Cutting Edge

TWO

From the Wall Street Journal

Online Weekend Edition:

“What’s wrong?” Pete Nimec said.

“Hmm?” Annie Caulfield said.

“I’m wondering what’s the matter.”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

Nimec was otherwise convinced.

“Come on,” he said, shaking his head. “Something is definitely the matter.”

Annie looked over at him. Nimec looked back at her. She was holding the ladle. He had the spatula.

“What makes you think that?” Annie said, a trifle distantly.

“This right here makes me think it.” Nimec raised the spatula and wobbled it in the air between them. It was a proffer of evidence, his smoking gun, courtroom exhibits A through Z rolled into one.

Still looking somewhat preoccupied, Annie regarded him without comment as a bright, warm, daisy yellow torrent of east Texas sunshine washed through the window of her kitchen, where they were at the electric range fixing breakfast, Annie with her blond hair spilling mussily over the collar of her bathrobe, Nimec already dressed in Levi’s and a T-shirt, Annie’s kids in their pajamas at the opposite end of the house, just stirring under their bedcovers, this being Sunday morning after all.

“You’d better flip that thing,” Annie said finally. She nodded toward the sizzling dollop of pancake batter she’d ladled onto the hot skillet in front of him.

“You sure?”

“Unless, of course, you have some reason for wanting to serve Chris and Linda burned pancakes—”

“Ah-hah. Got you. There it is,” he said.

“There what is?”

“More proof that you’re upset with me.” Nimec gave the implement in his hand another little shake. “I’m using a metal spatula right here. And the skillet’s your expensive nonstick. Means I’m supposed to use a Teflon-coated spatula or screw up the finish, right?”

Annie looked at the blade of the spatula with surprised recognition.

“Yes,” she said. “It does.”

“Ah-hah,” Nimec repeated, and gave her a look that meant his case was closed, open and shut.

He reached past Annie, slipped the spatula into a wall-holder jammed with cooking utensils, pulled a coated spatula from it, and immediately turned the pancake onto its unbrowned side.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “If you know you aren’t supposed to use my metal one—”

“It was a test,” he said before she could finish her question.

“A test?”

“Right,” he said. “I grabbed it to see if you’d notice, and then remind me which spatula I am supposed to use.”

“Oh,” she said.

“But you didn’t,” he said. “Notice or remind me, that is.”

“No, I didn’t…”

“And you always do,” Nimec said. “From the very first time I stayed over. Except once when we had a fight, and you got quiet like you’ve been all morning.”

Annie watched him transfer the finished pancake to a serving tray and then motion for another ladleful of batter. She dipped into the mixing bowl and poured some onto the pan.

“Okay, that’s plenty, or the middle won’t get done,” he said. “Now how about you tell me why you’re mad.”

“I’m not—”

“You are—”

Annie’s sharp look abruptly silenced him.

“That was you and not a Pete Nimec look alike in my bed when I awoke, oh, forty minutes, an hour ago, wasn’t it?” she said.

“What’s that got to do—?”

“Did the actions I initiated at the time seem angry?”

Nimec felt an embarrassed flush in his cheeks. “Well, no…”

“Because if they did, we were having a very serious miscommunication.”

“No, no. Your, uh, our, communication was fine. Great, actually—”

“So when, and why, do you believe I would have gotten offended?”

“Angry,” he clarified.

“Whatever,” she said.

Nimec looked at her a moment, then sighed.

“When you got so quiet afterward,” he said, “I wondered if it could have anything to do with my asking you to take Chris and Jonathan to see the Mariners next weekend. Which I wouldn’t have done, except that I promised to take them myself, and got Gord to swing those lower box tickets for me.”

A moment passed. Annie chin-nodded at the pancake cooking on the skillet. Nimec tossed it.

“Pete,” she said. “Why in the world would I mind going to a ball game with my own son?”

“Well, Jon’s my son…”

“Our respective sons, then,” she said, and suddenly hesitated. “Jon doesn’t have a problem with me, does he?”

“Annie, you know Jon’s wild about you.”

“I thought I knew…”

“He is. Crazy wild, in fact. Don’t ever worry about that.”

“So what exactly do you feel would be the problem?”

