Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  Lathrop reached for the cat’s dish, spooned some food into it.

  Sullivan had been careful to a degree, but he’d never been as smart or guarded as he thought he was. He’d also had a habit of showing off — his conceit like a thin balloon, overinflated with insecurity, ready to burst at the prick of a pin. Those weaknesses had cost him that night on Wards Island, and maybe there was still a way to exploit them. Dragonfly was the score of a lifetime, and Sullivan had known it. Thought he was clever holding back the keys, too… it had been all over him. If he’d had the opportunity to open his mouth about that to someone — in his own mind, safely boast — Lathrop was betting he’d have done it.

  He crouched, set the dish on the floor. He pictured the Irishman with his restored hairline, his trendy ski jacket, his top-end Jaguar sports car with its plush interior. All evidence of his vanity, meant to impress.

  Who would he most want to dazzle with it… and also feel he could trust to hang on to what he’d thought would be a big piece of insurance, something that might bail him out of a jam in the event one of his after-hours transactions went bad?

  Lathrop scratched Missus Frakes on the back of her neck, thinking the answer seemed much too easy.

  “Pillow talk, Missus Frakes,” he said. “Sullivan was going to whisper secrets into somebody’s ear, it would have been his old lady’s.”

  The cat bent her head to sniff the food in her dish and, satisfied it was to her liking, started on her meal with relish.

  THREE

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA / PAKISTAN / BELGIUM

  “How does this rock seem to you?” Roger Gordian said.

  “Wait a second, I’m not sure which you mean.”

  Ashley released the handles of their wheelbarrow, smacked her hands together to dust off the thick cowhide work gloves she was wearing, and stepped toward him. They were at the bottom of a shallow wash about thirty yards down from where they’d left her Land Rover below a switchback that zigzagged roughly east-west through the Santa Cruz mountains.

  “Look over there.” Gordian pointed at a scattering of sandstone near the base of the slope. “That rock.”

  “The round one with that sort of reddish stripe?”

  “No, no.” Gordian gestured. “The flattish one with those brown patches just to its right.”

  His wife stood beside him, inspected, considered.

  “It would be perfect,” she said, and nodded.

  “Thought so,” Gordian said. “I’ll start digging it up.”

  “Oh no, you won’t.”

  His expression went from pleased to perplexed.

  “You just told me—”

  “I know what I told you,” she said. “But I can see from where we’re standing that it’s set deep in the ground.”

  Gordian reached for the long-handled shovel he’d rested against a small, weathered outcrop.

  “That’s why I brought my friend here.”

  “Can your friend there dig by itself?”

  “Ash—”

  “Because I won’t let you break your back excavating a rock that probably weighs forty pounds and is going to be a ton of trouble to get out.”

  They stood looking at each other a moment in the bright, warm noonday light. Both had worn jeans, hiking boots, identical heavyweight gloves, and denim jackets to keep the stones they’d come to collect from snagging their shirts. On Gordian’s head was a blue-and-white striped railroader’s cap meant to likewise protect his scalp, his wispy gray hair offering it scant cover from sunburn these days. Ashley’s thick blond locks, meanwhile, were in some kind of elaborate feminine twist-and-tuck under a lilac fashion bandanna.

  “You can’t build a retaining wall with pea gravel and sand,” Gordian said.

  Ashley frowned.

  “Excuse me, wise guy,” she said. “Are you suggesting that’s what I’ve loaded into the wheelbarrow?”

  Gordian decided he’d better curb his testiness.

  “No,” he said.

  “Pea gravel?”

  “They’re nice, good-sized rocks, hon. I mean it.”

  “I hope so, for your sake—”

  “Although I do think we need some larger ones,” he said, scratching his head under the cap with one finger. “Especially for our end stones.”

  Ashley produced a sigh.

  “I don’t want you overdoing things, Roger,” she said. “On last count, it’s been a few years since you’ve been in your twenties.”

