Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 19

  Leading off last night’s bill had been the creepshow she thought of as Julia Can’t Find Her Home. The title said it all. She’d been driving home from somewhere — home being the residence Julia had shared with Craig for their entire six-year marriage — then swung off the usual highway exit and suddenly found herself in the wrong neighborhood. Or, to be more accurate, in a weirdly transformed version of what she somehow knew to be the right neighborhood. The street layout was vaguely familiar. There were landmarks that seemed to belong where she saw them, houses she seemed to recognize, but they had been altered in some uncertain way, and shuffled around like pieces on a Monopoly board. As Julia turned corner after corner, her initial bafflement escalated to panic. There was no sign of her driveway, her front yard. She was lost. The house wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t anywhere. She couldn’t even retrace her route to the highway. She was without any sense of direction, her bearings gone, driving up and down increasingly alien and unknown streets, circling them in a futile, endless search for a home that had vanished.

  That realization had awakened her with a scream, prompting a trip into the kitchen for a glass of cold water. It hadn’t ended the nightmares, though.

  Julia in a House Full of Strangers… Almost! had followed shortly after she’d fallen back asleep. In this dream, the beleaguered heroine arrived at her residence without any trouble, but opened the front door to find it filled with complete strangers. As she rushed through its interior she saw people everywhere. Cozying up on the sofa, at the refrigerator, seated in the dining room, chatting and laughing in the halls. None of them knew her. None was interested in knowing her. In fact they didn’t seem to notice her at all, just went about their affairs as if she were invisible. She’d wandered the house like a ghost, found herself outside her bedroom. The door was wide open. Inside a couple was vigorously making love, tangled naked in the sheets. The lights were on. They ignored her when she appeared in the doorway. Julia could see the woman’s back, see a man underneath her, his face blocked by her riding body, his ecstatic groans muffled against her breasts. It had sounded like Craig. It had sounded exactly like Craig. And that had brought Julia back to reality with a start, left her crying into the pillow of her own darkened bedroom for perhaps half an hour.

  At least she had been spared a reprisal of Nobody Knows Julia, a subtler but equally disturbing script in which she would come home to find her former in-laws watching television in the living room. In these dreams, they would acknowledge her presence with cool detachment and instruct her to leave at once. Their devoted son and his wife were returning any minute and would not appreciate uninvited visitors, particularly a strange woman drifting in off the sidewalk to cause trouble for them. When Julia insisted she was his wife they would quietly repeat that she had better vacate the premises for her own good and then would turn their attention back to the tube. Again, as if she were no longer there. The volume on the set was turned up loud. And whatever they were watching had a laugh track.

  Julia sighed. Her urge that dreary morning had been to pull her blankets over her head and stay put. It had been a powerful temptation she’d felt many times before. But she had resisted it today, as she’d always done, except for a couple of instances in the weeks immediately after she learned of Craig’s affair. Dreary or not, it was a new morning, and she had her responsibilities. Her work at the shelter was for a good cause, one very personal to her. It was also insurance against the deadly appeal of her drawn window shades, blanket, and pillow.

  Finished replenishing the shelves with dog food now, Julia sidled around the counter, inspected its adjoining showcase, decided it looked sort of bare, and went into the little side stockroom for some dental and nail trimming kits to fill it out. Despite the store’s limited front space, Rob was nitpicky about keeping at least one piece of every item he carried on display, but worrying about two jobs and a baby seemed to have spun his attention kind of thin. Yesterday he had driven out thirty miles along his way to the Fairwinds before realizing he’d forgotten an important ledger. He’d needed to return home for it and arrived at the motel over an hour late, aggravated and embarrassed.

  Julia was reentering the storefront with a handful of supplies when she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Don’t tell me Rob’s come back ledgerless again, she thought… and then told herself she didn’t want to jinx him by even half seriously considering it. No sirree, not this morning. What more fitting, lousy capper could there be to it than the poor, overworked guy having to double back after another bout of absentmindedness?

  She glanced out the window and was pleased to see it wasn’t his Montero, but one of those Subaru 4×4 utility wagons… an Outback. It had pulled up to Rob’s house, a thirtyish clean-shaven man in a tan leather car coat and jeans stepping out to ring the door bell. After a moment Cynthia appeared on the front porch, babe in arms, and pointed him toward the shelter.

  Back in his wagon, the driver rolled into the parking area near the shop, then got out again and came hustling over through the fog, which was now starting to turn into a fine drizzle.

  He pulled open the door and leaned inside. Cut in short, purposely mussed snippets, his hair was already sprinkled with droplets of moisture.

  “Hi,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. “I didn’t know your Sunday hours, but figured it was after eleven, and took a chance. The woman in that house told me you’re open.”

  Julia waved him in out of the wetness.

  “Sure, come on in,” she said. “We’re just slow this morning.”

  He entered, paused, quietly looking around the shop. Julia set her stockroom merchandise onto the counter, stood with her back to it. “If there’s anything special I can help you find, let me know,” she said.

  He gave her a smile, gesturing with his chin.

  “Actually,” he said. “I’m interested in somebody like your friend over there.”

