The Protector Read online

  Stunned, Cavanaugh tried to clear his mind. As the Taurus began to submerge, the pressure of the water against the side made it impossible to open the door until the car was filled with water and the pressure was equalized. During the chase, he'd managed to lower the windows a few inches. Now he touched the button that would take the driver's window down all the way. Hoping to shove Jamie through the gap and then go after her, he was dismayed when the window didn't budge.

  Cold water soaked his shoes as he undipped the Emerson knife from inside his pants pocket and slammed its butt against the safety glass on the driver's side, shattering the middle of the window into pellets. He pounded the knife's butt against the rest of the window, trying to clear its edges, when a dark shape made him stop. Moonlight, in combination with the Taurus's fading headlights, revealed that the dark shape was a boulder.

  Turning toward the passenger window, Cavanaugh saw a boulder on that side also. The Taurus had landed upright in the water in a trough between shelves of rock. On each side, there was no way to get out through a broken window, no matter if in front or back.

  Kick through the front windshield, Cavanaugh thought. Instantly he became aware that when the car had rolled, its roof had been pushed down, crushing the windshield and the window over the trunk, making the space too narrow for him to squeeze Jamie through.

  The cold water now reached Cavanaugh's knees. As the Taurus continued sinking, the headlights and the lights on the dashboard flickered. Trembling from the cold, Cavanaugh pulled Jamie into an upright position, trying to give her air for as long as possible. His feet felt numb.

  Doors. Blocked by boulders.

  Windows. Can't get through them.

  The roof.

  Cavanaugh thumbed the Emerson knife open, slashed at the roof's liner, and yanked it down. The roof was buckled inward. Its support struts had widened, creating enough space for someone to squeeze through, provided a gap could be created in the roof itself.

  Gripping the knife so its blade pointed in the same direction as his thumb, Cavanaugh stabbed upward into the metal. Among operators, the Emerson knife had a worldwide reputation as a hard-use tool. Its edge was razor-sharp and chisel-ground, its metal astonishingly strong, its point engineered for maximum durability. Its serrations were designed to cut along metal. It could pierce a car door, and Cavanaugh knew of instances in which it had struck through the fibers of a Kevlar vest.

  Indeed, its sharpness, its strength, and the force with which he hit the roof caused the blade to go through. He sawed, withdrew the knife, pounded it into the roof again, sawed, and withdrew the knife, straining to cut a hole. As the cold water reached his groin, he punched the knife into the roof again and again, the impact of the blows jarring his arm and his shoulder, radiating through his body.

  He jabbed the knife through the roof yet again, groaning from the pain it caused him. Alarmed, he saw that Jamie had listed sideways, drooping toward the rising water, which was now at his stomach. In a frenzy, he propped her upright again, then pounded the knife at the roof, straining to make a circle. His breath echoed loudly. He saw its vapor. The water reached his chest. Again, he stabbed the knife toward the roof, but the resistance of the water robbed him of strength, and this time the blade didn't pierce the metal.

  The lights went out. In darkness, as the Taurus sank farther, Cavanaugh inwardly screamed. With the water restricting his movements and without lights to see where he was cutting, he would never be able to get through the roof. He felt Jamie slide sideways toward the water and again propped her up. He touched her face. Close to tears, he thought, I'm sorry. If I'd loved you enough, if I'd listened, we'd be home right now. I didn't protect you well enough. So sorry.

  As the water rose past Cavanaugh's nipples, a fierce anger possessed him. God help me, there has to be a—

  Immediately, he pushed the trunk-release button. He kicked off his shoes, squirmed over the seat, and splashed into the back. Trembling from the cold, he yanked away the seat cover and drove the Emerson knife into the back support, hacking at it. Tearing, ripping, he widened a hole and shoved at the steel plate that he'd put against the rear of the trunk. Then he took a deep breath and swam underwater into the submerged trunk. The weight of the water had kept the trunk from opening. He pushed at the hatch, but although he'd used the trunk-release button, nothing happened. The trunk must have been damaged when the car rolled, he realized. He pushed harder. Lungs aching, he twisted the knife against the latch, pried, levered, and felt something give. Shoving up with his back, he forced the lid up.