Nimec shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Though I figured you might not appreciate having to fly all the way to the West Coast with me gone. Or maybe just having to sit through nine innings of baseball, not really being that familiar with the game…”

“The boys are always happy to explain its ins and outs to me,” she said. “Last time I got the lecture on the cutoff man, backup cutoff man, and the superduper Zimmer-Jeter rover play for when they both miss a throw. And I’ll be sure to use lingo like ‘lights-out’ and ‘good stuff’ and yell like a maniac whenever Ichiro’s at bat.”

That produced a faint grin on Nimec’s face.

“Guess you are pretty good,” he said.

“Guess I am.” She smiled a little, too, and gestured at the range. “We’d better get the next pancake on.”

They did. Nimec watched Annie go through the simple routine of dipping the ladle into her mixing bowl, and pouring the batter into the center of the pan, and rotating the ladle to spread the batter evenly. He watched her and noticed the golden highlights in her hair from the flood of morning sun through the window, and recalled all at once how those accents had seemed a deeper burnished color when he’d held her against him in the flicker of a bedside oil lamp the night before.

“Annie…” he said softly.

“Yes?”

“Please help me understand what’s bothering you.”

She looked up at Nimec’s face, and he looked down at hers, their eyes meeting, the two of them standing there by the stove in a kitchen filled with what had become a familiar yet preciously special aroma of weekends spent together after weekdays working in different cities, different states, thousands of miles apart, Annie at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, Nimec at UpLink’s main headquarters in California, thousands of miles, so many thousands of miles between them.

“Africa,” she said after a long silence. “It’s being worried about you going to Africa. To Gabon. A stone’s throw from the Congo, where tribal armies that have spent the last quarter century massacring each other in civil wars are usually also in-fighting just as brutally.”

“Annie…”

“And it’s being selfishly, clingingly worried about how much I’ll miss you.”

Silence.

Nimec looked at her, breathed.

“Annie, I’ll only be away a few weeks. There’s nothing to be afraid of—”

“Like when you were in Antarctica last year? For only a few weeks. An entire continent where people aren’t even supposed to have guns, and Cold Corners station was attacked by a small army. Hired commandos. You and Meg could have been killed. UpLink has enemies, Pete. That’s just how it is. UpLink has serious enemies around the world and I accept it. But don’t expect me not to worry.”

Nimec said nothing for a while. Then he suddenly moved closer to Annie, dropping the spatula on the counter beside the range, taking the drippy ladle from her hand to let it sink into the mixing bowl, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her to him.

“If not for us crossing paths in Antarctica, we wouldn’t be together,” he said. “That’s the other side of it.”

“I know, Pete, but—”

He gently held a finger to her lips, silenced her.

“I try to be careful,” he said. “Always. But these days I try even harder. Before, I wouldn’t care if I was in the field a week, a month, six months. In San Jose, it wasn’t much different. The job was everything, my whole life, and the rest was filling time. All I’d come home to on a Friday night was that pool room you’re always threatening to disinfect. Now, Friday afternoons at the office, I can’t wait to get to the airport. Can’t wait to get things done and come back to you. And that’s how it’ll be in Africa. I’ll get things done, and I’ll come back.”

Annie looked at him, still silent. Bright blue eyes holding on his brown ones. Blond hair shining in the sun. Then Nimec saw her smile and felt her press more tightly against him.

“I love you, Pete,” she said, her lips brushing his chin.

“I love you, Annie,” he said, his throat thickening inside.

“I smell my panny cakes!” Chris shouted from down the hallway.

Annie smiled.

“Little guy’s up,” she said in a furry voice.

Nimec winked at her.

“I hope you mean the kid,” he said, and reluctantly pulled himself back to the stove.

“ ‘Plunge telecom giant into choppy seas,’ ” Megan Breen read aloud, her head bent over the Journal piece, an errant tress of hair slipping across her cheek. “ ‘Navigate rough waters…’ ”

“ ‘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.”

Gordian 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 brief 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.

He blew bits of shaved wood off the bag as he got back to his feet and returned to his customer.

“It is in here,” he said. “Forty years old, maybe older. There aren’t many to be found these days. It is valued by collectors—”

The man in the white suit had stared him into silence.

