Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Mrs. Sullivan let the sentence trail, her eyes filling with moisture, reaching into her bag for a Kleenex before Lenny could awkwardly hold out the box on his desk.

  “Can I get you a glass of water… something else to drink…?”

  “No, no, thank you… ”

  “You’re sure? Hot coffee, maybe? It isn’t a problem… ”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Really, it’s all right.”

  There was a brief silence. Lenny’s hands found a stray paper clip on his blotter and began fidgeting with it.

  “The police talked about your husband’s friend when they showed up,” he said. “They didn’t say much… had no reason, I suppose. But, well, I’d wondered why he wasn’t a little concerned when Pat didn’t meet him.”

  “I did, too, at first,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “I’d tried reaching Pat on his cell phone around five-thirty, six o’clock that afternoon. So I could fix him some dinner if he canceled his plans. Like you said, it was coming down something awful outside. But he keeps the phone off half the time once he’s out of the office… or I should say purposely forgets to put it on so his night-owl boss can’t drag him back there.” She dried her eyes with a tissue. “I called Tony’s apartment next. Nobody answered, and to me that meant they went ahead with their plans. I never even thought to leave a message.”

  “Do you know where Tony turned out to be?”

  “Waiting for Pat to show up at one of their haunts.” She shook her head again, wiped at a blotch of mascara above her left cheek. “Of course he never did. Tony says he figured my husband just went home, maybe rushed to catch the train because he was afraid of delays. And that he’d hear from him later.”

  More silence. A question flirted with Lenny’s curiosity, but then tailed away as she motioned toward the picture frame on his desk.

  “Is this your family, Mr. Reisenberg?” she said.

  Lenny nodded. He’d taken reels of photos during their vacation out west last summer. Three days in the Badlands of South Dakota, then on to tour the Black Hills, Deadwood, Custer State Park, and finally Rushmore, which formed the backdrop for the shot that had drawn Mary Sullivan’s eye.

  “My wife’s Janice,” he said, and indicated the slender brunette waving at his camera from an observation deck in the loom of Abe Lincoln’s chin. “The kids are Max — he’s the tall one on the left — then Jake and Sarah.” He paused. “And you can call me Lenny, by the way.”

  “Lenny, you’ll probably understand what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “Pat’s a wonderful husband. I don’t make a habit of checking up on him. It’s like Pat always says… twenty years under the same roof, raising our daughter together, we’d better be able to trust each other. With the amount of traveling he does because of his sales job, there’d be no sense trying to watch his every step, anyway.” She shrugged, took a trembling breath. “My point is that he’s a grown man. I’m not the sort to harp if he stays out late with his friend once in a while. Usually I’m fast asleep when he comes in from watching his games. That night, though, in that storm, with the terrible wind, it was different. I couldn’t shut my eyes. And it bothered me when Pat wasn’t back by midnight. Or one in the morning. Around two o’clock, I called Tony’s apartment again. That time he picked up his phone, told me he’d walked in an hour before, and we compared notes. The minute I found out Pat hadn’t gotten in touch with either of us, I knew something was wrong… ”

  A sob took hold of her, then another, and she began weeping openly. Lenny studied the paper clip in his hand, waiting as she gradually regained her composure.

  “Mrs. Sullivan…”

  “You can call me Mary.”

  He looked at her. Saw that faint, sorrowful smile on lips wet with her spilled tears.

  “Mary,” he said. “Your husband and I… we’ve been doing business a while now. Far’s our relationship goes, I feel I know him pretty well.” Lenny paused, slid the paper clip under one finger, over another. “I’ve asked myself if there’s anything he might’ve told me the other day, anything I noticed that seemed different than usual. The truth is, there wasn’t—”

  “Please help me find out what’s happened to him,” she said all at once.

  Her red-rimmed eyes meeting his own, clinging to his own.

