The Naked Edge

by David Morrell

  “We don't know what it is. You need to get out of here.”

  “Buddy, I don't need convincing.”

  “Anybody else on this floor?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You're positive.”

  “I've been up and down this corridor for the past hour. The place is deserted.”

  A bell sounded. Down the corridor, an elevator opened. A policeman charged out.

  “This floor's clear!” the fireman shouted to be heard above the music. “I'm getting this janitor out of here.”

  “On the double! We don't know what else might happen!” The policeman ducked back into the elevator. Its doors closed.

  “You heard him,” the fireman said. “Go!”

  “I'm outta here,” Cavanaugh said.

  He and the fireman hurried toward the stairwell door.

  “Hold it, I forgot my coat,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Hurry!” The fireman turned and yelled down the stairs toward where footsteps and voices struggled upward, “Evacuee coming down!”

  “I'm right behind you!” Cavanaugh yelled. “Check the other floors. Poison gas? God help anybody who's in the building.”

  Breathing hard, the fireman climbed to the next level. Simultaneously, Cavanaugh opened the maintenance room's door all the way. There, amid boxes of cleaning supplies, Jamie and Eddie waited. Only one other set of coveralls had been in the room. They'd been too big for Jamie, so Eddie wore them.

  Jamie grabbed a box, holding it as if it contained something important.

  Clutching his mop as if he was too startled to realize it was in his hand, Cavanaugh led the way through the stairwell door. Lights glared. Above, the door to the thirtieth floor banged shut as the fireman went in. Below, other firemen climbed and opened doors.

  Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurried down.

  “One of your men ordered us out of here,” he told the next fireman, four floors down. “I don't understand what's happening.”

  “Just do what he told you.” The fireman breathed hard from the climb and the weight of his equipment. “Get out of the building. Evacuees coming down!” he yelled to his team farther below.

  As Cavanaugh, Jamie, and Eddie hurriedly descended, the clatter of their footsteps added to those of the emergency team.

  “Evacuees!” a fireman yelled to other men below him. “Are you hurt?” he asked Cavanaugh.

  “No. Just scared.”

  “I hear you,” the fireman said. Putting his oxygen mask on, he braced himself and opened a door.

  They hurried lower. Passing emergency workers, breathing hoarsely, they reached the fifth floor, the fourth . . .

  A few seconds after they passed the lobby door, it banged open. A fireman charged up the stairs, shouting into his two-way radio, “Affirmative! Poison gas! The thirtieth floor! Make sure the building's empty!”

  With his attention focused on the upper floors, the fireman failed to see them below.

  13

  GARAGE LEVEL TWO, the sign said. Cavanaugh cracked the door open and listened. Hearing only stillness, he opened the door farther and studied the few cars. In an emergency that required a building to be evacuated, it was standard procedure for the teams to start at the bottom, moving upward. Subsequently, they assumed areas they'd checked didn't need to be revisited.

  As he stepped into the parking garage, the overhead lights made everything a sickly yellow.

  “Over there.” Eddie pointed past three drab-colored Tauruses that Global Protective Services used.

  Eddie's car was equally anonymous.

  “Let's see if it explodes.”

  They crouched behind the farthest car and put their hands over their ears—except for Eddie who could protect only one ear while he pressed an ignition button on his car's remote control. When the car started, Eddie relaxed. “Well, at least we don't need to worry about that.”

  “But there might still be a bomb,” Jamie said.

  Eddie agreed. “The attack team would have seen me drive in here. They'd have had plenty of time to hide one somewhere other than attaching it to the engine.”

  Cautious, they approached the car. Its nostril-stinging exhaust made Eddie press another button on the remote, shutting off the engine.

  In the smothering silence, Cavanaugh reached under his sport coat, felt behind the pouch that contained his spare ammunition magazine, and unsheathed a small flashlight, another item from his bug-out bag. For its size—as long and wide as his index finger—it produced surprisingly intense light.

  Jamie took out hers, also.

