The Naked Edge Read online

  “Want to make a bet?” Bowie asked.

  “That your arms and legs are gonna be busted? That's a sure thing.”

  As they came closer, Bowie folded his left arm across his chest and raised his right palm to the side of his face in an absolutely non-threatening pose.

  “Well, well, look at how chilled this guy is,” a kid said.

  “He won't be after we stomp him.”

  “I'm serious. You want to make a bet?” Bowie asked.

  They came even closer. Bowie kept his left arm across his chest, his right palm on his face.

  “For what?”

  “The money in my wallet.”

  “We're gonna have it anyhow,” Raoul said, holding the gun.

  “But don't you want to know what the bet is?”

  They were almost to him.

  “So what's the stupid damned bet?” Raoul wanted to know.

  “That you can stand twenty feet away from me, holding your gun at your side.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “I can get to you before you shoot me.”

  Raoul snickered. “Yeah. Right.”

  “Believe me.”

  Raoul snickered again and turned to his friends.

  At that point, Bowie could have taken them.

  “And what'll I tell the cops when I put a bullet in your guts?” Raoul asked.

  “Self-defense.”

  “You've been smokin’ too much crack,” one of the kids said. “A gun against fists ain't self-defense.”

  “Well, maybe if I had something that the police would agree was a threat.”

  “Like what?” Raoul asked.

  “Oh, I don't know. A knife maybe.”

  “This is loco.” The kid with the knife sneered. “He wants me to give him my—”

  “Wait. Shut up while I understand this,” Raoul told him. “I stand thirty feet away.”

  “I said twenty.”

  “Thirty.”

  “That's the length of a good-sized room,” Bowie pretended to object.

  “And you stand over here with a knife.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you bet I can't shoot you before you get to me?”

  Bowie nodded. “And if you do shoot me, it's self-defense because I've got a knife. You can tell the cops how I followed you. Stalked you.”

  “I'm telling you this guy is loco,” the kid with the knife said.

  “How about it, Raoul? You've been away five years. Didn't you lie awake, dreaming of action? And now here you've got it. And it's perfectly legal. Your first day out.”

  Raoul studied him.

  As the sun became more intense, Bowie waited.

  “Forty feet,” Raoul said.

  “You're taking advantage. The bet I offered—”

  “Was forty feet,” Raoul said. He turned to his friends. “Right? Forty feet.”

  “Sure, Raoul. That's what he said.”

  “Okay, if you want to be tough about this,” Bowie said.

  Looking amused, Raoul took forty steps backward. Generous steps.

  The kid with the knife said, “I ain't givin’ him this.”

  “Then I'll need to use mine.” Bowie still had his left arm folded across his chest, his right palm to his chin. With his left hand at his right armpit, he reached into the short sleeve of his loose shirt and brought out a five-inch folding knife that he had secured under his arm with Velcro on a hypoallergenic strap wound around his chest.

  His handcrafted knife was different from the one with the polished ebony handle that he liked to play with. This knife was for business. Its action was butter-slick as he thumbed the button at the back of the blade, flipping it open. Anodized black, forged from 440 C steel, it was sharp enough to slip between the fibers of a Kevlar vest. Its handle was made from a grooved, laminated, almost indestructible plastic called Micarta. The grooves were important because they allowed Bowie to keep a tight grip, even if his fingers were slippery with blood.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” a kid exclaimed.

  Raoul raised his pistol.

  “Take it easy,” Bowie said. “I just need this for the bet. If you kill me, it needs to look as if you're defending yourself.”

  “If? There's no ‘if’ about it.” Raoul's eyelids lowered. “The bet was fifty feet. Right?” He took another ten steps back.

  “Aw, come on,” Bowie complained. “You want this to be fair, don't you?”

  “Fifty feet is fair.”

  “But you need to keep the gun at your side. You can't raise it until the bet starts,” Bowie said.

  “Sure.” Across the vast distance, Raoul smirked. “At my side.” He lowered the gun.

