Cutting Edge

THREE

Wearing protective goggles and earmuffs, the two men stood ready, their knees bent, hands wrapped around the butts of their weapons.

Then they heard the double beeps in their electronic muffs, a cue that their timed session had started.

They sighted down the shooting range’s raceway lanes. Now, or maybe an instant from now, their targets would begin moving at changing speeds and angles in computer-generated, randomized tactical scenarios.

In Nimec’s lane, inconspicuous lights dimmed to simulate crepuscular conditions. It was dawn or twilight, and the big bad wolves were out on the prowl.

Nimec saw a metal practice figure shaped like a male head and torso swing up at a firing point in front of him, snapped the muzzle of his Beretta 92 toward it, and squeezed the trigger. The exposed target turned edgewise on its pneumatic actuator stand, avoiding the first 9-mm round. Then it began to duck down. But Nimec’s second shot tagged its flank before it could reach concealment.

He had no chance to congratulate himself. Another target had emerged from the left side of his raceway lane and charged. Nimec shifted his aim as Metal Man reversed and started to retreat, covering ten feet in about a second. One shot, two, and then the third stopped Metal Man dead in his tracks.

Fast SOB, Nimec thought. He drew a breath, sliced his gaze this way and that. Another target leaned out from against the wall — a shoulder, a head. His gun crashed, good-bye Charlie.

In the next lane of the newly overhauled indoor course, Tom Ricci stared into different lighting conditions. Diffuse, full. It could have been the artificial illumination of an office building, a warehouse. Or—

No, not there, he didn’t want to go there.

Ricci held his FN Five-Seven by its stippled grip, waited, his nose stinging from the nitrate smell of propellent powder. He’d aced a pair of badguys that had sprung into sight back at the end of the lane and expected more of them, knew there’d be more, wanted more.

Ricci kept waiting, concentrating, eyes hard for the kill. He tasted acid at the root of his tongue and liked it.

Then, about forty feet down, here was pop-up badguy number three. Dead center in the lane, cutout gun in hand, got himself some balls, this one. Okay. Okay. Ricci aimed, eager to take him.

And suddenly his mind turned the hated, unwilling loop. Could be it was the preprogrammed lighting. Or maybe that was groping for a reason. Ricci wouldn’t think about it until later. Office building, warehouse… germ factory. Right now he was back. He was there.

Northern Ontario. The Earthglow facility. Déjà vu all over and over and over again—

Together they move down the hall. Ricci in the lead, followed by Nichols, Rosander, and Simmons, three members of the Sword rapid deployment team assembled at Ricci’s unrelenting insistence. This is their first mission as a unit, and it is one hell of a nasty biscuit: They have penetrated the heavily guarded facility seeking a cure— or information that might lead to a cure — for the lab-engineered virus with which Roger Gordian has been deliberately infected. Around them are austere gray walls, doors with plain institutional signs. Ricci slows before each sign to read it, then trots forward, seeking the one they need.

The corridor bends to the right, runs straight for twenty feet, hangs another right, then goes straight again for a short hitch and angles left. The men sprint around this last elbow and see a bottleneck elevator. An arrow below its single call button points downward — a sublevel. On the wall next to the button is a glass plate, what Ricci believes to be an electronic eye, hand, or facial geometry scanner. There is a biohazard trefoil above the elevator’s shiny convex door. The sign beneath it reads:

Ricci feels a cold tack push into his heart. While no medical expert, he’s done his homework in preparation for the raid, and knows that BSL-4 is the highest level of safeguard for personnel working with dangerous pathogens. It occurs to him that this may well be the birthplace of the mutant virus that is turning Gordian’s internal organs to bloody sludge in a San Jose hospital bed. He also realizes that the killer, who Rollie Thibodeau — Ricci’s co-supervisor of field security operations — calls the Wildcat, is likely one of the authorized. Ricci detests the name Thibodeau has attached to him, thinks it sounds too much like a badge of honor. But then, he and Thibodeau are on very different pages about almost everything.

Ricci lets these thoughts have their unpleasant moment, then he looks at Rosander and Simmons.

“We have to separate,” he says. “Somebody could come up this elevator, surprise us from the rear. It’s got to be watched while I scope out the rest of the hall.”