  Julia looked around, momentarily puzzled. Then she laughed. Vivian had gotten off her cushion and stuck her head out from behind the counter.

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize…”

  “Pooch is a little shy, huh?”

  “Don’t let Viv fool you, she knows how to get her way.”

  Now the guy chuckled, too. “Especially with you, I’ll bet.”

  “I guess.”

  He put out his hand.

  “Barry Hughes,” he said.

  “Julia Gordian,” she said.

  They shook.

  “So,” he said. “Tell me what I need to do to rescue a greyhound today?”

  Julia hesitated, did a quick memory check, and glanced down at the open schedule book beside the cash register. As she had thought, there were only the couple of afternoon appointments, and neither of them was for anybody named Hughes.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t see you listed…”

  “Oh,” Hughes said. “Do I need to be?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Julia said. “Other than for buying supplies or gifts, that is.” She paused, her brow creasing. “You mean you didn’t know?”

  Hughes shook his head.

  “I’m always noticing the sign for your shelter on the road,” he said. “Figured I’d drop by whenever I could.”

  Julia produced a sigh. “I really am sorry,” she said. “We have a lot of dogs that need placement, but there’s a telephone screening process. It’s given to every candidate owner before they come look at the greys.”

  Hughes shrugged.

  “I’d be glad to answer any questions right here. If you’d like to ask them, that is—”

  “I’d like nothing more,” Julia said. “It isn’t my choice, though. You’d need to speak with Rob Howell. He’s the shelter’s organizer and conducts all the phone interviews himself.”

  “Oh,” Hughes said again. “Mr. Howell available, by any chance?”

  Julia shook her head. “Best thing would be to give him a ring. Monday through Friday.”

  “That’s kind of difficult
for me… I’m a power company technician, always climbing utility poles, crawling around people’s basements, running everywhere on emergency calls,” Hughes said, and frowned. “You sure you can’t grab hold of him for a few minutes?”

  “I would if the timing weren’t so bad,” Julia said. “Unfortunately he’ll be out the next two weekends.”

  Hughes made eye contact with her.

  “And I couldn’t ask for an exception—”

  “As I said, there’s nothing I’d prefer. But I’m new at the job. And rules are rules.”

  A pause.

  “Well,” Hughes said, and expelled a long breath. “I guess I’ll try back another time.”

  Julia pulled a business card from the holder by the register.

  “In any event, why don’t you take this,” she said, handing it to him. “It’s got our regular business hours. Phone and fax numbers, too, of course.”

  Hughes reached for his billfold and slipped in the card.

  “Thanks.” He motioned toward the counter again. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and nobody else will take your adorable friend before I have my chance at her.”

  Julia glanced over at Vivian and was mildly surprised to see she hadn’t come out from behind the counter, but was poking her head out around its side, sniffing away, her ears flat back against her head, the bonnet bow undone. Viv didn’t often lay on the bashful routine that thick.

  “Maybe,” she said, feeling an odd twinge that she immediately chalked up to her own growing attachment to the dog — another violation of Rob’s thou-shalt-nots. The two of them really had become chums, but she had to recognize somebody would take her one of these days. And that it would be very much for the best. “Anyway, I hope you give us a call. Our rescues desperately need good homes.”

  Hughes nodded, gave her another smile, and left.

  A moment later Julia turned from the door and got back to work.

  In the Outback, the man who’d introduced himself as Barry Hughes passed the Howell residence, reached the bottom of the lane, turned left, and then drove west over the blacktop toward the coast.

  His own particular morning’s work was over, and it could not have gone any better.

  * * *

  “So what do you think?” DeMarco said.

  “From what you tell me,” Nimec said, swatting away a mosquito, “we’ve got some worries.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Serious worries.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which you obviously know, or we wouldn’t be here,” Nimec said.

  DeMarco nodded but said nothing.

  They were standing together on an aged steel foot-bridge over a drainage channel in the city’s Romb’Intchozo precinct, their elbows propped on its pedestrian guard rail. In the rainy season, the channel would be gurgling with overflow from the flooded Ogooué River delta. But this was a different season, and the water below them was low and still and muddy. Insects swarmed around thick clottings of food wrappers and other paper litter that floated on or just below the surface.

  Nimec wished he hadn’t worn short sleeves. Or that he’d splashed on some pest repellent.

  “Hell of it is, I can’t think of anything but the obvious,” he said after a long silence. “We need to find out who’s put a watch on us. How wide it is. And we need to find out the reasons why. What they’d have to gain.”

  DeMarco nodded again. He felt a tiny stinging bite on his bare left forearm, slapped his right hand down on it, examined his palm, and saw the mosquito’s wings, legs, and carapace mashed together in a smear of blood. He scraped it onto the guard rail with a sense of vengeful reward.

  “Damned bugs,” he said.

  “No pun intended, I hope.”

  DeMarco puzzled a moment over the vinegary humor in Nimec’s tone, then got it.

  “No,” he said with a thin smile. “None.”

  They stood looking out past at the stagnant, refuse clogged, insect-teeming murk under the bridge.

  After a while Nimec decided on the first step in what he supposed might be labeled a plan.