  Bowie lowered his knife and braced himself without seeming to. “Who's going to do the counting?”

  “Counting? Nobody said anything about—”

  Screaming at the top of his voice, Bowie charged. “I'm going to rip your guts out, cocksucker!” he shouted. “Cocksucker! Cocksucker!” Reaching full speed almost immediately, he hurtled across the distance, his motion so violent, his face so contorted with fury, that Raoul flinched. Instead of raising the gun, aiming, and pulling the trigger, he lurched backward. Off-balance to begin with, he became more off-balance when his knees bent with a will of their own. His arms jerked protectively up toward his chest. The instinctive motion caused the gun to point upward instead of toward the target who rushed at him, screaming, “Killyoukillyoukillyou!”

  The scenario was a worst-case nightmare for anyone who earned a living with a gun. Law-enforcement officers, special-operations personnel, protective agents—any professional knew that someone with a knife could scream and race across those fifty feet and kill you before you overcame your surprise and defended yourself. The only defense was to avoid the scenario and shoot that s.o.b. dead the moment you saw the knife. Then, if you were in law enforcement, you had to justify your actions to a review board and maybe a grand jury. Almost certainly the relatives of the dead piece of shit would complain tearfully, “It wasn't fair. A gun against a knife. The cop had the advantage. He didn't need to shoot.” And you'd think, “I damned well did need to shoot. And if I needed to do it again, I'd nail that sucker just as dead as he is now.” Because, in the popular imagination, the person with the knife stops running, gets set, and then jabs with the knife, wasting a valuable second or two in which time the person with the gun overcomes the startle reflex and starts blasting. But in reality, the person with the knife doesn't stop but keeps rushing, using all that raging momentum to slam into the person with the gun and send him or her flying backward, crashing against a wall or onto the ground, and then the assailant drops onto the victim and goes to work with the knife.

  That was close to what happened now. Raoul gaped, knees bent, arms thrust uselessly upward, as Bowie seemed to cross the no-longer-vast distance in hardly any time at all. Using his shoulder, he rammed into Raoul with such power that Raoul's lungs emptied. His feet left the ground. His body arched backward. His head made a sickening crunching sound when he landed.

  At that moment, Bowie could have used a curving downward motion to slice Raoul's throat. Instead, he yanked the gun from Raoul's hand and spun toward his gaping pals, ready with the knife and the pistol.

  “Want to make a bet?” Bowie asked.

  “Jesus, man, don't shoot me,” the kid with the knife begged.

  “Farthest thing from my mind.” Bowie put the gun under his belt. “Raoul, are you watching this? I want to make sure you see it.”

  “Uh,” Raoul murmured. “What?”

  “Damn it, are you watching this?”

  “Uh, yeah, uh.”

  Bowie folded his knife and clipped it onto a pants pocket.

  “You,” Bowie told the kid with the knife. “I asked you if you want to make a bet.”

  “Bet?”

  “That the three of you can't take me.”

  The three kids kept gaping.

  Bowie again assumed his absolutely non-threa
tening position, folding his left arm across his chest, raising his right palm and pressing it against the side of his face. “Come on, for God's sake, do something!”

  The kid with the knife took his chance. As he lunged with the knife, Bowie whipped his right hand down and deflected the knife. At the same time, he turned his left hand so that his palm was outward and slapped the kid as hard as he could, the blow so powerful and covering so large a portion of the kid's face that his eyes rolled up.

  In the same motion, Bowie spun so that the edge of one of his thick-soled shoes caught the side of the second kid's leg, hitting a nerve that temporarily disabled the leg and sent the kid screaming onto the dirt. Meanwhile, the kid with the knife sagged to his knees. Bowie thrust his right palm upward under the kid's chin, holding back just enough force that he didn't break the kid's neck when he struck. He kicked the third kid in the testicles, and when that kid pitched his head reflexively forward, Bowie jabbed a palm to his exposed chin also. Both dropped, unconscious.

