"Critical Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucka Greg)

Chapter 1

The ashtray didn't surprise me as much as the quality of the throw behind it.

Perhaps when Skye Van Brandt was still in high school, before she was "discovered" and turned into one of People'?, Fifty Most Beautiful Faces for two years running, before she'd netted two Oscar nominations and one Golden Globe award, maybe she'd pitched softball or even hardball at some point in her youth. Not that her youth was over: the woman on the other side of the hotel room was only twenty-two.

At least according to her publicist.

Skye was beautiful. Her hair was long and blond, just a shade too dark to be strawberry, and her large eyes were deep and soulful and tailored for close-ups during love scenes. Her lower lip was just a little pudgy and lopsided, and it gave her a perpetual almost-pout that reviewers described with words like "irresistible" and "wanton." Her dental work was perfect. She was one of those people who remain stunningly beautiful no matter what they're doing, be it smiling or screaming.

She was screaming at me right now.

"God dammit, Atticus! Take my bags!"

For the third time, I said, "I can't do that, Miss Van Brandt."

Skye dropped the suitcase in question and stormed my way, to where I stood just inside the front door. We were in the sitting room of the Presidential Suite at the El Presidente Hotel in El Paso, Texas, which meant that Skye had a lot of ground to cover, and that I had plenty of time to get out of her way. I didn't bother. To my mind I was doing the job I'd been paid for, doing more than it, in fact. It was now mid-morning of Day Eight on what was supposed to have been a six-day location shoot. I'd been hired to provide Skye's personal protection while on location, two thousand dollars a day, plus a stipend from the studio. I was, for the time being, Skye Van Brandt's bodyguard.

Not her valet.

The job, like so many other things in my professional life, was bullshit, for show and nothing more. But it was still a job, and I took it seriously, and there was no way I was going to pick up Skye Van Brandt's overpriced Tumi luggage and carry it to the lobby at her command.

She stopped three feet from where I was standing, hands on her hips, that wanton lower lip jutting a little more in her fury. For all her grace and beauty and presence on the screen, she was a tiny woman, nearly a full foot shorter than my six feet.

"I'm paying you! You do what / tell you!"

She jabbed in the direction of her bags with an index finger as if gouging at someone's eye. There were three bags – one garment, one small duffel, and one larger duffel with a shoulder strap. All were black leather, all bulging with clothes, scripts, cosmetics, and the witch's brew of new-age elixirs and homeopathic medicines Skye used to keep herself fueled.

"Take them downstairs to the car," she ordered.

"You know I can't do that," I said. "I have to keep my hands free. Wait until the bellman…"

"God dammit! What fucking word don't you fucking understand? Pick up my fucking bags!"

I waited until she was done and catching her breath. Then I said: "No."

Skye Van Brandt raised her right hand and I figured she was going to slap me, but then she spun off and stomped away, swearing louder. The way she swore reminded me of my Army days, and I wondered how People might've altered their rankings if they heard Skye Van Brandt shrieking things like "shit-eating goatfucker" and "fart-breathed ass-miner."

When she passed the executive desk with its fax machine and multi-line telephone and leather-bound hotel directory, she grabbed the ashtray on its corner and flung it at me without pause or warning. The ashtray was small, cut glass, and surprisingly aerodynamic. I had just enough time to turn my head, and then it hit and bumped me out of the world for a moment. For an instant I felt like I had been knocked down a well, and I was surrendering to gravity when somehow I managed to arrest myself, leaning back against the wall until I was sure I wouldn't collapse.

Blood was coming off my forehead as I straightened, blinding my left eye. I felt thick and sluggish, and it took a while to get my hand up and my glasses off to clear my vision. Each time I swiped, more blood came to replace it. I put my glasses back on and tried to focus on my principal.

Skye Van Brandt stood behind the couch, her hands at her sides. There was no repentance or apology in her expression.

"Now," she said sweetly, "pick up my bags, motherfucker."

"I quit," I said.

The doorman hailed me a cab to the airport, and I spent the entire ride with my handkerchief to my forehead. Facial cuts, as any guy can tell you, bleed a lot. I caught a glance of myself in the rearview mirror during the drive and, over the reflection of the hack's curious gaze, saw the gash above my left eyebrow. It wasn't deep, but the skin had split and I was probably going to need stitches.