  They knelt and aimed the beams behind the wheels and at every area of the car's undercarriage. Then Cavanaugh went to one side of the car while Jamie went to the other. He aimed his light through a window toward the rear of the interior while Jamie did the same from the opposite side. The idea was to concentrate on small areas, progressing from one tiny space to another in an ordered way. Cavanaugh had difficulty keeping his flashlight steady when he knew that at any moment the door to the parking area might bang open and what came through might not be an emergency team.

  Through the windows, they looked for anything that seemed out of place. But the chances were, a bomb wouldn't be that easy to notice. Sometimes, the only indication was a slight shadow.

  The dashboard. The steering column. The brake. The accelerator.

  What they mostly searched for was a wire. When a door was opened, the wire would tug a concealed igniter, and the car would explode. The extremely thin wire might have a non-reflective coating that made it difficult to detect.

  Cavanaugh's mouth felt dry. “See anything?”

  “No,” Jamie answered.

  “Time for the game.” Cavanaugh referred to “rock, paper, and scissors.” He and Eddie made a fist and shook it three times. When they stopped, they had three options: to leave the fist closed (rock), to open the hand flat (paper), or to hold out the first two fingers (scissors).

  Cavanaugh's scissors cut Eddie's paper. “Okay,” he told Jamie and Eddie, “Get back behind the far vehicle while I open the doors.”

  “You didn't play the game with me,” Jamie noted.

  Cavanaugh studied her.

  “Fine,” he said.

  They held up their fists and shook them three times.

  Jamie's paper covered Cavanaugh's rock.

  “I don't want you to do this,” Cavanaugh said.

  “I don't want to, either. But I'm part of the team, and I'm going to risk my life the same as everybody else.”

  “Yeah, you're tough,” Eddie said.

  Cavanaugh had never understood the expression “heart in my throat” until now.

  “Do it slowly,” he said. “Keep looking for wires.”

  The speed of his pulse made him sick as he and Eddie crouched behind the farthest car. He opened his mouth and pressed his hands over his ears to minimize the impact of an explosion. But even with his ears muffled, he was sure he heard Jamie open the doors.

  A few instants lasted forever.

  Then Jamie was standing in front of him, looking terrified but proud.

  “Okay,” he said, exhaling. “My turn. I'll check inside.”

  As Jamie and Eddie crouched behind the far vehicle, Cavanaugh aimed his small flashlight and cautiously leaned into the car, peering up under the dashboard. He checked under the seats.

  Nothing looked suspicious.

  As Jamie and Eddie rejoined him, he reached into his jacket pocket and came out with something else from the bug-out bag: a zip tie.

  Without needing to be told what came next, Eddie unlocked the Taurus's trunk but kept his hands on the lid so that it opened only a crack. While Jamie aimed her flashlight, Cavanaugh inserted the zip tie into the crack between the lid and the car's chassis and drew it from one side to the other.

  What he felt for was a taut wire. All an enemy needed to do was pick the trunk's lock, put a bomb inside, attach a wire to the bomb's detonator, close the lid until only the enemy's hand f
itted inside, hook the wire to the inside of the lid, and then close the lid.

  The twist tie was pliant enough that if it encountered a wire, it would bend without putting pressure on the wire. Sweat trickled down Cavanaugh's face. His hand wanted to shake, but he kept it steady. Five minutes later, he nodded to Eddie, who raised the lid slightly higher, while Cavanaugh and Jamie aimed their flashlights inside.

  Finally, the trunk was all the way open. They searched among weapons and an armored vest, and to their relief found nothing that looked like a bomb.

  Security specialists were paranoid about being held prisoner in the trunks of their cars. One of the first things an operator did when acquiring a vehicle was to inspect the trunk's interior and rig its latch so that it could easily be tripped from the inside. As a further precaution, a weapon and escape tools were hidden behind the trunk's lining, and air holes were drilled, tubes leading from them to the vehicle's interior. Finally, the best agents had a secret stash of something else. Smiling, Eddie now displayed it, peeling off the lining on the right side of the trunk.

