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  "What sort of reaction has the breakup proposal generated from your board?" a reporter asked.

  "I've spoken over the telephone with everyone on it, and can tell you my plan has been welcomed with almost complete unanimity," Gordian said. "I foresee no problem obtaining the board's endorsement when we convene sometime next week."

  Another reporter. "Your computer division aside, there are a number of subsidiaries in UpLink's medical and automotive branches which you've said will also be up for sale.. and which have yet to find buyers. How do you expect your shareholders react to these, ah, forced separations?"

  "Very positively, I hope," Gordian said. "The spun-off entities remain under skilled and imaginative management, people who will be able to implement their ideas with greater freedom than ever outside the pressure of a large corporate bureaucracy. And while it would be unrealistic for me to expect full confidence from our shareholders at the onset, I think most will be initially reassured by the package of financial bonuses we're preparing, and eventually become true believers. We're dedicated to our investors and guarantee their concerns will be addressed."

  A half-dozen more wearisome questions, most regarding the technical aspects of the breakup. What sort of financial bonuses? Will you be retaining any stock in the divested companies? If so, what percentage is to be floated to shareholders?

  Question Number Seven was the charm, fired at him courtesy of someone from Business Week:

  "Mr. Gordian, how will your plans be effected should the Spartus Consortium finalize the sale of their stake in UpLink, which amounts to fully one fifth of the company — an enormous minority holding — to Marcus Caine, who we all know hasn't been over to your home for dinner lately?"

  It was a setup Richard couldn't resist.

  "As part of our overall deal, UpLink will be placing an equal portion of its stock in my hands," he said, stepping in seamlessly. "If Marcus Caine wants to make himself an uninvited guest at the table, he'll have to sit across from Roger Gordian and myself from now on, look us both squarely in the eye, and learn it isn't an all-you-can-eat. And let me tell you, people, if Caine tries grabbing anything from my plate, he'd damned well better watch out for my fork."

  A beat of surprised silence from the audience, and then laughter over Richard's quip.

  A great, rising swell of laughter.

  Gordian looked out at the room, and was embarrassed by the realization that he was grinning himself.

  But not too embarrassed.

  Boom, he thought. Bombshell delivered.

  And dead-on in the crosshairs, no less.

  In his office watching C-SPAN, Caine lowered the croissant he'd been eating to his desk, then glanced circumspectly over at his secretary. When Deborah had come in with his coffee and pastries, he'd asked her to stay and take notes regarding the press conference, and she was now sitting on the sofa with her laptop, typing, her gaze fixed on the screen. Perhaps too intently. She'd passed a hand across her mouth a moment ago, briefly shielding it from sight. Had she found Sobel's remarks amusing? he wondered. He would have liked to tear out her throat just on the suspicion. If his belief ever hardened into surety, she could look forward to her walking papers. He would see that she never set foot in an office again, not as an employee.

  Caine felt his stomach burning savagely. It was as if he were on fire inside.

  Those bastards, he thought incredulously. Those bastards. They should have been dead. Killed when Gordian tried to land that plane. The people he'd sent to work on it had assured him they would be. But somehow.. somehow nothing had happened to them. And instead—

  Instead…

  He had to credit Gordian's resourcefulness. By segmenting off entire divisions of UpLink, he would almost certainly gain the capital to dispose of his outstanding debts. By parting with the cryptographic operation, he had eliminated the greatest cause of his shareholders' dissatisfaction, and no doubt raised the price of UpLink stock to its highest level in years. And by handing Sobel a chunk of the core outfit — making him White Knight and Squire all in one — he had forged an alliance that would decisively give him control of the company just when it had been within Caine's grasp. In order to overthrow that alliance, or even mitigate its control, Caine — or any buyer of voting stock — would now need to acquire an improbable and newly expensive number of shares.

  A terrible, nauseous crashing sensation added itself to the pain tearing at Caine's gut, and he was suddenly afraid he might be sick. Even knowing what he'd set in motion at Gordian's data-storage facility tonight didn't help. Nga and his confederates would get what they wanted… but he…

  Think it, an inner voice insisted. At least have the courage to think it.

  No. No. No.

  His hand shaking, he lifted the plate of croissants off his desk, slipped it into his wastebasket, and stared at the television screen in an agony of his own hatred.

  No.

  He would not, could not concede that he was beaten.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  SOUTHEAST ASIA

  SEPTEMBER 29/30, 2000

  "— ello, Max? Max, It's Kirsten. Call me on my mobile soon as you can.''

  "Max, this is Kirsten again. Still waiting to hear from you.''

  "Hello, Max? Same message as before."

  "Max, where are you? It's been four days and I'm getting really concerned. My sister and her husband are telling me to call the police, and maybe they 're right. This is all so confusing for me. So please, if you hear this, get in touch.''

  "Max, I've decided to do what Anna wants and contact the authorities—"

  Nimec clicked off the answering machine and looked at Nori in silence.