The two men accept his orders in silence. Then a thumbs-up from Rosander, his eyes fastened on Ricci’s.

“Good luck,” he says. “Chief.”

There is pride and respect in Rosander’s voice as he addresses Ricci with that informal designation of rank. Chief. Even if there were time, Ricci knows he could never express how much it means to him. He is not the share-and-bare-it-all type. Not by a hobbled man’s mile.

He nods, claps Rosander’s shoulder, shifts his gaze to Nichols, who is young, green, and has made mistakes in training that might have gotten someone else dismissed from the team. In fact, the kid had been prepared to lay his head on the chopping block afterward. But Ricci had seen some of his own fire in Nichols’s eyes — only a cleaner, brighter, untainted flame — and convinced him to stay on.

“Ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ricci nods again.

“Come on, it’s you and me,” he says, and they hurry on along the corridor, leaving the other two men behind to guard their rear.

Though Ricci cannot know it, the next time he sees them they will be dead on the floor near the elevator, Simmons bleeding out from multiple bullet wounds to the side of his rib cage, Rosander with a crushed windpipe, and his brains oozing from a point-blank gunshot to the head meant to finish him off like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen.

And that will not be the worst of it. Unbelievably, unbearably, not the worst…

Ricci heard the flat, electronically baffled report of his gun through his earmuffs — a sound that tugged him from the sinkhole of memory with his finger still tight on the trigger. He took in the present like a drowning man starved for air as the third firing-range badguy went down, caught by a single clean shot. The Five-Seven raised level with his chest, Ricci stood waiting, ready, wanting to stay fluid as the tac sequence progressed. To keep his mind on the controllable here and now, and resist the desirous undertow of the past.

A second ticked by. Ricci breathed, exhaled. Ready. Steady. A crouched figure appeared from the right side of the course, the computerized lights dimming around it for a little added mischief and chaos. Go! Ricci swiveled his extended arms, sighted over the nub of his gun barrel, and bang. Crouching badguy was no more.

Ricci held a motionless shooter’s stance. Took another breath. Kept trying not to think but to be. Here, now. In the moment, as the movie stars liked to say. Then a fifth badguy sprang out at him, standing at full height, facing Ricci from the middle of the corridor—

No, no. The firing lane.

Ricci swore to himself. Just what moment had he been in?

He got that biting, bitter taste in his mouth again, his gun swinging into position, his finger starting its deadly squeeze… and stopping.

Another figure had sprung up out of nowhere directly in front of the badguy. A woman, her painted-on eyes wide, her painted-on mouth gaping in a silent scream, the expression a cartoon facsimile of terror. Ricci held his fire. This was goddamned unexpected. Sure, why not? Unexpected was the whole point of this exercise.

Clever fucking software.

Practice badguy, practice hostage.

Ricci hesitated. Tick-tick-tick. Decision time. Now thought had to reenter the process. And with thought came a backslide into the choking memories of Ontario, and his dash through that final passage with Nichols, deep in the hornet’s nest, desperate to find what he needed to save Gordian’s life, uncertain whether he’d even know how to recognize it, or the place where it would be stored. Ricci’s helmet gear had provided wireless audiovisual contact with Eric Oh, an epidemiologist who was coaching him from three time zones away in California, and who Ricci had been told might know if they were very lucky—

On his right, behind a thick plate-glass inset, Ricci sees a large room filled with equipment that seems to indicate he’s getting hot. Tanks, ducting, air feed, and intake pumps.

“Doc? You with me?” he says into his helmet mike.

“Yes. You’re looking at the microencapsulation lab. This can’t be far from where they’d keep the cure.”

“Right. Assuming there is one.”

Silence to that remark.

Ricci looks at the solid concrete wall ahead of him with a stitch of apprehension, hustles along at a trot. The problem is he’s running out of hallway. Three, four more office doors on either side, and that’s it. Dead end. If he doesn’t find what he needs here, it’s doubtful he can shift the hunt to another part of the facility without turning all his men into casualties. He can almost feel the weight of their lives on his shoulders.

“Ricci, wait, slow down!” Eric’s voice is loud, excited in his comlink’s earpiece. “Over on your left, that door!”