  Cavanaugh grinned at a plastic bottle of water and a bag filled with energy bars.

  “God, I love working with a pro.”

  They took turns drinking. Water had never tasted so wonderful. Cavanaugh wiped drops from his lips and bit heartily into a caramel-flavored energy bar, all the while staring toward the door that led into the parking garage.

  He looked at his watch. Almost five a.m.

  “We still need to check the engine and under the car.”

  Twenty minutes later, every part of the vehicle had been studied.

  “Clean,” Eddie said.

  “But we can't leave the building yet,” Jamie said. “The police and the emergency crews would see us and stop us. They'd probably take us somewhere and question us.”

  Cavanaugh nodded. “We need to assume the assault team's watching the building. They'd follow.”

  “I'm tough to follow,” Eddie said. “Even so, yeah, we'd better stay put and get some rest.”

  After another round of rock, paper, and scissors, Eddie got the spacious back seat, Jamie the front, and Cavanaugh, who hated enclosed spaces, got the trunk.

  It faced a wall. He set the weapons to one side. Then he crawled in, put his handgun beside him, saw a section of rope, threaded it through a rib in the underside of the lid, and lowered the lid until the trunk was open about five inches. He tucked the rope under him so that his weight would keep the lid at the level he wanted. If he needed to, he'd be able to release the rope and raise the lid in a hurry.

  Jamie stepped back, pretending she was someone who'd just entered the garage. “It looks natural. With the trunk facing the wall, I can't tell it's partly open.”

  Eddie was already stretched out in the back seat. With both doors closed, Jamie couldn't see him unless she stood at the side of the car and looked directly in. She turned toward the trunk's lid and peered through the gap. “Sweet dreams, babe.”

  PART FOUR:

  THE RULE OF FIVE MISSIONS

  1

  Dreaming that he was buried alive, Cavanaugh woke with a start. Having imagined the sound of dirt being shoveled onto his coffin, he knew that further sleep was out of the question.

  Instead, he imagined Jackson Hole near dawn, the crisp autumn air, elk in the pasture.

  Sounds interrupted. Opening his eyes, Cavanaugh clutched his pistol and listened to a door banging. He heard car engines, footsteps, voices. But there wasn't any sense of urgency. The police and the emergency crews must have finished their investigation, decided that the risk was over, and finally allowed the building to be reopened. As more cars arrived, he pulled the rope down, lowering the trunk's lid almost all the way. In the murky enclosure, he stared at his watch, waiting for his eyes to detect the faintly luminous dial. The hands showed that the time was eight minutes after one.

  “Time for lunch, babe.” Jamie's voice was close outside the trunk.

  “Don't you think about anything except food?”

  “And a bathroom,” Jamie said. “But restaurants have bathrooms, so we're got everything covered. Incidentally, I'm pretending to unlock the trunk.”

  Cavanaugh released the rope and let Jamie raise the lid.

  Her green eyes studied the enclosure. “Reminds me of the first dormitory room I had at Wellesley. Minus the weapons, of course. Nobody's watching. I'm partially shielding you. Come on out.”

  Cavanaugh's legs felt stiff as he stepped down to the concrete.

  Eddie looked rested, putting a stick of gum in his mouth.

  More cars entered the parking garage. Sounds and movement filled it. Men and women wearing business clothes walked toward the elevators. Cavanaugh heard bits of troubled conversation about rumors of what had happened during the night.

  “Ready to go?” Eddie no longer wore the janitor's coveralls. Despite his beard stubble, his clean leather jacket and turtleneck made him look the most presentable of the three.

  Jamie closed her blazer over the blood spots on her white blouse.

  Cavanaugh decided that the coveralls he wore would attract less attention than the damaged clothes underneath. “Let's do it.”

  They got in the Taurus, Eddie behind the steering wheel, Cavanaugh next to him, Jamie in the back. Despite the care they'd taken to make sure the car didn't have a bomb, Cavanaugh tensed when Eddie turned the ignition key. But the only sound was the car's smooth drone.