  Or thirties, or forties, or fifties. Gordian thought with a limp smile.

  “We could have bought dressed rocks from a stone yard and had them dropped five feet from my rose garden on a pallet,” she said. “If I’d realized you were going to be this stubborn, I might have hired a professional contractor.”

  Gordian looked at her.

  “I know a little bit about putting together a stone wall,” he said. “My father owned a construction supply business, don’t forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “You also shouldn’t forget your stated aversion to made-to-order retaining walls that look like big piles of potato chips.”

  Ashley frowned again.

  “Fried corn chips,” she said. “The comparison I made was to fried corn chips. They tend to be more uniform in shape.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  They regarded each other quietly.

  “Ash, listen,” Gordian said. “I stepped down as chief executive of UpLink so we could finally share the personal life we’ve always missed. So I’d be able to spend more time doing things with you — and for you— after decades of endless responsibility to a corporation with thousands of employees scattered across every continent on earth. But the key phrase is doing things. I’m not a dodderer quite yet. And frankly, I’ve been bending over backward to show you I’m mindful of my limitations.”

  Ashley glanced down at the lumpy soil underfoot, scuffed the toe of her boot around in a way that endowed her with an unaffected girlishness. Gordian managed to resist a smile.

  “Okay, I concede,” she said, after almost a full minute of toe-scuffing had left a swash in the dirt. “With the stipulation that we can revisit this issue the instant I see you bend over backward with a boulder in your hands.”

  “Sounds fair enough to m—”

  The oddly distant tweedle of his cell phone interrupted Gordian.

  He felt for it on his belt clip, couldn’t locate it, glanced down at himself. The phone wasn’t there.

  It rang again.

  Gordian searched the area immediately around him, didn’t see it there either, then looked toward the slope where he’d been rock-gathering in a minor panic, positive it must have fallen somewhere among the jumbled chunks of broken hillside.

  “Over here, Roger.”

  He glanced over at Ashley, surprised to see the phone in her hand.

  “Where did—?”

  “I picked it up off the ground after you dropped it half an hour ago.”

  Twee-dle!

  “You should answer before the caller thinks you’ve fallen asleep on your rocking chair,” she said with a lopsided grin.

  Gordian scowled in response to her open amusement, took the phone, flipped up the earpiece.

  “Hello?”

  “Boss, great, I was getting ready to leave a message.”

  Gordian opened his mouth, closed it. The two or three seconds it took him to place the voice at the other end of the line had nothing to do with it being unfamiliar to him. Rather, it was the unfamiliarity of the context in which he was hearing it. He supposed it had been years since he’d spoken with Lenny Reisenberg outside a business office, whether in person or long distance.

  “Lenny?” he said.

  “Yeah, Boss.” A pause. “This a bad time to talk?”

  “No, no.”

  “You sure? It should only take a couple minutes, but I don’t want to keep you from anything…”

  “No, really, right now is fine,” Gordian said.
“It’s been a while, Len. How are you?”

  “Okay,” Lenny said. “Yourself?”

  “Working hard at semiretirement.”

  Lenny chuckled. “You were always so busy running the show at HQ, it must be an adjustment having some time on your hands.”

  “That’s what I expected,” Gordian said. “But I’ve found out keeping busy isn’t the tough part.”

  “Oh?”

  Gordian leaned back against the outcrop beside his shovel and glanced over at Ashley. She was reorganizing some of the rocks she’d stacked in their wheelbarrow.

  “It’s all still about negotiation and compromise,” he said. “Just happens to be of a slightly different nature than before.”

  “You’ll have to promise to give me the lowdown on that one of these days.”

  One of these days, Gordian thought. “What can I do for you, Len?”

  There was momentary silence in the earpiece. Then Lenny exhaled.

  “A favor, I hope,” he said. “I feel awkward even asking… guess it’s pretty unusual…”

  “Business or personal?”

