The Protector (2003) (50 page)

The walkie-talkie crackled. "Nothing."

Cavanaugh heard sirens in the distance. "Anybody who isn't dead will bleed to death if we don't get them to a hospital."

"And Prescott can pick us off as we try to go in for them." What Rutherford said next seemed to come out of nowhere. "Do you know what Baptists believe?"

Cavanaugh assumed he was talking to calm himself. "No, John. Tell me."

"Humans are sinful." "Truth to that," Cavanaugh said. "Our only hope is God's mercy." "Truth to that also."

"Well, God have mercy," Rutherford said. He darted toward a pine tree in front of Prescott's house.

Cavanaugh wanted to follow, but his legs unexpectedly resisted. Imagining the smell of the hormone, he felt an impulse to back away, to get as far from the house as possible.

Rutherford said something into his walkie-talkie. As the sirens wailed closer, the FBI agents and the police officers shifted toward the house.

"God have mercy is right," Cavanaugh said. Hearing another moan through the open front door, he bolted from the fence. Punishing himself for having almost been a coward, he raced across Prescott's lawn, reached a space between two windows at the front of the house, pressed himself against the stone wall, and smashed each of the windows with the butt of the shotgun.

Next to him, he heard other windows being smashed, the agents and police officers following his example, using the butts of shotguns to shatter the glass while pressing themselves against the front wall. A half minute later, the windows in back were shattered, as well.

As Cavanaugh waited for Prescott to shoot, an ocean breeze drifted through the house, fluttering curtains. "What's that smell?" a police officer said. "Get away from the house!" an agent yelled. "Take cover! I saw something move!"

"Don't shoot till you're sure of the target!" Rutherford yelled. A policeman raced from the front of the house.

Two agents followed, scrambling toward the barricade of police cars at the end of the block.

Cavanaugh tried to hold his breath.

Then he had to inhale, the
breeze
carrying the pungent smell to him. Even diluted, it shocked his brain. Instantly, sweat burst from his body, soaking him. He'd have run if panic hadn't paralyzed him. With tortuous slowness, the breeze took the last of the hormone from the house. But even though the only smell was now one of salt and kelp from the ocean, Cavanaugh continued to tremble.

"Living room's clear!" someone shouted from inside. Because the team in back had followed the breeze into the house, the hormone hadn't overcome them.

"Media room clear!"

"Guest room clear!"

"Bathroom clear!"

Beyond the broken windows, flashlights zigzagged, moving through the house. Agents and policemen slipped in through the front. More flashlights zigzagged.

"Second bedroom clear!"

"Second bathroom clear!"

"Office clear!"

As the litany continued and the search team shifted toward other rooms, Cavanaugh eased through the front door. In place of the hormone's pungent smell, the air was filled with cordite and the coppery odor of blood.

"Move the barricade! Get the ambulances down here!" Rutherford yelled into his walkie-talkie.

Cavanaugh saw him hunched over a body on the floor. A flashlight showed blood on a SWAT uniform. The man had been shot in the face.

As Cavanaugh moved from room to room, he saw more bodies, more blood. Thank God, some of the men were squirming, moaning, their armored vests having saved them from center-of-mass damage. But the wounds to their arms and legs might still cause them to bleed to death.

Through broken windows, he saw the flashing lights of two ambulances approaching the house. He shifted his attention to the array of strobe lights mounted at the corner of every room, sirens next to them.

"Master bedroom clear!" "Master bathroom clear!" "Garage clear!" "Laundry room clear!" "Darkroom clear!"

Amid the glare of more flashlights, ambulance attendants rushed into the house and hurried from body to body, doing their best to keep the wounded alive.

"You were right," Rutherford said. "They shot at each other." Cavanaugh pointed. "The way the strobes were set up, the flashes probably looked like automatic gunfire. Maybe they even created a flashing image of somebody with a weapon. The sirens would have engaged a startle reflex. Wherever those guys turned, they couldn't tell the difference between a threat and their own men. All it took was for one of them to panic because of the hormone and start shooting. Others would have followed suit. Scared beyond any extreme they'd ever experienced, they cut each other down in a cross fire." "Professionals," Rutherford said.

"Just like the fifteen Rangers who lost control and shot at each other in the swamp. Damn it, where's Prescott?" Cavanaugh asked.

Reinforcements arrived, more flashlights filling the darkness as two dozen agents and police officers searched the house repeatedly.

"No basement, no attic," Rutherford said. "It's a sloped roof. There'd be some kind of space under it," Cavanaugh said.

"Two agents checked every inch of it twice. Prescott isn't up there."

"As the SWAT team approached the house, he shut off the lights," Cavanaugh said. "He rigged a motion sensor for the strobes and the siren."

"Then he slipped out the back way," Rutherford said. "Check the neighboring properties. Search the houses. Get squad cars on the streets and the highway. If he's on foot, he can't go far."

"Well, that's the problem," an agent said.

"Problem?"

"There aren't any cars in the garage. Maybe he's got a vehicle hidden around here."

For the first time, Cavanaugh heard Rutherford swear.

Rutherford's walkie-talkie crackled. A voice Cavanaugh recognized as belonging to the van's radio operator asked, "Is that bodyguard with you? Over."

"Right next to me. Over."

"Tell him we just got a phone call from the hospital."

Chapter 9.

