Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  “Being the best Megan I can be,” she said with a flicker of eye contact.

  “Those words unintentional, too?”

  “Nope,” she said. Cross, hook, cross. “But you wondered what’s on my mind this morning, and that’s it.”

  Nimec braced the bag against himself.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wanting to be the best’s a good thing.”

  Her lips pulling tight across her teeth, the muscles of her neck standing out, Megan slammed in an explosive overhand right that wobbled Nimec back a little. Then she paused in her tank top and workout shorts and gave him a long look, wiping perspiration off her forehead with her arm.

  “Quit the knucklehead act, Pete, you know what I mean,” she said, breathing hard. “We’ve come pretty far from where we were, haven’t we?”

  “With our plans.”

  “Promises.”

  Nimec looked at her, nodded.

  “So far,” he said, “so good.”

  She smiled at him. He smiled back. And they held an easy silence for a while, attuned to each other’s thoughts, sharing a single recollection, these old friends whose unbreakable bond of trust had been forged through painful trial and costly triumph, who had together stood against more dangers than they wished to count, who would lay down their lives for each other without a moment’s hesitation.

  It had been back in Antarctica, a world removed from where they were now in more ways than could be quantified merely in terms of time, distance, or even environment. An inexpressibly alien world. They’d stood outside Cold Corners, the UpLink research station on the ice where Megan had served as base commander, a few days after Nimec and his makeshift rescue team had freed two of its personnel, Alan Scarborough and Shevaun Bradley, from their hostage-takers in a subterranean network of outlawed uranium mines and rad dumps. In the wake of a cosmic disturbance, the southern aurora had been putting on a spectacular display, the heavens awash with color in the polar nightfall.

  It was, as Megan put it to him, the solar storm’s last hurrah. And although forty-eight hours remained before Nimec would wing back to civilization aboard an LC-130 Hercules transport, leaving Megan behind for the duration of her winter-over stint, it was also when they had exchanged their true farewells, aware their remaining time together would be consumed by operational matters. There had been some preliminary banter, some gazing at the aurora overhead — the lights cascading in sheets of red and orange, wheeling like purple daisies, taking soaring, curling plunges through the atmosphere in peacock-green combers.

  “So,” Megan had asked. This just moments after she’d informed him of having phoned the airbase in New Zealand to confirm his pickup. “What’s first for Pete Nimec when he gets home?”

  “A call of his own,” he’d said. “And then a ride in his hot Corvette.”

  “That call… would it be to a certain lady astronaut in Houston?”

  The lady in question was Annie Caulfield. Once bitten by a failed marriage, twice shy of opening himself to another emotional entanglement, Nimec had foolishly let her slip away from him after the budding weeks of their relationship, and would almost surely never have gotten a second chance were it not for Megan’s intervention… a bit of artful romantic splicing that she dismissed to this day as having been unintentional, or at least blown out of all proportion.

  Standing there layered in extreme-cold-weather garb, Nimec had given her a slow affirmative nod, and then jokingly wondered aloud why she hadn’t had any follow-up questions about his car. She’d just shrugged him off and told him she had limited areas of interest, or words to that effect, as if the question of his contacting Annie had been something tangential she’d just happened to wonder about on the spot.

  “Okay,” he’d said, steam puffing from his nose and mouth. “Your turn. What’s next for Megan Breen?”

  “A very dark and cold Antarctic winter,” she said. “After which she expects to turn the reins of Cold Corners over to her second in command, and resume practicing her fisticuffs with a certain trusted fight guru and best pal in San Jose.”

  Nimec had kept staring up at the wondrous display in the sky.

  “Six more months here for you,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Seems like a long time.”

  “Time enough to make myself the best Megan Breen I can be.”

  “Sounds like an army recruitment commercial.”

  “A line that works is a line that works, so why feel obliged to be original?”

  Nimec had smiled under his balaclava and put his arm around her shoulder. Megan had put her arm around his waist. And they had stood with their eyes raised to the sky as the magical lights had soared defiantly through the falling gloom.