  “I’m not sure there’s a clear line,” Lenny said. “Or if there is, it’s sort of fuzzy in my head.”

  “Then I suppose you’d better lay everything out before that fuzziness spreads into mine.”

  Lenny released another tidal wash of air from his lungs and started to explain.

  Gordian listened closely. There was the Kiran salesman, Patrick Sullivan. The Long Island detectives who’d arrived at Lenny’s office while investigating his disappearance, followed by Sullivan’s wife appearing to solicit his help. His initial unwillingness, and her striking a resonant chord inside him that overcame it. Then his pledge to do what he could, Noriko Cousins shooting him down at Sword HQ, a Chinese herbalist named Yan offering sagacious advice, and an epiphany at a kosher deli triggered in some ambiguous way by a bite, or perhaps several bites, of a pastrami sandwich.

  Five minutes later Lenny had almost gotten through his struggle to explain what was weighing on him.

  “I wandered around half of Manhattan yesterday telling myself I had no right asking for Sword to meddle in something that’s happened to a guy who isn’t one of our employees,” he said, seemingly out of breath. “That I had to let it go. Hell, I don’t even know Sullivan well enough to get his daughter’s name straight. Thought she was in first or second grade till his wife mentions she’s away at college. But then… Boss, you remember the old TV show, This Is Your Life? Since Mary Sullivan came into my office, it feels like my brain’s been taken over by the spirit of the host… what was his name…?”

  “Ralph Edwards.”

  “Right, him, and he’s been walking my past out in front of me. And I’ve got to admit, the one memory that keeps coming out from behind the curtain… well, you know the day we met… the night, that is… it was right here in New York. Times Square…”

  “How could I forget, Len?” Gordian said. “You were, ah, quite the character. Decent salesman, too.”

  “I was a screwed-up mess with an attitude, a minimum-wage job in a record shop, and a little knowledge of jazz,” Lenny said. “ ‘You want to bop, there’s Ornithology.’ Remember?”

  A reflective smile touched Gordian’s lips.

  “ ‘I’ll do it with Dizzy if you’ll give me Anthropology,’ ” he said. “I remember, Len.”

  “Never can tell where you’ll find one of life’s little shoehorns.”

  Gordian considered that one, smiled.

  “The crossroads of the world would seem just the right place.”

  “Yeah,” Lenny said. “I suppose it would.”

  Gordian waited in silence.

  “Boss, I don’t want to sound sappy,” Lenny said after a moment. “But the reason I called… I know you trust the people at Sword to decide where and where not to stick our noses. I know Noriko Cousins had solid reasons for taking a pass in this situation, and I don’t like making an end run around her. But twenty years ago you turned me around for no good reason I could figure, and probably none I deserved. You took a chance on me. And I think what I’ve carried away from it is that there are times when you’ve got to reach out just for the sake of helping. Or when something inside a person reaches out to something that’s inside you, and you know it’s only right to help. That if you don’t, you’re dropping the ball.”

  Gordian thought in silence some more. It had been six months since he’d turned the daily responsibilities of running UpLink over to Megan Breen, which meant he probably wasn’t up to snuff on the doings of the Kiran Group or its parent company, Armbright Industries. But however unsaintly it might be, one of Sword’s regular, necessary functions was to compile and evaluate competitive intelligence on other tech firms… in blunter terms, shadow UpLink’s market rivals. Gordian was sure he did not need to remind Lenny of this, and wouldn’t have discussed it over the telephone anyway. CI was a vital, accepted part of business that every major corporation conducted, guarded against, and artfully pretended to know nothing about. The ethical and legal issues associated with it primarily arose when using information for strategic advantage crossed over to intellectual theft or sabotage, boundaries Gordian had always made sure weren’t overstepped.