Cavanaugh sat in a corner of a blindingly bright room in Intensive Care. Across from him, Jamie lay unconscious, her face pale, EKG electrodes attached to her chest, a hospital gown and a sheet covering her, an IV tube leading into her left arm, a respirator tube going down her throat. Behind her, pulse, blood pressure, and heart monitors flashed and beeped.

One of her surgeons, a slender Hispanic, turned from examining her. "She's remarkably strong."

"Yes," Cavanaugh said.

"I'll know more in twelve hours, but her vitals are encouraging. We've got reason to be optimistic."

Staring at Jamie, Cavanaugh nodded.

"She'll have you to thank," the surgeon said. "She probably would have died before she got to the hospital if you hadn't stopped the bleeding with duct tape."

"No," Cavanaugh said. "She doesn't have anything to thank me for at all."

The doctor looked curious.

"If I'd listened to her," Cavanaugh said, "she never would have gotten shot."

The heart monitor beeped.

"Can I stay in here?" Cavanaugh asked.

"Normally, we don't allow ..."

Cavanaugh looked at him.

"Yes," the surgeon told him.

"The lights," Cavanaugh said, squinting from their brightness. "Can you put something over her eyelids?"

"As soon as we're finished in here, we'll dim the room."

"What about for now?"

"I'll have a nurse bring a washcloth."

"Thank you."

Thirty seconds later, Cavanaugh was alone with her.

The respirator hissed, wheezed, and thumped, Jamie's chest going up and down.

"I'm sorry," Cavanaugh told her.

His muscles ached. His eyes felt as if sand scratched them. Closing his lids to shield his eyes from the stark overhead lights, he leaned back in the plastic chair and managed a fitful sleep, even when nurses came in to check Jamie and replace her IV **ch**10

Around two in the afternoon, Cavanaugh drove a borrowed unmarked police car along Highway 1 and stopped at the side of the road just before the Carmel Highlands turnoff that would eventually lead to Prescott's street. He got out of the car and stayed close to the trees at the side of the road as he walked toward the turnoff. The afternoon was pleasant, with a gorgeous sky, but Cavanaugh paid attention only to the high branches on the trees just in from the turnoff. He approached them slowly from an oblique angle, craning his neck, taking off his sunglasses to get a better look at the trees.

When he didn't see what he wanted, he raised binoculars and scanned the branches. Continuing to remain carefully to the side, he paid particular attention to where the branches met the trunks. After ten minutes, a high Monterey pine--on the left, about forty feet in from the turnoff--became the sole object of his concentration. He focused the binoculars on a gap in the branches and nodded.

Chapter 11.

Near the entrance to Prescott's street, Cavanaugh stopped again, got out of the car, and stayed well to the side as he approached the turnoff. Now that his eyes were practiced, he took only five minutes to find the miniature TV camera, its lens about the size of a flashlight's, attached by a metal strap to the crook of a branch in a Monterey pine about thirty feet in from the entrance. The strap was painted the brown of the trunk. The camera was the same type that Prescott had said he'd hidden in the parking garage to watch for anybody who might be following him. "The Internet's crammed with advertising for them," he'd said. "Check up on your baby-sitter. See your neighbor's teenaged daughter sunbathing."

Or watch the police stake out your house and try to catch you by surprise, Cavanaugh thought. Last night, Prescott saw every move we made from when we drove into the Highlands to when Rutherford set up the roadblock here to when the SWAT team snuck up on the house. Cavanaugh recalled how the lights in Prescott's house had gone off a few seconds after the SWAT team had started to approach it. Sure, he thought. Prescott hoped that a brightly lit house would be a deterrent and buy him some time, but when he saw the police move toward it, he proceeded to stage two, shut the lights off, set the motion detectors for the strobes and the siren, then filled the house with the hormone.

Staying out of the camera's sight, Cavanaugh returned to the car. When he drove onto Prescott's street, he peered toward the end of the block and for the first time got a clear look at Prescott's house, which was low, modernistic in design, and made from flat sections of stone set on top of one another. Flanked by shrubs, a curved driveway led up to the front entrance. The door to the double-car garage was open. Yellow tape with police crime scene do not cross on it went from tree to tree, encircling the property. Other things caught Cavanaugh's interest. On the right, a large truck had a platform raised next to the utility pole, two workmen replacing the electrical transformer Cavanaugh had shot the night before. In the driveway, a bearded man in coveralls was removing sheets of plywood from a pickup truck. Half of the broken windows in front of the house had already been covered with the wood. To the left, parked along the street, pointing in Cavanaugh's direction, were two police cars and an unmarked car that Cavanaugh recognized as the dark sedan belonging to Rutherford and some of his fellow agents.

Cavanaugh made a U-turn in front of the house, doing it slowly, taking the opportunity to study the corners under the house's eaves without seeming to. Small boxes with peepholes might have been birdhouses, or they might have been receptacles for miniature TV cameras hidden under the eaves.

After parking in front of the police cars and walking toward the house, he saw Rutherford come out and study him wearily.

"Is your wife's condition any better?" Although Rutherford had changed his suit and shaved, he looked haggard. The lingering bruises on his face made his black skin seem pale.

"She's still unconscious." Cavanaugh made himself continue. "But the surgeon says her life signs are better than he expected. We're more hopeful."

"Good." Rutherford sounded genuinely relieved, despite the betrayed tone in what he said next. "Incidentally, I just found out her name's Jamie, not Jennifer."

"I'm sorry."

"Of course."

"I figured if I kept her real name a secret, in the long run she wouldn't be involved," Cavanaugh said.