Bio-Strike

TWELVE

The instant Palardy entered Roger Gordian’s office, a strange feeling came over him. Everything seemed the same yet different, like in one of those dreams that was so close to real life you awoke confused about whether its events had actually occurred. The setting of the dream might be the place you grew up, the home you lived in, the park across the street, it didn’t matter. You knew you were somewhere familiar, but things weren’t quite the way they should be. Both inside and outside yourself.

It was like that for him this morning. The same yet different.

He tried to shake that floaty, disoriented sensation as he strode across the carpet toward Gordian’s desk.

“You’ll do what you have to do, ” Quiros had insisted. And Palardy thought now that he could.

He could do it.

Because this was only a day after his regular countersurveillance sweep, Palardy was not carrying the Big Sniffer or any of its accompanying equipment, which made him a bit more conspicuous than he otherwise might be. But once Enrique Quiros had forced this thing upon him, he’d known he would want to get it done right away. That zippered case he took from Quiros, it had felt so heavy in his hand, so heavy in his pocket. Like some superdense piece of lead being drawn toward the earth’s magnetic core, pulling him down with it. Every minute he held onto it, that downward pull grew harder to resist. Palardy needed to get the thing over with before he sank into the ground.

He’d arrived at work a little before seven o’clock, the usual time for countersurveillance personnel — their sweeps were always conducted before the corporate workday began so as not to interfere with business — and then had gone straight up to Gordian’s office suite, prepared with an excuse, should anybody be around. And it had turned out someone was. Though the boss almost never came in before seven-thirty, a quarter of eight, Palardy knew his administrative assistant, Norma, would often arrive much earlier to get a jump on her filing, scheduling, whatever other duties admins performed. And sure enough, she’d been at her desk in the outer office today when Palardy stepped out of the elevator.

Damn good thing he’d had that story ready.

“Morning, Norma,” he said, amazed that he could stand there and smile while feeling like he was about to plunge through a hole in the ground. “How goes?”

She’d looked up at him from her computer screen with mild surprise.

“Hi, Don,” she said. “Don’t tell me it was your twin brother I saw here yesterday with that fancy bag of tricks?”

“Nope, sorry to report there’s just one of me to go around,” he said.

“I’m crushed on behalf of all womankind,” she said with a mock frown. “So what brings you back to us?”

“Actually, I think I must’ve misplaced one of the fancy little gizmos that go in my bag when I made the rounds.” Palardy’s words seemed to reach his ears from a far corner of the room. “Maintenance tells me it isn’t in the lost and found, so I’m retracing my steps.”

Part of his mind had expected Norma to be suspicious. To sit there with her eyes boring into him, discerning something was amiss. Though the rest of him had known that was irrational. Known the reason he’d given for his encore appearance would sound perfectly ordinary and believable.

And, of course, it did. She had waved him toward the door to the inner office.

“Be my guest,” she said.

Now Palardy stood over Gordian’s big mahogany desk, his back to the door, and hurriedly put on the white cotton gloves he’d brought in his pocket. Just to the right of the blotter was a can of rolled wafers. A month or so before, Palardy had been running behind schedule with his sweep, and the boss had come in and waited at the desk as it was completed. Swirling a wafer in the cup of coffee he’d poured for himself, Gordian had complained in a kind of lighthearted way about having to swear off flavored coffee, and the two-per-day wafer stick allowance his wife had insisted upon instead.

Palardy had clearly remembered that instance in Quiros’s car the other night. And was remembering it again as he reached for the can of wafers, pulled off its plastic lid, and set it down on the desktop. The can was more than three-quarters empty. Maybe ten wafers left inside. He got the flat leather case out of his coverall pocket, unzipped it, produced the disposable syringe, and laid it beside the can lid. He’d already drawn the solution from the ampule and tossed it. This should take him sixty seconds, ninety max.

Get it over with, he thought. Get it done.

With his right hand, he fished one of the wafers out of the can. With his left he inserted the syringe’s needle deep into the opening at one end of the rolled wafer and depressed the plunger about a millimeter. Colorless, odorless, tasteless, the contents of the ampule would in-discernibly permeate the wafer’s cream-filled center.

Removing the needle, Palardy put the wafer back in the can, and injected a second, a third, and a fourth wafer.

That would be enough. Would have to be. There was more of the suspension in the hypo, but he couldn’t bear staying in the office any longer. His stomach felt like a brick of ice.

Palardy closed the can, returned the syringe to the case, and slipped the case back into his pocket.

He was taking off his gloves when he heard the doorknob turning behind him.

His heart tripped.

“Any luck?”

Norma’s voice. From the doorway.

It was the worst moment of his life to that point. Worse, even, than his last terrible meeting with Quiros. Balanced equally between guilt and terror, he went numb everywhere, the blood seeming to flush from his veins.

Somehow Palardy managed to stand perfectly still, managed to keep his body between his hands and the doorway until he’d finished peeling the gloves from his fingers and stuffed them into a patch pocket on his thigh.

