As he drove through the darkness, his tortured thoughts tugged him back to a long-ago summer when he and Aaron had played in the shadows of the trees in the park at the bottom of their street. Someone had built a new subdivision a few blocks away. To make the location more attractive, the owner had put in a lake, stocking it with goldfish. What the owner didn't count on was the effect of heavy rains. The lake overflowed, fish and water spilling into the stream that wound through the park. Aaron and Bowie had sat by that stream, spellbound by the magic of the six-inch-long fish, their speckled gold shimmering beneath the water.
"We could go home and get buckets," Aaron had suggested. "Trap a couple of fish in each bucket."
"And then what?"
"Try to convince our parents to buy us each a fish tank."
"I don't think my father would go for that. He'd probably knock me on the floor for suggesting it."
"I don't think my stepfather would go for it, either," Aaron said. "But, hey, we could still get the buckets. What we'll do is catch the fish and carry them back to the lake."
"It'll take all day," Bowie said, although his name had been different back then. "Besides it wouldn't make a difference. The next rain, all these fish will flood back into the stream." He removed his knife from his pocket and opened it. "I know what to do."
Aaron stared uneasily at the sunlight glinting off the blade.
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.
Chapter 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."
Chapter 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.