  That left the one whose leg was paralyzed, the pain so intense that he could barely make himself fumble for something in a pants pocket. As the kid pulled out a shitty, short-barreled .22 revolver, Bowie kicked him in the chin, taking care that he only broke the jaw and didn't kill him.

  Raoul lay on the ground, struggling to catch his breath, blinking in disbelief.

  “And what did you think of that?” Bowie asked.

  “Uh.”

  “How'd you like a job?”

  “Uh.”

  “How'd you like to learn to do that? Be an operator. Win friends and cause a world of pain.”

  “Job? What kind of—”

  “Working for me.” Bowie pulled a money clip from his pocket. The steel clip, handcrafted by him, had a knife so skillfully concealed along the side that he never had trouble taking it through security checkpoints. “Two thousand dollars as a sign-up fee.”

  “Two thousand?”

  “You get room and board, free clothing and equipment.”

  “Two thousand?”

  “The sign-up fee. Then you get three thousand a month. You never got that much robbing liquor stores.”

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Prove you can learn. And then . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Do what you're told.”

  17

  “A slap?” William asked, as if Cavanaugh were joking.

  Cavanaugh felt subtle pressure in his stomach as the Gulfstream G-200 soared away from the airport in Casper, Wyoming. Jackson Hole's airport could have handled the jet, but there was too great a chance that the attack team would watch that airport. Better to use the helicopter to fly 240 miles east to Casper, where the Gulfstream had been instructed to land and wait for them. GLOBAL PROTECTIVE SERVICES was stenciled across the side. Club chairs, a conference table, living-room-style sitting for up to ten passengers, a spacious galley, a sophisticated entertainment system, a transcontinental fuel range, quiet engines, one hundred percent filtered air, plenty of natural light.

  “You think a slap sounds like a sissy kind of thing?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “Well, certainly,” William said.

  Jamie came from the bathroom, where she'd put on a white blouse, blue blazer, and gray slacks, clothes that William had instructed the pilots to bring. Turquoise earrings brought out the deep green in her eyes. She'd undone her ponytail, her brunette hair hanging to her shoulders.

  “It's actually very serious,” she told William.

  “Fairbairn wanted his close-quarters combat techniques to be simple,” Cavanaugh said. “Easily taught. Easily remembered. When condensed to essentials, there are only a few moves. But just as important, Fairbairn's system ensures that the person making those moves doesn't get injured in the process.”

  Mrs. Patterson stopped admiring the Gulfstream's appointments and listened.

  “A punch, for example.” Jamie made a fist and pretended to hit the wall. “I'm going to hurt that person, no question about it. But I'm probably also going to hurt my hand. At the least, my fist will swell and throb and become useless if I try to keep punching. At the worst, I'll break bones, incapacitating me with pain and shock. I don't care how tough you are—you can't will yourself not to experience shock.”

  Cavanaugh added, “So Fairbairn asked himself, ‘What are the parts of the body that can administer force with little risk of injury?’”

  “Since we're talking about slaps, I assume one of them is the palm of a hand,” William said.

  “Yes, but when we say a slap, we're not talking about anything dainty,” Cavanaugh told him. “We're talking about a slap that's as hard and fast as you can make it. The full force of your body. Your palm covers a lot of area, almost the entire side of someone's face. If you don't knock the opponent out, you'll daze him enough so that when you slap the opposite side of his face, he'll go down.”

  “What are the other parts of the body that Fairbairn decided were the best to use?” William asked.

  “The feet, if you wear thick-soled shoes. You can stomp down hard and break somebody's toes. Fairbairn recommended a variation in which you stomp the side of your shoe all the way down your opponent's shin before you hit the toes.”

  “Ouch,” William said.

  “The knee,” Jamie said.

  “To the groin?” William asked.

  “Definitely.”

  Mrs. Patterson kept listening.

  “The elbows,” Cavanaugh said. “You can break ribs with them but not hurt yourself.”

  “You can chop the edge of your hand against someone's throat and not hurt yourself,” Jamie said.