  Or something close to one.

  * * *

  The Ogooué Fan. Eighty leagues below sea level. Fifteen feet long, its leech-white outer hull devoid of markings, the deep submersible had passed beneath the sand ridge’s crumbled terrace to assume a stable automatic hover close to the ocean bottom.

  In the steel-walled forward pressure cabin, two men in overalls that matched the color of the craft’s fiberglass exterior occupied its command station behind a hemispheric acrylic viewport — the large half bubble allowed for wide field, low refractory visibility, giving a near illusion that there was nothing to separate them from their aqueous surroundings. One of them sat in the pilot’s chair, ready to take manual joy-stick control of the craft and push its ducted, silent-running, eight-horsepower electric thrusters to a speed of better than ten knots in the event that sudden detection or imminent threat drove them to launch an escape. Behind the backup controls to his right, the copilot monitored his frontal and overhead status boards and handled their periodic radio communications with the surface team.

  The four crewmen in the aft pressure chamber also wore pale overalls. Two had manipulated the clawed robotic arm that had plucked the segment of fiber cable from its bed of sand and sediments. Their companions behind a separate instrument console had followed the marine cable’s exposure with the deployment of a tubular protrusion from the submersible’s underbelly midway between bow and stern, running it to the rubbled sea floor, mating it to what almost appeared to be an ordinary splice enclosure in the line. But the bidirectional data port in the enclosure’s upper surface would be certain to draw attention from a knowledgeable eye such as Cédric Dupain had possessed… and indeed did when he’d spotted its watertight cover some months earlier, making the discovery that would seal his and Marius Bouchard’s fate.

  Had Dupain lived long enough to further scrutinize it, his inquisitiveness would have surely led him to find the data port and the special multifiber coupler fitted within the splice enclosure: a microchip-activated beam-splitting pod that, when switched on, would tap into the lightwave signals passing through the cable and divert a fraction of them into the optical fibers of the extended feeder tube. Because the pod had been built into the system near a splice housing known to Planétaire’s, and now UpLink International’s, system managers, the temporary signal degradation would be considered unremarkable. The heat-fusing of fiber ends at splice points will always result in some attenuation of signal strength, intrinsic losses that are ignored within certain established levels, and there would be many of these points along the route of a typical long-distance network’s architecture.

  At each parasitic siphoning off of the cable, its flood of raw high-speed data was transmitted from the submersible’s array of receiving/buffering computer terminals to Cray superprocessors aboard the Chimera using a direct, narrow-targeted underwater-to-surface Intranet link maintained via an extremely high frequency (or EHF) acoustic telemetry modem and on-hull antenna about the size and shape of a carrot. Were they to hear a mission-abort command from the pilot’s chair, the men at the aft consoles would be responsible for disengaging the feeder tube and, if time and opportunity allowed, retrenching the cable to hide any visible sign of their tap.

  Although these emergency measures were practiced in drills, the reality was that their implementation never had been required. A cautious and prudent man in any circumstance, Harlan DeVane was at his best functioning in the depths.

  As DeVane himself often mused.

  * * *

  Port-Gentil. Late Sunday afternoon. Pete Nimec and Vince Scull strode through the main lobby of the Rio de Gabao to the street, past the accommodating concierge, the smiling doorman, the ready taxi drivers parked near the entrance.

  On the pavement they turned right and started walking unhurriedly toward the big outdoor market at the north side of the city, a couple of commercial travelers enjoying a we
lcome weekend respite from their high-powered business affairs.

  Soon afterward, Sword ops Charlie Hollinger and Frank Rhodes left the hotel together and strode south toward the casino district. They were talking about things like their luck at the slots and exchanging tips for cashing in big at baccarat and roulette.

  A half hour passed before Steve DeMarco and three more members of the Sword advance team — Andy Wade, Joel Ackerman, and Brian Conners — hit the street. The group stood chatting in front of the hotel, casually discussing their separate plans for the rest of the afternoon. DeMarco and Wade said they wanted to see some historic sights. Ackerman mentioned a free Makossa concert in the city park he was anxious to catch, and Conners, who played guitar as a hobby, indicated he’d like to tag along with him. DeMarco suggested that all of them ought to try hooking up with Nimec and Scull at the bazaar a bit later on, maybe going out for dinner afterward. Conners said he wasn’t sure, but would probably decide to pass on that, expressing his interest in some local sights he wanted to visit on his own after the concert. And besides, he’d already promised Hollinger and Rhodes he would join them in blowing his week’s pay at the tables.

  The group stood there talking for another five minutes or so and then moved on.

  DeMarco and Wade went right, following the direction Nimec and Scull had taken to the market quarter with only few detours en route.

  Ackerman and Conners walked left toward the park together, though Conners would eventually go off on his own.

  As had been true since their arrival in the country, all eight men were being watched.

  This time, however, they were watching the watchers.

  * * *

  For the second time in as many days Jean Jacques Assele-Ndaki had been shocked and horrified by the photograph of his lifelong friend Macie’s gruesome murder. But having the president himself confront him with it this time added a new and entirely different element to his reaction.