  Though it was still not yet full morning in Johor, and both were running on empty, they were in Blackburn's spare, single-room living quarters at the ground station, having decided to check it out for clues to his whereabouts before heading off to bed. There had been nothing to help them on that score, but Kirsten Chu's frequent and increasingly worried messages — the most recent of which had been left two days earlier according to the machine's time/date stamp — at least revealed that she had not completely vanished from the face of the earth as well. And while the messages also seemed to confirm Nimec's feeling that Max had gotten into some kind of serious fix, they ultimately engendered more questions than they answered.

  "Sounds like she's staying with her sister," Nori said after a while.

  "Hiding out's more like it," Nimec said. "You catch the sister's name or do I have to run through the tape again?"

  "Anna," Nori said. "No second name, though. And Kirsten mentioned there being a husband, so it'd be a different surname from her own. Makes it harder to track her down."

  "A lot of married women keep their family names these days."

  Nori shook her head.

  "You're thinking like an American," she said. "Asian societies aren't quite so liberated."

  Nimec sighed.

  "Why the hell would she ask Max to call on her cell phone?" he said. "Wouldn't it have been simpler to just leave Anna's number for him?"

  Nori thought about that a moment.

  "Simpler for us, absolutely, but her situation's another matter," she said. "Put yourself in Kirsten's shoes. Whatever she's been into with Blackburn, it's something her family's probably better off not being enlightened about."

  "For their own safety, you mean."

  "Right," Nori said. "The less they know the better. Also, it sounds to me like Max would have been against Kirsten calling the authorities to report whatever happened—"

  "Or at least she feels that way," Nimec said. "We can figure out why later, but go on, I didn't mean to interrupt."

  "My point is that she seemed to be under pressure from her family to make the call, and would've been torn in two different directions about actually doing it. Could be the sister and her husband had misgivings about Blackburn… why wouldn't they, when you consider the whole situation? If you're Kirsten, you're going
to feel uncomfortable about having him get in touch with you on their home phone, maybe kicking off a round of difficult questions from Sis. The other way's a lot more private."

  "Except, as you've already indicated, it stinks as far as we're concerned," Nimec said. "Joyce has numbers for Kirsten's home and business phones, but not the cellular."

  "No address?"

  "Besides her office at Monolith, no."

  "What about Max's notes on his investigation? The ones he gave to Joyce?"

  "I didn't even know they existed until yesterday, when I called to tell her I'd be coming to Johor. They're encoded on his PIM, and it'll take some time to decrypt and go through them."

  She nodded, thinking. "I assume we want to steer clear of the badges."

  "For the time being, yes. Not that we even can be sure she's phoned them. Or, if she has, that she's told them where she's staying."

  "It's even an open question which police force she'd call," Nori added. "Her sister could live on either side of the causeway. Or elsewhere. National borders are close in this neck of the woods."

  "True enough, but we do we know Kirsten lives in Singapore. If we're lucky, she'll be listed in the public telephone directory. And that might give us the info we need."

  "Maybe, maybe not," Nori said. "Most young, single women leave their addresses out of the listings. It's standard protection against sickos."

  "Now you're the one thinking like an American… and a New Yorker at that," Nimec said with a wan smile. "Singapore isn't the kind of place where there's going to be a problem with obscene phone callers. If she's in the book, we'll likely find out where she lives…"

  "And the next step would be to get in there and look around for something with Sis's address written on it," Nori said, completing his thought.

  Nimec nodded agreement.

  "I hate to risk breaking and entering," he said. "But if we have no better alternative…"

  Nori wobbled her hand in the air to interrupt him, then gestured to the key he was holding, a spare they had obtained from Station Security to gain access to Blackburn's room.

  "Leave that part to me," she said.

  It was a little past four in the afternoon when the two men in the Olds Cutlass drove up to the entry gate of the UpLink Cryptographies facility in Sacramento, slowing to a halt as they reached the guard station.

  "Detective Steve Lombardi," the driver told the guard through his open window. He tilted his head toward the man in the passenger seat. "My partner here's Detective Craig Sanford."

  The guard regarded them through his mirrored sunglasses.

  "How can I help you?" he said.

  "We need to speak to the supervisor in charge," Lombardi said. "We've got a subpoena for crypto keys, you know the deal."

  The guard nodded. It was SOP for law enforcement to deliver court orders whenever there was an investigation or legal action involving the release of data-recovery keys used by UpLink software. With everybody from banks to supermarkets to Mafia hoods using crypto in their daily business operations nowadays, and thousands of keys stored in the data-recovery vaults, and all kinds of civil and criminal cases in which computerized files were requested as evidence, it wasn't unusual to get as many as four or five visits a week from police officers delivering subpoenas.

  "Just need to see your ID and papers," he said.

  The driver took the requested items out of his sport jacket and gave them to the guard. A moment later the passenger reached over and passed the leather case holding his own badge and identification through the window.

  The guard angled his mirrored lenses down at what he'd been handed, glancing over the police tins, unfolding the court papers.

  "Everything kosher?" the driver asked.

  The guard studied the ID and paperwork another second, then nodded and returned them through the window of his booth.

  "Go right on ahead, fellas," he said.

  The doorman at the luxury condo near Holland Road, on the eastern part of Singapore Island, had scarcely arrived for his morning shift when he saw the pale blue taxi pull up near the entrance and discharge its passenger, a slight, nicely dressed young woman carrying a couple of overstuffed travel bags. The luggage aside, she looked as though she'd been traveling, her hair slightly messed, a somewhat frayed expression on her face.

