressed the switch just before he reached the rocks, allowing the cord to unwind as the waterproof bag floated in the crashing surf. Thus, he could climb without the weight of the bag dragging him back. Higher. He had the sense that his fingers were bleeding. They didn't matter. Only not giving up mattered. He reached for a handhold, shoved his feet into another fissure, reached again, and touched the rock wall at the top, gaining energy from knowing that this part of the ordeal was almost over.

  The miniature TV cameras hidden under each corner of the eaves were aimed toward each other. They could show someone creeping around either corner, but the limited field of vision afforded through holes in the birdhouses made it impossible for them to provide a view of the waist-high wall above the cliff. Ca-vanaugh raised himself, balanced on the wall's foot-wide rim, and pulled the cord looped around his wrist, hoisting his equipment bag. Water dripped from the bag as he set it down. Throughout, he studied the back of Prescott's house. Harsh lights illuminated the corners and the French doors across from him. Like the shattered windows, the doors were covered with sheets of plywood. A padlock secured the doors. Yellow crime-scene tape was stretched across them. A police department sign nailed to the plywood warned that trespassers would be prosecuted.

  Cavanaugh unzipped the waterproof bag and pulled out the sawed-off shotgun, along with a nylon bag of shells that he hitched over his right shoulder. He removed the Emerson knife and clipped it to the neck of his wet suit. He took out a pouch of his lock-pick tools. Finally, he threw off the wet suit's hood and reached into the bag for night-vision goggles that he'd found at the military-surplus store while buying the Zodiac boat. He draped the goggles around his neck.

  Ready, he dropped to the terrace, sank to the flagstones, and squirmed across them toward the French doors, the bottom of which was another area that the angle of the TV cameras couldn't reach. When he came to a crouch, he at last risked being seen as he hurriedly picked the lock. He opened the doors, rushed into the dark house, shut the doors, put on his night-vision goggles, and aimed the shotgun.

  His

  goggles gave the dark interior a faint green illumination as he checked the wreckage of the living room and then shifted left into the media room, then the guest bedroom and bathroom. These areas weren't his main interest, but he had to make sure they weren't a threat. Satisfied, he crept toward the opposite side of the house, broken glass scraping under his rubber-protected feet. The vague smell of cordite still lingered in the air. At once, Cavanaugh knew that the TV cameras had at the last moment revealed him crouching to pick the padlock and enter the house— because the smell of cordite was overpowered by the sudden pungent stench of the hormone.

  Until now, Cavanaugh's wet suit had been comfortably warm. Now the sweat that squirted from his body raised his temperature so much that he felt as if he were in a sauna. Almost dizzy from the heat under his wet suit, he risked taking his right hand off the shotgun for the few seconds he needed to pull down the wet suit's zipper, exposing his chest. The effort made no difference.

&n
bsp; In Karen's basement, he had thought he'd endured the full force of the hormone, but now, as the smell became almost unbearable, he understood that he had no idea how powerful Prescott's weapon could be. His legs threatened not to support him. His stomach felt simultaneously scaldingly hot and polar-cold. His pulse was so fast, he came close to fainting.

  Part of him wanted to roll into a ball and pray for this nightmare to end. Another part compelled him to pivot in an increasingly rapid circle, pointing his shotgun anywhere and everywhere. His body heat misted the faint green images of his night-vision goggles. Surrounded by every imaginable threat, seeing through fear-narrowed vision, he spotted a man with a pistol aiming at him from the corridor that led to the master bedroom. He came within a millisecond of pulling the trigger, then realized that the man with a pistol was merely a shadow, that this was how the Rangers and the SWAT team had reacted.

  Cavanaugh's only advantage was that he'd suffered the hormone's effects and knew what to expect. Even so, as the pungent smell became strong enough to make him taste bile, he heard unnerving noises that he realized were pathetic whimpers forcing their way from his throat. The heaving bellows of his lungs made the whimpers come and go, come and go, each time stronger, building to a scream that he repressed by racing along the corridor to the master bedroom.

  Charging inside, he didn't dare think, didn't dare hesitate or second-guess himself. The huge bedroom had an arcade video game next to a luxurious reading chair. A large flat-screen plasma TV was mounted to the wall at the foot of the bed, a cabinet of electronics next to it. To the right of the TV, a sliding door led into a closet. That afternoon, Cavanaugh had looked into the closet and seen Prescott's designer jackets hanging on a rod, cedar shelves of expensive tank tops, T-shirts, and sweaters behind them.