He turned toward Norma. She was leaning into the room through the open door.

“No,” he said. Realizing nervously that he hadn’t looked himself over, hadn’t made sure the gloves weren’t sticking out of his pocket. Wondering if she could see them. “Not a bit.”

The receptionist studied his face a second, shrugged.

“Sorry, my dear,” she said. “But in the meantime, don’t look so worried, I’m sure your thingamajig will turn up.”

She didn’t notice, Palardy thought. Merciful God, she didn’t notice.

He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I can manage without it, meanwhile.”

Then the phone on her desk chirruped.

“Better answer that, hope you don’t mind letting yourself out,” she said and ducked her head back into the outer office area. “I’ll remind the cleanup crews to stay on the lookout.”

Palardy took a gulp of air, smoothed his coveralls over his body with sweaty palms. The gloves weren’t showing. She hadn’t seen anything. He was going to be okay.

A moment later, he followed Norma into the anteroom, exchanging a smile and a wave as he went past her desk, got into the elevator, and rode it downstairs.

Moving on legs he could hardly feel through a world that would never again seem to be the one he’d always known.

“Hi, Ash,” Gordian said into his office phone. “Your wheels down at LAX yet?”

“On the ground, safe and sound,” she said. “I’m calling on my cellular from the arrivals terminal, so you can stop biting your nails.”

Gordian smiled. Nearly four decades of flying planes ranging from Air Force bombers to his private Learjet had made him a well nigh unbearable backseat pilot, and he became even more fretful whenever his wife or kids took to the air with someone else’s hand at the controls.

Grown kids, he reminded himself.

“Trip okay?”

“Couldn’t have been smoother,” Ashley said. “How are things at the office?”

“Not without pockets of turbulence,” he said. “I just retreated to my desk after running into one, matter of fact. You know Mark Debarre? The Marketing veep?”

“Sure. Nice guy.”

“Usually,” Gordian said. “You should’ve seen him sprout fangs at today’s sales conference. Almost sank them into one of the guys from Promotions when they got into a flap about whether to call those information download kiosks we’ve developed Infopods or Data-pods. ”

She laughed.

Even from hundreds of miles away, the sound warmed him. It was like being able to hear a sunbeam.

“Which was Mark’s preference?”

“The first.”

“And yours?”

“I’m back and forth.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “I’ll think about it over the weekend, give you my opinion, if you’d like.”

“I’d like.”

“Then consider me on it,” she said. “Meanwhile, Laurie, Anne, and yours truly are about to hold a marketing conference of our own at the luggage claim. We wish to become the most enthusiastically vulnerable, suggestible consumers we can be.”

Gordian smiled, reached into his tall can of rolled wafers, fished one out of the can, and let it steep in the cup of coffee on his desk. Ashley’s pre-Thanksgiving shopping weekend with her sisters in L.A. was a lollapalooza that had grown in size, scope, and budget each year, seemingly by conscious design.

“Did I hear you say luggage claim?” he said. “Since you’re only going to be away from home for two days, my impression was you’d be okay with carry on.”

As always, Ashley knew a setup line when it was pitched to her.

“The suitcases, my love, are for bringing home the bounty,” she said.

“Guess I’d better wait till you’re done with the charge cards before filing for Chapter Eight, then.”

“That would be considerate.” She laughed again.

A sunbeam touching the wings of a butterfly, Gordian thought. On the brightest and bluest day of summer.

“I really should get cracking,” Ashley said after a moment. “Meet you at Julia’s house Sunday afternoon, okay?”

“Why don’t I pick you up at the airport,” he said. “We could drive there together afterward.”

“Really, Gord, you don’t need to bother. It’s easier for me to arrange for a car.”

“Well…”

“Besides, some father-daughter alone time might be good for the two of you. And I know you’d like to finish that doggie corral you’re building for Jack and Jill.”

“That I would…”

“Then knock yourself out,” she said. “I certainly will.”

Gordian pulled his wafer out of his coffee, examined it idly, dunked it back into the cup.

“You win,” he said. “Have fun. And give my regards to your partners-in-buying.”

“Will do on both counts,” she said. “Love you.”

“Love you, too, Ash.”

Gordian hung up the phone, reached for his cup, sipped, and decided the wafer stick had imparted all the hazelnut flavor it was going to. The result wasn’t quite as satisfying as the high-sat-fat coffee blend he’d relinquished at Ashley’s insistence, but having the wafer to snack on with his hot beverage offered something of a consolation.

He took a bite of the end that had been soaking in the coffee, like a man playing Russian roulette without even an inkling that he holds a cocked and loaded revolver in his hand.

This, his second rolled wafer of the day, was not among those Palardy had injected.

Three hours later, Gordian would sneak a third into his daily allotment as a perk to himself after hearing more cries and lamentations from his fueding execs.

That was the bullet that got him.

