Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 8

  “And you haven’t seen any change?”

  “Not for the better.” Nimec said.

  Megan mulled that over.

  “I haven’t missed getting nicked by those edges you mentioned,” she said. “But I also haven’t been back in SanJo very long, and it’s an understatement to say I’m not close to him. I don’t believe he likes me too much. Sometimes I doubt he even respects me.” She paused. “I suppose that’s my way of making excuses for leaving you stuck with a problem that really needed attention from both of us.”

  Nimec looked out over the sportster’s hood scoop and through the restaurant window and watched its short order cooks working over their deep fryers and grills. Big Eddie’s was a family business that had first opened its doors when Eisenhower was president and stayed under the same family’s continuous management for going on half a century. It still held annual sock hops and for all Nimec knew Big Eddie, if he’d ever existed, continued to run the show. Though more likely it would be Big Eddie Jr. or Big Eddie III.

  “Don’t sweat it,” he told Megan. “You’ve had to make your own adjustments. I can see the boss handing over more responsibilities to you. See him easing himself out of things little by little. He’s still Gord. He’s looking healthier. But he isn’t what he was before the bio strike. And he won’t be again, will he?”

  Megan looked at him.

  “No,” she said. “He won’t.”

  Nimec sat facing the windshield for several moments, then turned partially toward her.

  “So you see where I am tonight,” he said. “Thinking about changes. The ones that are happening, and the ones that aren’t. And none of it’s in my control.”

  Megan nodded. The carhop rolled up with a tray of food in disposable containers and hooked it over the half open window. She reached into her apron pocket to fill her hand with tubs of cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, and ketchup, set them on the tray with the meals, and then asked Nimec if he cared for anything else besides the check. He told her he didn’t, noticed her sweet, easy smile again, and added a generous tip to his payment.

  Megan held a hand out over the stick shift.

  “Okay, pass me the greasy delights,” she said.

  They leaned back in their bucket seats and ate quietly.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Megan said after a while. “When you wanted to bring Tom Ricci into a command position with Sword, I was convinced he’d never work out, and went along with the move assuming you’d eventually see how wrong it was. Yet now I feel I’m having to defend the rightness of your choice to you. Tom came through tremendously in Kazakhstan, and then again in Ontario. He lays everything on the line, and it’s probably true that sometimes not all of him comes back from it. But if that costs us, imagine what it has to cost him. How hard it must be to live up to what he demands of himself.”

  Nimec considered that a second. He dipped a shrimp into some tartar sauce with his fingers and put it in his mouth.

  “You’ll need to keep an eye on Ricci while I’m gone,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a lot of anger and frustration between him and Rollie Thibodeau, and I can see a blowup in the making. It’s pretty clear from all the little things. Like how they say each other’s names. And the way they act whenever they’re together in the same room. You’re going to have to watch out for that, too.”

  “Yes.”

  They ate some more of their food. Outside, the Buddy Holly simulacrum had done a gradual fadeout and Elvis Presley, the genuine article, was singing about how he couldn’t help falling in love with someone.

  Nimec looked at Megan.

  “I’ve also got a personal favor to ask, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “It involves Annie.”

  Megan waited.

  “Before she came along, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to worry about anything or anyone besides UpLink,” Nimec said. “I’ve had to rethink that, though. Take a new look at my responsibilities. What they are, and what they should be. I figure Africa’s probably going to be business as usual. But you know how it is.”

  Megan nodded again.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do. You can’t afford to let things slide.”

  Nimec paused, transferred his food container from his lap to the top of the dash, and moved forward a little in his seat.

  “Jon’s got his mother to take care of him, and I know he’ll always be okay,” he said after a bit. “With Annie it’s different. She’s tough. Good at handling things, been relying on herself a long time. But I don’t want her to have to do that anymore. Don’t want to be thinking there’s a chance she’s ever going to be alone.”

  Megan gave him a third nod.

  “Annie’s my friend, Pete,” she said. “More, she’s one of ours now. Package deal. You know what comes with that.”

