Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

before catching it by the blade between his palms.
    “Could you not do that?” Nathan quipped.
    Taber shot Nathan a look and then stopped pacing. He returned his knife to the holster on his belt.
    “Your guards should have reported back by now,” Nathan surmised.
    Taber kept quiet. He had been trained to read situations. He knew when not to give up information, even to the people that he served. Nathan eyed the radio lying on the table. He reached for it, but once again, Taber got to it first.
    “We do not speak until spoken too, sir,” Taber hissed. Nathan was well aware of the rule. Any attempt to contact the guards could give up their position.
    The radio squelched while still in Taber’s claw. Declan Drake came on and filled their ears with troublesome news.
    Nathan was wild. “They’re gone! Fucking gone! How in the hell could those fucking idiots lose them?” The news of Sydney getting away, this time by vehicle, meant it was his ass. Now she and the American could go anywhere.
    “I thought the American was dead,” Nathan said.
    Taber relayed Nathan’s concern over the radio. The answer instantly came back.
    “He got lucky.” Drake explained about the duffle bag filled with rifles and the apparent ricochet. “But we got lucky, too. As Stavros was falling off the truck, he managed to drop his weapon in the truck bed.”
    Nathan snapped at Taber. “He shot the bag the American was carrying? I thought that you people were supposed to be expert marksmen! Tell me they at least got the vehicle’s license plate number.”
    Taber relayed the question through the radio.
    “I already had it run, sir,” Drake replied. “The truck was reported stolen four months ago in Laredo, Texas, by a Carlos Martinez. The description of Martinez doesn’t come close to Ms. Dumas’s accomplice.”
    “Jesus fucking Christ!” Nathan hollered. Please God, give me two minutes of use in my legs! Let me show the incompetent bastards what I think of them! What infuriated Nathan most was that Taber was simply standing there with his arms calmly crossed on his chest like he didn’t have a care in the world.
    “Sir, you need to stay calm,” Taber advised. “All of our rifles are equipped with GPS tracking chips.”
    Nathan offered Taber a strange look and then he remembered what Drake had just reported: As Stavros was falling off the truck, he managed to drop his weapon in the truck bed.
    Nathan motioned to a laptop at the end of the meeting table. Taber had been using it on and off since this madness began. “Do we track it with that?”
    “No, sir.” Taber reached in his pocket and extracted an odd-looking PDA device. “ I use this.”
    Nathan nodded and tried to at least look relaxed as questions seemed to bombard his brain from every direction. Where would they go? Being that they were so close to the United States and that Sydney was with an American, they would no doubt head for the border. The closest checkpoint was Hidalgo, Texas, just south of McAllen. But would they use a major checkpoint? No. Not with a bullet-riddled vehicle. They would get interrogated for sure. They would need to find one of the lesser-used crossing points.
    Would Sydney show the lawsuit to the border authorities? Nathan was fairly certain she wouldn’t. She would seek people higher up on the food chain, people she thought she could trust.
    Trust.
    Sydney Dumas’s strength and weakness was that she didn’t trust people. But what about the American? Why did she trust him? Could she have known him? Certainly not. Nathan pictured Sydney with her striking features and her perfect body. Then he pictured the American, gazing on her with desire in his eyes.
    Of course.
    He had been so focused on Sydney, he wasn’t thinking about the American. The American knew the monastery, he knew about the secret passageway. He had a cabin here, which meant he either lived here or, more likely, it was a vacation home. They could be traveling to his other home in the states. But where was that?
    Nathan eyed Taber. “Tell your men to turn the cabin inside out. I want the American’s name.”

Chapter 27
    Danny took over behind the wheel as soon as he could. Now, almost three hours later, he was worn out from steering his battered truck over the fractured oil-tops that snaked across the Mexican wilderness. When they stopped to change drivers after their messy escape, Danny noticed that the guard who almost killed him had dropped his assault rifle in