“I am not a collector,” he said and held out his hand. “You will vouch for its place of origin?”

“The highlands in western Kenya, near Lake Victoria.”

“I see. It is Gusii, then.”

“Yes. From a warlord, I am told.”

“By who?”

“The omobari omotwe himself,” the merchant said. “He still lives to curse those Red Cross and missionary doctors who stole his patients.”

The man in the white suit had taken the bag, opened it, removed the article inside with his thumb and forefinger, and given it a careful inspection. The shape, feel, and coloration were right; after a few minutes he’d been convinced it was authentic.

“Tell me your price,” he said, and slipped it back into the bag.

He had paid what the merchant asked without dickering and left the market for his appointment downtown.

Etienne Begela’s title was Minister of Economic Development, and his office was on the fifth floor of town hall, a building of tall colonnades and marble walls that reflected the august sensibilities of the French governors for whom it was originally built. The man in the white suit had announced himself at the main security desk and waited less than a minute before the guard who phoned upstairs motioned him toward the elevator.

Now he took the short ride up, walked through a hall in profound need of air-conditioning, and turned a bend. A young woman approached, rushing toward the car from which he had just emerged — Begela’s aide. Her gaze averted, she nodded her head in acknowledgment as she swept past him.

He returned the minor courtesy, sensing her nervousness.

Another turn of a corner and he saw Begela at his door, leaning out into the corridor.

“Mr. Fáton,” the minister said. “Bonjour, do come in—”

The man in the white suit disdained physical contact, but allowed for local custom and shook Begela’s extended hand. The Gabonese were demonstrative in their airs, offering the firm grip and steady eye as they connived.

As he entered Begela’s office, Fáton noticed a cup of steaming coffee and an open records file on the aide’s unoccupied desk. Not to his surprise, she had been hastily dismissed.

Begela showed Fáton through to his inner office, pulling its door closed behind them. Fáton had seen the room before, a typical high-ranking bureaucrat’s sanctuary, its walls fortified with certificates of education and accolade, photographs of Begela posed alongside his ministerial cohorts, a flagpole in the corner — in this instance brandishing the green, yellow, and blue national stripes.

Begela gestured toward his desk with a sweeping wave of his arm.

“Please, please have a seat,” he said, his too-loud voice another example of that nettlesome overexpressiveness. “I know why you’ve come, but let me reassure you that I did my best in Libreville.”

“Your best?” Fáton lowered himself into a chair, removed his hat, and watched the minister round the desk to sit opposite him. “It seems, Etienne, that the unwanted newcomers face no greater problem than to choose their lodgings before arrival. Are you going to tell me that is all I was to expect from you? After listening to your pledges? After what I have spent?”

The minister looked at him. His skin was chestnut brown, his face a long oval. With its flat cheeks and narrow eyes under high, arched brows, it seemed an animated version of a Congolese mask Fáton had once purchased for himself at the fetish market.

“I’ve kept my promise,” Begela said. “Nothing in life is certain, and in the capitol this is particularly true. Some members of the National Assembly have been swayed by UpLink’s—”

Fáton’s hissing expulsion of breath instantly silenced him.

“Watch your words,” he said. “That name is vile to my ears, and its mention further erodes my confidence in you. Only a fool would think this cubbyhole secure as we sit here.”

Begela opened his mouth, closed it.

“Monsieur Fáton, I share your disappointment with the results of my trip,” he said at last. “My ties to factions within the assembly have tilted the balance of important decisions affecting Port-Gentil in the past, and I was frankly convinced they would do so again in this instance. It was indicated to me that your, shall we say, financial incentives, would be the glue for a political coalition that could block the Americans from finalizing arrangements with my government. But in the end the assemblymen who signaled they would act in your—our—favor backed down. As did a fellow minister in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications… someone with whom I have a clan affiliation and whose promises are normally trustworthy. No offer was enough. The president and prime minister are adamant about welcoming those we wish to keep out. They control the ruling party, and the party holds more than half the assembly’s hundred and twenty seats. And, needless to say, the assembly controls the OPT.”