When I hit the terminal I gave the cabbie an extra twenty for a tip – expense money – and then made straight for the monitors inside, trying to find the next departure to any of the New York-area airports. There was a flight to Newark that was boarding, another to Kennedy that was leaving in thirty minutes. I got into line and weathered a storm of stares. I couldn't tell if the stares were because of the wound or because I'd been recognized, and frankly didn't care.

"You ought to do something about that cut," the customer rep said in a gentle Texas drawl. He looked sincerely concerned.

"I am doing something about it," I said. "I'm going home."

I checked my bag with my weapon inside, and as he was swiping my credit card, my cell phone started ringing. I shut it off, took my boarding pass, and then stopped at the first gift shop I could find on the concourse, where I paid too much for a package of Band-Aids. Then I found a men's room and examined myself in the mirror. The appraisal didn't help my mood. Blood had speckled my cheek and the collar of my shirt, though the wound was now content only to ooze. I looked tired and sallow and generally unpleasant, though maybe that was the lighting.

I ran some warm water, cleaned myself off carefully, then used my pocket knife to slice the bandages into makeshift butterfly sutures. It hurt when I applied them, but the wound appeared closed and I guessed I'd earned myself a companion scar to the one on my cheek from when I'd been pistol-whipped a couple years back. I tried to remember a time when I hadn't had any scars on my face, realized I really was thirty years old, and then ran some more water and cleaned my glasses. I pushed a couple fingers through my hair, straightened the two hoops in my left ear, and made it to the gate as they were closing the door.

My seatmate was white and in his mid-thirties, wearing a blue suit with a green-and-gray-striped tie. A leather laptop case lay by his penny loafers, stowed under the seat in front of him. He had all the marks of a business traveler, and I prayed that meant he'd leave me alone. With some squeezing I made it past him and then folded myself into the window seat, and with additional contorting, managed to assume a position that was merely uncomfortably cramped rather than genuinely painful. We were another forty-three minutes on the tarmac before actually lifting into the air, during which time the headache from the tete-a-ashtray invited a few friends over to throw a really big party.

Then we were rising and I stared out the window, watching as Texas faded away beneath me and wondering how I'd become someone who was expected to carry the bags of the likes of Skye Van Brandt.

The call had come in February, five months earlier. It had been a bleak winter, filled with rain and slushy snow, and a wind with teeth that never seemed to let up, day or night. I'd been cold and often irrationally lonely. My "don't call me girlfriend" Bridgett Logan had entered rehab just a few weeks prior, and Erika Wyatt, my almost-baby-sister, had started NYU, and moved out of the apartment we'd shared and into student housing. My home, which had never seemed spacious to me before, felt cavernous.

I was stretched out on the sofa in Dale Matsui's living room, squabbling with Natalie Trent about whether or not we were so desperate we needed to take out ads in some of the less-reputable trade journals. I was on Dale's couch because we'd been using Dale's house in Queens as our offices, and I was arguing with Natalie because our company was in serious danger of going belly-up.

"Can you think of another way to get clients?" Natalie asked. "Because without clients, we don't have a business."

"Security firms that advertise in the publications you're considering do not, in my opinion, engender confidence," I said. "And if we're protecting someone's life, I think confidence is kind of important."

"Don't be snide. We build confidence by protecting clients. To get clients, I'm suggesting we advertise."

"No," I said.

"Sentinel advertises."

"Well, by all means, then," I said.

She scowled at me, and I kept my tongue still, knowing that I'd cut too close to the bone. Natalie and I have a confused history that includes things like her dating my best friend, that friend dying, her blaming me for his death, and, eventually, the two of us making up to such an extent we ended up sleeping with one another off and on for almost a year. That the friendship has survived such things is a testament to its quality and our stubbornness.

Even knowing that, though, the crack about Sentinel was probably a cheap shot. Sentinel Guards was the biggest security firm in Manhattan, run by Natalie's father, Elliot Trent. Our firm – KTMH Security – was founded, in part, due to a falling-out between Natalie and Dear Old Dad, and she and I liked to think of ourselves as an alternative to the old-school protection firms that Sentinel personified. That was still, in my opinion, a worthy goal, and one that I knew Natalie shared.

The problem was that personal protection is an intimate community. Most work comes from referrals, either via former, satisfied, clients or from other agencies. Since we were a new firm we didn't have any former clients, and the rumor was that Elliot Trent had pretty much blacklisted us from the start, so no firms, from Sentinel on down, were giving us referrals.