He stops, turns, scans the sign above it:

“Tom, listen—”

“You don’t have to translate,” Ricci says. “We’re going in.”

He quickly moves to the left of the door, waves Nichols to the opposite side, tries the knob. Locked. Stepping back, Ricci aims his weapon — it is a compact variable velocity rifle system subgun with adjustable lethal or nonlethal settings — at the spot below the knob, squeezes off a staccato burst, then kicks out at the door. It flings inward without resistance, the lock mechanism in fragments from his shots.

They scramble into the room, Ricci fanning his outthrust gun to the left, Nichols buttonhooking to the right of the doorway, looking sharp, his technique perfect.

The office is unoccupied, its lights off. Ricci finds the wall switch and they come on.

He is seconds from a decision that he will always wish he could unmake.

The mid-size room is windowless, partitioned into four central soundproof cubicles that enclose counters and computer workstations. The double-depth multimedia filing /storage units built into the walls are six feet high, with slide-out drawers and rotating shelves in steel housings. Quick access systems, no doors, no locks. It doesn’t surprise Ricci. The staffers allowed into this office, this entire wing of the building, would have wide clearance anyway.

He moves deeper into the room, turns to Nichols.

“You better stand outside in the hall, watch my back,” he says, forking two fingers at his own eyes. “Keep alert.”

It seems a fundamentally obvious and sensible call for Ricci. He does not know how long he will be in the room. He doesn’t even know exactly what he’s looking for. But he does know he’ll be vulnerable and distracted while he forages around in here. Watch my back, keep alert. Obvious.

Nichols looks at him with an expression that Ricci notes without quite being able to characterize it. In months to come, on the countless nights of poisoned sleep when that moment replays itself in his thoughts, he will understand it is plain and simple gratitude — for the second chance Nichols has been given, and the confidence being placed in him.

The moment passes. Then the kid gives Ricci a crisp little nod that has about it the quality of a salute, turns, and goes back through the door toward his encounter with the Killer, and the hail of bullets that will rip the life out of his body…

Ricci was jolted back to the reality of the firing range, this time by his heart’s heavy beating. He’d gotten caught somewhere between past and present again, as if they had converged around him in a kind of dizzying overlap — the dashed, rudimentary lines of the target figure’s face becoming the sharply defined features of the Killer as Ricci first saw them years ago. He had never gotten his chance at that savage monster inside Earthglow, but there had been a time long before that, when they had grappled hand to hand in yet another faraway place, fighting to an impasse at the Russian Cosmodrome. There, as in Ontario, the Killer had escaped him, vanishing into the benighted Kazakhstan mountains amid the fierce, final combat of what would be logged in Sword’s mission files as Operation: Shadow Watch.

Now Ricci stood with his hands wrapped around the butt of his gun. The Killer had started to retreat, backing slowly away down the lane, using the hostage figure as a shield, keeping her in front of his body. He was about a foot taller than Screaming Woman, easily a foot, and Ricci was convinced he could take him down nice and clean, do it without so much as ruffling her hair. One shot to the head, over and out. But there would be an undeniable risk to Screaming Woman. Say the Killer was holding her at gunpoint, the weapon’s snout pressing into her back. Say he had a knife against her throat. Ricci knew her situation was chancy even if his marksmanship was true. A slight jerk of the Killer’s hand, an automatic dying spasm, could result in Screaming Woman becoming what Ricci had called a civilian casualty when he wore a detective’s badge. On the force, protection of the innocents overrode your pursuit of the guilty. When losses occurred it was despite every intent and effort to avert them. But would a loss in this case be unintentional or incidental?

Ricci stood there with his hands around the gun, its trigger a tease to his finger. The finger moving slightly back, increasing its pressure—

“Tough choice. Good thing you don’t have to make it.”

Ricci turned his head toward the sound of Nimec’s voice. He had stepped over from his firing lane, the earmuffs off, goggles down around his neck, his Beretta already holstered at his side.

Ricci looked at him but didn’t say anything. His features were blank.

“Didn’t you hear the beeps?” Nimec said. He was tapping his unprotected ear. “We’re done.”

Ricci stared at him in silence a while longer, his Five-Seven still held out, the pupils contracted to black pinpoints in his ice blue eyes.