“Ah,” Fáton said. “And what am I to take from this lesson in Gabonese civics? Other than further evidence that your prating assertions of influence meant nothing. That you failed me.”

Begela shook his head in denial.

“It may be true we cannot keep the Americans out of this city at present,” he said. “Their future is anything but inevitable, however. Port-Gentil is many kilometers from Libreville. And I have recourse to ways of making their time here most unpleasant.”

Fáton traced a finger around the brim of the panama hat on his lap.

“If by that you mean your pathetic assortment of greased gendarmes, technicals, and militiamen, then you are once again exaggerating your reach,” he said.

Begela continued shaking his head, his hands on the arms of his chair. “With utmost respect, I think I know something about my own people—”

“Perhaps so, Etienne. But you know nothing of the enemy’s strength,” Fáton said. “I cannot afford another fumble… which brings me to the reason for this call.” He paused, his eyes on Begela’s. “I’ve picked up a gift. A piece of history that I hope will benefit you. Help you avoid similar misjudgments from this point onward.”

Fáton reached into an inner jacket pocket for the plastic bag he’d brought from the fetish market, removed what was inside, and leaned forward to set it down on the desk.

The minister’s high, curved eyebrows became more pronouncedly elevated. A bleached white color, the object was a smooth, not quite flat disk perhaps four inches in circumference.

“What is this?” he said, drawing back with an involuntary start.

Fáton kept his gaze on the minister.

“Come now,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to tell a man of your erudition and deep cultural roots.”

Begela shuddered a little. He was taking in quick snatches of air, as though short of breath.

“C’est un rondelle,” he said.

“There you go,” Fáton said. “My source assures me it was taken from the skull of a Gusii chieftain. I cannot offer independent verification, but that’s of trivial consequence with something of this rarity. As you can see, it is close to a perfect circle. I also think it worth appreciating the even, regular scrape marks around its edges, where the cranial hole was made. All in all, a beautiful specimen. One that would have required an expert bit of filing and scraping with the omobari’s knife.”

Begela stared at the object, his hands still gripping the arms of his chair.

“Why?” he said. “Why do you come here with such a thing—?”

“I shall not repeat myself,” Fáton said. “Surely you know that a patient would be trephined to rid him of demons believed to have lodged within his skull. Similar practices were used in medieval France when surgeons looked to remove pierres de tête—stones of madness — from the brains of idiots and the delusionally insane.” A thin smile touched his mouth. “I don’t know if any were ever found, Etienne. But your people are enamored of French tradition, yes?”

The minister sat in silence. Beads of sweat had gathered in the depression above his upper lip.

“Take it,” Fáton said. “Carry it as a talisman around your neck, or in a pocket over your heart. How you wear it is not my concern… just so long as it stays on your person.” He continued to smile faintly. “May it guard your head against poisonous thoughts, and serve as a reminder of what can happen to a man who succumbs to them.”

Begela looked at him. Then he slowly lifted a hand off his chair, reached toward the desk, and closed his fingers around the rondelle.

“What should I do next?” he said in a dry rasp. “About the Americans…”

“You needn’t do anything for the moment — but I appreciate the fact that you’ve asked. It already signifies a new mental clarity.” Fáton rose and put on his hat. “Between us, I’ve planned an intense study of the enemy that should determine our tactics against him in coming days. Find what he treasures most, and you’ve identified his greatest vulnerability. Take it from him, and you hold the key to his defeat and destruction. It is a simple doctrine that can prove complicated in execution… but a game without challenge is hardly worth playing, don’t you agree?”

The minister had lowered his eyes onto the back of his own clenched, trembling hand.

“Quite so,” he said.

Fáton stood before the minister’s desk, his smile growing until it showed a row of small, even teeth.

“I’m glad we agree,” he said in an indulgent tone. “It seems to me we’ve made progress here today. And progress, Etienne, is always a delightful lift.”

The adoption center was at the end of a long dirt and gravel drive that led off the coiling two-lane blacktop between Pescadero Creek County Park and Portola State Park, a short fork in the road to the southwest. Julia Gordian considered herself fairly adept at following directions, but because the sign marking the drive was obscured by a thick outgrowth of oak and fir, she had missed it at first and had driven twenty minutes past her destination to the Pescadero Creek Park entrance. There a helpful ranger at the admissions gate had steered her back around, advising her to stay on the lookout for a PG&E roadside utility station about an eighth of a mile before the unpaved turnoff.

