Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Logging on to his anonymous client server, Lathrop opened a new message window and addressed it to: thomas. ricci @ uplinksanjo. sword. com.

  Then he wrote and sent his e-mail, snapped off another to the candidate he’d originally decided to reach out and touch, and finally leaned back in his chair.

  The choice was either to play the wildcards in hand or get caught holding a wasted bluff, Lathrop thought.

  He was curious to see how his latest play turned out.

  * * *

  Tom Ricci had a face of hard stone carved in extreme, jagged contrasts. His brow formed a prominent ridge over deep hollows that trapped his eyes in shadow. His high, wide-spaced cheekbones seemed in danger of piercing the skin stretched tight over their sharp points and juts. His nose was straight except at the bridge, where it was thickened and a bit skewed from an old, badly repaired break. His long, angular chin ended in a blunt wedge, as if the hand that sculpted it had been seized by a fit of impatience, bringing work on it to a finish with an abrupt, dead blow of the mallet. These contours flouted predictability; a fine cut this way or that, a careful tap of the chisel, and it would have been easy to call them handsome. Instead one regarded them uneasily, sought balance where none could be found.

  Hard stone, too, his expression. Cold and unvarying, it chilled the eye. For years Pete Nimec had been able to see a rough compassion — a stark decency — embedded within its angry lines and angles, but that had ended when the Killer did his damnable work on those young recruits in Ontario. And with the Killer dead, even the anger had been scraped away.

  While Ricci had physically showed up in Nimec’s office after being summoned earlier that morning, it remained an open question whether he was mentally accounted for. Sitting across the desk from him, Nimec could see nothing but distance and emptiness in his features.

  There had been nothing in them as he flatly reported on his session at the AG’s office in Sacramento. There had been nothing in them — except, possibly, a sort of neutral acknowledgment — after Nimec told him he’d been right to stay on top of the computer-cracking case, indicated he had no problem with his hurrying to attend, but then suggested it might have been best if he’d notified somebody about it before heading off. There had been nothing in them when Nimec turned to the Sullivan business, outlined the picture as it looked at the moment, mentioned its tangential connection to the separate probe of Armbright that Noriko Cousins had gotten underway, and then informed Ricci of the decision to have him go east, oversee things, and hopefully help get it all wrapped up to everyone’s satisfaction.

  When Nimec sprang the news that he’d called Derek Glenn down in San Diego and arranged for him to accompany Ricci, he finally thought he saw something.

  Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t pleasant.

  “Why Glenn?” Ricci said. His eyes held on Nimec, unmoving. “You’re going to send along another warm body, we have people here at SanJo.”

  Nimec had been prepared for the objection. He’d also been ready to give the unshaded, if partial, truth in response.

  “The two of you’ve been successful together in the past,” he said. “I figured you could use the help.”

  “Help or a baby-sitter?”

  Nimec hesitated.

  “You tell me,” he said. “We carry a lot of weight in New York. The mayor’s office, NYPD, the whole city government gives us a lot of leeway to operate. If it turns out we need them on this one, decide to ask for their assistance, you’ll be there to represent us.” He struggled a moment with the rest. “Those bruises on your face and knuckles… you’d have to admit they don’t send a good message.”

  “Inside UpLink or out?”

  “Take your pick.”

  Ricci looked at Nimec in silence for a long time. Nimec didn’t look away.

  “Shipping me off to the Big Apple,” Ricci said. “This an idea somebody kicked around the boardroom?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “Put it any way you want,” Ricci said. “I’m asking whose brainstorm it was.”

  Their eyes remained locked.

  “I wouldn’t go along with it unless I thought it made sense,” Nimec said. “It’s mine, it’s someone else’s, doesn’t make a difference.”

  “Does from where I sit,” Ricci said. “People here aren’t happy with me, they’re entitled to their reasons. Maybe I don’t like them. Maybe I don’t care enough to find out what they are.” A pause, his gaze very still. “People are making decisions about me, then I have to know how they’re lining up. If I’m on my own.”