  That was over a year and a half ago.

  Since then Nimec and Annie had become husband and wife, and Megan had succeeded Roger Gordian as chief executive officer of UpLink International at the urging of no lesser personage than Gordian himself, these transitions unfolding, if not quite in an eye-blink, then faster than either of them would have ever supposed… had they been able to imagine them occurring at all.

  Now Nimec realized he was still holding the heavy bag in his gym. He let go of it, stepped out from behind, and looked at Megan.

  “Things’ve changed a lot,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ve changed.”

  “You like it where you are?”

  Megan looked thoughtful.

  “I’m not Gord. I can’t try to be. But I’m proud to have his confidence,” she said. “Every day’s another challenge, and if it wasn’t for Antarctica, I’m not sure I’d be prepared. But being there taught me patience. I think it helped teach me how to lead.” She smiled. “Those polies were characters. Especially the longtimers. You know what I mean, Pete.”

  He smiled a little, too.

  “Yeah,” he said, remembering. “I do.”

  Megan hesitated.

  “Volunteering to live in a freezer box for a year or more isn’t for your ordinary man or woman,” she said. “Re-upping for a second tour, or returning for several… you need to be a bird of a different color. It shames me to admit it, but my first impression when I got to Cold Corners was that I’d been shipped off to oversee a colony of two hundred misfits and rejects. That sense of things didn’t last long, though. It couldn’t. They showed too much heart. Too much goodness. I found them to be an inspiring bunch. True, courageous, resourceful, selfless.”

  “And misfits.”

  “Boastfully,” she said. “That was a lesson right there… learning to accept people for who they are and make the most of their differences, rather than judge them by my predetermined expectations. And I really can’t say it was the hardest lesson, Pete.”

  “You want to tell me what was?”

  “I could list a few that would rate,” she said. “But right up top is that I’d been using myself as a standard for those expectations without examining my own flaws. And realizing I had some very serious ones.”

  Nimec considered a moment, shrugged.

  “Funny,” he said. “I always figured you for perfect.”

  Megan smiled.

  “Relax, Pete,” she said. “I may have become your boss in title, but you’re still my shining knight in fact.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said, looking straight at him.

  They stood in silence for a few seconds.

  “How about you telling me something now?” Megan said. Nimec shrugged.

  “I suppose it’d make us even,” he said. “And get you back to the bag.”

  “You brought up the New York matter,” she said. “I’d like your feelings about it.”

  Another shrug.

  “Ask me after our vid conference with Noriko Cousins in a couple hours and they might be clearer,” he said. “We’ve got somebody who could be a roaming husband, a guy in a jam, or an undiscovered body. Gord wants us to look into it as a favor to his friend Lenny Reisenber
g, fine. I know Lenny some and he’s okay. If we could check things out for him, pass along a tip or two, I’d be all right with it.”

  “But you aren’t.”

  “Noriko’s got her eye on what could be export violations at Armbright. She feels she’s right on track and has concerns about having her wheels knocked off. That could happen if we get caught sticking our fingers where they don’t belong.”

  “The Case of the Vanishing Husband, you mean.”

  Nimec gave her a nod.

  “Those briefs she e-mailed over the weekend… you have a chance to look at the ones I forwarded?”

  “Not enough to sound like an authority,” Megan said. “Probably enough to have an idea why Noriko might be uncomfortable. Her intel suggests Armbright’s been very aggressive with its high-energy laser development program.”

  “At least a couple of years ahead of our timetable,” Nimec said. “Way ahead of what they’ve got going at Rheinmetall Weapons and Munitions in Germany, or anything the military’s tested at White Sands. But for me the yellow flags aren’t only waving on a business front. Armbright’s laser research went into overdrive when it bought up the Kiran Group. And Kiran’s top man… this Hasul Benazir…”

  “Had some ill-chosen associations when he was younger, I know,” Megan said. “Except who hasn’t, Pete? They seem to begin and end with his early college days. He’s made no secret of them and has a long-term business visa, which wouldn’t have been awarded without extensive background checks. Talk about UpLink minding its own affairs, it’s not up to us to second-guess the INS. And there are at least two major government regulatory bodies overseeing export controls.”