  William winced, imagining the damage to the other person.

  Mrs. Patterson leaned forward.

  “And you can shove the palm of your hand up under someone's chin, gouging their eyes with your fingers while you thrust back your opponent's head and . . .”

  William looked more uncomfortable.

  “Why didn't my husband teach me any of this?” Mrs. Patterson demanded. “He never taught me about the guns he kept around the house, either. He was a good husband, but he always treated me as if I was weak.”

  “Now's your chance to make up for lost time.” Jamie motioned for Cavanaugh to stand. “Fairbairn recommended combinations.”

  She crossed her left arm over her chest and raised her right palm to the side of her face.

  “I'm defenseless?” she asked William and Mrs. Patterson.

  “Pretty much,” William said while Mrs. Patterson nodded.

  “That's what you want the opponent to think. The idea is to make him feel overly confident and then to engage his startle reflex when you do something he isn't expecting.”

  Cavanaugh pretended to strike at her stomach.

  Her right hand swept down to knock the blow away. Her left hand whipped, palm outward, in a pretended slap across Cavanaugh's face. She mimicked a kick to his groin, and when he bent forward in pretended pain, she delivered a slow-motion palm thrust to his chin, fingers near his eyes, pushing his chin back.

  “The slap would have so stunned him that he couldn't defend himself,” Jamie concluded. “Fairbairn wrote a book: Get Tough. We'll find a copy for you.”

  “Which reminds me, I have something for both of you,” William said.

  They watched with interest as William opened a drawer in a storage compartment that resembled a side table.

  He took out a briefcase. “You told me to arrange to have a bug-out bag delivered from GPS headquarters and put on the plane, but I confess I haven't the faintest idea what a bug-out bag is.”

  “It's something you need when you bug-out,” Cavanaugh said.

  “What?”

  “An emergency kit for when you expect you'll be on the run. Most operators have a bug-out bag stashed somewhere.”

  Cavanaugh opened the case and revealed knives, nine millimeter ammunition, an extra magazine, an easy-to-conceal SIG Sauer 229 pistol, lock picks, a miniature flashlight, a
n ample supply of twenty-dollar bills, fake ID, small rolls of duct tape, and assorted seemingly non-tactical items such as safety pins and zip ties, the thin, supple plastic strips that were used to bundle wires or close garbage bags.

  “What are they for?” William asked.

  “Pinning things and tying things.”

  William gave him an unamused look. “Right. And I suppose the duct tape is for sealing leaky pipes.”

  “Or veins.”

  “Some day, you'll need to teach me about that.” William turned to Jamie. “This is for you.” He handed her a black plastic case the size of a laptop computer. SIGARMS was stenciled on it.

  “How thoughtful,” Jamie said. “Everybody wants to give me firearms.”

  “You'll also need this.” William handed her a holster.

  “No,” Cavanaugh said.

  Jamie looked at him.

  “You're not in danger if you're not with me,” he said.

  “You're suggesting . . .”

  “Stay with Mrs. Patterson. Keep away from me.”

  “The attack team might still try to find where I am and use me to get at you,” Jamie said.

  “You'll be well guarded.”

  “See this ring on my finger,” Jamie said. “I'm in this as much as you are, babe. There's no way I'm going to hide while you're out making yourself a target.”

  “It's the safest thing for you.”

  “I don't give a damn about what's safe for me. If this were reversed, if I were the target, would you hide?”

  “Of course not. But that would be—”

  “Different? How? Because I'm a woman and you're a man?”

  “You know I don't think that way. It's just . . . if we do this together, if things go wrong and something happens to you . . . I couldn't bear losing you.”

  “You think I could bear losing you? You won't get a better, more motivated protector than me.”

  “I know.”

  “And I'm good at it, as you often told me. Together?”

  Cavanaugh's emotions made it difficult for him to speak. “Yes. Together.”

  PART THREE:

  “DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES, RAOUL?”

  1

  Oaxaca, Mexico.