  Lenny remained quiet for a moment. His face showed surprise and confusion, and on the outside that was a somewhat authentic reaction. The problem being that it was another matter below the surface. In many respects, he didn’t consider himself quick on the uptake. Show him a thousand times where to lay down silverware in a standard table setting, or what food went in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer, he wouldn’t remember. Explain whether you were supposed to turn a screw clockwise or counterclockwise to loosen it, it would never sink into his brain. Figuring out how ordinary things worked defied him. But ordinary people were another story. He got their signals without too much difficulty. It would only take a single gesture to give him a full read on someone’s personality, a few words to deliver the message he or she was trying to put across to him.

  Right now he knew just where Mary Sullivan was going, and suddenly felt too quick for his own good.

  “I don’t understand,” he lied. “That is, how could I…”

  She shook her head.

  “I wasn’t talking about you alone, Lenny,” she said. “But the company you work for… UpLink International. It could help.”

  Lenny stared at her. His sympathy notwithstanding, he really and truly didn’t like the turn their conversation had taken.

  “Mrs. Sullivan… Mary… we’re a telecom,” he said. “We develop communications networks.”

  “And other things, too. For the military, yes?”

  “Well, sure. There are the defense contracts. I suppose it’s common knowledge Roger Gordian built our company on them. But that doesn’t give us any strings with—”

  “I try to follow the news, keep up with the main stories,” she said. “None of us in this city will ever forget what happened a few years ago, that terrible time we went through. So many thousands of people killed by those maniacs for no reason. And I remember a report on TV, the program might have been 48 Hours…”

  In fact it was 60 Minutes, Lenny thought without bothering to correct her.

  “On that show they talked about the security team UpLink’s pulled together to keep its employees safe around the world,” she pressed on. “How it’s supposed to be the best. And the part that stuck with me, sticks to this day, is when the police commissioner was asked about Mr. Gordian helping our government find the terrorists who attacked us.”

  Lenny didn’t need to be reminded, having played a relatively minor, tell-me-no-secrets-and-I’ll-ask-you-no-questions role in UpLink’s investigation and eventual pursuit of the conspirators in four separate countries. The boss had wanted it kept under wraps for a slew of reasons, as had the Feds, and the PC had obliged them all to the extent that he could. But then, maybe six months after the tragedy, a former aide at One Police Plaza gave a videotaped interview — his face an unrecognizable smudge on the screen, his voice electronically wound and stretched to a distorted pitch — in which he’d bared much of a classified department file on UpLink’s participation. That had put the commissioner in the hot seat. Rather than offer lame denials, he’d acknowledged the “debt of gratitude,” or some such, that New Yorkers and the nation in general owed Gordian and company for their patriotic actions. While his answers didn’t completely douse the fire under him, they kept the back of his pants from catching until the press scrambled off after the next headline.

  Lenny sat gathering his thoughts. He knew he was about to take his cue from the commish and felt kind of lousy.

  “Mary,” he said. “When our city got hit, all kinds of volunteers committed to picking us up. I know my boss pitched in, but couldn’t say how. The situation back then was so far from normal…”

  Her eyes flashed, the green irises suddenly bright.


  “I’m not trying to compare. Not in the way it might have sounded,” she said. “Pat’s only one man. His disappearing into thin air isn’t a crisis except for his family. But are you telling me it’s normal? Or not different enough…”

  Lenny shook his head.

  “You’re going through hell,” he said. “I realize that. But I’m a shipping officer. I work with freight forwards, import regulations, customs documents… I really don’t know what I’d do—”

  “Anything you can,” Mary Sullivan said. Sounding composed, even resolute now. “It isn’t easy for me to come here and ask a favor of you, a person I’ve never met before. And I wouldn’t if I had somewhere else to turn.” She paused. “I once read, or heard somebody say, the missing are presumed guilty… that when they first drop out of sight, the police treat it like they’ve run off on their own, and wait too long before they start looking for them. You can see what they’re thinking on their faces, tell by their voices. Why waste manpower on an angry wife, or a husband who loses it when the charge cards get run up too high?”