  “So you’re saying…?”

  “Just what I did at the start… that I wanted a sense of how you’re leaning initially before Noriko gives me an earful at the conference.” Megan spread her arms. “It’s a sensitive issue. There’s no question Kiran’s operations warrant continued awareness and review from a purely competitive standpoint, and Noriko’s position is that looking for hubby could disrupt her work, or in a worst-case scenario blow things for her. I know she’ll oppose it, try to sway us toward backing off, even use stall tactics if I give her the chance.”

  Nimec gave a nod.

  “It’d be like Noriko,” he said. “She feels we’re going to roll over her, she’ll do whatever she can to flatten our tires.”

  “Which leaves me to figure out how to satisfy Gord and address her concerns. Find an approach that makes everybody feel accommodated, if not altogether happy—”

  Nimec’s WristLink timer beeped, interrupting her. He held up a finger, looked at its display.

  It was a quarter to six.

  “Ten minutes till I need to get the kids shaking for school,” he said. “Want to stick around after your session and have breakfast with us? You can leave your car down in the garage, ride along when I drop them off. Then we can pick up on this subject on our way to the office.”

  Megan nodded.

  “Sounds great,” she said. “But please tell me Chris isn’t going to ask for my hand in marriage again. Because it’s hard to reject a proposal gracefully with bits of scrambled egg caught between my teeth.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m serving buttermilk pancakes.” Nimec glanced at the lighted floor indicator above the elevator, then gestured toward its door with his head. “Anyway, you’ll have the chance to find if he still loves you in a second… looks like the little gym rat’s out of bed and coming up to join us.”

  * * *

  Lately Avram had been conscious of the hallway mirrors. Conscious of them to an unsettling extreme, and for no reason he could figure out. True, they were everywhere around him. They paneled the walls to his left and right as he walked through the building’s doors. They hung above the guard platform by the elevators, mounted in the corners of the ceiling, concave, silvery, angled downward like inscrutable metallic eyes. They were kept clean and polished, without the merest trace of smudges, dust, or fingerprints. On cloudless mornings such as this one, they would catch the sunlight that came spilling in from the street and bounce it between them to give the corridor a brighter feel, an illusion of space that made the walls seem less pressing and constrictive than they really were.

  First and foremost, Avram realized, the mirrors had been installed for purposes of safety. They aided the steady vigilance of Jeffreys, the ground-floor security man, and allowed those who approached the elevators to see what was going on around them, warn them of anything suspicious at their backs. But the stories above were layered with surveillance mechanisms — overt and circumspect — and Avram couldn’t recall a single instance of a serious breach having occurred in the building’s long history.

  As he passed through the entrance from the sidewalk for what was only his third time since flying back into town, Avram again found himself glancing over the mirrored wall, almost as if it were a new addition to the corridor. It was odd, very odd, and hard to understand. In this fixture of stubborn constancy the slightest change was viewed as a concession, and each step forward brought a dose of the familiar that Avram might have expected would dull him to his surroundings. In recent months, however, things had been just the opposite. Avram had probed his mind for an explanation, focused on the obvious possibilities, and ruled them out. He harbored no guilt over his choices. Not a kernel. None. And he hadn’t for a minute. Of course he was only human and couldn’t deny his increased stress over the recent gambles he’d taken… but in his occupation that went along with the terrain, and Avram thought he was better-than-average at handling it.

  This building, this institution, was for him associated mostly with feelings of comfort and stability. Connected to his formative memories in a thousand ways, it was an inseparable part of his life, and had been since he’d been brought here on regular childhood visits by his father and uncles. These days, so many years later, he was accustomed to coming four, sometimes five mornings a week. Even diminished, the Club carried an influence that was felt worldwide. What went on within its walls imparted a sense of rock-steady continuity.

