Cutting Edge pp-6 Read online

  “Was Bouchard as good a diver?”

  “He lacked the seasoning, but was a trustworthy professional. We send no one down to work at seven hundred meters without comprehensive training and stringent certification.”

  “The day those men were lost,” Nimec said. “What went wrong?”

  Gunville drank some scotch, lowered his glass to the table.

  “A freak calamity,” he said. “They were troubleshooting for the source of a partial system failure and discovered a fault in the cable, a segment that runs along the bottom of an underwater ridge primarily composed of mud and sediment. We believe the damage had been done by sharks. Soon after they tracked it down, there was the apparent submarine equivalent of an earth slide.”

  “Anything like that ever happen before? I mean, without your divers getting hurt?”

  Gunville shook his head.

  “It is what made the incident so shocking. Had it been a massive collapse, I might have perhaps reconciled myself to their deaths… gotten my mind around it as you Americans say… more easily. When you know someone is in a building that has collapsed, you immediately prepare for the worst. But imagine learning a person has been killed after being struck by a few crumbled bricks or something that has fallen from a construction scaffold. In this case two people. The slide was confined almost to the precise area where Cédric and Marius were working.”

  “I wonder what touched it off,” Scull said. He raised his eyes from his soup bowl. “Reports I’ve seen all say the fan’s tectonics are real stable.”

  Gunville looked at him.

  “That is correct,” he said. “Our best guess is that it was progressive erosion. There are natural interactions that can change the features of the undersea landscape even in salutary conditions. Tidal flows, gravitational effects, storms, scavenging or colonizing creatures. This creates nonconformities. Areas of deterioration that may go undetected, particularly if they are small. Over a long period of time an overhanging portion of the shelf was undermined, fractured, and simply gave.”

  Scull grunted. He ran his spoon around the inside of his bowl to clean off the last of the tiébou dienn and put it in his mouth.

  “Did you have any seismographs taken afterward?” Nimec said. “Would’ve helped rule out any chance there was a minor quake.”

  Gunville shook his head.

  “Planétaire Systems saw no reason for it,” he said. “Frankly neither did I. The event was localized. Its causes were apparent from subsequent inspection by divers and ROVs. And we were confident of the seismological data already compiled.” He reached for his drink. “You must also understand my own immediate priority was recovering the bodies of my crewmen.”

  “Sure,” Nimec said. “We’re not trying to second guess anybody.”

  “Still makes sense to do a comparative geological work up,” Scull said. “With all the offshore rigs popping up in the Ogooué, you want to be sure the drilling hasn’t moved things around, loosened them like people sticking their toes into sand castles.”

  Gunville looked at him.

  “I agree with your suggestion. If Planétaire hadn’t pulled out of the region, it is likely a new survey would have been conducted by my employers at Nautel. Unfortunately, without their finances…”

  “UpLink will get one ordered,” Nimec said.

  “Excellent.” Gunville sat quietly a moment, then glanced over at the stage. “I hope you will forgive me, but I must prepare for my next set.” He offered the men a courteous smile. “I’m certain we’ll be talking again over the next several days.”

  Nimec nodded.

  “You bet,” he said. “We’re very grateful for your time.”

  Handshakes around the table, and then Gunville was off across the room.

  Nimec saw him move toward the blond at the foot of the stage, dawdle there to speak to her.

  “Hot stuff,” Scull said, following his gaze. “If I could sing like him, I’d be picking up broads left and right, too.”

  “Don’t remember you having trouble on that score when you were married.”

  “Which time?”

  “I could probably take my pick.”

  Scull shrugged.

  “That was all before I lost my boyish good looks,” he said.

  They were silent a bit.

  “Okay,” Nimec said, and pointed his chin in the direction Gunville had gone. “Give me your impressions.”

  Scull pointed to Gunville’s half-full scotch glass. “Didn’t finish his drink.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Sort of left me feeling he gave us the bum’s rush.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meanwhile, he’s over there talking to the blond, plenty of time for her.”