  He looked at her, then grunted.

  “She’ll be in town a couple of weeks from now, staying at my condo with the kids. Hers and mine. We were supposed to see a ball game… and if you have time—”

  “At your service,” Megan said. “I’ll invite them over for dinner and ask if they want to stay overnight. Annie’s been scoffing at my claim to virtuosity in the kitchen, so it’ll give me a chance to show her up and feed the brood all at once.”

  “Uh-oh,” Nimec said. “Double jeopardy.”

  “Is this what you consider being grateful?”

  “No,” he said. “Realistic.”

  Megan stretched her lips into an exaggerated frown, reached for his food container, and set it back onto his lap.

  “Eat a clam, buster,” she said.

  * * *

  Madrid. One o’clock in the afternoon. His model church on a table near the apartment window, Kuhl’s curtains were drawn, a pale light filtering through their sheer white fabric to throw a shadow of the church, still towerless, onto a wall and corner of the ceiling. Under a fluorescent swing-arm magnifier clamped to the table, the tower subassembly awaited his last touches of detail.

  Across the room, Kuhl sat at a notebook computer joined to a cable Internet connection, his eyes fastened to its screen as he clicked onto a private conferencing site and typed in his security key. Headset on, he waited a moment and was forwarded to the next level of channel-specific authentication.

  The prompt for his first spoken pass phrase appeared.

  “On Maple White Island,” he said into his headset’s microphone.

  Another moment passed. Kuhl sat in the cropped shadow of his church. His computer’s client software converted his analog voice signals into a binary stream that was encrypted and transmitted to the server.

  He was prompted for his second pass phrase.

  “Deep in the Brazilian jungle,” he said.

  Kuhl waited. The prompt for his third and last pass phrase flashed onto the computer screen.

  “Professor Summerlee found the Lost World,” he said.

  Kuhl waited again. The three-step process ensured exceptionally accurate client verification, allowing the server’s voice biometric program engines to conduct a comparative analysis in much the same way that a fingerprint would be scanned for its unique characteristics — his words broken into phonemes and triphones, basic units of human speech that were analyzed for their dominant tonal formants and matched against a digitally stored speech sample in the database.

  Kuhl’s identity confirmed, his computer showed the ENTRY ALLOWED notification. A brief animated icon flashed onto it: the Chimera of Greco-Roman legend standing in profile, its lion’s head twisting toward him, its jaws splitting open to breathe a great billow of fire that went curling and churning across the display until it became a coruscant sheet of orange. The orange quickly dispersed in brilliant slips and shreds and left only the monstrous head of the lion — now static except for a pair of sparkling ember-red eyes — facing Kuhl onscreen.

  Then an electronically altered voice in his earpiece, its frequencies bent and
phased to a low pitch:

  “Siegfried, at long last,” Harlan DeVane said. “How splendid it is to hear from you.”

  * * *

  In the study adjoining his yacht’s master stateroom, DeVane sat very still as the wall-mounted plasma display went dark. Then he slid off his headset, lifted his wireless computer keyboard from his lap, and put it on the richly inlaid walnut table beside him.

  A chill smile trickled across his face. The user icon Kuhl had chosen for himself was a nice bit of drollery that suited his temperament as well as DeVane’s animation did his own personality… or at least a part of it. The chimera was an amusing outlet, but Kuhl had no similar touch of flash, no taste for the razzmatazz. A barbarian warrior who stood out of his time, he could have been a Viking, a Saxon, a Mongol Khan.

  DeVane reclined in his chair, his elbows propped on its armrests, fingers woven into a cradle under his chin. If Kuhl was surprised by his activation notice moments earlier, it had not showed. But the actual mission assignment — that had given him quite a shot of juice. Not even the digital processing that stripped all mood and emotion from the human voice had concealed Kuhl’s eager satisfaction over his instructions. The words DeVane used were deliberate echoes of comments he had made to the good economic minister Etienne Begela in his governmental office — why bother to fiddle with something that worked?

  “Find what Roger Gordian most loves, and we will know his greatest weakness,” DeVane had said. “Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.”

