Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 4

  “ ‘Beware of sinking beneath those shifting currents’ happens to be my favorite,” Roger Gordian said.

  “Ouch.” Megan tucked the loose strands behind her ear. They were the rich reddish brown color of mid-autumn leaves. “Talk about stretching a metaphor, I can almost hear this one groaning.”

  “And begging in vain for a merciful end,” Gordian said.

  “Until it lapses into tortured incoherence,” Megan said.

  Gordian turned from where he stood by the coffee maker in a corner of his office.

  “We’d better quit while we’re ahead,” he said. “You’d almost think the article was written by our old friend Reynold Armitage, wouldn’t you?”

  Megan sat nodding in front of Gordian’s desk. She put her hardcopy down on it.

  “Now that you mention it,” she said. “What was it he called us in print? ‘A growing monstrosity’?”

  “ ‘A growing, failing monstrosity,’ ” Gordian said. “You know, I actually found myself looking for Armitage’s byline after scanning the article. But he seems to have pretty well faded from sight since we beat the Monolith takeover attempt.”

  “Amen,” Megan said. “May destiny’s sails sweep him along a course far from ours—”

  “Megan—”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It scares me to think I’m becoming so impressionable… could be it’s all that time on the ice.”

  Gordian opened a tin of green tea beside the coffee maker, spooned some into his cup’s ceramic filter, held the cup under the machine’s hot water tap, and ran steaming water over the loose tea leaves. Then he covered the teacup with its lid and looked halfway around at Megan.

  “Like some coffee?” he asked, and nodded toward a pot on the warming tray.

  “What’s the roast?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The roast,” she said. “I was wondering if you can offer me any of that great Italian coffee you always used to make or if it’s more of that weak stuff your dear, sweet, gustatorily desensitized personal assistant’s been brewing.”

  “No idea, I stick to my ocha these days… strict orders from Ash,” he said, sounding oblivious. “I can ask Norma—”

  Megan hastily flapped her hand.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll pop out to Starbuck’s later on this morning.”

  Gordian shrugged, returned to his side of the desk, sat. There was a box of assorted doughnuts to his right. He peered inside, selected one with chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and took a bite as the tea steeped on his blotter.

  “Are the doughnuts permitted by Ashley’s dietary edicts?” Megan asked.

  Gordian chewed, swallowed, gave her another mild-mannered shrug.

  “I haven’t mentioned them to her,” he said, his expression all innocence. “Her big concern lately seems to be that I get my tea polyphenols. Something about their antioxidant and antiviral properties.”

  “I see,” Megan said. She was thinking that the boss did seem incredibly hale and hardy. Perhaps not quite back to the robust fitness he’d exuded before the disease — really an attempted assassination with an insidious bioweapon — that nearly ended his life almost two years ago, but immeasurably better than when she’d left for her nine-month stint in Antarctica. His hair was all gray now, true, and you could see more scalp underneath, but there was little else in his appearance to remind Megan of the anemic fragility he’d shown throughout his early recuperative period. He looked, in a word, restored. And while Megan wasn’t inclined to dispute the beneficial properties of tea tannin, or flaxseed oil capsules, or whatever else Gord’s wife incorporated into his therapeutic regimen with each of her frequent trips to the health food store, she believed that Ashley herself — her unfailing devotion and perseverence — had been at the true center of his comeback. Ashley, yes, without question, and the combative spirit that beamed from his steely fighter-pilot’s eyes and had sustained him through five years of nightmarish captivity in the Hanoi Hilton.

  “So,” Gordian said now, lifting the filter from his teacup and placing it on a small tray near his elbow. “What are your thoughts?”

  Megan looked at him, pulled her mind off its momentary detour.

  “About the article, you mean,” she said.

  Gordian nodded. “Articles, plural. And I’m referring to their journalistic merit rather than prose stylings. A lot’s been written about our African plans since we laid them out to the financial press, and none of the pieces I’ve seen is applauding our judgment.”