  “Yeah.”

  Their eyes met.

  “Can’t figure what it might be, but I think our fucking crooner Romeo’s got something to hide,” Scull said.

  Nimec nodded.

  “You and me both,” he said.

  * * *

  Port-Gentil. Headquarters Police Gabonaise. Forty-seven minutes past midnight. His shift long concluded, leaving him drained from overwork and nerves, the normally starch crispness of his officer’s uniform gone as limp as he felt, Commander Bertrand Kilana slouched before a computer screen behind his locked office door.

  The air in the room was stale with sweat, ground out cigarette butts, and paper cups of cold, half-drunk coffee. One of the cups on his desk had begun leaking from its bottom, but Kilana had not noticed the spreading brown ring of wetness around it. Nor would he until tomorrow morning, when he returned to the office after too few hours’ sleep. By then the coffee would have partly soaked through a stack of his important case documents and the pages of a favorite investigative reference book, then dribbled down to the floor to leave a dark, permanent stain on his rug. Kilana would find the paper cup empty and curse himself for having neglected to dump it.

  On Kilana’s monitor now, a live-streaming Internet surveillance video from the Rio de Gabao Hotel showed two of the Americans under observation exit an elevator that had risen to its luxury suite level and return to their separate rooms.

  The commander identified them, tentatively, from his matched listing of UpLink personnel and their suite numbers. This information was stored in his computer’s encrypted database, but for the sake of convenience he’d kept a hardcopy on hand beside his keyboard. According to this printout, the men were Peter Nimec — suite 9—and Vincent Scull — suite 12.

  He did not know, or wish to know, where they had been tonight — only that they had left shortly before ten, and stayed out for some three odd hours. He did not know their positions with UpLink, though that information could be easily obtained from departmental sources. He did not even know with absolute certainty why he had been instructed to maintain a constant watch over them.

  Kilana kept his eyes on his role in the plot and let its other players worry about theirs. It was what he’d been told to do. It was also what was very much safest for him.

  Kilana palmed his mouse, moved the cursor to the toolbar of his Internet Service Provider’s browser and clicked FILE ➞ ARCHIVE ➞ SAVE. When the dialogue box opened to request a file name, Kilana typed in the word hibou, followed by the number twelve.

  Hibou is the French word for “owl.”

  Now Kilana clicked again, and the hidden camera’s real-time images of the men were stored as a high-resolution, compressed audio/video DivX file on his database. He then took a rewritable DVD from the rack on his desk, slipped it into the computer’s burner drive, and returned to the toolbar.

  Several mouse clicks later, he had merged the night’s dozen hibou surveillance files from the hallway outside the Rio de Gabao’s luxury suites into a single large file on the disk. Also on the disk were separate files from inside the suites themselves, designated faucon—“falcon” in French. These included an exceedingly interesting video of Tara Cullen — suite 5—as she showered and prepared for bed, which K
ilana had given a number of successive replays, watching it for his personal enjoyment while a freshly lighted cigarette burned down to a charred, unsmoked stub in his ashtray.

  With the files copied, Kilana removed the disk from the drive tray, put it into a jewel case, and turned off his computer. Then he rose, made a perfunctory attempt at smoothing down his rumpled, sagging uniform, abandoned all hope of it, and left the office, snapping out the lights as he went through the door.

  In the parking lot, a courier waited in the shadows near Kilana’s automobile. The police commander knew this man’s face but not his identity. More willing ignorance; it was well within Kilana’s power to learn everything about him, from his grandmother’s maiden name to his favorite pissing hole.

  Passing the jewel case to the courier without a word, Commander Kilana watched him leave the parking area on foot and then disappear into the night.

  After a few moments, he got into his car and drove home, ousting from his mind an intrusive guess about the DVD’s eventual destination.

  Yes, the less he knew the better.

  Except, perhaps, when it came to the beautiful occupant of luxury suite 5 at the Rio de Gabao Hotel.