  Nimec hesitated.

  “I’m no front runner,” he said after a moment. “I brought you into UpLink because I felt you could be the best. Nothing’s changed that. But we can’t make believe things have been working out lately… and I think everybody needs to take a little time to figure out how come.” He paused. “You have an objection to the assignment, tell me right now.”

  Ricci sat. His eyes pressed flatly on Nimec’s. And more than his eyes. Nimec could feel the heavy and impervious bar of his thoughts pushing up against him.

  Then Ricci finally shook his head.

  “No,” he replied. “No objection.”

  And they said nothing more to each other as Ricci rose from his chair, turned his back, and left Nimec to watch him step out of the office — the door shutting behind him with a soft but noticeable click of the latch.

  * * *

  Ricci entered his office, locked the door, and went to his computer to clean up his hard drive. He had quickly eliminated the cryptic e-mail message he’d received a little earlier that afternoon from his INBOX and DELETED ITEMS folder, clearing cache memory at the same time, but that really just scattered everything around the hard drive instead of really getting rid of it, and he’d wanted to perform a thorough wipe as soon he was back from seeing Nimec. Although access to the machine would require biometric hand-key user authentication — coupled with the standard password ID — Ricci had no intention of taking any chances with what might or might not happen while he was gone.

  Seated at the machine, Ricci opened his hard disk scrubber and chose the high-security menu option that would destroy any traces of erased e-mails scattered in the drive’s free disk space and file slack. Then he leaned back in thoughtful silence and waited for the software to complete its function with multiple passes of the drive sectors.

  New York City had sent out an unexpected call even before Ricci had known he was headed there.

  What surprised him even more than the call itself was his interest in finding out where it would lead.

  * * *

  Turning from his computer to the aquarium in his office wall, Hasul Benazir watched the tiny blue-ringed octopus jet from its artificial cove, and then fall upon a live crab he had dropped into the feeder panel above the tank. When dormant, the nocturnal octopus was a yellowish-brown that camouflaged it against the habitat’s rocks. As it struck now, blue circles flared brightly on the eight pale yellow tentacles that clenched its prey, its beak piercing the crab’s shell to flood the soft meat underneath with sufficient poison to kill two dozen grown men.

  The crab twitched, its legs dancing spastically over the bottom gravel as the injected toxin paralyzed it. Already it was being devoured.

  Benazir studied the tank a moment or two longer and then shifted his attention to his computer’s flat-panel monitor, which was encased in a contoured radiation filter to shield him from its ultraviolet emissions. When at the computer, he typically limited his sessions to an hour maximum and wore sun-block for additional protection. Since his deliberate exposure several days past, he had been applying a special lotion impregnated with Dimericine, a molecularly engineered enzyme harvested from yeast and algae enzymes that entered the skin cells through liposomal absorption and was believed from preliminary testing to repair light-ravaged DNA. While the research on its medical effectiveness was still inconclusive, Benazir was relieved that his lips and cheeks, stung by a tre
acherous dusk, had not become sore or blistered.

  He could find no comparable relief from his trepidations, however. In his office tonight, he had spent the greater portion of his allotted sixty-minutes staring at a two-sentence message that had arrived with his e-mail, scarcely able to believe the words on his screen.

  The e-mail said:

  From: One Who Knows

  To: Hasul Benazir

  Subject: Dragonfly

  I’ve caught one that flew from your hand.

  Stay tuned or it will come back to bite you.

  Dragonfly, Benazir thought with a fresh surge of incredulity. Although perhaps surprise was a reaction that might not be entirely warranted, and logic should have dictated that he be prepared.

  The message, its timing… the lines that connected them could only run back to Sullivan. And beyond him. But how far, and to whom?