Then he looked back down the firing lane.

The lane had gone completely dark, its target and hostage figures fixed in position. A lighted red sign high on the back wall was blinking the words:

Ricci slowly lowered the gun and slid it into his leather.

“Yeah,” he said. “Done.”

Quiet hung over the room, as rife in the air as the smell of discharged ammunition.

“Tom, we need to talk,” Nimec said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Here’s fine.”

“It might be better to do our old usual tonight. Sit down in my pool room over a couple of Cokes.”

“Here’s fine,” Ricci repeated, his tone no more expressive than his features.

Nimec almost felt as if he’d phoned one of those automated customer service lines and gotten stuck on the starting option. He studied the rough, jutting angles of Ricci’s face and shrugged.

“There’s some general stuff I’d like to cover,” he said. “With me going to Africa, it’ll be you in charge—”

“And Thibodeau,” Ricci said. “He’ll make sure I remember to pull the store gate at night.”

Nimec inhaled, exhaled.

“Thought I rated better than that sort of comment,” he said. “You were gone a long time. I know what it took for you to leave. How much it took out of you to come back without finding our man. But we have to put it away for now. Move on.”

Ricci nodded, seeming to look straight past Nimec at some point several feet behind him.

“Sure,” he said in his null, automatic tone. “Got anything to mention besides?”

Nimec considered whether to push ahead. Though Ricci had returned from his alligator hunt three months ago, it mostly felt as if he were still elsewhere. And that sense of his continued absence just intensified when you tried stepping close to him.

Finally Nimec shook his head.

“Maybe later,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost eight P.M. “I’m driving on over to HQ. There’re lots of odds and ends that need wrapping up before my trip, and I might as well get some things done while the building’s quiet. You want to stay, work in some more practice, that’s fine with me. I won’t worry about you pulling the gate afterward.”

Ricci stood without moving and watched as Nimec turned to leave the room.

“Pete,” he said.

Nimec paused near the door, looked at him.

Ricci nodded toward his darkened shooting lane.

“I’ve got a question,” he said. “Strictly about procedure.”

“Go ahead.”

“That hostage situation before the timeout,” Ricci said. “If you’re in my place when it comes up, how would you handle it?”

Nimec thought about it a second, then shrugged again.

“Hope to God I never have to find out,” he said.

The personal ads appeared on the first Thursday of every month in newspapers throughout Europe. Although each entry was different from the preceding month’s, its content would be identical to those printed on the same date in various countries and languages. In Italy the personals ran in l’Unita. In Germany, Die Zeit. The London Times carried them in Great Britain, Liberation in France, El Mundo in Spain, and De Standaard in Belgium. Because Cyrillic script had to be avoided out of practicality, the ads were placed in English versions of Hungarian, Czech, and Russian papers — the Budapest Sun, Prague Post, and Moscow Times, respectively. Also for practical reasons, the Greek daily chosen to print them was the German-language Athener Zeitung. As in eastern European nations, the character sets unique to Greece’s alphabet would interfere with a consistent application of the simple code embedded within the messages. And a code without fixed rules amounted to no code at all.

For some time now the recipient of these secret contacts had rented a luxury suite in a restored nineteenth-century home on the Gran Vía in central Madrid. Built as a manor for relatives of the second Bourbon Restoration king, Alfonso XII, it was now occupied by an apartment hotel of four-star excellence and high discretion, appropriately named La Casa Real — The Royal House. This was the busiest part of the city, and he had once explored the idea of settling into the quieter but equally lavish Barrio de Salamanca east of downtown. Both had residences to his liking, and cost was not a factor. His sole concern about Gran Vía had been the dangerous number of eyes that might slip onto him. In the end, however, his instincts snarled at the soft faces of the pijos, or children of affluence, who dallied in the bars and cafés of the latter neighborhood, and he had decided it would be better to hide in full view at the city’s center than to hear their bleating voices and smell the mother’s-milk stink coming off their pores.