  SIX

  CALIFORNIA GABON, AFRICA

  It was eighteenth-century Franciscan padres at the San Carlos Barromeo Mission, outside what would become the city of Carmel, that gave the vast, cragged stretch of the central California coastline its original name: El País Grande del Sur, or the Big Country to the South. As U.S. western expansion brought the wagon wheels of American settlers rolling into this territory, its Hispanic friars, their numbers and influence already on the wane, must have been chagrined to hear the place name anglicized, abbreviated, and vulgarized to Big Sur. But then, it may be surmised that waves of gold-rushing Forty-Niners, and the subsequent annexation of California by the Colossus of the North, would have soon made any consternation over such a thing seem trifling to the manifestly destined extreme.

  The rental cabin Kuhl’s sleeper agents had acquired for him in Big Sur perched on the edge of a precipitous gorge three thousand feet above sea level, its western windows offering a wide view of the Pacific Ocean beyond the canyon, its isolation guarded by a thirty-foot-tall iron entry gate a full mile down the ridge’s eastward slope. Built in 1940 as a secret getaway by one of the state’s early millionaire lumber barons — and currently assigned by family heirs to the management of a real-estate company specializing in wilderness properties — the furnished cabin was a large two-story structure of stone and Douglas fir logs with open interior spaces, a central spiral staircase, French doors, and upper and lower balconies that extended past the sheer western cliff to overhang the long, empty plunge of the canyon. Access from the limestone gateposts was confined to an unmarked strip of winding dirt road circumscribed by thirty private acres of oak and redwood forest, vertical shale outcrops, rolling fields, and scattered swift-moving streams that ceaselessly chattered, splashed, and tumbled down deep, steep cuts in the wooded mountain slopes.

  Behind a high west window on the second floor, Kuhl sat in a supple leather chair watching the commercial van’s arrival through his binoculars. It pushed uphill between the trees at an engine-grinding crawl, its wheels occasionally sinking into loose, crumbly ditches in the access road. The road’s narrowness would not have allowed even two small vehicles to pass in opposite directions, and it had recently become rutted and washed out after a spate of heavy late summer rainfall. The Realtor’s offer to fill and regrade its surface had been declined by Kuhl’s representatives. Their employer sought a period of complete escape from distraction, they emphasized. The noisy repair work would have impinged on the first week of his stay at the very minimum, and he was adamant about requiring uninterrupted solitude.

  A ten-thousand-dollar deposit left on his lease had ensured that complete deference was given to his wishes.

  Now the van came jolting and bumping over the final few yards of the path. Kuhl wondered whether its rough trip up had agitated the occupants he assumed were riding in its cargo section. This was no bit of idle musing. He must have absolute confidence in their reliability. If they showed any sign of unrest he would notice it, apologize for the driver’s trouble, and send him back on his way.

  After several moments, Kuhl lowered his binoculars to the windowsill. The van had reached the cabin and pulled to a stop on the unmanicured grass beside his own Ford Explorer. The words ANAGKAZO BREEDING AND TRAINING painted on its flank were easily legible to his naked eye.

  As the driver got out, Kuhl rose and turned to the man who had been standing behind him near the window.

  “Stay out of sight, Ciras,” he said. “I’m going down.”

  Ciras nodded. He was slender, almost delicate looking, with shiny black mongoose eyes, dark curling hair, and olive skin. There was about him a keyed, alert stillness that was all contained energy. He rarely seemed to move unless necessary. When he did, it was in darting bursts. On a crowded Munich street once, Kuhl saw him turn on a Verfasungsschutz intelligence agent who had been trailing them, and slice open his belly with a sweep of the knife so quick its blade was never glimpsed in his hand.

  At the foot of the spiral stairs now, Kuhl heard the bell chime and crossed the main room to open the door.

  “Mr. Estes, hello,” his visitor said. Tall, bearded, and stocky, he wore a short-sleeved chambray shirt, denim trousers, and western boots. Under his arm was a black portfolio briefcase. “Sorry if I ran a little late, almost got stuck a couple times…”

  “The drive can be tedious. I saw your difficulty coming up.” Kuhl let him enter. “You must be Mr. Anagkazo.”