  The answers were unknown; Benazir had deliberately kept himself at a fair distance from Sullivan’s demand-side linkages. But what he did know was that this unexpected threat to him… and far more importantly to his plans… could not have seemed any closer, immediate, or critical.

  He would need to move, and do so at an accelerated pace. Night of Fate and Power, Day of Noise and Clamor, he thought. Soon, oh, soon, they would come rushing upon his enemies, catching them unguarded, scouring them from the earth in a great, all-consuming tide of fury.

  Benazir reached for his desk phone to contact the unlikeliest of all possible agents of their arrival.

  PART 2

  Zero Hour In the House of Cards

  SIX

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  From the New York Post Online Edition:

  AREA COPS LINK TWO MISSING PERSONS CASES — EYE PUBLIC HELP WITH INVESTIGATION

  By Jake Spencer

  EXCLUSIVE

  Previously treated as unrelated cases by authorities, the separate disappearances last week of a Manhattan woman and a married father residing on Long Island have been tied together by a surprise tip.

  Sources inside the New York and Nassau County police departments have told The Post they have learned of an ongoing relationship between Patrick Sullivan, 44, of Glen Cove, and Corinna Banks, 31, a single mother living in a condominium on E. 19th Street in New York City.

  A high-tech equipment salesman for the Kiran Group, a subsidiary of telecom giant Armbright Industries, Mr. Sullivan was reported missing by his wife ten days ago when he failed to return home from his corporate office at Pier 14 in lower Manhattan. Ms. Banks vanished under mysterious circumstances several days later after dropping off her four-year-old daughter at an indoor playspace only blocks from her residence.

  The new information connecting Sullivan and Banks has been voluntarily provided by a close mutual acquaintance who is said to have come forward out of concern for their safety. While currently protecting this individual’s identity, police are satisfied what they’ve learned from him is credible and have already begun gathering corroborative evidence that points toward the missing persons having a long-standing “boyfriend/kept woman relationship,” as one NYPD investigator characterized it.

  The investigator disclosed that Sullivan is sole owner of the condo, which has been occupied by Corinna Banks — described as an attractive, thirtyish blonde — and her daughter since he purchased it sometime last year. Garage attendants in the upscale Chelsea building have further confirmed that Ms. Banks drives a late-model Jaguar X-type sedan that police have found to be leased in Sullivan’s name.

  “We believe Sullivan was in Corinna Banks’ apartment a little while before he disappeared, and took the Jaguar when he left there to meet somebody,” a source told The Post, adding, “That same car was towed away from a No Parking zone the next morning and has been sitting unclaimed in impound ever since.”

  Police said they do not know the nature of Sullivan’s meeting, raising obvious questions about where it was to take place, who he had gone to see, or what might have happened to him in the hours after he left the condominium and the discovery of the Jaguar — now undergoing forensic analysis — outside the Robert F. Wagner Middle School at 220 E. 75th Street.

  “We’re still gathering information, chasing down leads, and doing a lot of guesswork,” a police source said.

  Both police departments involved with the case are committed to working closely together and may hold a joint press conference within 48 hours in hopes of gaining public attention and bringing potential witnesses to the fore. And while cops admit there is no solid evidence linking Sullivan’s disappearance to that of Ms. Banks, they are convinced it will materialize as their probe widens.

  “A man and woman who share a love nest drop into nowhere a few days apart, you can bet it’s not an accident,” said a lead NYPD investigator. “In my eyes coincidences like that just don’t happen.”

  * * *

  Noriko Cousins was already having a supremely bad day, the kind she knew had to be governed by some Bitch Goddess of the Pit who would dispense illimitable random miseries to inhabitants of the world above, tacking on one after another until you wanted to mark the date box on the calendar with a big black X and then blow your vocal cords to shreds screaming for tomorrow to hurry up and come around.