  “I will be moving on from here right away, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “To America.”

  “That’s correct, Siegfried. America. Where Gordian’s heart is. And where opportunity is a wild running horse to be roped and ridden.”

  Kuhl had asked only a few practical questions after that.

  Though far away, DeVane had felt his arousal.

  Slowly now, he let his eyes glide over the row of four African masks aligned on the wall above the plasma screen. There was a reptilian gold fetish mask that Ebrie chieftains had carried to laud the killing of their tribal enemies, a blockish, primitive Dogon hunter’s helmet worn for protection against the spirits of slaughtered prey, an Ashante ghost mask with curling horns and sharply filed teeth, and the Fang Ngi secret society mask of which Begela’s face had somehow reminded DeVane — or more accurately, Mr. Fáton — at their recent appointment in Port-Gentil.

  Gerard Fáton. Jack Nemaine. Henry Skoll. The Facilitator. El Tío. All of them were masks of DeVane’s creation, available to him when necessary. Even his Harlan DeVane identity was a guise of sorts. Form-fitted, true. Designed and developed around basic elements of his personality. Yet no less a careful invention than the others, a role he had learned to play fully and well…

  A vivid memory bobbed up into DeVane’s thoughts and he closed his eyes as if to stave it off, his fingers unmeshing, pressing lightly against his temples. He sat a while in quiet struggle with himself. It was useless, though. Impossible. The recollection pulsed with a kind of independent, insuppressible life.

  DeVane knew he could only let it unfold and hope it did so quickly. He lowered his hands from the sides of his head, rose from his chair, strode across the carpeted floor, and drew the curtain back from a brass opening porthole.

  Sunlight washed over him. He lifted the porthole and stared outside without seeing anything. Fresh sea air breezed through into the study, but DeVane’s nostrils registered heavy urban smog as the images and sensations came on.

  First, the building.

  It always started with the building.

  As he’d approached from the street, it had seemed to rise infinitely above him.

  Nervous, he had walked through the entrance to a security desk and told his name to a uniformed guard who consulted a visitor list, cleared him for entry, and then pointed him toward the elevators.

  His stomach had lurched as the car sped him up to a corporate suite filled with employees. They were darting busily between doorways, though he’d sensed their quick, concealed glances. It was as if they were the inhabitants of a lush, sheltering forest, unsure what to make of the stray and anxious creature that had wandered in from some outer barrens.

  He had stood before the receptionist, again given his name, and she had risen from her chair and shown him to the office of the man he had learned was his father.

  The glass boardroom table was long, dominating the room. There was a smaller table in a corner, a vase with fresh flowers, a coffee urn, some comfortable looking chairs. Shelves of books, many of them leather bound, on a wall near the chairs. He had guessed this to be some sort of informal greeting area, used for pleasant talk.

  It was unoccupied as he entered, and there was no smell of brewed coffee in the room.

  After several minutes the father had entered and stood regarding him from the head of the long glass table. He, the son, waited beside a window looking down on the great city skyline’s tallest office towers. None of them were close to reaching its height.

  Instructed to sit at the foot of the long glass table, the son watched the father he had never met before that moment, the stranger with a face so much like his own, settle into a chair at its opposite end. He was a tall man, his posture very rigid. They had seemed separated by many miles. The father wearing a perfectly tailored suit of some fine, light fabric. The son hoping the sleeve of his sport jacket would not ride up to show the frayed threads on his right shirt cuff. He had saved to buy the jacket for their meeting. The old shirt was his best. There had been no money for another after he bought the jacket.

  The father observed the son across his long glass table and asked why he had come to him. His voice was calm and without inflection. His exquisite suit was like soft but impermeable armor. He truly seemed miles and miles away.

  Seated by the window, the son answered him and wondered if his voice would fail, fall as short of reaching the father’s chair as the tops of the skyscrapers below. Still, his request seemed a fair, even modest one. The son knew of a deep and broad accumulation of family wealth, but did not then appreciate its meaning, and would have mistaken its neglected leavings for the brightest and rarest of jewels. The son knew of respected legitimate children, but he did not then consider himself their equal, let alone their better by vast degrees.