  So here came Lenny wanting Noriko Cousins — and now Gordian himself — to have Sword look into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a Kiran employee. Or poke around in a missing-husband case, however you chose to frame it. Either way, the first question that request had provoked in Gordian’s head was whether it violated any of his basic tenets for CI activity. And while he’d concluded it might not be a typical recon, it still fell more or less into his definition of what went with the program. Which left Gordian to decide if Lenny’s appeal warranted an allocation of corporate resources… either because he felt it was in UpLink’s best interests, or because he was ready to yield to it out of friendship.

  Gordian remained thoughtful, watching Ash continue to shift around the stones she’d gathered inside the wheelbarrow. He wondered in a vague sort of way what was wrong with how they’d been stacked in the first place, then realized all at once that she was only fussing with them to give him a chance to talk on the phone. At about the same instant it struck him how much he wanted to get back to her. Then it occurred to him how much he also liked having to make a determination of some significance that concerned UpLink.

  He turned his mind back in the direction of Lenny’s request, focusing in on his core justification for wanting Sword involved. What exactly was the point he was making?

  That it’s the decent thing to do. Pure and simple. When you boil it right down, he hasn’t tried to convince me there’s any benefit in it for UpLink, or sell me on any other reason besides.

  Gordian thought for another minute, feeling the warm sunlight press against his face. Then he nodded to himself and pushed off the outcrop.

  “Let me get back to you in a day or two, Len,” he said. “I’ll make a few calls and start that ball of yours rolling in the meantime.”

  * * *

  Pete Nimec opened his medicine cabinet, looked inside, frowned, shut it, studied his bristled cheeks in its mirrored door, sighed, bent to open the cabinet under the bathroom sink, reached in, foraged through it a minute, frowned, shut it, stood to examine his weekend scruff of beard again, sighed, and then reopened the medicine cabinet for his fourth sure-to-be-futile inspection of its variously sized compartments.

  Nimec hated having to rush around, and never more than on Monday mornings. Especially when his rushing seemed to lead nowhere.

  The knock on his bathroom door came just as his lips started to take yet another stymied downturn.

  He tightened the belt on his robe.

  “C’mon in.”

  A moment later Christopher Caulfield stood looking at him from the doorway. A month from his twelfth birthday, all four feet and change of him combed, scrubbed, and dressed, he was eminently ready for school.

  Ni
mec noticed the kid’s bright expression, then saw the cell phone in his outstretched hand.

  “Hey,” he said, his latest frown interrupted in progress. “Where’d you dig that up?”

  Chris continued to beam.

  “You know mom’s old wooden box, or whatever it is, with the drawers?”

  “The one near the front door.”

  “Nope, her other one,” Chris said. “On that sort of table thing outside the living room.”

  “Aaah,” Nimec said. “I owe you, skipper.”

  “Like enough for a half hour up in the dojo later?”

  “Like you finish your homework soon’s you come home and we make it an hour.” Nimec gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Linda getting anywhere with my clean dress shirts?”

  “She found a white shirt that only stinks a little in the other bathroom.”

  “Won’t do.”

  “That’s what I told her.” Chris looked at him. “No razor blades yet, huh?”

  Nimec scratched the stubble under his chin with deepening self-consciousness.

  “No,” he said. “I must’ve looked everywhere.”

  Chris motioned toward the sink cabinet. “Down there, too?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Bad news.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re gonna be late, Pete.”

  “Not if we rush we won’t.” That loathsome word.

  Nimec reached for the shelf where he’d put his wristwatch before climbing into the shower… well, technically speaking, where he’d put the WristLink wearable microcomputer that did everything under the sun but find the basic necessities for getting him shaved, dressed, and out of the house in time to drive the kids to their respective schools before heading on to his office at UpLink San Jose, where Nimec presided over the company’s welfare as Chief of Global Security, a job he could hopefully carry out with greater success than his latest inexpert shot at solo parenting. This while Annie — Nimec’s bride of four months, and long-experienced mother of the poor children left in his bumbling care — was off in Houston making men and women into astronauts.