  Why, then, should even a glance at one or another of the mirrors have such an effect on him? It was incomprehensible. Still, Avram would at times glimpse his reflection and halt in mid stride, pausing to wonder over the expression on his face — how it seemed overtaken by a sort of puzzled, disoriented surprise. At other times he might feel an abrupt reversal of perspective, as if he’d switched places with his mirror image. For a span of several heartbeats, he would become Avram the Reflection. Detached, two dimensional, without substance, he would manage to hold on to a vague, nameless recognition of the physical form he’d quit, sharing the intense confusion so evident on its features. That person, if not quite a stranger to this scene, seemed at least of questionable identity, bound to draw attention from Jeffreys, and provoke uncertain, even resentful, looks from members of the crowd gathering by the elevator door. Where was he from? Who did he intend to see? Was he trustworthy? Reliable? Beyond all else, did he belong?

  Now Avram tore his eyes from the mirror, aware he’d been captured by its brightly gleaming surface again. That he’d lost a few seconds, stopped midway down the hall amid the procession heading toward the elevator. It had happened again, and the jarring realization made his chest feel a little clenched. Could the pressures he was under be taking a greater subconscious toll than he’d suspected? He supposed it was possible. Look at what had been going on with him, his change of fortune. Everything had accelerated, gathering a pace and momentum of its own. And there were new risks involved, measured as they might be.

  Avram pulled a deep breath through his mouth. Whatever the cause of his episodes, he thought, he’d be okay. Mentally and physically. All things considered, Avram took reasonable care of his health, and at forty-seven years old assumed he’d enjoy many more decades of good living. Anxiety attacks should be the worst of his problems, he’d be back to normal in a minute. Fully Avram the Flesh-and-Blood. And he would
go on with his customary routine.

  A second inhalation, another, and Avram moved on toward the end of the hallway. He gave old Jeffreys a nod, was wished a good morning in return, approached the elevator. Then he abruptly swung back around to the security platform. He’d almost forgotten to tell the guard about a visitor who’d be coming to see him, and appointments didn’t often escape his memory.

  Avram supposed he wasn’t quite himself again. Not yet. Absentmindedness wasn’t one of his usual shortcomings.

  “What can I do for you today, Mr. Hoffman?” Jeffreys asked pleasantly from his stool.

  A light-skinned black man in his sixties who knew most of the regulars waiting outside the elevator by name, and the rest by sight, he’d been at his post more than thirty years, a fixture within a fixture. Avram had been a teenager when they were first introduced, Jeffreys younger in those days than he himself was now.

  “I’m expecting an important guest in about an hour. Ten-fifteen, ten-thirty,” he said. “Mr. Katari has trouble with the language, and might need help finding his way upstairs to the Club. He’s Ethiopian… well, an Ethiopian-Israeli… ”

  Jeffreys offered him a wry wink, a smile, and then pinched the pecan-colored skin of his left wrist with his right hand.

  “A little piece’a yours, a little piece’a mine, huh?” he said.

  It took Avram a second to catch the guard’s meaning. His brief lapse, or fugue, or whatever his breathless spell at the mirror might be called, really had left him out of sorts.

  “Right,” he said at last, and returned the smile. “That’s exactly right.”

  Jeffreys slipped a pen from the breast pocket of his gray uniform shirt.

  “This fella… he spell his name K-A-T-A-R-I?”

  Avram nodded.

  “I’ll leave a note right here, see he gets to you ’case I step out for a minute,” Jeffreys said, scribbling a reminder in the visitors’ book.

  Avram thanked him, heard the elevator arrive, and hurried to join the dozen or so men crowding inside. Again, he exchanged familiar hellos.

  Then he pressed the tenth-floor button and the car started upward with a bump, creaking on pulleys and hoist cables that had seen better days, but nonetheless continued doing the work for which they were built as if age, wear, and rust weren’t actually problems at all.