  As she struggled toward the building with the bags, he set down his tea and rose from his desk to get the door.

  "Can help?" he asked in typical Singlish fashion, blending English words with Chinese sentence structure.

  She set the bags down on the carpeted floor of the vestibule and fussed her hair into place.

  "Yes. Or I hope so, anyway," she said. "I'm here for Kirsten Chu."

  The doorman regarded her a moment. Her American accent explained why he had not recognized her as an occupant of the high-rise. But he was familiar with the woman whose name she'd mentioned.

  "Apartment Fifteen, I can call up, lah." He reached for the intercom's handpiece. "Your name, please?"

  "No, you don't understand," she said. "Kirsten won't be home until tonight, and I was supposed to let myself in. But now I can't…"

  She let the sentence trail off.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Maybe I'd better start over." She looked upset. "I'm her sister Charlene, and I'm here visiting from the States. Did she mention my name to you, by any chance?"

  He shook his head.

  "Well, I suppose there wouldn't have been any need" she muttered to herself, rubbing her forehead.

  "Yes?" the doorman said again. He was becoming increasingly baffled.

  When she looked up at him, her large brown eyes were moist.

  "You see, I have a key to her door… well I had a key to her door… but I think I may have lost it at the airport…."

  "Yes?" he said for the third time, suddenly afraid she might burst into tears.

  "Listen," she said agitatedly. "I don't quite know how to ask you this… it makes me feel so foolish.. but could you let me into her apartment? I haven't any idea where else to wait for her… she went to pick up our other sister, Anna… and isn't supposed to be home until very late, you see.. and I've got these bags…"

  He gave her an uncomfortable look. "That against rules, miss. Okay if you want leave bags with me, but I not can—"

  "Please, I'll show my passport if you need identification," she said at once, her voice trembling. She crouched over the bags she'd deposited on the vestibule's carpet, unzipped one of them, and began fumbling around inside it.

  "Miss—"

  The doorman cut himself short. Just as he'd feared, she had begun to sob. Tears spilling down her face, she bent there in front of him, pulling items out of the bag, dropping some of them in her distress, stuffing them hastily back into the bag and fishing out others….

  "Wait, wait, my papers are in here somewhere… I'm so sorry… I just have to find them…."

  The doorman looked at her, feeling sorry for her, thinking he couldn't just stand there and watch her cry.

  "It okay, miss. It okay," he said finally, reaching for the intercom button. "I call superintendent, tell him let you in, no problem."

  Noriko stood and wiped a hand across her eyes.

  "Thanks, that's so kind," she said, sniffling. "Really, I don't know what I'd've done without you."

  The driveway leading up to the encryption facility terminated in a parking area outside the main entrance, the left side of which was reserved for staff, the right for visitors. The men in the Cutlass swung into the visitors' section, found an empty slot, strode across the lot toward the flat cinder-block building, and approached the armed guard posted at the door.

  "Detectives Lombardi and Samford?" he said, smiling pleasantly.

  They both nodded.

  "I was informed you gentlemen were on your way from the gate," he said, and gestured toward the walkthrough weapons-detector beside his station. "If you'd please leave your service weapons with me, and place any other metal
articles you may have in the tray to your right, you can step through the scanners and come in."

  "We're cops, and cops carry guns," the man who'd announced himself as Lombardi said. "It's in our regulations."

  "Yes, and I apologize for the inconvenience. But a facility of this nature has to take added precautions, and most departments cooperate with them," the security man said. "If you'd prefer, I can call ahead to Mr. Turner… he's the supervisor you're going to see anyway… and request that he waive the requirement. I'm sure it wouldn't be much of a problem."

  Lombardi shrugged.

  "No need," he said. "Policy's policy."

  The two men unholstered their firearms — both were carrying standard Glock nines — and turned them over to the guard, then deposited their coins and key chains in the tray and passed through the archway.

  "Thanks for your cooperation," the guard said. He looked at his LCD display, gave the items in the tray a cursory glance, then held it out for the detectives to retrieve their property. "Follow the entry hall straight back, turn right, then cut another right at the end of that corridor. Supervisor's office will be the fourth door down. I'll have your weapons right here when you leave."

  Lombardi stuffed his key chain into his pocket.

  "Just hope we don't have to chase any armed robbers while we're here," he said, smiling a little.

  The guard laughed. "Have no fear," he said. "This place is as safe as they come."

  Nori slipped into the rear of the white company Land Rover parked in a shopping mall off Holland Road, three blocks up from Kirsten Chu's residence.

  "Found what we wanted," she said. "And more."

  "Any problems getting in and out?" Nimec asked from the front passenger seat.

  "Nope. The doorman has a crush on me. He talked the super into giving me a key," she said. "Anyway, I've got a personal phone book with a number and address for a Lin and Anna Lung in Petaling Jay a."

  "Where the hell's that?"

  "Back over the causeway, lah. Outside KL." This from the driver, a Malay named Osmar Ali who was with the Sword detail at the ground station.