La Casa Real held a further advantage of convenience for him. It was a short walk west to the green line Metro station or east to the Iglesia de San Jose on Calle de Alcalá. Past the church on that same street was the circular Plaza de Cibelles, where its statue of the Roman fertility goddess Cybele — known as Rhea to the Greeks — sat in her stone chariot hitched to stone lions on a stone island from which her naked stone cherubs, their forever-young, never-innocent faces bloated like the faces of dying cats, poured their bowls of water into the surrounding fountain pool. There at the lower rim of the fountain he could bear right into Paseo del Prado and then cross the green toward the great old art museum, where he would admire Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death in its ground-floor Flemish gallery, only paces beyond the Puerta de Goya entrance.

These past days as September rain clouds arrived to douse the summer heat, he had been drawn to another destination at the corner of Calle del Arenal and Calle de los Boradores, in the ancient district north and west of Gran Vía — Iglesia de San Ginés, whose bell tower struck its Sunday calls to worship mere hours after the Joy Eslava discotheque in its shadow had its last call for drinks, and the Saturday-night crowds that flung heatedly across its dance floor emptied, staggering and shuffling, onto the streets. With the lens of his digital camera, he had photographed the church from every angle to capture its solid ledges and brickwork, the architectural repetitions that hinted at that deep-rooted Moorish tendency to hold fast, the forceful and domineering thrust of the tower’s spire. Back in his suite, he had used the images for detailed reference as he sketched out plans for a wooden scale model of the church.

Without any previous experience, Kuhl had scrupulously crafted three such models during his extended hibernation. The gothic Saint Jean Cathedral of Lyon was his first; if his goal was to task himself, he would move with audacity to capture a resplendent citadel of heaven, an archbishop’s throne. The next church he had built was the Basilica of Santa Croce, where the bones of Galileo, the seeker of answers accused of heresy, and Machiavelli, the seeker of power banished for conspiracy, lay entombed. His most recently completed model was the Church of Saint Thomas, in Austria. The small, severe building was a relatively undemanding bit of work for him, but he had known that in advance, having mastered his woodcraft long before the project was undertaken. And the church’s cloistered austerity had seemed a perfect expression of his circumstances as one year of withdrawal and cover made a slow passage into another.

A man who hungered for action, Siegfried Kuhl had needed to remain dormant. It was an adaptation that ran against his innermost grain, and he had often thought of surfacing to face the Sword operative whose seething cathexis of revenge had made his pursuit of Kuhl a constant threat. But Kuhl had been advanced a handsome sum to vanish from the face of the earth, with additional payments of one million dollars a year deposited to a numbered Swiss account in monthly installments. A soldier of fortune by self-definition, he was bound to honor this contract — and his sponsor’s exceptional reach of imagination, his resourcefulness, was no less an inducement than the monetary retainer. There was in him nothing of the mediocre or the common. His mannered delicacy en-framed a hot rebellion against the boot of order that Kuhl recognized and found impressive. While the payments toward their unwritten agreement continued, he would stay out of sight, and attempt to stanch the dreams of combat bleeding into his mind.

Kuhl’s work on the model churches was the wrap, the tourniquet he applied, a means of control that had come to him in an unexpected, almost startling moment of revelation back in Lyon. He did not know what precipitated it. Saint Jean Cathedral was on the Saône not far from his hotel, and Kuhl had passed it along the river walk many times before the day he paused to gaze up at its buttresses and pinnacles, its transept spire piercing the sky. All at once, Kuhl believed he had come upon an understanding of the aggressive vision it must have taken to conceive and raise so magnificent a structure… a thought followed immediately by his own visions of the torch, the bonfire, and the raised sword. What furies of the human soul must have needed such an elaborate, soaring cage? How great a will to contain them must have driven its construction? And what if its deconstruction were achieved with comparable purpose and discipline? What measure of will would that be? What consecration of the fervent thing within?

Kuhl had decided to put himself to a private test. Soon afterward, he started his model of Saint Peter in his hotel room, working at a sunlit window that overlooked the site where one of Caesar’s lieutenants had founded the city, declaring it a home to his veteran warriors. And his work in each of its phases had been ongoing ever since.

Here today, however, Kuhl had no room in his affairs for the final camera shots of San Ginés tower he felt were necessary for the accurate weathering and detailing of its twin on his scale miniature. Nor was the Breughel a present lure to him. Leaving his hotel at six A.M. under a Madrid sun that had arisen hot and contemptuous of autumn, he had instead gone toward Calle de Alcalá and the San Jose church, a structure of lesser distinction than San Ginés that interested him only because of the daily hours its diocese kept and how they in turn determined the hours of a sidewalk newspaper and magazine stand down the street from its steps.

