Cutting Edge pp-6 Read online

  He watched Ashley in silence a moment longer, noticing she was holding yet another little glass bottle in one hand. On it was a homemade sticker he could tell had come out of her label maker, the word printed across it in red capitals partially covered by her fingers. In her other hand was a round, dime-size piece of aluminum foil she had cut from a sheet beside the rest of the items on the dresser.

  “What have you got for me there?” he said.

  “Let’s not change the subject.”

  “I wasn’t trying,” he said honestly. “It’s just that I’m curious.”

  Ashley shrugged.

  “The bottle was a sample giveaway of moisturizing lotion,” she said. “I finished all the lotion and hung onto it.”

  Gordian nodded.

  “I suppose there’s no sense throwing out good bottles,” he said.

  “None,” she said. “That’s a complete waste.”

  “What’ve you filled it with now?”

  Ashley held it up. “See for yourself.”

  Gordian glanced at the label.

  “Astringent,” he said, reading it aloud.

  Ashley nodded.

  “There you are,” she said. “You’ll be glad to have it with you in the hot weather.”

  Gordian paused. Impeccably scrubbed and unblemished.

  “And the foil?” he said.

  “A safety seal to replace the original one.” Ashley said. She carefully fitted it over the neck of the bottle, pressing the edges tight. “If the cap comes loose and there’s a leak, it might ruin something in your suitcase.”

  Gordian gave her a look that was perhaps nine parts appreciation and one part amusement.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” he said.

  She nodded, unsmiling. Then she twisted on the bottle cap, took the Ziploc from the second transparent pocket, added the astringent to the rest of its contents, and returned it to the travel kit.

  “I have to go, Ash,” Gordian said after a while, nothing amused about his tone now. Her dead-serious expression had made him feel a little guilty. “I couldn’t avoid the trip to Gabon even when it was all about closing with Sedco. But now it’s become about a lot more.”

  “You feel you have to make a point.”

  Gordian nodded.

  “A show of commitment,” he said. “The surveillance on our advance team… that hit-and-run on the supply convoy… whether or not they’re tied together, they make it vital that we move forward as planned. We can’t seem to be intimidated by anyone.”

  She looked at him. “Sedco knows what’s been happening to your people in Africa?”

  “Dan Parker was briefed, and he’s informed Hugh Bennett and the rest of its company officers.”

  “And they’re with you on going ahead with things.”

  “All the way. Especially Bennett. On Sedco’s board, he’s got the last word.”

  Ashley considered that a second.

  “I understand your reasons,” she said. “But what are his? From what you’ve told me, he doesn’t share your particular interest in supporting nation builders.”

  Gordian thought a moment.

  “King Hughie’s used to doing business in difficult environments. He would realize you can’t be effective in the region, build upon any accomplishments you’ve made, by backing down from threats,” he said. “And our joint venture aside, my guess is that he believes UpLink to be the prime target of hostile interests in Gabon, figures we’ll be the ones to bear the brunt of any escalation.” Gordian shrugged. “I also suppose it’s possible he simply won’t be deterred from staging a corporate tent show with himself as ringmaster. Probably it’s a little of this, and a little of that. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that we’re providing extra security for everyone and footing the entire tab. In the end, though, it doesn’t make a difference. I can be concerned only with my own motivations.”

  Ashley continued looking at him across the room.

  “I know,” she said. “And you know better than to think I’d suggest that you cancel. But I’m not talking about now. This conversation is about our future.”

  “I’ve never asked my people to do what I won’t.”

  “Things have changed, Roger. Sometimes I think everyone knows and recognizes it except you,” Ashley said. “You can admit to your physical limitations, handle them, or choose to pretend they don’t exist.”

  Gordian stood by the bed, his gray eyes holding on her green ones.

  “I feel fine,” he said. “The doctors gave me their full consent.”

  She shook her head.

  “I probably know the results of your checkup better than you do. And all things considered, I’m happy with them. But they don’t mean we can erase the damage that’s been done to your body.” She sighed and leveled her voice. “Two years ago I came closer to losing you than I like to remember. But I’m not able to wish away those memories. We can’t afford the luxury. It isn’t for nothing that I packed away a nebulizer of albuterol. There’s scar tissue in your lungs. Fibrosis. You have shortness of breath sometimes—”

  “Be fair. It’s generally okay unless I overexert myself. And I’ve tried hard to be careful—”

  “Let me finish,” she said. “I’m not accusing you of being cavalier with your health. But you are determined. Protective. When the stakes are high for the things you care about, you tend to push yourself further than you should. Over the last few weeks, you’ve taken how many vaccines? Yellow fever, typhoid, diphtheria, hepatitis A. And I’m sure there are some that slip my mind right this instant. Any one of them can have side effects on people whose immune systems never took anything close to the blows yours did.”

  “Ash, you said it yourself. It’s been two years since I got sick.”