  Eddie drove up the ramp toward the building's exit, where he showed a GPS badge to a security officer. The crossbar went up. They emerged onto the noise and commotion of 53rd Street.

  “It'll be hard to follow us in all this traffic.” Eddie drove through noisy Madison Avenue and continued along 53rd.

  “Unless they planted a location transmitter so small we didn't spot it when we searched the car.”

  “Unpleasant thought.” Eddie checked his rear-view mirror. “Where to?”

  “Get us off the island,” Cavanaugh said. He turned on the radio. Billy Joel sang about “A New York State of Mind.” Cavanaugh pushed a button that switched the sophisticated radio to an extremely wide FM spectrum, a Global Protective Services modification. “Jamie, why don't you tell us the fascinating story of your life?”

  Jamie hesitated only long enough to gather her thoughts before starting her monologue. “It is fascinating. First I was born, and then I learned to crawl, and then I was toilet trained . . .”

  Cavanaugh proceeded FM spectrum on the radio. Most location transmitters used an FM setting, as did many eavesdropping devices—tuned to bandwidths that weren't employed by local radio stations and police/fire-department radios. To discover if that type of beeper or bug had been concealed in the car, Cavanaugh needed only to continue up the FM spectrum and listen for Jamie's voice or the beep of a location transmitter to come through the radio.

  “And then I went to junior high, and then I started dating boys, and then I went to high school, and I really started dating boys.”

  “You can skip that part,” Cavanaugh said.

  “And then I went to Wellesley, and I dated men.”

  “You can skip that part, also.”

  “And then I met you, and my life got weird, and . . .”

  Cavavaugh reached the top end of the FM spectrum without hearing Jamie's voice come from the radio. “Seems like it's safe to talk.” He didn't add his next thought, which was that if the attack team had used a radio transmitter that gathered conversations on exotic frequencies and sent them in microbursts, there was no easy way to detect it.

  Eddie had his hands at ten o'clock and two o'clock on the steering wheel, his fingers slightly spread as a professional driver was trained to do. “How about the Lincoln Tunnel?”

  “Good,” Cavanaugh said. “Then head south on Ninety-Five.”

  “To?”

  “Washington.”

  Eddie passed Fifth and Sixth avenues, then turned south onto Seventh, switching his grip on the steering wheel
. The next light remained green. The many lanes of one-way traffic increased speed.

  “Why are we going to . . . Shit.”

  “What's the matter?” Jamie asked.

  “Something . . .” Eddie took his right hand off the steering wheel and stared at it. “Stung.”

  “What?”

  “Something stung me.”

  They kept with the rapid traffic.

  “A bee?” Cavanaugh glanced around. “A mosquito or something? It's a little late in the year for—”

  “No.” Eddie's voice was thick. “Steering wheel. Something on the . . .” Eddie pointed toward the two o'clock position on the steering wheel. “Jesus.” His breathing sounded labored.

  “Hey.” Jamie touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Don't feel . . . Cavanaugh, have you got a . . .” Eddie shivered. “Handkerchief?”

  Cavanaugh frowned. “In my jacket.” He pulled it out.

  “Wrap it.” Eddie gasped. “Your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Grab the . . .” Eddie shivered more violently. “Bottom . . . steering . . .”

  Suddenly, Eddie's head jerked back. He slumped.

  2

  When Cavanaugh had learned defensive/offensive driving techniques, one of the drills involved what to do if you're in the front passenger seat of a car, your partner driving, and the windshield blows apart from super-velocity bullets, and the driver takes one in the head. You can't let the car veer off the road into a wall or a tree. You can't let it stop. The prime imperative is to get away from the shooting zone as quickly as possible. And that meant you had to do what Cavanaugh did now.

  Conscious of the rapid traffic on either side, he undid his seatbelt and shifted close to Eddie. With his handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, he grabbed the lower portion of the steering wheel, far from where Eddie had gripped it, far from whatever had stung him. Simultaneously, Cavanaugh shifted his left foot over to the floor pedals, pressing the brake as traffic slowed and then stopped for a red light.