Bowie saw a dead branch on the ground and cut off its twigs. He was about to sharpen its tip and suggest that they use the fish for target practice, but the look on Aaron's face told him to make a different suggestion. "Let's get some string and safety pins. We'll fish. We'll pretend our helicopter crashed in the jungle."
"Cool." A doubt clouded Aaron's eyes. "But if we catch any, I don't want to eat them. They're not very big, and I'm not sure goldfish taste good."
"Who said anything about eating them? We'll put them back in the lake after we catch them."
But they never did catch any fish, no matter how hard they tried throughout that muggy summer, most of which they spent in the shade of those dense trees, pretending they were the last two members of a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines. They became so skilled at hiding from the enemy that kids bicycling past or men and women strolling hand-in-hand along the path didn't see them crouching among the bushes.
As things turned out, it didn't rain again for a long time. The stream evaporated until there were only four inches of water. Most of the fish suffocated. By then, he and Aaron had gotten tired of fishing and instead lay among the bushes, reading Bowie's knife magazines. Sometimes when Bowie's father got even drunker than usual, bragging about what a hot-shit football player he'd been and how Bowie had damned sure better be as good, Bowie went down to the park on his own. He speared a couple of the surviving fish. His knife was so sharp that it made him feel as if he cut through butter when he sliced their bellies open. After all, what did it matter? The fish would have died anyhow.
13
"By the time I concluded that you and Aaron Stoddard were the same person, I'd learned a lot about your alter-ego," William said in the cabin. "Aaron Stoddard is part of Jackson Hole's search-and-rescue team. He volunteers to coach basketball at a local school. He teaches children's groups about wilderness camping."
"A hell of a swell guy," Cavanaugh said. Knowing that he'd been investigated made him feel vulnerable. If William could find him, others could. In fact, they had.
The cabin-a hunting retreat that Garth leased from the government-had a living/cooking area, a bedroom, a hand-pumped well, and an outdoor toilet. After scouting the perimeter, Cavanaugh had waited in the woods, listening, satisfying himself that the night was quiet.
Meanwhile, Jamie had closed and locked the interior shutters. When he entered, he saw her put a lamp in a corner, where it wouldn't help a gunman who peered through cracks in the shutters and tried to use its feeble light to guide his aim. Mrs. Patterson (tireless, wonderful Mrs. Patterson) used the cabin's Coleman stove to heat cans of soup that she found in a cupboard.
"You're going to get your wish," Cavanaugh told Jamie after a long silence.
She looked confused by the apparently out-of-nowhere reference.
"I'm accepting what Duncan gave me in his will. I'm assuming control of Global Protective Services."
The stove hissed. William and Mrs. Patterson watched him.
"I think the only way to catch whoever's responsible is to offer myself as bait," he continued, "and that's an awfully good reason to own Global Protective Services. It'll give me access to the best operators in the business."
The stove kept hissing.
"All my life, I tried to protect people," Cavanaugh said. "Even when I was in Delta Force, I thought of it as protecting. Against terrorists. Against all the cowards and sadists who think they can kill anybody in the name of God or because they believe they're God. But this is something new for me. This is the first time I've needed protecting."
14
Venice.
The suite in the hotel-a converted twelfth-century Doge palace-had a dramatic view of St. Mark's piazza. Crowds persisted, despite a chill spray from rising waves.
"Glass making," the Internet tycoon said.
"Glass making?" The head of his protective detail frowned.
"Nobody comes to Venice without taking the boat across the lagoon to Murano," the tycoon's wife said. "For certain, I don't. Murano's the most famous glass-making town in the world. Its pieces are museum quality."
The protective agent nodded. "Give me twenty-four hours to set up the security."
"In twenty-four hours, we'll be in Madrid," the tycoon's wife told him.
"Madrid? That isn't on the schedule."
"We decided during breakfast. This city's too damp."
The agent, a former member of Britain's Strategic Air Service, nodded again. "Yes, all those canals." One hundred and fifty of them, to be exact. Four hundred bridges. One hundred and seventeen islands, every nook and cranny of them a security nightmare.
"So that's the plan." The tycoon's wife dropped her napkin onto a half-eaten bowl of fruit. "In ten minutes, we leave for Murano."
There wasn't much to be said after that. The agent, whose name was Miller, had five men at his disposal, three of whom were resting after the night shift. Because the change in schedule was last minute, a predator couldn't know about it, so there wasn't any point in sending a man to scout the location. Miller took some consolation that he didn't need to be overly concerned about a long-distance threat from a sniper. With a business executive, the likely threat was kidnappers wanting a ransom.
The bumpy twenty-minute lagoon crossing made the tycoon and his wife slightly nauseous. As Miller's eyes roamed the choppy water, on guard against any boats that might speed toward them, he studied the island of San Michele, Venice's main cemetery. Several boats were docked there, draped with funeral cloths and wreaths. He'd read somewhere that, with land so scarce in the Venice area, soil had to be brought to the cemetery so that it could continue accepting coffins.
He switched his gaze toward Murano, the heart of which had two rows of Renaissance buildings separated by a canal. Yellow and brown, the long, stone structures adjoined one another, almost all of them glass-making factories.
My God, if we need to go into every one of these buildings, Miller thought, we'll be here all day.
But the tycoon and his wife had made phone calls and knew precisely where they were heading. Miller instructed one of his men to stay behind and guard the launch, to make sure it wasn't tampered with. Then Miller and his remaining agent flanked their clients, never looking at them, always peering outward at potential threats. The tycoon and his wife ignored the tourists, crossed the street next to the canal, and entered a building, where two well-dressed owners waited for them.
Miller didn't like the shadowy corridor he faced-or the roar at the end of it. He entered a large area that consisted of several blazing furnaces, their hatches open. Men wearing fire-retardant aprons and gloves held metal poles into the flames, turning them, softening the large pieces of glass suspended from their tips. At a precisely judged moment, one of the workers removed the pole and applied various tools to the molten glass, cutting, twisting, and shaping it, sometimes blowing through a tube to expand it into a globe.
Keeping his attention on the corridor through which they'd entered, Miller heard a conversation behind him, the two owners using English to explain to the client and his wife how time-intensive a hand-crafted piece of glass was, how it could take all day to make one perfect vase and certainly much longer to fashion a glass peacock, its fanned-out tail as multi-colored as that of an actual bird. The most ambitious pieces, the most complexly contoured and layered, required centuries of glass-making experience. The techniques were handed down from generation to generation.
Miller straightened as a man and woman came along the corridor. In their mid-thirties, pleasant looking, they wore shorts and sandals. The man's shirt was tucked in. So was the woman's blouse. No outline of a gun or a knife. No fanny packs. Nothing to cause concern. The man had a camera around his neck. He nodded to Miller, a little puzzled that Miller wasn't watching the activity around the ovens. Miller nodded in return.