Cutting Edge

THIRTEEN

Entering her dining room, Ashley Gordian glanced up at the wall clock above the Sword op’s head and was amazed to see that morning had turned into afternoon. What sleep she’d gotten since Julia’s disappearance had come only when she let her guard down against it, and in each instance she hadn’t kept her eyes shut for long. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, she wouldn’t let herself yield to more than that. Ashley’s reluctant sub-missions to fatigue had felt more like automatic power-downs than true periods of rest — the physical equivalent of going offline for system maintenance, she supposed — and between them she had lost all sense of time’s orderly progression. Yet afternoon it was. The hands of the clock had moved on since she’d last been in the room… even if the Sword op hadn’t since she’d last entered it.

Seated below it at a mahogany lowboy he’d been using as a workstation, his shirt sleeves rolled up, he was hunched over the laptop computer in front of him, staring at the screen. Ashley wasn’t sure of his name; his ID tag was on his jacket, and his jacket was slung over the back of his chair. There were so many of her husband’s security people around the house and its grounds giving everything of themselves, working well past their scheduled shifts, defying exhaustion in ways she couldn’t fathom. Some were men and women Ashley recognized, others were people she’d never seen until a day or so ago, but all wore the same look of implacable resolve on their faces. Her admiration and gratitude went beyond words, and she’d provided whatever assistance she could, making them as comfortable as possible, bringing them food and drinks to keep them going, little things that made her feel useful in a way she paradoxically thought almost selfish. She needed to do something, needed to participate, even though her participation hardly seemed to measure up to their efforts. The alternative was to succumb to the crushing sense of futility and helplessness that always seemed to be lurking just past the next moment.

Now she stepped over to the op, noticed the remains of a pizza crust on a paper plate at his elbow, and placed a hand on his shoulder to catch his attention.

“I brought you this slice hours ago,” she said, taking the plate. “You look like you haven’t budged since.”

He glanced blearily up at her from the screen.

“Hasn’t been that long,” he said. And paused. “Has it?”

The puzzled expression on his face made Ashley smile in spite of herself.

“Why don’t you take five,” she said. “I can set you up on—”

She broke off, a stir in the adjoining living room turning both their heads toward its entrance. Everyone in the makeshift command post was suddenly moving, exchanging hurried questions and answers, bringing cell phones out of their pockets.

Ashley felt sweat slick her palms, felt her legs tremble beneath her. Whatever news had broken and spread through the command center like a wave was critical, good or ill, and the op beside her could not hide his recognition of it.

“Mrs. Gordian.” He was suddenly on his feet beside her, motioning toward his vacated chair. “Ma’am, why don’t you wait here while I—”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m okay, really. Let’s just get in there.”

She rushed toward the living room, almost running into Megan Breen as they converged on the entry from opposite sides.

Megan was gripping a cellular in her hand, tears streaming from her eyes. It was the first time Ashley had ever seen her cry, and the realization seemed to bring her heart to a standstill.

Then she noticed the smile beneath her tears, wet with her flowing tears, and took what she would always remember as the deepest breath of her entire life.

“Ashley—”

“Meg—”

“Julia’s on the phone,” Megan said, and held it out to her. “She’s on the phone, they’ve found her… and she wants to say hello to her mother.”

The Sedco oil platform. Offshore Gabon. Roger Gordian stood behind a podium in the glare of high-mounted kliegs, grim eyes staring from faces where smiles were to have held, silence around him where festive music was meant to have been played.

In each of his pants pockets was a folded sheet of paper. On each sheet, a different speech: the one near his left hand a scripted concession to madness, the other written in stubborn, unrelenting hope of its defeat.

Gordian glanced at his watch, then back at the solemn faces lined in rows before him.

Moments to go, and bitterness sat at the back of his tongue.

He would mouth the words that needed to be spoken. For his daughter’s life, for the slimmest chance at saving her life, he would do that, do anything necessary. Whoever had taken Julia from him, whatever monstrous intent was behind the act, her kidnapper had known an essential truth:

In Gordian’s heart, the Dream had been born. But while the past and present were things of hard reality, only the future lived in a man’s dreams… and Julia was truly, beyond all doubt, the child who carried it on her shoulders.

He stepped forward, took the podium, began to slowly reach for the words in his left pocket.

And suddenly caught sight of movement beyond the faces, the eyes. Someone racing toward him the blinding lights.

An excited shout: “Boss… Gord…”

Roger Gordian stood stock-still as Nimec came closer, pushing between the rows of men and women seated before him. His heart knocking in his chest, Gordian found himself no longer thinking about words that had to be spoken, but only caring about those he wanted more than anything to hear.

“We’ve got her!” Nimec shouted. “She’s safe, she’s okay, we’ve got her!”

Gordian took a breath.

Perhaps the longest, deepest breath he’d ever taken in his life.

And then he reached into his right pocket and carried on.

The Gulf of Guinea. One thousand feet below the ocean’s surface. The crewed submersible launched from the Chimera ’s hold eeling toward an escape platform off the Cameroonian shore.

In the small aft passenger cabin, Harlan DeVane stared past Casimir and his co-pilot into the watery gloom outside the forward dome. Behind him in abandoned waters, toasts to good fortune were being made on the Sedco platform, its beacon lights radiating far into the night. Broadcast to the world, Roger Gordian’s words of success had been statement enough of DeVane’s failure. Transmitted in secret, his own unanswered communiques to Kuhl had been mere redundant verification.

The robin was free. Father and daughter would be reunited.

Father and daughter.

DeVane stared into liquid emptiness, his bloodless face without expression, despising the thoughts that filled his mind like some baneful toxin. Was there relief from them knowing what was in store for Etienne Begela… that before the night was over his brains would pour from a bullet hole in his skull not quite as neatly made as the rondelle he had been given? Or would he find greater comfort in the past?

DeVane pictured his long-ago return to the high tower of his father, its doors unlocked for that second visit by the secret video he had taken of his couplings with the widow Melissa Phillips, and his genetic proof of paternity of the child she had birthed out of wedlock… the misbegotten product of their ardent clasps in the night.

His small teeth bared themselves in what might have been a smile of recovered satisfaction. DeVane had studied his father’s life thoroughly after their first meeting at the long table of glass. There were two legitimate sons, and a daughter…

Her surname at birth had been VanderMoere. After her marriage to the multimillionaire president of an inherited commodities empire, Arthur Phillips, she had adopted her husband’s surname, retaining it after his untimely death.

DeVane learned everything he could about the widow Melissa Phillips… everything he could well before the day he stepped up to his half-sister’s brownstone in New York City and allowed her to think she had begun her seduction of him.

In fact, it had been other way around.

Oh, what flimflam that turned out to be — the father who had taken pains to hide any knowledge of his whore-son’s existence from his family rewarded with a twice-misbegotten grandchild. The payoff DeVane extorted from both father and daughter to keep their vile secret providing ample startup capital for the first of his own business endeavors. And the son DeVane had fathered…

He closed his eyes now, resting his head back in his contoured seat as the submersible sped him away through the depths.

That little bastard had been left to fend for himself in some adoption home.