The rain had lessened to a drizzle by the time Cavanaugh, following Duncan's instructions, reached the Holiday Inn on Route 17, a half mile from Teterboro Airport. Duncan waited under the carport at the motel's entrance. He wore a raincoat and hat. His hands were in the coat's pockets, one of them, no doubt, holding a pistol. His trim mustache emphasized how pinched his lips were. With his straight military posture and intense eyes, he exuded a focus that made Cavanaugh pleased to rely on him.
The moment Cavanaugh drove under the carport and stopped next to Duncan, a gray van suddenly appeared behind them.
Prescott flinched. "They caught us."
"No," Cavanaugh said. "It's fine."
Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw two men and a woman, all three familiar to him, all wearing rain slickers, step from the van. They kept their hands beneath the slickers, presumably on weapons, while they scanned the area around them, paying particular attention to the highway beyond the parking lot. Five seconds later, everything looking satisfactory, one of the men approached Cavanaugh's side of the car.
With that all-clear sign, Cavanaugh pressed the car's unlock button.
Instantly, Duncan opened the passenger door and looked in. "Mr. Prescott?"
Prescott looked dumbfounded.
"I'm Duncan Wentworth. Global Protective Services. We spoke on the phone. Come with me, please."
Before Prescott seemed aware of it, Duncan had guided him from the car. Meanwhile, the woman and the remaining man flanked Prescott, Duncan leading the way, escorting him to the van.
Cavanaugh got out of the car.
"How ya doing?" The trim man who waited on the driver's side chewed gum.
"Better than I was a half hour ago."
"You can relax now. Leave the show to us."
"Looking forward to it. The car might have a location transmitter."
"By the time they find it, it'll be far from the airport. They'll never suspect how you got away."
"The pistol on the seat belongs to the assault team." Cavanaugh pulled the.45 from under his belt. "This belongs to Prescott. I have no idea where else it's been."
The man, whose name was Eddie, nodded. The rule was, you never kept a weapon whose history you didn't know. If you were caught with it, ballistics might prove that the weapon had been used in various shootings. The police would have every reason to believe you were implicated in them.
"These pieces'll soon be in pieces in a sewer," Eddie said.
Amused by the pun, Cavanaugh stepped aside and let Eddie get behind the steering wheel. "They all wore gloves."
Eddie tightened his own gloves. "No way to use fingerprints to identify them. So it won't matter if I wipe down your prints."
"The only places we touched are in the front seat."
"Makes it easier. Ciao."
As the black car drove from the hotel's carport into the drizzle, Cavanaugh got into the van and closed the hatch.
"Hey, Cavanaugh." The driver, who was Hispanic, put the vehicle into gear and proceeded from the carport. The drizzle made a hissing sound on the roof.
"Hey, Roberto." Cavanaugh knew the goateed man only by his first name and assumed it was an alias. "How are the tropical fish?"
"They ate each other. I'm getting a better hobby."
"What kind?"
"Model airplanes. The kind with a motor, so the planes can actually fly. I'm gonna rig them so they have aerial dogfights and shoot at each other and stuff."
"Stuff?"
"You know, tiny rockets. Maybe they could drop little bombs."
The van was configured so that two rows of seats faced each other, with a table in the middle. Cavanaugh buckled himself into a seat in back, next to Prescott and Duncan, and looked across the table toward the man and the woman who'd escorted Prescott into the van. Their rain slickers were off now, revealing Kevlar vests and holstered pistols on their belts.
"Hey, Chad," he said to the red-haired man, who was about thirty-five and had the same strong-shouldered build that Cavanaugh had. His name, too, was probably an alias.
In some elements of the security business, Chad's red hair would have been a liability, drawing attention to him. But as a protective agent, Chad often took advantage of his hair color to act as a decoy. An assassin or a kidnapper, having studied the target long enough to determine that a red-haired man was one of the protectors, would pay attention to where Chad went, on the assumption that Chad would be near his client. Thus Chad made a specialty of pretending to protect a look-alike client while the real client slipped away under escort. When Chad wanted to be inconspicuous, he wore a hat.
"I heard you got shot," Cavanaugh said.
"Nope."
"Good. I'm glad you didn't get hurt."
"I didn't say I didn't get hurt," Chad said. "I got stabbed."
"Ouch."
"Could've been worse. It was my left shoulder. If it'd been the shoulder I bowl with…"
Cavanaugh looked at the woman next to Chad. "Hi, Tracy."
She wore a Yankees sweatshirt and concealed most of her blond hair under a Yankees baseball cap. She had the capability of making herself look plain or gorgeous at will, and if she'd been in the Holiday Inn restaurant, if she'd put on lipstick, taken off her cap, let her long hair dangle, and pulled her sweatshirt tight, everybody in the restaurant, including four-year-old kids, would have remembered her after she left.
"I heard you quit," Cavanaugh said.
"And give up these fabulous working conditions? Besides, when would I ever see lover boy if I wasn't working with him?" She meant Chad, but she was joking. Protectors who had a relationship weren't allowed to work on the same team. In an emergency, they might look after each other instead of the client. But on numerous assignments, Chad and Tracy had proven where their priorities lay.
The van reached the highway and headed toward the airport. Meanwhile, Duncan handed blankets to Prescott and Cavanaugh, then poured steaming coffee into Styrofoam cups for them. "We'll soon have dry coveralls for you."
Cavanaugh felt the coffee warm his stomach. "You did good, Mr. Prescott."
"Mr.? Now you call me Mr.? Ever since the warehouse, it's been 'Prescott do this' and 'Prescott do that.'" Duncan frowned. "Is there a problem?"
Prescott's puffy eyes crinkled. "Not in the least. This man saved my life. I'm deeply grateful." With a smile, Prescott shook Cavanaugh's hand.
"Your hand's cold," Cavanaugh said.
"I was just going to say the same thing to you."
Cavanaugh looked down at his hands. They did feel cold, he realized. But not because he'd gotten soaked.
It's starting, he thought. He wrapped his hands around the warm Styrofoam cup, but the hands, which felt as if they belonged to someone else, trembled enough that some of the coffee almost spilled over.
"Your adrenaline will soon wear off," Duncan said.
"It already is."
"Do you want Dexedrine to make up for it?"
"No." Cavanaugh removed his hands from the cup and concentrated to steady them. "No speed."
Cavanaugh knew all too well the down effect that the central nervous system experienced after the high of adrenaline had made it possible to perform extraordinary acts of strength and endurance. Already, he felt uneasy urges to yawn, which had nothing to do with needing sleep but a lot to do with the uncomfortable release of muscle tension. Dexedrine would return his nervous system close to the high level at which it had functioned when he had rescued Prescott. But he hated to rely on chemicals and, as always, was determined to go through what amounted to adrenaline withdrawal in as natural a way as possible. He disliked having a client see him go through it: the slight unsteadiness, the yawns. There was always the chance that Prescott would misinterpret the unavoidable effect of being in violent action as a symptom of fear, just as earlier he had praised Cavanaugh for being brave, a virtue that Cavanaugh denied.
"No speed," Cavanaugh repeated.