"They taste good?"

"I have no idea, but now I raise ostriches. Those you can eat. Plus, they lay eggs the size of basketballs."

"True?"

"I exaggerate only slightly."

Cavanaugh laughed again. "Hombre, I missed you."

He led them toward the lodge. In the kitchen, he scanned the monitors again, saw that everything was normal, and introduced Mrs. Patterson as she spooned pumpkin mix into the pie crust.

"Want something to eat or drink?" he asked his guests.

"Thank you, no," William answered. "We have business to discuss. Then I need to get to Denver."

"What's in Denver?"

"A Vietnamese businessman with a problem."

"Ah." Knowing William's reluctance to confide, Cavanaugh knew that the Vietnamese businessman might actually be a Japanese baseball player. "I hoped you'd stay for a while. Both of you are welcome. You'll never forget the color of the sunset behind the Tetons."

"Another time."

Chapter 10.

The office looked the same as when the property had been a dude ranch. Next to an old desk, a wall of photographs showed children fishing, swimming, riding horses, and pitching their tents in the meadow next to the lodge. Another wall had shelves with slots for mail and messages. Everything retained the vague smell of pipe smoke from long ago. On occasion, Cavanaugh was tempted to clear everything out, but then he remembered the two men in their thirties who'd arrived a couple of years earlier. They drove Winnebagos. They had beer paunches, their wives looked bored, and their kids kept shoving each other. The men asked Cavanaugh if it was all right for them to show their families what the children's camp had been like. They'd spent the happiest summers of their lives here, they said. They couldn't get over that everything was the same.

Their happiest summers. Cavanaugh had found it sad that they knew their lives hadn't gotten any better.

Now William sat in a dark leather chair and opened his briefcase while Cavanaugh and Jamie watched from wooden chairs across from him.

"I came all this way because--"

"You might as well know right away that I don't want a job."

"A job? You think I came here to offer you a job?"

"Didn't you?"

"The word 'job' doesn't quite describe it." William looked amused. "I'm offering you everything."

"What are you talking about?"

"'Lock, stock, and barrel,' as I believe they say out here."

"You're not making sense."

"You've got it all, my friend."

"All of what?"

"Global Protective Services."

Cavanaugh was certain he hadn't heard correctly. Then his heart lurched, and he took a long breath.

"Duncan gave it to you in his will," William said.

Again, Cavanaugh was overwhelmed by memories. Tall and wiry, with a mustache, Duncan had been Cavanaugh's Delta Force instructor. After leaving the military, Duncan had founded an international security agency that flourished, thanks to the quality of the personnel Duncan hired, all of them from special-operations units around the world, many of them having been Duncan's students. When Duncan had been killed on an assignment, there were Global Protective Services branches in New York, London, Rome, and Hong Kong, with another planned for Tokyo.

"His will?" Cavanaugh subdued the anger he suddenly felt. "You're telling me about this five months after he died?"

"There were reasons."

"What reasons? Jesus, we could have talked about this at Duncan's funeral. We could have--"

"No," William said, "we couldn't have."

Cavanaugh noticed Jamie looking at him with concern.

"I'm sorry," he told William. "I didn't mean to sound like I was criticizing you."

"Of course not. Anyway, you're in mourning. You're allowed. One of the reasons you didn't hear about this until now is that it was difficult to verify Duncan's death so that the probate process could begin."

"Verify his . . ." Then Cavanaugh understood. The bullets had mutilated Duncan's face so completely that his teeth couldn't be used to establish his identity. What the bullets hadn't accomplished, a fire had. "God help him."

"There were indications of healed broken ribs and a similarly healed broken collarbone."

"Occupational injuries." Cavanaugh felt sympathetic twinges in his own healed bones.

"Unfortunately, there weren't any recent x-rays of those areas of his body, so I still couldn't prove the remains were his. Finally, I went to the Pentagon and asked to see Duncan's medical file. The Army was as protective of him in death as if he'd continued to be a Delta Force instructor. It took a phone call from a former client, a ranking member of the current administration, before the file was released to me. My concern was that the injuries occurred after Duncan left the military, in which case the x-ray films would have been valueless. But in fact, the broken ribs and collarbone were visible. I was able to make my case."

"You said 'one of the reasons' I didn't hear about this until now."

"Another is that Duncan was a better protector than he was a corporate executive. Without consulting me, he made a number of business decisions that brought the continuing existence of Global Protective Services into doubt. There almost weren't any assets for anyone to inherit. Fortunately, I've been able to disentangle those problems. But still another reason that I didn't pay you this visit until now is . . ." William held up a sheet of paper. "Duncan willed Global Protective Services to a man named Aaron Stoddard."

As Jamie gave Cavanaugh another look of concern, he sat straighter, his back hardening.

"The problem is, nobody at GPS ever heard of a man with that name. Duncan didn't have any surviving family, so it wasn't possible to seek that avenue of help."

"You could have asked me," Cavanaugh said.

"You made clear you didn't want to be contacted. But what would you have answered if I had come to you and asked if you knew Aaron Stoddard? Would you have told me, or would you have remained determined to separate yourself from your former life?"

Cavanaugh didn't reply.

"In the end, the Pentagon complied with another of my requests. Aaron Stoddard, it turns out, once belonged to Delta Force also. In fact, he was one of Duncan's students. Then Duncan hired him for Global Protective Services, but by then, for security reasons, Aaron Stoddard was using another name. Your name."

Conscious of his heartbeat, Cavanaugh leaned back. He needed a few moments before he could respond.