The utility station was nothing more than a green metal shed with a concrete apron that almost blended into the woods to the right, and Julia spotted it only at the last instant. But soon afterward she’d seen the sign with the wood-burned depiction of a greyhound on a rustic post amid the trees. She had swung her brand new Honda Passport onto the mostly uphill drive, muttering a stream of obscenities at the pebbles spitting up from under the vehicle’s tires to pop and rattle against its windows, and sparing some choice words for the jutting branches on either side as they raked across its shiny silver finish.

Julia drove slowly along. She had just strung together a phrase pairing synonyms for the excretory functions of various farm animals and a particularly objectionable sex act between human family members, when two buildings came into sight ahead of her — a small frame house with a neat lawn to her left and a flat-roofed prefabricated aluminum structure some yards beyond it. There were five greyhounds cavorting in a large pen behind the house. Two of them were fawn colored, two were roans, and the odd dog out was a tawny brindle. It hardly surprised Julia that none of the greyhounds were gray.

She rolled the Passport into a dusty, weed-smattered parking area by the prefab, cut the engine, grabbed her handbag off the passenger seat, strapped it over her shoulder, and got out. The plain metal sign above the building’s open door read:

As she started toward the building, a man in blue jeans, a plaid work shirt, and a baseball cap with a well broken-in bill appeared in its entrance, and then came down the two wide front doorsteps to greet her.

“Julia Gordian?” he said.

She nodded. “And you must be—”

“Rob Howell, pleasure to meet you,” he said, smiling an instantly likeable smile. A lank six footer with a dark scruff of beard, he held a cell phone in his right hand, offered her the other. A pair of heavy rubber gloves was stuffed into his back pocket. “Today’s my day to clean the exercise area out back. Cynthia… that’s my wife… saw you drive up and called to let me know. I’ll introduce you later, when she’s through feeding our six-month-old.”

Julia nodded again and stood quietly in the warm sunlight.

“So,” Howell said after a moment. “How was your trip here?”

“Oh, great,” Julia said. “Very relaxing, in fact.”

“Any trouble spotting that sign down the hill? Guess it’s kind of hard to notice sometimes. With all the branches I’m always forgetting to trim—”

“No, no, I saw it just fine.” She nodded over toward the house. “Those are beautiful dogs back there… are they up for placement?”

“Actually, they’re our personal brood. Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, and Joey. Don’t ask how we got stuck with them—”

“What about Chandler?” Julia said. “I assume they’re named after characters from that TV show Friends… ”

“Right, that’s it.”

“And Chandler being the sixth, well, friend…”

“Cynthia and I try to leave an open slot. Just in case another dog turns out to be irresistible,” Howell said with another smile. “You have, what, two ex-racers of your own?”

“Jack and Jill,” Julia said. “Which means a third pooch would have to be named Hill or Pail of Water. If I use your general naming formula.”

“There’s a lesson in that for prospective adopters, I suppose,” he said. “Stick to nursery rhymes with lots of characters—”

“And sitcoms with large ensemble casts.”

Both were grinning now.

“Follow me,” Howell said and nodded toward the center. “We should talk about the job.”

The area just inside the building’s doorway turned out to be a combination waiting area and supply-and-gift shop. There were folding chairs to one side of the room that Julia guessed were for visitors, a counter and cash register, and walls lined with all manner of greyhound-related merchandise: books on the breed’s history and care; porcelain statues and life-size posters of greys; ashtrays, coffee mugs, pens, beach towels, cooking aprons, sweatshirts, T-shirts, jackets, and even socks featuring their likenesses. There were also leashes, collars, and coats as well as plenty of general dog health and grooming items.

Howell had noticed Julia looking around the place.

“Every cent we make here at our In the Money store… that’s a little play on words, since racing greyhounds get retired, really discarded, by their kennel owners and trainers after they’ve finished out of the money once too often… goes toward the upkeep of our facility and maintenance and veterinary expenses for the dogs,” he said. “We do lots of mail order and are just getting into online sales.”

