Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

thorough, Danny thought. I’ll give her that.
    Danny walked toward her. “I take it this isn’t the first run-in you’ve had with our friend.”
    “We must get out of here now.” She strode past Danny and clipped away from the monastery.
    “Listen, lady, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what’s going on here. Until I do, I’m not going anywhere. Neither are you.”
    She stopped and turned toward him. Danny tried putting her mind at ease. “Look,” he started, holding up the knife, “this guy’s a professional. There’s only one reason why he’s carrying a knife like this. It’s to kill in silence. He didn’t want to alert anyone to his actions. He’s working alone—”
    “He’s not working alone! His captain fired a gun at me!”
    Explains the shots I heard, Danny thought. He looked around in all directions at the quiet terrain. There was no one in sight. “Still, I think we’re safe for the moment.” He closed the knife and jammed it into his pocket. “I can help you. But I need to know why this guy and his captain are after you.”
    Sydney took in a huge breath, let it out, and walked back to him. Danny had to fight the very male urge to leer as her toned muscles worked underneath her butterscotch tan.
    “I’m Sydney Dumas.” She glanced toward the monastery. “I was meeting with two other members from our group here at the monastery.”
    “What group?”
    “The International Court of Justice.”
    International Court of Justice? Danny had never heard of it, but then again he had never heard of half the clandestine groups that he learned about during his short tenure with the Texas Rangers. There’s a whole big world out there, Danny boy. A world about which you know damn little.
    “What’re you meeting about?” he asked.
    “We’re here to discuss the implications of a lawsuit.”
    “So, you’re a judge?”
    She huffed. “Even out in the middle of nowhere people are surprised to learn that.”
    It’s just that I’ve never seen a judge make underwear look that good, Danny thought. He motioned toward their assailant. “Who’s this guy? A military officer?”
    “He’s one of the guards assigned to our security detail. I don’t even know his name.”
    “And his captain? The one who shot at you?”
    “He’s the head of the guards. His name I do know. It’s Stefan Taber.”
    “How many guards on your detail?”
    “Including this one and Taber, five.”
    “So, eight people total? Three judges and five on the security detail?”
    Sydney nodded. Five guards, Danny thought. A group named the International Court of Justice must be flush with resources. That meant their security detail was well equipped. Danny eyed their surroundings again. His confidence that they were safe for the moment was no longer high.
    Danny picked up the guard’s arms. Then he motioned for Sydney to pick up his feet. “Let’s get him out of sight.” They carried him off the path a few yards and dumped him behind a dense patch of prickly-pear cactus.
    “Let’s get his clothes off. You can wear them.” Danny squatted, taking cover behind the cactus. Sydney followed his lead. He started working on one of the guard’s boots. Sydney went to work on the other one. “So what’s this lawsuit about?” he whispered.
    “Japan is suing the United States.”
    “On what grounds?”
    “They want to redeem their U.S. treasury notes.”
    “Redeem? You mean cash them in?”
    “Yes.”
    “How much?” Danny asked.
    “All of them,” Sydney replied.
    “All of them? How much money are we talking?”
    “A little over $1 trillion.”
    Danny whistled. “No wonder we don’t want to pay up.”
    Sydney nodded. “America has been living well beyond its means for the last twenty-five years. Why start paying your bills now?”
    Danny let that one go. He was aware of the mind-boggling amount of debt that America had racked up, something in the neighborhood of $13 trillion, which easily made the United States the world’s largest debtor nation.
    “A few months ago,” he started, remembering, “didn’t China and Japan stop buying our debt?”
    Sydney nodded. “Three months ago, yes.”
    “Does this lawsuit have something to do with that?”
    “It has everything to do with that.”
    Danny waited a moment for Sydney to continue with an explanation. “You don’t like giving away too much, do you?”
    “I think there is something else, something more.”
    “You think the lawsuit’s a