  Breathe. Need to breathe. Desperate, he swam back through the hole in the rear seat, reached the car's interior, and raised his head, only to bump it in the darkness. Exhaling, his lungs made a roaring sound, amplified by the confined space. He frantically estimated that there were barely five inches between the rising water and the roof. Without pause, he inhaled as much air as he could, then plunged under the water, groping into the front seat, finding Jamie and raising her into the airspace.

  Her moan filled him with a hope. You can't moan if you're not breathing. He pulled off her shoes. Then he turned her to face him, opened her battered mouth, and breathed into it, trying to fill her lungs, to give her enough air that she could survive what he was now forced to do, which was to pull her over the seat and swim with her through the hole in the backseat. He tugged her into the trunk, braced his feet against the floor, and shoved upward, clearing the open lid, fighting to rise with the current.

  He had a powerless, disorienting sensation of being buffeted this way and that.

  One thousand.

  Two thousand.

  Three thousand.

  Four thousand.

  He seemed to hear explosions as he and Jamie broke through the surface—the impact of waves hitting rocks. As Jamie gasped, he gripped her around the shoulders and kicked through the water, using his free arm to fight to swim.

  A flashlight's glare almost blinded him. It was aimed from a bridge about twenty feet above him, from near the bluff over which the Taurus had fallen. Prescott, Cavanaugh thought. Now he's going to finish it. Struggling to swim toward boulders, Cavanaugh waited for the bullet he would never feel, which would blow his skull apart. He knew that Jamie would drown, if Prescott didn't shoot her first. Their corpses would be caught in the current and swept out to sea.

  Close. We came so close.

  "You son of a bitch!" Cavanaugh managed to yell.

  "What? I can't hear you!" a man's voice yelled back, not Prescott's. "Try to reach those rocks!"

  Cavanaugh didn't have the strength to answer.

  The flashlight kept blinding him. "When I saw the broken guardrail, I stopped and spotted your car going under! I called the police! Swim closer! I've got a rope in my truck!"

  * * *

  5

  An oxygen mask over her face, an IV blood line going into her left arm, Jamie lay on a gurney that two nurses wheeled urgently through electronically controlled swinging doors toward a brightly lit corridor flanked by operating rooms. Two surgeons quickly followed. A clock on the wall showed it was 12:35. Watching the doors swing shut, Cavanaugh tightened his grip on the blanket wrapped around him.

  "I heard you stopped the bleeding with duct tape," a voice behind him said.

  Cavanaugh turned toward Rutherford, whose husky dark features looked pale with fatigue. Like Cavanaugh, he still bore the marks of the beating he'd received.

  "We're going to have to start teaching that at the Academy," Rutherford said.

  Cavanaugh's hollowness made it difficult for him to speak. "Good to see you again, John."

  "Hard to believe, given how much trouble you took to avoid me."

  "When did you get in?"

  "This evening. As soon as it was obvious you were jerking us around again, several of us decided to go sight-seeing in Carmel. In fact, I received your second phone call in a Bureau jet somewhere over Ohio."

  "You told the police to report any incidents involvin
g people who matched our description?"

  "It seemed a reasonable tactic. Trouble has a way of happening to you." Rutherford nodded toward the doors to the surgical area. "Is she going to be all right?"

  Cavanaugh glanced down at his hands. "They don't know."

  "I'm very sorry. We could have tried to help you get her back."

  " Tried.' A lot to coordinate. No time to do it. The government would have cared more about keeping Prescott than helping me. I couldn't risk it."

  "Did the doctors tell you when they'd have word about her condition?"

  "Four to five hours."

  "A long time to wait," Rutherford said. "You can spend it in jail, or you can spend it with us. Do you think you're ready now to help us get Prescott?"