I used my elbow to prop myself up and looked at Natalie, who had now turned her scowl to the window that looked out onto Dale's backyard. Outside, a light sprinkling of snow was twirling down onto the lawn. Dale, in the other chair, was looking at me like a disapproving parent. I've actually known Dale longer than I've known Natalie – he and I were in the Army together on a couple of the same details. He is, without a doubt, the nicest person I know, genuinely kind.

As a result, his disapproving look is pretty darn devastating.

"You know what I mean," I said to Natalie.

"I don't appreciate being compared to my father."

"That's not what I was doing, Nat."

She looked back at me, and her green eyes lost their focus briefly in their contemplation. Natalie is just shy of my age, tall and fine-boned, with red hair that she'd recently had cut into a bob. The new haircut showed off her facial features, the line of her neck and jaw. While the four of us in KTMH – Natalie Trent, Dale Matsui, Corry Herrera, and I – are equals, there is a hierarchy when we're at work, and Natalie is my strong second-in-command. She's as good as I am at the job, if not better.

"We're living on credit right now, you are aware of that, aren't you?" she asked.

"Painfully aware," I said.

"And you understand that our credit is almost gone?"

"Yes," I said.

"So you tell me, Atticus, what are our options? Keep waiting, hoping that the phone is going to ring? Or do we do something proactive, do we take out some ads and see where that gets us?"

"The question may be moot," Dale said. "We may not have enough money to advertise, at least, to advertise anywhere that'll do us some good. We need a corporate account."

"I am not going to just wait for business to come to us," Natalie said. "We need to do something."

"I agree," I said.

"What, then?"

"I have no idea."

She was ratcheting up her glare when the phone rang. Dale moved to answer it, and Natalie let the glare go, went back to frowning at the backyard.

"It's for you," Dale said, holding out the phone.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Sergeant Robert Moore. Of the Two-Two SAS. You remember him?"

I nearly tripped over the coffee table going for the phone. "Robert?"

"Atticus, how've you been, mate?" The connection was good, and I couldn't tell if Moore was calling from England or across the street. "World treating you just?"

"I've got complaints, but you don't want to hear them," I said. "What's up?"

"This a bad time? I can ring you later, you like."

"No, now's fine."

"Called your apartment first, got this number off the machine. I've left the Regiment, didn't know if you'd heard."

"News to me."

Moore laughed in my ear. "Figured I was getting too old to be running through marshes with fall kit. Day comes you know the Beacons are going to beat you rather than the other way around, a man thinks about retiring. I'm in your line of work now, matter of fact."

"No kidding?" I said. Natalie and Dale were both watching me, curious, and I made a half-wave with my free hand, trying to indicate that I knew as little as they did.

"Dead serious," Moore said. "And it so happens that I've got a principal coming across the water in a couple weeks, has some speaking engagements. Pseudopolitical, lots of photo opportunities, things like that. Wondering if you'd be interested in handling some of the crowd for me."

"What are the dates?" I was motioning frantically for someone to give me something to write with and to write upon. Natalie tossed me the GG G Industries catalogue sitting on the coffee table, and Dale handed over a ballpoint.

"End of the month, twenty-fifth through the third of March," Moore said. "You free?"

"Absolutely."

Moore laughed. "Didn't have to check the schedule, then?"

"No, I've got it memorized," I said, scribbling the word "JOB" on the catalogue and holding it up for all to see. "Can you tell me anything more?"

"I've got a packet I can fax you, if you give me the number. Dates, itinerary, so on. You can review it then give me a ring back, we can discuss terms."

"Hold on," I said, and covered the mouthpiece. "Do we have a fax number?"

"We have a fax number," Dale said.

I removed my hand and repeated the number Dale gave me to Moore. "When do you need an answer?"

"Can you ring me tomorrow?"

"Done."

"Talk to you then. Cheers."

I hung up the phone and turned back to share the news, only to discover that the room had suddenly emptied, and that Dale and Natalie were now in the office at the end of the hall. Dale was making certain the paper tray was loaded, and Natalie was staring at the fax machine as if it would start reciting Homer at any second. As I entered, though, she pulled her look from the machine and put it on me.

"Well?"

"Robert Moore has left the SAS and is now in the personal protection business. He's got a job in New York and he wants us to assist. Details to follow."

"Who's the principal?"

"Didn't say."

"But presumably it's someone who can pay?"

"I'd expect."

Natalie gnawed her lower lip for a moment. The fax machine bleated, once, then began humming, and within seconds pages were spewing forth. Dale grabbed them as they hit the out tray, handing them over, and Natalie snatched the first sheet before I read it.

"Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter," she said. "Moore is protecting Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter."

"I'd say she can pay," I said.

Natalie socked me in the shoulder.

Lady Ainsley-Hunter was, at twenty-three years old, one of the most visible advocates of children's rights in the world, and the founder of Together Now, a grass-roots group that had started in the U.K., similar to Rock the Vote. Hunger, disease, abuse, exploitation, ignorance – all of it was on Together Now's hit list, and the organization worked closely with UNICEF and the ILO to reach its goals, with Lady Ainsley-Hunter spearheading the assault. She was blond and attractive and surprisingly innocent-looking despite all she had undoubtedly seen, and her mission occupied most, but not all, of her waking moments. In interviews she could talk as easily about her favorite bands and foods and films as about mortality rates among infants in the Third World and incidences of child and spousal abuse in emerging nations.

The media absolutely adored her, in both Britain and the U.S. It was that visibility as much as anything else that made her a force to be reckoned with: She got the message out.

It was that visibility that also made her a target, because every wacko in the woodwork knew who she was.

For the next three weeks, we buried ourselves in advance work, covering everything we could think of, just to be safe. All four of us knew that Moore had thrown KTMH a life preserver, and we weren't planning on letting it go. This was our big break, our chance to show all watching that we knew our stuff, that we were on the stick.

And there would be people watching, none of us doubted that at all.

We just didn't know who.

Natalie and I started with close surveys of all the locations Lady Ainsley-Hunter would be visiting, from the hotels to the restaurants to the apartments, right up to the front entrance of the United Nations. We took photographs, made maps, racked our brains trying to imagine the worst that could possibly happen, and what our actions would be if it came to that. We practiced entry moves, debus moves, went so far as to put in extra range time. The last week of February alone, just prior to Lady Ainsley-Hunter's arrival, Natalie and I put a combined two thousand rounds through our weapons.

While we were busy on the ground, Dale and Corry were working on the road, planning primary, secondary, even tertiary routes, driving them over and over. Wherever they were in the city, they knew the nearest hospital, the nearest precinct house, and the quickest routes to get there. They did the drives in daylight and darkness, at dawn and at dusk, learning the traffic patterns, learning where to expect delays and planning how to react should any occur. Corry repaired, overhauled, and polished all of our equipment, making certain it was in good order; he even paid for new radio batteries out of his own pocket.

It was some of the best advance work any of us had ever done, and when Lady Ainsley-Hunter landed at Kennedy and we met her and Moore and the rest of her entourage, we were as ready as we could be. We were confident but cautious. We knew what we were doing.

Unfortunately, when it finally came down, none of that mattered. Not the prep. Not the gear. Not the two thousand rounds, or the hours spent driving the routes and poring over maps, or the brand-new batteries in the radios.

When it finally came down, what mattered was luck.

Pure dumb luck.

Even before she arrived in New York, the invitations had begun pouring in, various celebrated people all trying to contact Lady Ainsley-Hunter, inviting her out to dinners, concerts, and clubs. For the most part, she turned them all down, sending regrets and thanks, but preferring to stay at her hotel and work.

Until Carson Fleet invited her to attend the premiere of his new blockbuster, Long Way Down, starring – amongst others – Skye Van Brandt.

"She'll want to go," Moore told me, after he'd read the invitation. One of his duties was to screen any incoming mail, and he'd opened and read the letter as a matter of course. "She loves Fleet's movies."

"You think it'll be a problem?" I asked.

"Nah," he said. "Invitation is for the movie and then a bash at Pastis on Ninth afterwards. She'll do both, we'll have her back by two in the morning, no later. She's not much of a party girl."

"For which we are all extremely grateful."

"You and Nat want to run the route, I'll let her know we've got security in place."

"We'll do it this evening, after she's buttoned up for the night."

"Right, then," Moore said. "Should be a no-brainer, really."

Ingress was flawless.

Egress was another matter entirely.

We were using two cars, one driven by Dale to ferry Lady Ainsley-Hunter, Moore, and myself from location to location, and then a second car to follow, driven by Natalie, and loaded with Corry and Lady Ainsley-Hunter's personal secretary, a young woman named Fiona Chester. The vehicles were kept lined up around the block, and as each celebrity departed, the event staff would radio to tell each driver that they were free to move. Because we didn't trust the event staff to know their jobs, Dale and I were waiting on word from Moore.

"Sleepy coming out in thirty seconds, " Moore said over the radio.