  “You didn’t just get sick,” she said. “You were almost murdered with a biological weapon, deliberately infected with a virus nobody had ever seen before. A strain grown in a laboratory by a process so sophisticated government scientists are still incredulous.” She paused and waved a hand toward the window. “Whoever created that germ, whoever tried to kill you, is still out there somewhere. We don’t talk about it much these days, I think because you know how it worries me. Maybe we should, though. It’s not a trifling detail we can ignore because it’s convenient.”

  Gordian stood there feeling her gaze on him.

  “Our marriage is my proudest achievement, what I care about more than anything,” he said. “But I’ve never made you a promise I couldn’t keep, and I won’t now.”

  Ashley folded her arms across her chest and gave him a little shrug.

  “Then how about trying to make one you can,” she said.

  Gordian watched her a while without saying anything. Then he strode across the room, came close in front of her, and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’ll think about what you’re asking,” he said. “Give me until I come back from Africa, and you’ll have my answer. I don’t know if that does anything to make you worry less. But I want you to feel easier.”

  She looked at him, then nodded, her eyes overbright.

  “It’s a start, Roger,” she said. “It’s a start.”

  * * *

  There was soft music coming from the jukebox at Nate’s, a saloon on San Diego’s east side that was an exhausted but tenacious holdout against the pressures of neighborhood gentrification, something that also could have been said of the battered rowhouses shouldered around it on the street like allies in a neglected, fading cause.

  Tom Ricci and Derek Glenn sat in a mustard-colored booth toward the back, Ricci sipping a Coke loaded with ice, Glenn drinking imported stout from the bottle and taking long hits on a Marlboro in violation of a clean air law the gray-haired barkeep had resolutely disavowed as unconstitutional, or if not that, then at least undeserving of constitutionality. The four or five other people spaced out along the bar were representative of his dwindling client base, which was almost exclusively male, black, working class, and on the
far downhill side of retirement age.

  “Business isn’t what it was last time I came down to see you,” Ricci said.

  “Wasn’t much, even then,” Glenn said. “Notch another win for the civil boosters.”

  “You sound mad,” Ricci said.

  Glenn tipped the neck of his beer bottle toward Ricci.

  “Sounds like, huh?” he said with a faint smile. “Now I see how you earned your reputation for being an astute son of a bitch.”

  Ricci watched him take a long pull of the stout. A tall, large-framed black man in his thirties, Glenn headed the bantam security crew at UpLink’s regional offices, established in a single renovated warehouse on the Embarcadero waterfront mainly to handle administrative overflow from its Sacramento data-storage facility.

  “No reason you have to stay where you are,” Ricci said. “I could hook you up at SanJo. A command gig, worth a big pay hike. The rapid deployment team program needs somebody to pull it back together.”

  A surprised look formed on Glenn’s face.

  “I thought that was your baby,” he said.

  “Had to put it down when I went into the field.”

  “So I heard. But now you’re back, and I kind of figured you’d be picking it up again.”

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Decided I work better alone,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Glenn looked at him. “It’s probably none of my business, but what’ve you been doing instead?”

  Ricci shrugged.

  “Catching up,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Security rundowns.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Ricci hesitated. He reached for his glass, rattled the ice cubes inside, but didn’t drink from it.

  “And waiting,” he said. “Mostly waiting.”

  “You mind me asking what for?”

  “No,” Ricci said. “Just not sure I can answer.”

  Glenn started to say something, appeared to reconsider, and sat listening to the music on the jukebox, a mid-tempo jazz instrumental carried along by a husky tenor sax.

  “I’ve been hearing all kinds of news about Africa,” he said at length. “The hit on that supply convoy, other things besides. What the hell’s going down?”

  Ricci rattled his ice cubes some more.

  “Maybe it ought to be you telling me,” he said. “Since you hear so much.”

  Glenn smiled thinly again. He waited.

  “Truth is, I don’t know,” Ricci said. “I haven’t got all the facts yet. A lot of odd stuff’s happening over there. All kinds of questions floating around. But it’s only been a couple days, and so far nobody’s connected anything to anything else. They’re not even clear about what the attack was supposed to accomplish.”

  Glenn exhaled, cigarette smoke streaming from his nose and mouth.

  “I guess this makes the extravaganza aboard the oil platform a scratch,” he said.

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Gordian needs to get the Sedco deal done,” he said.

  “How can they work out a security plan, decide what protective measures to take, when they don’t have any idea what to expect? Seems crazy to go ahead with it until they do.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Ricci said. “The timing of what happened puts us on the spot. You know the game. The territory we cover, you’ll find plenty of uglies who’d love to see us skip out from a threat. That would be giving them what they want.”

  “Notice we can be intimidated.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “This is bigger than Gabon,” he said. “If I were in Gordian’s position, I’d do the same as him. He’s got to hang tough.”

  “With some extra manpower to protect him, I hope.”

  “A fresh Sword detail’s flying out,” Ricci said. “He’ll be fixed okay.”