  The thrust of what he wanted was recognition.

  The father looked at him without any whatsoever.

  “Listen to me this once, because once is all you get,” he had said. “You have no place here, no help, nothing to gain. Your mother is a piece of loose candy in a common bowl. Any man can reach into it for her, and I may have had a taste. If the bowl was passed to me or put in easy reach, why not? I can’t be sure. Hard candy, it’s a cheap temptation. Sweet but uninteresting. Meant to be indulged and forgotten.”

  The father had stood, then. His gaze flat and noncommittal, no room in it even for contempt.

  The son had hated his eyes for their resemblance to his own.

  “I’ll give you some advice, off the record,” the father said. “Go about your life, make what you can of it. But know your boundaries. Don’t look past the rim of the bowl. Don’t expect to share my name. And don’t ever dare to return here. I said this was your one and only chance, and I meant it. If you try to see me again, contact me in any way, you’ll be pissing in a very goddamned strong wind.”

  The father had allowed a few seconds to pass, as if to make certain his warning had been absorbed. Then he waved his hand toward the door in a gesture of dismissal, held it out until the son had risen from his chair and turned his back.

  Now, as the memory finished running its cold, cold course through his mind, DeVane lingered by the Chimera ’s open porthole for several moments, as he had lingered before departing the table of his father those many years gone by.

  He realized his pallid hand was spread open in front of him, looked down at it with constricted anger, and lowered it to his side. Then he s
hut and latched the porthole, and pulled the curtains across them with a sharp jerk of his wrist, expelling both breeze and sunlight from the room.

  Traces of his memory stayed in the air with him somewhat longer.

  DeVane had listened carefully to his father’s words, let them sink in and work their changes. He had remembered them, as advised, and in that sense proved himself an obedient son.

  But he had bided his time — and returned.

  And when he did, the wind, that goddamned strong wind, had been blowing relentlessly in his favor, feeding his sails all the way.

  FOUR

  GABON, AFRICA CALIFORNIA

  As he lugged his feet toward the Rio De Gabao Hotel’s atrium and wearily braced for the dinner reception organized by his cultivated Gabonese hosts, Pete Nimec pressed a multifunction button on his wristwatch twice to check its Annie-Meter, which was not what the integrated feature was actually supposed to be called. What the feature was supposed to be called, going by the user’s manual he’d barely skimmed, was either “To-Do List” or “Reminder Calendar” or “Countdown Alarm”… or maybe something else kind of similar he’d given up trying to remember.

  There were, Nimec thought, too many brand names and trademarks and jargonese catch words for all the countless gadgets floating around these days. Or possibly it just seemed there were too many when you cruised into your forties, and were old enough to remember a time when the pocket transistor radio was considered a modern marvel, and the black-and-white portable television became an affordable household fixture that would eventually render the behemoth family console obsolete.

  Still, the name game seemed complicated to Nimec. Even his digital watch wasn’t a watch, or exclusively a watch if you wanted to be nitpicky. It was, rather, a WristLink wearable minicomputer with a high-res color liquid crystal display panel and infrared data-transfer port, designed and marketed by no lesser outfit than his own employer, and sporting everything from an integrated 5× zoom digital camera with sufficient built-in memory to store a hundred fifty snapshot images, to a personal global positioning system locator, to satellite e-messaging software, an electronic memo pad, address book, onboard video games, and — proving it could still could be used as a timepiece by Cro-Magnon throwbacks such as himself — programmable displays for every time zone in the world and a receiver module that synched it to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s atomic clock out in Boulder or Denver — Nimec forgot which Colorado city — rendering it accurate to the split second by an official federal government agency. Besides touting these many bells and whistles, the watch, or wearable, was certified waterproof to a hundred-foot depth and furthermore had come to Nimec free of charge, being one of his occasional deluxe perks as Roger Gordian’s security chief.