  * * *

  6

  The squad room in the Monterey police station had two rows of desks at which weary-looking Justice Department and local law-enforcement officers sat, listening to Cavanaugh. Throughout, phones rang. Each time one was answered, Cavanaugh tensely expected it would be word from the hospital. It never was.

  "We'll get a sketch artist working on the description you gave us. The airports along the coast have already been alerted," Rutherford said.

  "I don't think he'll leave the area," Cavanaugh said. The overhead lights were painfully bright. "To the best of Prescott's knowledge, we're dead."

  The possibility that Jamie might, in fact, be dying at that moment made Cavanaugh hesitate.

  Somehow he continued. "I told Prescott that the government didn't know I'd tracked him to Carmel. He believed me. After all, if I was working with the government, I wouldn't have been alone. In his arrogance, Prescott might decide he'd finally covered his tracks. He might do the unexpected and stick close to home. Where's the list I asked you to make?" He referred to the names of men who had bought or leased property in the Carmel/Monterey area within the previous three weeks and who had also made appointments to play golf at the best courses.

  Rutherford handed Cavanaugh several sheets of paper. "This is what we've got so far. It doesn't include men who've rented property without using a broker. We're checking past 'For Rent' ads in the local papers to try to contact property owners who made direct arrangements with new renters."

  The overhead lights seemed harsher as Cavanaugh studied the list. "There're more than I expected."

  "It's a popular area."

  "How come there aren't many names in Carmel itself?"

  "Expensive real estate. Not many people can afford it. The location's so prized, very few sell."

  Cavanaugh kept scanning the names. Noting occupants in Pacific Grove, Monterey, Seaside, Carmel, the Carmel Valley, and the Carmel Highlands, the list went on and on.

  "It's going to take a lot of personnel to check all this," Cavanaugh said. "And a lot of time and effort not to make Prescott suspicious if you get close to him."

  "We were hoping we'd save some of that time and effort if any of those names caught your attention," an FBI agent said.

  "When Karen was preparing Fresco It's new identity," Cavanaugh said, "she wouldn't have picked an unusual name. Nothing that stood out. And nothing that anybody would associate with Prescott's former life."

  The group looked more weary.

  "Unless Karen got a bad feeling about Prescott," Cavanaugh said.

  They glanced up.

  "If Karen knew she was in danger," Cavanaugh said, "she might have chosen a name for Prescott that meant something to me and led me to him."

  "You?" an agent asked.

  "She had every reason to expect I'd go after anybody who hurt her."

  "You and she were that close?"

  "Her brother and I were in Delta Force together. He bled to death in my arms."

  The group became silent, sobered.

  Cavanaugh scanned the list. "His name was . . ." Cavanaugh tapped his index finger on a name. "Ben."

  Rutherford came over and stared at the name he indicated. "Benjamin Kramer."

  "The Carmel Highlands." Cavanaugh remembered steering onto a road that led to the Highlands and asking Prescott the significance of the name. "It's a small community of houses on a bluff above the ocean," Prescott had said matter-of-factly. The bastard lives there, Cavanaugh thought. Without knowing it, I was close to Prescott's home.

  "How strongly do you believe there's a connection?" Rutherford sounded like he wanted desperately to believe. "It could be a coincidence."

  "I didn't notice it at the start because Ben never used the formal version of his name. He was always just Ben. But Prescott has a thing about nicknames. He insisted that his first name was Daniel, not Dan, and when he created the Joshua Carter identity, he was firm to the staff at the exercise club that his name was Joshua, not Josh. On this list, some people used abbreviations to identify themselves—Sam, Steve. In contrast, Benjamin seems awfully formal."

  "What about the last name 'Kramer'?" an FBI agent asked.

  "Before Karen had the car accident that put her in a wheelchair, she was engaged to a guy named Kramer. As soon as the creep found out Karen was permanently crippled, he broke the engagement. Ben said the only good thing about Karen's accident was it kept Kramer from marrying her."

  "Let's find out where this address is. Who's familiar with the Highlands?" Rutherford asked.