  A wretched day already, no question. A day Noriko was convinced would not pass into the next before taking a fairsized piece out of her, chewing it to a pulp, and spitting it into a particularly foul-smelling sewer… which was especially discouraging when she considered that it was only a few minutes past nine o’clock in the morning, and she had barely been at the office long enough to warm the seat behind her desk.

  Now she slapped a hand down on her computer mouse and attacked its left button with a finger to close her Internet browser, resentfully casting the front page of The Post Online into cyberspacial exile. The Sullivan thing making tabloid headlines, a joint press conference in the offing from not one but two police departments… she needed this about as much as an epidemic of purple leprosy, which itself barely ranked lower on her wish list than the scheduled arrival later that afternoon of her supposed “help” from San Jose. One of Megan Breen’s designated hitters being the notorious Tom Ricci, who wasn’t quite a contagious leper, but did carry the rap of being an undesirable from sea to shining sea.

  Noriko took a few moments to settle down and think. Maybe there was an upside here, something to console her. The news about Sullivan’s girlfriend and the towaway Jaguar had come as a double-barreled revelation — and while she would rather have learned of those disclosures before they got out to the general public, they did open new lines of independent investigation for Sword. In that respect, she had to grudgingly concede things might just work out. The same probably wouldn’t hold true for Camp SanJo’s decrees and impositions… but what she needed to get into her head was the inevitability of having to accept the variables she couldn’t control, and turn those she could to her benefit.

  Noriko sat back, crossed her arms. Okay, she admitted, the situation could have been shaping up much worse. That still didn’t mean she had to like it, or that she didn’t feel it had the potential to turn into a total circus, with her having to don a polka-dotted jumpsuit and flop shoes, climb into a miniature railroad train with the rest of the performing clowns, and tumble humiliatingly out into the ring as it gathered steam. And when she thought about the guy who’d done the most to put her in that position, arriving last week to mention Sullivan’s name in her office for the first time, it grew hard to resist the urge to spread some unhappiness of her own in his direction.

  He’d asked a favor from her, refused to take “no” for an answer, and then made sure he got his way regardless.

  Time to see how he would appreciate a little tit for tat.

  Noriko looked up his number in her company directory, reached for the phone, and started to punch in his area code — which had to be dialed despite being the same area code as hers, thanks to some regulatory stroke of genius by the FCC a couple of years back mandat
ing the 1-plus-tendigits policy for local calls, as though New Yorkers didn’t have to contend with enough hassles besides having to reprogram the autodial features of every computer, fax machine, and telephone in the city.

  Right around digit number eight, Noriko reconsidered her original idea, stopped pushing buttons, and instead got up to fetch her coat from the closet. Why let the phone company and government regulators kill her fun?

  Lenny Reisenberg, who had showed up as an emissary of the Bitch Goddess, was about half an hour from finding out there was more than one to fear in the universe.

  It would be a pure and distinct pleasure for Noriko to see the look on his face when he did.

  * * *

  “You know my problem with asking favors of people?” Brian Duncan said.

  “Honestly,” Malisse said, “I cannot imagine.”

  Duncan looked at him across their table in the glassenclosed public plaza outside an office tower entrance on Park Avenue and 55th Street.

  “My problem with asking favors of people,” he said, “is that you always wind up having to return them sooner or later.”

  Malisse selected a chocolate biscotti from an assortment box he’d bought at his hotel’s gift shop, dipped it into the coffee he’d picked up at an amenities stand across the plaza, and ate it with a little murmur of gratification. This was, he thought, a pleasant enough space. Warm, open, clean, planted with ficus trees and giant philodendron that stood lush and green in mid-January, even while the flower beds on the traffic islands outside were dead and smothered in sooty ice. Across the tiled floor from him a fountain gurgled softly into its shallow pool, reflecting the weak winter sun and low, strung-out clouds above.

  His eyes momentarily drifted to a nearby table at which a pair of chess players sat amid a scrum of observers, all white-haired senior males, casually but neatly dressed. Members of a retirement club, perhaps.