"Confirmed," Dale answered, and as he started to roll us into position, I got on my radio and echoed the order to Corry. Natalie confirmed before we'd come to a stop, and I was out, holding the door open at the end of the red carpet, scanning both sides of the line. Natalie and Corry fell into position on either side, where photographers and autograph seekers were lined up three and four deep beyond the velvet ropes. The flashbulbs started exploding.

Moore's voice came over my earpiece. "Sleepy coming out."

"Confirmed."

They appeared at the end of the carpet, making their way toward us. Lady Ainsley-Hunter was smiling, waving to each side, and Moore was sticking close to her, and there was another barrage of flashes, followed immediately by a yell, and without warning a fight erupted amongst the paparazzi that spilled onto the red carpet. Moore's left hand shot to Lady Ainsley-Hunter's shoulder, pulling her back toward him and tucking her in, and he tried to power through to the car using his body as cover. I stayed on post, watching as Nat and Corry did their damnedest to keep the route clear.

Cops started swarming in, the gawkers got involved, and suddenly there was a furball of people pushing and pulling. The brawl was escalating, punches starting to fly wildly, and Moore abruptly went down like a dropped brick, a flailing photographer's elbow connecting with the former soldier's face, taking him utterly by surprise. For one horribly long moment Lady Ainsley-Hunter was motionless, alone, standing on the red carpet with the melee around her.

I went off the car, diving in after her, using my hands to knock people out of the way. Over my earpiece, I heard Moore shouting for an evac.

Lady Ainsley-Hunter gripped my arm as I reached for her, and I pulled her into me, looking for a path out. "Got you," I told her. "Got you, you're fine."

"Bloody hell," she muttered.

"Hold on," I said, already turning to fight a path back to the car.

Then Corry was shouting, "Gun! Gun! Gun!"

His name was Samuel Jeppeson, and we learned later that he was forty-three years old and recently released from Bellevue, where he'd been undergoing treatment for paranoid schizophrenia. When the cops finally managed to get a semicoherent statement from him, they learned that he'd stopped taking his medication four days before Lady Ainsley-Hunter arrived in New York. Jeppeson then explained that he had merely been trying to keep the British Crown from reclaiming the Colonies. What we didn't understand, he said, was that Lady Ainsley-Hunter was actually a member of the One World Government's Covert Action Staff, on a mission to New York City to seduce the mayor and recruit the NYPD to her cause.

He never explained where he got the gun, which was a Llama Model IX, a semiautomatic pistol manufactured in Spain, with a magazine capacity of seven nine-millimeter rounds. The gun hadn't been well cared for, and specks of rust were visible around the barrel and along the slide, though they certainly wouldn't keep the weapon from firing.

Any other weapon, and things could have turned out very differently. But Jeppeson brought the Llama, and from that single decision everything else sprang forth.

By the time Corry was shouting "gun" a second time, I had my hand on Lady Ainsley-Hunter's shoulder and was pushing her down into the crouch, hoping that Moore had drilled her on this, hoping she wouldn't go flat. If she went to the deck, down on the carpet, it would be impossible to move her quickly. She stopped on her haunches, and it's to Her Ladyship's credit that she remembered what she'd been taught, and she was in her crouch when I spotted Jeppeson.

He was in full lone-gunman mode, making straight for us, right into the critical space, the pistol out in his right hand, shouting some condemnation that I never actually heard. My stomach had shrunk to the size of a marble, I didn't have time to index my own weapon, in fact I didn't really have time to do anything at all. I remember thinking, quite clearly, that if Jeppeson shot Lady Ainsley-Hunter I'd end up getting blood all over my only suit, which was from Brooks Brothers and which I was rather fond of, and which I didn't think I could afford to send to the dry cleaner because certainly if our principal died I'd never get work again.

He broke through the line with people moving to get away, and I stepped in front of him and grabbed the pistol with my left, trying to force the slide back and out of battery, trying to keep the hammer from falling on the bullet in the chamber. It wasn't a conscious attempt to do anything clever; it was a move of panic more than anything else, an act to do something – anything – to keep the Llama from firing.

The force of my grip on the gun drove Jeppeson's arm back against his body, and I started to reach up between us, to grab his elbow and pin him back. There was the vibration of something metal snapping in my hand, and then my grip on the gun was gone, so I reached for him again, catching his right shoulder with my left hand, catching his elbow once more, and then I pivoted and pitched him headfirst into the carpet. The flip dislocated his shoulder, and Jeppeson hit the deck howling.