In Madrid even churches neglected by travel brochures held valuable art and artifacts, and admittance was generally restricted to scheduled prayer services to ensure the presence of a watch against thieves who might drift in among the worshipers and sightseers. It was unusual for a church to open its doors before nine or ten o’clock in the morning, but Iglesia de San Jose was an exception, opening at seven to accommodate legions of international travelers, VIP businessmen, and morning traders at the nearby stock exchange in this most visited district of the city.

The news vender outside Iglesia de San Jose capitalized on its early hours by getting a similar jump on his sales. He received the morning papers well before any competing dealers in town and would arrive at his stand at the break of dawn to set up his display racks and have them filled for his sidewalk trade as the congregation moved on from its prayers at the church.

Kuhl presumed the vender had convinced his delivery-men to make him the first stop along their routes with ample greasing of their palms, but that was of no importance to him. The relevant point was that it enabled him to pick up his first-Thursday-of-the-month copy of El Mundo almost as it shipped from the press. The window of opportunity for which the personal ad would be useful was an hour, not one second more or less. Precisely when that hour commenced was part of the information relayed by the code, and any chance that Kuhl could miss it was eliminated by his getting hold of the paper on release.

The electronic editions of El Mundo and other papers that Kuhl read for the communiqué in his scattered lodgings across the Continent would not do. Their posting times could be irregular, and the Web sites sometimes went down. Moreover, the online sites were not uniformly comprehensive. Some of them omitted personal columns, and some offered partial or alternate listings. For Kuhl to be confident, his sources had to be dependable. Thus he relied exclusively on the print versions of the newspapers.

This morning Kuhl’s brisk pace had carried him to the stand as its owner was still slicing open the wide plastic straps of his newspaper bundles. With a few minutes to spare before the papers were separated, he had turned into the church and paused at a side altar to light a votive candle for a lover he remembered with particular fondness, and whose life he had reluctantly taken to preserve secrets of which she had known far too much, leaving her body in the beautiful rolling hills of Castilla y León in the Spanish countryside. The votive was a memorial Kuhl believed she would have appreciated.

Now he came down the porch onto the street, noticed El Mundo had been put out for sale, took a copy, dropped his pesetas into the vender’s hand, and pushed his way back through the thickening foot traffic on Calle de Alcalá to Casa Real. Waiting for a stoplight to change at the street’s busy intersection with Calle de Hortaleza, Kuhl folded it open to the classified pages and traced his eyes down columns of personal entries. Most were straightforward casts for sex or companionship that shared a certain banal, desperate vocabulary. There were the people seeking long-term partners, thrill dates, discreet adulteries. The common descriptions of age and appearance, and predictable mentions of candlelight, music, and travel.

Kuhl found the entry meant for his eyes in the third column. Adhering to the established format, it was a brief lettre d’amour, identifiable by distinctive matched, reusable pairs of sender and recipient names chosen from a list of twenty-four he had committed to memory — twelve of them male, twelve female. In fact, mnemonic triggers were the basis of the code. Information stored away in his mind provided the context for its key elements, making it absolutely foolproof. Kuhl knew the first letter of the recipient’s name always corresponded to a time at which he would, if necessary, have the ability to reach his sponsor over a secure Internet live conferencing connection. The letter “A” matched with one o’clock, “B” two o’clock, “C” three o’clock, and so forth. Whether the start time for the viable SILC was before or after noon depended on the sender’s first initial: a vowel pointed to the morning while a consonant marked it for the afternoon.

Here, Kuhl instantly noticed that the ad began with “My Darling Anya” and ended with “Your Unforgetting Lover, Michael-Sebastian.”

These routine elements of the message elicited no reaction from him besides a rapid noting of the timetable. The short window of contact would open at one o’clock Greenwich Mean Time that afternoon — the GMT standard was used, again for consistency’s sake — and shut at two o’clock after the predetermined hour passed.

It was something in the body of the message that quickened his pulse.