  Megan shrugged.

  “You’ll notice the total absence of shock on my face,” she said. “Those pieces might give a rosier view of things if the splendid and talented wordsmiths behind them bothered with their easy homework… And what gets me ticked is that it wouldn’t mean shelling out so much as fifty or sixty expense-account dollars for one of those overpriced country investment guides. Any legitimate reporter has budgeted — id est, free — access to online information services. What would it take to find an economic profile on Gabon? Or West Africa in general? A five-minute search, and they’d have loads of data about the oil and gas field development that’s been going on offshore… especially Sedco Chemical’s licensed acreage blocks.”

  Gordian abruptly broke into a grin.

  “Fiery,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t look shocked,” he said. “I’m just hoping the flames you’re spitting won’t set off the sprinkler system.”

  Megan felt a smile steal across her own lips.

  “Maybe I don’t have much tolerance for people who run on negative charges. Less than ever after Cold Corners, and seeing how everyone there came together to tough out the worst of situations,” she said. “But it’s like Alex Nordstrum says. After the military contracts UpLink landed a decade ago, you could have gone into instant retirement. Spent the rest of your life chasing hot-air-balloon-around-the-world records, climbing mountains in the Himalayas, crossing the Atlantic in replica Viking ships… what Alex calls jolly follies. The naysayers don’t carp about anybody who makes that sort of choice. I’m not sure I particularly wish they would. You’ve stayed in the real world, though. Put everything on the line to make a difference, corny as that sounds. And they’re always expecting you to fall on your face.”

  Gordian raised his teacup, inhaled the flowery-scented steam wafting up from it, and sipped. He put down the cup, took a large bite of his doughnut, chewed quietly, swallowed. Then he dabbed a bright pink sugar sprinkle from the corner of his mouth and had another sip of tea.

  “Megan, I’m flattered, but these are my questions,” he said after a while. “First, do you think we’re getting in over our heads with this fiber project? And second, can I assume the more conscientious homework you implied the newsies should have done relates to Dan Parker holding a chair on Sedco’s board of directors?”

  Megan looked at him for about thirty seconds, thinking.

  “I’ll try to roll my answers together,” she said. “I studied the figures we received from the number crunchers, and gave Vince Scull’s risk-assessment report some careful attention. Then I factored in Murphy’s Law and concluded our spending in Africa’s going to surpass what the negative-charge people expect by two to three billion dollars over the next couple of years. To be honest, four billion wouldn’t surprise me if we start integrating our broadband fiber and satellite facilities. That would deplete us to an extent we might not be able to sustain, even with the credit guarantees we’ve secured from Citigroup.” Megan paused and leaned forward. “That said, we also have a great shot at success. But I really believe it hangs on doubling up our projects in the Ogooué Fan. And that means we need to clinch the deal to wire Sedco’s deepwater platforms to each other and then build the cable out to their land-based offices. The advance capital from Sedco can carry us for a minimum of two years, and by then we should be seeing a slow but steady return on our African telecom expenditures as a whole.”

  G
ordian had moved his cup of green tea — still about two-thirds full, Megan noticed — aside and out of his way on the desktop. Now he reached for a second doughnut and got started on it.

  “Qualified optimism,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of fried dough, grape jelly, and chocolate frosting. “Is that how you’d describe your Monday morning outlook?”

  Megan shrugged.

  “I’d say it’s considered optimism,” she answered. “There’s a difference.”

  Gordian sat, nodded, and ate his doughnut.

  Megan looked past him out the office’s polarized glass wall at Mount Hamilton in the southern distance, its great flank rearing over the Diablo Range like a hump of bunched and knotted muscle. It was a clear, sunny day and she could see the Lick astronomical observatory domes gleaming white on its four-thousand-foot summit. The view reminded her of something.

  “I stopped by Pete’s office on the way to mine, but he wasn’t there,” she said. “Do you know if he got hung up in Houston?”