Julia faced him, impressed. “That’s quite an operation,” she said.

Howell stood at one end of the counter, an elbow resting on its edge.

“Right now, it’s tough,” he said. “Cyn’s got the baby on her hands, and I’m a night auditor over at a hotel out near San Gregario Beach. But we try our best to juggle everything.”

“There are no other volunteers?”

Howell shook his head.

“We used to have a couple of regulars, super folks,” he said. “A college student who came in two, three afternoons a week. And a woman who’d help us out Saturdays. But the kid transferred to an out-of-state school, and the woman’s a single mom who’s had to take on a paying weekend job to make ends meet.” Howell shrugged. “When she couldn’t cut the schedule anymore, I decided to put up fliers in pet stores.”

“Like the one I saw,” Julia said. “How’s the response been?”

He wobbled a hand in the air.

“I’d categorize it as lukewarm. There’ve been a few candidates, besides you. They were all well intentioned, bless ’em. But being a dog lover or even somebody who’s put in hours at an ordinary animal shelter, isn’t necessarily enough of a qualification. People who haven’t had experience with greys don’t expect the kind of work that’s involved after we rescue them from the track. The dogs are sick, malnourished, and covered with open sores from being cooped up in wooden boxes whenever they’re not racing. They’ve spent their lives in what amounts to a state of sensory deprivation, and it’s easy to lose patience with a seventy- or eighty-pound, five-year-old adult that’s basically a puppy in terms of behavioral development. They aren’t housebroken. They need to be taught how to walk up and down stairs. They’ve never seen windows before and think they can jump right through glass. They’re traumatized, afraid of everything. And with good reason. Maybe sixty percent of them have caught regular beatings from their handlers. I’ve got to figure, though it’s not as if anybody’s going to fess up to it. The dogs come in with gashes, bruises, torn ears, even broken teeth and ribs.”

Julia nodded.

“Jill couldn’t do stairs for six months,” she said. “And Jack must’ve been very badly abused. He’d wake up from a dead sleep and spring onto all fours, screaming, his eyes bulging. The sound of those screams, God, it was so horrible. So human. The first time, I was sure he was in excruciating pain, having some kind of physical seizure. I think it was the middle of the night. My husband… well, my ex… phoned the veterinary clinic’s emergency number, but before we could reach anybody, Jack settled down. From then on, I’d try to soothe him whenever it happened, talk to him the way you’d talk to a person who’s had an awful nightmare. That worked okay after a while. But he still has occasional episodes.”

Howell gave her an assaying look from where he stood against the counter.

“Guess I don’t need to worry about your experience,” he said.

She smiled. “Guess not.”

Howell was silent a moment.

“You want to know the hardest thing about running this show?” he said at length. “For me and Cyn, anyway?”

She nodded again.

“It’s letting go of the dogs once we’ve gotten them healthy,” he said. “We find that handling more than fifteen or twenty stretches us thin, though we’ve boarded as many as thirty at a time. Every grey we save arrives with a whole set of problems and needs lots of attention. Some are here months, even years, before we find a suitable home, and they can grow on you. One-on-one. But you have to be able to keep a certain distance, almost a doctor-patient relationship, and that takes a strong kind of person. You invest too much of yourself in a particular animal, you’re going to have your heart broken more than a little when it’s placed.”

Julia looked at him.

“Or wind up living with the whole cast of Friends,” she said, thinking she’d managed to survive her disastrous seven-year investment in a marriage that had been liquidated when Craig decided to take a sudden hike on her — talk about having to let go and learn to cope with heartbreak.

The room was quiet. Howell leaned against the counter, a thoughtful expression on his face. Julia heard the distinctive throaty woofing of a grey somewhere out back of the building, followed by that of a second dog. Then the overlapping, explosive barks of what sounded like at least three or four more of them.

“Rolling thunder,” Howell said. “They’ve been stuck in their kennels all day, and are letting me know they want to be let out to do their business.” He pushed himself off the counter. “You have time to help with that right now?”

Julia smiled.

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever dirty job you ask of me.”

Howell motioned toward the door.

“C’mon,” he said. “We’ll work out your schedule while we walk.”