The text between salutation and closing said:

Kuhl stared at the newspaper, his eyes locked on a brief possessive phrase in the message’s fourth and last sentence.

Love’s ashes.

Moments passed. Kuhl kept staring at the paper, at that pair of simple words, the sounds of automobiles and pedestrians in the intersection tamped and dulled by the bloodrush in his ears.

Love’s ashes.

Together they formed a second mnemonic. Codewords he had hoped for, but never truly allowed himself to expect.

Kuhl thought of the flame he had lit in the church, that tiny surrendered spark of memory and passion. Then he closed his newspaper and resumed walking quickly toward his apartment hotel as the traffic light across the street changed from red to green.

For the next several hours he would do nothing but wait in his suite to make contact.

“This place is exquisitely nifty,” Megan said. “All we need now is for the Blob to come glooping over us.”

“The what?” Nimec said.

“The Blob,” Megan said. “As in that old fifties make-out movie. Starring Steve McQueen and a thousand tons of gelatin.”

“Oh, right,” Nimec said. He was staring out the windshield of his reconditioned ’57 Corvette roadster at an orange neon sign shimmering the words BIG EDDIE’S SNACK SHACK into the night.

Megan looked at him from the passenger seat.

“The gelatinous lump was known to be gracious and humble in real life, but tended to play very slimy characters. I suppose it was the usual Hollywood typecasting.”

“Hmm.”

“Winning an Oscar for its role must have been some consolation, though,” Megan said. “The story goes that nobody in the Academy knew whether to nominate it for best actor or actress, so they created some kind of special category. Best Performance by an Amorphous Gender-Neutral Green Thing.”

Nimec kept gazing silently at the entrance to the drive-in restaurant as a pretty, ponytailed carhop who seemed about the right age for a college sophomore came roller-skating out to the car.

He pushed in a chrome dashboard knob to douse the lights and glanced over at Megan.

“What are you having to eat?”

“I’m torn between the fried popcorn shrimp and fried clam strip baskets.”

“That time we stopped in Maine a couple years ago, you told me you didn’t like clams.”

“Whole clams,” Megan said. “Much too chewy.”

Nimec looked at her.

“Let’s get one basket of each and split them,” he said.

“Yum, yum,” Megan said. “And don’t forget our side of potato skins. And my Diet Coke. While you’re treating, dear man.”

He grunted and rolled his window halfway down. Rockabilly music burst into the ’Vette from speakers above the diner’s wraparound awning — somebody who sounded like Buddy Holly but wasn’t.

“Hi.” The carhop outside leaned toward him with a pad, a pencil, and a very cute smile. “Will the two of you be needing menus?”

Nimec told her they wouldn’t and placed their orders and watched the carhop roll off across the parking lot with the diminishing clatter that skate wheels make when spinning away over paved surfaces.

Then he became quiet again.

“About the Blob winning an Oscar,” Megan said. “A nonhuman superstar of undetermined sexual identity must have caused quite a ruckus at the time. This was 1957 or ’58 and couldn’t have been more than three or four years after the McCarthy hearings, blacklisting… did you know even Lucille Ball came under investigation, by the way? Lucy, of all people in the world. But what’s odd about how it came about was that Desi—”

“Meg, give me a break.” Nimec glanced over at her. “There’re some things we need to discuss.”

She gave him a look of mock surprise.

“No kidding,” she said. “Here I thought you only dragged me out of my apartment at ten o’clock at night to go hot-rodding around the Bay Area and chowing down fast food.”

Nimec sat there unconsciously tapping the steering wheel.

“Ricci was over at my place before,” he said. “I asked him to come for shooting practice at the range. Figured it might loosen him up, get him talking. The way it did sometimes before he left here.”

“And it didn’t work.”

Nimec shook his head no.

“A big piece of him’s still gone,” he said. “Maybe most of him. He won’t tell me what he’s thinking, or what he’s feeling. I can guess some of it. But just enough to know he isn’t right.”

“Does it worry you?”

“Some, yeah,” Nimec said. He moved his shoulders. “Could be I’d feel different if I wasn’t heading off for Gabon the day after tomorrow. Once Ricci got back, I had myself convinced the normal routine would help him. You start on an everyday grind, it can smooth the edges from the outside in.”

“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 shut 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.