  Or who decides he feels like a week of fun and games at the Mustang Ranch, Lenny thought.

  He hesitated, returned to playing with his paper clip. He felt a load of compassion for the woman sitting across from him. He liked her husband, thought he was a nice guy, and sincerely hoped he came back to her okay. But it was not his responsibility. She was asking him to become involved in something that was none of his affair. Moreover, she was asking him to ask UpLink’s security division to get involved. They would want no part of a missing persons investigation unrelated to their duties on behalf of company interests… as he was sure to be reminded if he brought the matter to their attention. And knowing the person he’d have to approach, it would be a snub bordering on ridicule. He had no juice with her. Or close to none. And less than he’d had before at the main office in San Jose, what with all the changes going on there lately. Far too much was being expected of him, and he would have to lay that out to Mary Sullivan as delicately as possible.

  He looked down at the clip in his hands. Looked up at her.

  And before he could say anything heard a pair of voices in his head, his own and another’s, a startlingly clear auditory transmission bursting across a quarter century of time:

  “You want bop, there’s Ornithology.”

  “I’ll do it with Dizzy if you’ll give me Anthropology.”

  For a second Lenny was rocked by those words from the distant past, warped back to the fluke encounter that had reversed the steady downward slide of his life. It hadn’t seemed that way to him then, but he’d been at the edge. The very brink of a dark someplace he would surely have fallen into if one man hadn’t held out a line for him to grab.

  Damn it, he thought. Damn that stinking memory. Why did it have to come to him now?

  Lenny sat in silence a brief while longer, feeling as if he needed to catch his breath. Then he dropped the paper clip into the tray where it belonged.

  “No promises, Mary,” he said. “But I’ll see if I can’t get you some answers.”

  * * *

  “Forget it,” Noriko Cousins said without looking up from behind her computer screen.

  Lenny didn’t say anything. That had been just the response he’d expected.

  “No way,” Noriko added.

  Lenny was silent. She seemed inclined to give her rejection further embellishment, and he figured he’d wait for it before mounting his comeback.

  “There’s isn’t a chance I’m about to get us embroiled in a situation that has absolutely zero bearing on our corporate interests,” Noriko said. “If this woman who came to see you needs somebody to sniff out her wayward spouse, she can check the Yellow Pages for bedroom-peeping gumshoes.”

  Lenny stood facing her desk with his hands in the pockets of his tweed overcoat, uncertain whether the chill he felt was a result of her brusque reception, the low temperature in the room, or his long walk down to Hudson Street from his midtown office. Hudson was a bitter, blustering channel of wind in January. This building, a converted nineteenth-century meat-packing factory, remained full of cold, slippery drafts that would seep through its redbrick facing despite myriad layers of interior renovation. And Noriko tended to keep the thermostat way down for inexplicable reasons of her own. So maybe it was the physical environment making him want to shake off icicles. But Lenny hadn’t found it quite so inhospitable when Tony Barnhart had been running things here at the local headquarters of Sword — the official tag for UpLink’s intelligence, security, and crisis-control arm, and a clever allusion to the old legend of Alexander of Macedonia undoing the supposedly undoable Gordian knot with a swift, sure stroke of his blade. Roger Gordian, Gordian knot, decisive and pragmatic solutions to tough problems, whack!

  Lenny took a deep breath. He had liked Barnhart exponentially more than Noriko Cousins, who’d succeeded him as section chief after wounds he suffered in a gunfight with some lowlife Russian hoods had sent him into early retirement. But the plain truth was that Lenny never felt quite at ease around any Sword personnel. It was their collective attitude, mostly. He could tolerate some remoteness given the perilous nature of their work, safeguarding the lives of UpLink employees in hot spots around the world… and probably an untold number of people who knew nothing about UpLink. Given, also, that they were culled from law-enforcement, covert intelligence, and military special operations groups and thus conditioned to secrecy through years of training and experience. Lenny got that without a problem, yo comprendo todo y más señoritas y señores. And yet Noriko was a case apart from the rest. In his opinion she had raised close-mouthed, standoffish impenetrability to a new level.