“You have any thoughts about why I asked to see you here this late on a Friday afternoon?”

“Well, sir—”

“Tom’s fine for now,” Ricci said. After seven months on the job, he guessed he was past due making up his mind how he wanted to be addressed by his subordinates.

“Yes, sir,” Nichols cleared his throat nervously. “Tom.”

Ricci looked across his desk at the kid.

“And what might they be?”

The kid’s face was confused.

“Your thoughts,” Ricci said.

“Oh.” Nichols cleared his throat again. “Well, it’s late Friday afternoon…”

“Which I already established,” Ricci said.

“Yes, you did, sorry, Tom…”

Ricci wound his hand in the air.

“My assumption was that you’d waited till the end of this week to complete your evaluation of my actions during last week’s training exercise. And, uh, that you wish to discharge me from the RDT before next week gets under way.”

Ricci looked at him.

“That had occurred to me,” he said.

The room was quiet a moment. In fact, it was dead still. Late Friday afternoon, almost everybody had gone home for the weekend. Even the corridor outside was deserted.

Ricci glanced at the wire-basket penholder on the desk near his left elbow, decided it was situated too close to him, pushed it farther away, decided he liked its original position better, and returned it there.

“We know what went wrong with the office penetration,” he said. “Looking back, you want to tell me how it should’ve been executed?”

Nichols took a few seconds to think and seemed to get steadier and less antsy as he did. The kid had close-cropped blond hair and cheeks that Ricci doubted would have any fuzz on them if he were to miss shaving for a week. But there was a toughness underneath the school-boy looks, a focus. And he had the build of someone who exercised with intelligence, shooting for overall fitness and stamina rather than bulk. Ricci had observed these qualities while working briefly with him in Kazakhstan, and then again during the first-round tryout drills for his RDT.

“Our targets were confined to the room. Without any known means of exit but the door, according to our floor-plan schematics. That was to their disadvantage,” he said at last. “To their advantage, they knew we were outside, and the doorway gave them a narrow, direct, and easily covered zone of observation and fire.” He paused again. “We could have created multiple diversions before and during our entry. A breaching charge could have been placed on the wall adjacent the door. A profusion of chemical incapacitants and distractive tools were available to us. There may have been time for our outside support teams to launch gas projectiles through the outside window. Primarily, though, I should have waited for your specific orders, directions, and countdown before attempting to break through the door.”

The kid sat rigidly in his chair. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to contain his embarrassment. And somehow that made Ricci feel embarrassed for him.

“You were crackerjack until you swung that rammer,” he said. “Didn’t miss a beat when we were surprised by those guys coming down the stairs. Or when we got into that firefight in the hall. Both of’em were tough situations. What happened at the last? Adrenaline take over?”

Nichols’ smooth cheeks flushed a little.

“Not exactly, sir… Tom, sir…”

He shook his head.

“Go on,” Ricci said. “Let’s hear it.”

The kid inhaled, exhaled.

“When you ordered us to neutralize the men in the corridor, your words… what I heard you say… was that you wanted it done yesterday.” He breathed again, looked at Ricci. “At the time, I took it to mean you wanted us to directly move on to the next stage and complete the seizure of our target. In hindsight, I think… that is, I know… I was too eager to please you and make the grade.”

Ricci was quiet a moment.

“I’ve got this theory about mistakes,” he said. “That they’re always waiting for us, sort of like hidden mines or trapdoors. Every step along, we’ve got choices to make. The better ones are usually just enough to get us a little further ahead. The worse ones have this crummy way of being more final. Of doing us in. Which doesn’t make for joyous odds.”

Ricci eyed his penholder, transferred it to his right side, then his left, then more toward the middle of the desk.

“I’ve been a soldier, and I’ve been a cop,” he said, looking up at the kid. “Met guys on both jobs who got into trouble not knowing the difference between obedience and blind obedience. Maybe it ought to be emphasized more. Showing men how to see the line, I mean. It can be thin. Razor sharp. Slippery. But if that’s where you choose to live, you better be wise to the terrain.” He paused. “I’m your commander. My orders are supposed to be clear. You tell me the words I used had a part in your screwup, I’ll take it into consideration, give you a second chance. But there won’t be a third. Because we’re talking life and death. For you and your teammates. And because, on my team, just following orders won’t cut as an excuse. You’ve got to use your head. All your judgment, everything you’ve learned, your understanding of what the mission’s about. Of what we’re about. And keep the line in sight.”

Nichols sat quietly in his chair.

“Thank you,” he said after a few seconds, looking awkward. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me. And I’m sorry—”

Ricci interrupted him with a motion of his hand, looked at his wall clock.

“Go home,” he said. “It’s late on a Friday afternoon. Weekend’s calling.”

“Yes, sir,” the kid said.

Ricci looked at him. Opened his mouth, closed it. Then looked back at his penholder and resumed shifting it around his desktop.

Nichols rose from his chair and left the office.