  "My aunt lives down there." A female detective grabbed a phone.

  Rutherford turned toward another detective. "Does your department have detailed maps of the communities around here?"

  "A computer program and a satellite image from the Internet."

  "Let's get a precise location of the house."

  A phone rang. As a detective answered it, Cavanaugh hoped but also dreaded that this time the call would be from the hospital, but it turned out to be about another matter.

  Someone put a CD-ROM disc into a computer. A layout of the few streets in the Carmel Highlands appeared on the screen. The detective typed the address. "There. At the end of this ridge. Directly over the ocean." A magnified satellite image showed the tops of homes, the patterns of vegetation, and the contours of streets. The detective zoomed in on the property they wanted to know about.

  "A big lot," Cavanaugh said.

  "In the Highlands, some of them are an acre and more."

  "Sprawling house."

  "Compared to the shadows these other houses give off, it looks like it has only one level."

  The female detective finished talking to her aunt and set down the phone. "Everybody knows everybody down there. When this guy moved in, she took him a fruit basket to welcome him. He was overweight. Gruff. Said he was dieting. Couldn't eat fruit because of the fructose in it. That's the word he used—fructose. The few times she's seen him since then, he'd slimmed down. Shaved his head. Grew a goatee. She says she can see through the trees to his house. The lights are on."

  "At one-thirty in the morning?" an FBI agent asked.

  "Maybe he leaves them on when he's not home."

  "Or he could be packing," Rutherford said, grabbing a phone, "in which case, there isn't much time to trap him."

  * * *

  7

  On edge from tension and lack of sleep, Cavanaugh stood behind one of the three police cars that formed a barricade at the entrance to the dark street. Increasingly worried about Jamie, he'd phoned the hospital before he'd arrived, but there had still been no word about her condition. Next to him, Rutherford and his team used night-vision binoculars to scan the handful of shadowy, widely separated houses and then concentrated on the one at the end of the block. Perched on a bluff, its low-sprawling profile would have been silhouetted against the whitecaps of the ocean if not for the numerous outdoor lights that glared around the house's perimeter. Several of the windows were illuminated also.

  "I still don't see any shadows moving behind the curtains," an agent said.

  "Maybe Prescott's gone, and the lights are supposed to make us believe he's there," someone else said.

  Despite dry clothes, C
avanaugh crossed his arms over his chest, trying to generate warmth, continuing to feel the chill of what had happened to Jamie—and another chill: fear. "You don't see movement because it's not in Prescott's nature to go near windows."

  Movement attracted his attention, figures emerging from trees and shadows, policemen escorting a family up the street toward the protection of the barricade. Wakened with a phone call, warned not to turn on their lights, they had been directed to leave their house via a back door, where the heavily armed officers had been waiting.

  "Is that the last of them?" Rutherford asked.

  "Six houses. Six families. All clear," a detective told him.

  Behind the barricade, next to an open van, equipment made scraping sounds as shadowy black-clad figures put on two-way-radio gear, equipment belts, armored vests, night-vision goggles, and helmets, ten members of a SWAT team looking like starship troopers while they checked their pistols and assault rifles.

  Rutherford went over to them. Cavanaugh followed.

  On the far side of the van, a middle-aged male civilian, one of Prescott's neighbors, showed the SWAT commander a diagram he'd made of the interior of Prescott's house. The muted red flashlight the commander used to study it couldn't be seen beyond the van.

  "How recently were you in there?" the commander asked.

  "Five weeks ago. Just before the previous owner moved. Jay and I were very close. It's a damned shame he got sick."

  "Any construction work since then? Workmen showing up? That sort of thing?"

  "None that I saw."

  "Okay, so we've got a living room past the front door," the commander said. "Media room, spare bedroom, and bathroom to the right. To the left, the kitchen, two more bedrooms and bathrooms. A home office. Friggin' big house. These are French doors leading off the living room?"

  "Yes. There's a terrace in back. A waist-high wall looks over the cliff to the water."

  "What's this area in back of the garage?"