As soon as my hands were clear I indexed my weapon with my right, scanning for another attack, and shouting at Lady Ainsley-Hunter, "Get in the car! Get in the car!"

She sprang up from the crouch, and I fell in behind her, looking at the mass of people, wincing at the onslaught of more flashbulbs. Lady Ainsley-Hunter slid into the backseat, and I pitched in after her, slamming the door shut and then literally covering her body with my own. The engine had been running, and we were out into the street in roughly a second, Dale accelerating, speaking quickly into his radio.

"We're clear, we're good," Dale told me, after a minute. "Moore and the others are en route, they'll meet us at the hotel."

I rolled off Lady Ainsley-Hunter and helped her sit up, then began running my eyes and hands over her body, making certain she hadn't taken a wound I might've missed. Given enough adrenaline, a person can take a bullet and keep moving for quite a while, and I didn't want us to arrive at the hotel only to discover that we should have been headed for the hospital instead.

"Fresh," Lady Ainsley-Hunter said.

"You'll forgive me," I said. "You're all right? You feel okay?"

"I'm fine, Mr. Kodiak."

I took my hands off her and slid back. She was flushed, still breathless, but as best as I could see she was telling the truth. "We're taking you back to the hotel."

"I heard. Somehow I didn't think Mr. Matsui was racing us to the party. It would be anticlimactic after all of that, I think," Lady Ainsley-Hunter said lightly. She smiled.

Then she put her hands on her thighs, doubled over, and vomited.

I pulled her hair out of the way, realized I was holding something in my left hand, and tried to imagine what it could be.

When the heaves became dry, Lady Ainsley-Hunter pushed my hands away, then sat up once more. Tears were streaking her face now, shimmering in her eyes, and her mascara had run. She wiped her nose with her fingers, and I found my handkerchief and handed it over.

She took it and blew her nose energetically, dabbed at her eyes, tried the smile on me again. "I'm sorry."

"Not to worry. It's a natural reaction."

"I'm afraid I've made a mess."

"Dale'll clean it up."

She laughed, just barely, but I took it as a good sign. Then she focused on my left hand. "What's that?"

"I'm not sure," I said, and opened my hand to see a chunk of metal about four inches long. "I think it's the slide."

"The slide?"

"From the gun."

From the front seat, Dale said, "From the what?"

"The slide-stop must've snapped when I was trying to force it back," I said. "Came off in my hand, and I was too amped up on adrenaline to drop it."

Lady Ainsley-Hunter leaned back and used the handkerchief again. "Nicely done," she said. "Taking the man's gun apart like that."

"Oh, hell yeah," Dale said. "He so meant to do that."

"How do you know I didn't?" I asked.

"I know you."

The plane was descending into Kennedy, and I was watching the sunset light slide away from Rockaway below us, thinking it was a beautiful thing, that it would be a beautiful image to keep and preserve. Much more worthwhile than yards of videotape and mountains of photographs that almost, but didn't quite, tell the truth.

It was the cameras that did it, that lofted me and the rest of KTMH into the same orbits as Skye Van Brandt and Carson Fleet and even Lady Antonia Ainsley-Hunter. The still photos and the endlessly looped videotape that showed, again and again, what appeared to be my magic trick, the effortless one-handed dismantling of Jeppeson's gun. The full-color photo that, for one week, was on the cover of Time, taken the moment after Jeppeson hit the deck, showing me with the slide in one hand, my weapon in the other, and Lady Ainsley-Hunter dashing past, sprinting for the car.

Within days of the attempt on Lady Ainsley-Hunter, we were swamped with requests for our services, everything from legitimate protection work to puff show jobs to one query asking if we'd be willing to fly out to Idaho for a week and train a militia unit in the finer points of personal protection. We took a pass on that one; we said yes to just about everything else. We were invited on talk shows, including a couple of national ones. We appeared on Charlie Rose and Larry King Live. New York magazine did a cover story, entitled "The New Security." Natalie, certainly the best looking of us, got singled out for particular attention, with one photograph of her running with the caption, "Cover me!"

We weren't working out of Dale's house in Queens anymore. We had an office in Manhattan, below the West Village by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, in what was once the Printing District. We were almost rich, and certainly comfortable. We had more work than we could handle, and of late Natalie and Dale had been agitating for hiring on another couple of hands, just to help with the load.

We were, by all reckoning, successful.

My dumb luck.