  Gordian shook his head. “Pete took a long weekend,” he said. “He’ll be leaving for Gabon with the advance team on Friday, and wanted to spend some extra time with Annie Caulfield.”

  Megan smiled a little, her expression hinting at an un-stated thought.

  “They’ve become quite an item,” she said.

  “Seems the case.” Gordian looked at her. “It’s interesting to me how they got together romantically. The circumstances, that is.”

  Megan tapped the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Gordian finished his second doughnut, reached for a napkin, wiped his lips, and then tossed the crumpled napkin into his wastebasket.

  “They first met in Florida. When Pete went down there to help investigate the space shuttle tragedy at Cape Canaveral,” he said. “It was clear they worked well as a team, but kept their relationship all professional at the time. Or didn’t go too far beyond that, anyway.”

  Megan looked at him.

  “You never can tell. Pete’s such a tightly corked bottle, it’s almost impossible getting him to spill anything about his private life.”

  “I think I had a bit of an inside line,” Gordian said. “Annie and I stayed in contact afterward. UpLink having so many ties to NASA, and she being an executive at the JSC, of course…”

  “Right, of course…”

  “Annie would often ask how Pete was doing, ask if I’d say hello to him for her, that sort of thing. And I’d always pass along her best wishes.”

  “Right…”

  “Although Pete never commented or showed much reaction,” Gordian said. “Then after a while Annie stopped sending her regards but would still occasionally mention Pete during our conversations. For the most part wanting to know if he was okay. So I can pretty safely conclude they lost touch.”

  “Well,” Megan said. “That seems a logical guess.”

  “It does,” Gordian said. “And it’s the reason I find it so interesting that their love bloomed amid the frozen wastes an entire year later, excuse my stale poetic instincts.”

  Megan caught a quick glance from him.

  “Why the look?” she asked.

  “I was just wondering if you had any insights,” Gordian said. “Given that you were with the two of them at Cold Corners.”

  Megan quickly shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “No insights.”

  “You’re sure? I can’t shake this hunch that something or someone helped coax them along…”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” she said.

  “Oh,” Gordian said. “Because I know you’re about as close to Pete as anyone. Besides Annie, naturally. And that you’ve become very friendly with her since Antarctica…”

  “I was too busy with my responsibilities as chief administrator to put on a second hat.”

  “Second hat?”

  “As in social director.”

  “Oh,” Gordian said.

  “Or matchmaker, if that’s what you’re suggesting…”

  “Then it was long-time-no-see, I love you for the two of them?”

  Megan shrugged.

  “I suppose,” she said.

  Gordian shot her another glance. “That sounds very un-Nimecian, so to speak.”

  “Like I said, you never can tell.” She shrugged again. “I’d better get back to my office, there’s a ton of paperwork that’s been waiting since Friday.”

  Gordian nodded, watching Megan rise from the chair opposite him.

  “However their match got made, whoever may or may not have given it a kick start,” he said, “it’s wonderful to see Pete and Annie happy.”

  Megan paused in front of Gordian’s desk, a dark mahogany affair roughly the size of a fifteenth-century Spanish war galleon.

  “Yes,” she said, struggling against an insistent grin. “It really is, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Port-Gentil sits on the low-lying Ile de Mandji finger peninsula of Gabon amid estuarine swamps and deltas that swell to flood levels in the rainy season, the drainage channels describing its neighborhoods joined by small bridges that are more pleasantly — and safely — crossed on foot than in one of the city’s speeding, careening taxis.

  No such bridges span the social divisions between district borders. In the fringe neighborhoods of Salsa and Sans there is unemployment and periodic lawlessness. Street crime may be scurrying or savage as opportunity bids, the hustle alternating with the gun.