  The man stood inside the entrance and held out a hand.

  “John’s fine,” he said. “A lot of people maul the second name, and I’ve had more than a few of them tell me I should change it to something easier to remember. For business’s sake. But the line I always come back with is that we’ve had it in the family a while.”

  Kuhl slipped a smile onto his face.

  “It is Greek, yes?”

  “You got it. My great-grandparents came over from Corinth.”

  “A magnificent city.”

  “So I hear,” Anagkazo replied. “I’m kind of embarrassed to say I’ve never made the trip. All kinds of relatives there I’d love to meet, but it’s always one thing or another keeps me tied down.” He glanced into the living room. “You’re a professional photographer, right? Bet you get around some.”

  Kuhl looked at him. He had deliberately placed his camera on a mission bench against the wall — not the digital, but a 35-mm Nikon. Beside it in a deliberate clutter were accessory cases, a light meter, a folded tripod, and scattered rolls of Kodak film.

  “Some,” he said after a moment.

  The visitor angled his head back toward his parked van. A second man had exited and was striding around its right side.

  “That’s Greg Clayton, my best trial helper,” Anagkazo said. “It’ll take him about five, ten minutes to get suited and ready for the demo.” He hefted his portfolio case. “Meanwhile, we probably should sit down, go over a few things. I’ll show you the pedigrees and trial certifications, answer whatever questions you have about my program.”

  A pause. Then Kuhl said, “I’ve owned Schutzhund trained dogs before. My assistant made that clear in your conversations, did he not?”

  “He did. Well, generally—”

  Tired of the man, wishing him gone, Kuhl remembered these banalities of interaction were woven into the fabric of his camouflage veil. “A Rottweiler and a German shepherd — at different times,” he said. “Please, though, have a seat.”

  Anagkazo stepped through the room, lowered himself into a rustic oak couch, and regarded the camera gear again. He seemed intrigued.

  “Here to shoot anything special?” he said, unzipping his case. “If you don’t mind my being curious.”

  Kuhl looked at his visitor from an armchair opposite him.

  “No, not
in the least.” He smiled. “I’m working on a book to be published in Europe. A pictorial record of my modern-day journey over the Royal Road.”

  “El Camino Reaàl, sure. Connects the old mission chain from San Diego to Frisco,” Anagkazo said. “I guess you’d find most of those settlements along Route one oh one. Or near it. There are maybe twenty altogether, that right?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Anagkazo nodded, his brow creasing with interest.

  “You know, I’ve heard San Antonio de Padua’s something else,” he said. “It’s way out past my breeding farm in the middle of nowhere. A hassle to reach because you’ve got to take a twisty local road, G-sixteen, leads you through the mountains. But seeing it must give you an idea how rough life must’ve been for those original Spanish priests.”

  “Yes,” Kuhl said. “I’d planned on making the drive.”

  “Just don’t forget to pack lunch and a coffee Thermos,” Anagkazo said. “Also better make sure you have loads of identification. There’s an army base, Fort Hunter Liggett, in the Ventana backcountry. Government land covers maybe a hundred seventy thousand acres, believe it or not. Most of it’s plain wild. The base itself was deactivated almost ten years ago, but they still use it for military reserve and National Guard drills. There are tanks, choppers, fire ranges, ammo dumps. I hear they conduct some special-op training, too, though they keep that part sort of hush-hush.” He produced a pocket folder embossed with his company’s name from the briefcase on his lap. “The reason I say to bring your ID is that the mission happens to be smack in the middle of a valley on the base’s land. You actually need to drive through a checkpoint to visit it, and security’s gotten tighter nowadays. Like I told you, it can be a challenge.”

  Kuhl had reason to be amused.

  “But worthwhile, I think,” he said. He took the pocket folder from Anagkazo, opened it, and hastily riffled through the thin stacks of clipped-together documents in its sleeve. “All the paperwork is in here?”