  “You mean to join them?”

  Ricci shook his head again.

  “Pete Nimec can handle whatever comes up,” he said. “Better I stay out of his hair, mind the family farm. That way we’ve got all fronts covered.”

  Glenn lipped his cigarette, reached both hands into his pants pockets, and fished out a couple of quarters.

  “Makes enough sense,” he said. “There’s nowhere you can feel safe these days. Sometimes I think we’re all stuck in the land of Nod.”

  Ricci’s face showed incomprehension.

  “You know,” Glenn said. “It’s from the Bible. Book of Genesis: ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.’ ”

  Ricci shrugged a little. “Religion’s never been one of my vices.”

  Glenn gave him a look.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said.

  There was a brief silence between them.

  “My offer,” Ricci said. “You interested?”

  Glenn shook his head no.

  Ricci looked straight into his eyes.

  “Seems like a fast decision,” he said.

  “Fast, yeah,” Glenn said. “That doesn’t have to mean arbitrary.”

  Ricci kept watching him across the table several moments, then nodded slightly.

  “No,” he said. “Guess it doesn’t.”

  Glenn finished off his stout, went to get himself a second. Before returning to their booth he stopped at the juke, dropped in his quarters, and punched in some selections.

  “Can’t find many bargains around these days,” he said, sliding back opposite Ricci. “Fifty cents for three good spins on the box is one of the few left.”

  Ricci’s lack of response opened out another spell of silence between them.

  Glenn drank his beer, swayed a little to the music in the background. A female vocalist sang to the accompaniment of a piano, its fills running smoothly around her nuanced phrasings.

  “The song’s ‘When October Goes,’ ” Glenn said after a while. “Singer’s Mary Wells. Lyrics by Bobby Mercer, music by Barry Manilow. Nice.” He paused and took a deep swallow of beer. “I’ve dug Manilow since I was in high school.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “You going to explain your turndown?”

  Glenn shook another cigarette from the pack near his elbow, lighted it with a Bic disposable, and sat there smoking. The Marlboro’s tip flared on his deep inhale.

  “I’ll let you in on a little something,” he said. “I grew up right in this neighborhood. A rowhouse on Fourteenth Street, two blocks south. All my older brothers wore Crip blue. It’s kind of a long story, but I wound up wearing a beret at the opposite end of the color spectrum.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “The flash was black with a wide diagonal gray stripe, yellow borders,” he said. “Delta Force, attached to Joint SpecOps. I wouldn’t’ve considered you for my replacement without reading your personnel file.”

  “I don’t suppose.”

  Ricci regarded him through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  “Any special reason you joined the service besides wanting a change of scenery?”

  “Like I said, long story,” Glenn said. “Maybe we’ll get to it sometime. Meanwhile, you can have one crack at guessing where I choose to live nowadays.”

  “Fourteenth Street. Two blocks south.”

  “My, you are an astute son of a bitch,” Glenn said.

  He drank, smoked, and listened to his music.

  “Family ties why you’re back here?” Ricci said.

  “Family’s gone, one way or another.”

  “Then what’s holding you?”

  Glenn’s broad shoulders went up and down.

  “Maybe it’s my volunteer work,” he said. “I do a lot with teenage kids.”

  “Why the ‘maybe’?”

  Glenn finished his second beer, pushed the bottle aside.

  “I think part of it’s that I’m just stubborn,” he said. “Civil boosters and quick-kill real estate brokers hate the sight of rowhouses. They’d be glad to sweep everybody out of them like litter and doze them flat to make room
for more hotel towers, art galleries for rich people who can’t draw a straight line to hang their junk, and ritzy apartment lofts where the Swells can live. Try moving into one of those pads — you need to show your broker that you earn fifty, even a hundred times the monthly rent in income.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “Sounds to me you’re on a crusade,” he said.

  “Could be,” Glenn said. “But, you know, the Mexican gangs that smuggle drugs across the border into this city, players like the Quiros bunch we brought down a couple years ago, have a Spanish expression, plata o plomo. The silver or the lead. You’re either a friend and taking their bribes or an enemy taking their bullets.” He shrugged again. “I read a paper by some professors comparing what they do to unfair pressure tactics in business and politics. Fat cat landlords, brokers, and public improvement committees, they just use legal harassment instead of guns. Sometimes to influence each other. Mostly to put the squeeze on tenants. Same principle, different methods.”

  Ricci sat without offering any comment. The barkeep had dropped onto a chair behind the counter and was watching a ball game on the television above his head, following its action with the volume down — Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, forty-three thousand screaming fans. Although it was not yet nine P.M., his smattering of customers had evaporated and left him to tend only the two Sword ops in their rear booth and a skinny old drunk at the bar. The drunk was slouched over a shot glass, mumbling to himself as he threw left jabs and hooks into the empty air. Ricci watched him a moment or two, noticing the punches had snap. Probably the guy had done some real boxing once. Coulda been a contender.