  Downtown in elegant colonial homes, ears sensitive to mannered conversation are deaf to far-off sounds of crime and looting in the night. Was that a crash of breaking storefront glass beyond the canal? A woman’s pitched scream? Ce n’est rien, leave it to the gendarmerie! Instead, enjoy the gentle clink of the champagne flute, the cognac snifter. This is where the magnates and government officials thrive — an upper stratum of wealthy, educated functionairres molded and hardened over a century ago, when Gabon was the capitol of French Equatorial Africa. This, too, is home to the expatriates: bankers, investors, industrialists, and technical engineers drawn by the country’s oil and precious mineral reserves.

  Their nights are calm and long in comforts, their days busy and filled with enterprise.

  The man in the panama hat and white tropical-weight suit had found Port-Gentil a good place to settle. Here he had eluded his enemies and was able to move with freedom, delving into currents where he could satisfy his innate drive to achieve and attain. When not aboard the Chimera attending to his dark occupations, he liked to stroll the city’s conspicuously miscellaneous districts and take in their skewed contrasts: mosque and casino, skull cap and pomade, luxury hotel and hovel, sidewalk café and fetish market. Often he stopped outside the large church where worshipers raised their voices in a fusion of Christian hymns and animistic chants, hedging their bets by musically praising Christ as they recalled ancient initiations to the Cult of Fire.

  The market was among his favorite spots, a crowd of outdoor stalls lined up in aisles in a section of town called Le Grand Village.

  Today there had been a bad moment during his walk. The blazing dry-season heat took his mind back to Bolivia, and the time he had turned his face to the sun and burned away his rage, feeling the layers of skin redden and blister in its searing exposure. Such flashes of that memory were exceptional for him. He had suffered the annealing pain, scoured the leftover contaminants of defeat from within himself, and gone forward with things. But the disappointing news from America had caused the past to seep into his mind lately, and for those few seconds it had found a particularly deep route of entry. At the Beacon District sidewalk stand where he had stopped for pain beurre and coffee, he paid the vender his coins and left the breakfast sitting on his cart. The African street had faded around him and he was again on the veranda of his Chapare ranch house, his dull-eyed, placidly stupid heifers grazing in the distance. And his face was on fire in the sun.

  Then his bri
ef opening to the recollection shut tight, and it was Bolivia that evaporated from thought. He had continued to the market for the item he wished to pick up before calling on his governmental contact at city hall.

  Once there he had gone directly to a merchant of charms and ritual medicines known among the circumspect for his choice stock, transported from around the continent in defiance of endangered species and antiquities laws that intimidated others — all of it stored in barrels, baskets, cartons, crates, burlap sacks, even rusted cans arranged beneath his stall’s straw canopy. He trafficked in back-room merchandise while lacking a back room, pawned smuggled hides and relics with his left hand, and common medicinal powders and charms with his right… sometimes shuffling items from one hand to the other.

  That this merchant was an ace of the swindle just gave bargaining with him a crisp edge. His combination of guile and brazenness merited appreciation and kept the man in the white suit’s own cunning instincts honed.

  The dealer sat in his simple kaftan behind a wide display board mounted on loose foundation stones, and cluttered with animal skulls, horns, and hooves. Carved wooden masks hung from one of the thick canopy poles, bunches of desiccated lizard and mammal cadavers from another.

  He acknowledged his customer with a quick smile of recognition.

  “Je suis heureux de vous voir.”

  “Merci, vous êtes trè‘s aimiable.”

  Their polite exchange of greetings out of the way, the man in the white suit had been specific about what he wanted to acquire, and the merchant was quick to declare he could provide it. Indeed, the desired commodity was not, strictly speaking, black market; legalities only discouraged the practice by which it was obtained and put it in short supply. He had turned from his display board, knelt on his haunches, and then begun moving and shifting the containers, taking occasional furtive glances over his shoulders at passersby. The man in the white suit kept an observant eye on him. Soon the merchant located the carton he’d been seeking, unfolded its flaps, pulled a coffee can from inside, took off the can’s plastic lid, and extracted a sealed plastic bag that had been folded double and packed in sawdust.