  “Look, I didn’t say I’m in love with the idea of getting mixed up in this whole thing,” he said.

  “Good, great.”

  “For that matter, I wouldn’t dream of having us stick our noses in a situation with no connection to UpLink.”

  Her brown Eurasian eyes remaining on the screen, Noriko swished a hand toward the door in an absent gesture of dismissal.

  “It’s wonderful we agree—”

  “Except in this case it happens there is one,” Lenny said.

  She finally glanced up at him. Tall, slender, athletic, her shoulder-length black hair gelled and tousled around symmetrically fine features, she wore a body-hugging black sweater, black leather miniskirt, black tights, and high-shaft black leather boots for a total effect Lenny had to admit was a draw to the eyes. Still, the good looks didn’t nearly compensate for her brass.

  “I hope you aren’t going to tell me it’s because we buy components from this Patrick Mulligan—”

  “Sullivan,” Lenny said.

  “Right, excuse me,” Noriko said. “But if that’s your rationale, you might as well make UpLink responsible for the friendly men and women who sell us light bulbs, keep us in bathroom supplies, and stock our hallway vending machines with bags of potato chips and chocolate kisses.”

  Lenny shook his head.

  “Pat’s a salesman for the Kiran Group. And we’re probably his biggest account, since we lay out maybe five million bucks a year to Kiran for—”

  “Synthetic ruby, I know…”

  “Laboratory-cultivated sapphire,” Lenny said. “Sapphires and rubies are the same mineral. Corundum. The difference is their crystallization pattern. And their properties. It’s why we use one and not the other in our laser equipment.”

  Noriko looked at him.

  “I stand corrected again,” she said. “I also still don’t see any logical reason why that makes Mull… ah, Sullivan, our concern.”

  Lenny guessed he didn’t either. But it was his pledge to Sullivan’s wife that he’d make a go of things, not logic, that had propelled him down here to SoHo on his lunch break.

  “I’m busy, Lenny,” Noriko said now. “What’s your point? The condensed version, please.”

  Lenny shrugged his shoulders.

  “Just that we’re talk
ing about somebody with ties to our core operations, not the Hershey’s chocolate guy,” he improvised. “It isn’t my job to fill in the blanks.”

  “And how does it follow that it’s mine?”

  Lenny shrugged a second time, stuck for a persuasive reply. Trying to get past the interference she threw up was like having to dance between raindrops.

  Noriko kept looking at him, her expression openly scornful.

  “Six months ago the Kiran Group was bought by Armbright Industries, a multinational corporation that happens to be our chief competitor in a dozen areas of tech development,” she said. “Armbright has its own internal security to look after its employees.”

  “Their security isn’t Sword by a longshot.”

  “Not my problem,” Noriko said. “Let them allocate a heftier slice of their budget to the division. They’ve mimicked us in every other way.”

  Lenny felt swamped with futility. He hated talking to her. Hated it.

  “You’re really catching me on a hectic afternoon,” she said. “Is there anything else you want me to consider before we wrap up?”

  This time Lenny guessed he might have had an answer, but it stalled short of his lips. What was he supposed to tell her? That he’d related to Mary Sullivan’s background without ever asking a word about it, her sorrowful but determined green eyes stirring memories that hadn’t occurred to him in years?

  “No, nothing else,” he said at last. “I’m done.”

  “Okay,” Noriko said with flat disinterest. “Be well, Lenny.”

  “Yup. I’ll see myself out.”

  Noriko Cousins returned her eyes to the computer screen, both hands on the keyboard even before he left her office.