Cutting Edge

SIX

It was eighteenth-century Franciscan padres at the San Carlos Barromeo Mission, outside what would become the city of Carmel, that gave the vast, cragged stretch of the central California coastline its original name: El País Grande del Sur, or the Big Country to the South. As U.S. western expansion brought the wagon wheels of American settlers rolling into this territory, its Hispanic friars, their numbers and influence already on the wane, must have been chagrined to hear the place name anglicized, abbreviated, and vulgarized to Big Sur. But then, it may be surmised that waves of gold-rushing Forty-Niners, and the subsequent annexation of California by the Colossus of the North, would have soon made any consternation over such a thing seem trifling to the manifestly destined extreme.

The rental cabin Kuhl’s sleeper agents had acquired for him in Big Sur perched on the edge of a precipitous gorge three thousand feet above sea level, its western windows offering a wide view of the Pacific Ocean beyond the canyon, its isolation guarded by a thirty-foot-tall iron entry gate a full mile down the ridge’s eastward slope. Built in 1940 as a secret getaway by one of the state’s early millionaire lumber barons — and currently assigned by family heirs to the management of a real-estate company specializing in wilderness properties — the furnished cabin was a large two-story structure of stone and Douglas fir logs with open interior spaces, a central spiral staircase, French doors, and upper and lower balconies that extended past the sheer western cliff to overhang the long, empty plunge of the canyon. Access from the limestone gateposts was confined to an unmarked strip of winding dirt road circumscribed by thirty private acres of oak and redwood forest, vertical shale outcrops, rolling fields, and scattered swift-moving streams that ceaselessly chattered, splashed, and tumbled down deep, steep cuts in the wooded mountain slopes.

Behind a high west window on the second floor, Kuhl sat in a supple leather chair watching the commercial van’s arrival through his binoculars. It pushed uphill between the trees at an engine-grinding crawl, its wheels occasionally sinking into loose, crumbly ditches in the access road. The road’s narrowness would not have allowed even two small vehicles to pass in opposite directions, and it had recently become rutted and washed out after a spate of heavy late summer rainfall. The Realtor’s offer to fill and regrade its surface had been declined by Kuhl’s representatives. Their employer sought a period of complete escape from distraction, they emphasized. The noisy repair work would have impinged on the first week of his stay at the very minimum, and he was adamant about requiring uninterrupted solitude.

A ten-thousand-dollar deposit left on his lease had ensured that complete deference was given to his wishes.

Now the van came jolting and bumping over the final few yards of the path. Kuhl wondered whether its rough trip up had agitated the occupants he assumed were riding in its cargo section. This was no bit of idle musing. He must have absolute confidence in their reliability. If they showed any sign of unrest he would notice it, apologize for the driver’s trouble, and send him back on his way.

After several moments, Kuhl lowered his binoculars to the windowsill. The van had reached the cabin and pulled to a stop on the unmanicured grass beside his own Ford Explorer. The words ANAGKAZO BREEDING AND TRAINING painted on its flank were easily legible to his naked eye.

As the driver got out, Kuhl rose and turned to the man who had been standing behind him near the window.

“Stay out of sight, Ciras,” he said. “I’m going down.”

Ciras nodded. He was slender, almost delicate looking, with shiny black mongoose eyes, dark curling hair, and olive skin. There was about him a keyed, alert stillness that was all contained energy. He rarely seemed to move unless necessary. When he did, it was in darting bursts. On a crowded Munich street once, Kuhl saw him turn on a Verfasungsschutz intelligence agent who had been trailing them, and slice open his belly with a sweep of the knife so quick its blade was never glimpsed in his hand.

At the foot of the spiral stairs now, Kuhl heard the bell chime and crossed the main room to open the door.

“Mr. Estes, hello,” his visitor said. Tall, bearded, and stocky, he wore a short-sleeved chambray shirt, denim trousers, and western boots. Under his arm was a black portfolio briefcase. “Sorry if I ran a little late, almost got stuck a couple times…”

“The drive can be tedious. I saw your difficulty coming up.” Kuhl let him enter. “You must be Mr. Anagkazo.”

The man stood inside the entrance and held out a hand.

“John’s fine,” he said. “A lot of people maul the second name, and I’ve had more than a few of them tell me I should change it to something easier to remember. For business’s sake. But the line I always come back with is that we’ve had it in the family a while.”

Kuhl slipped a smile onto his face.

“It is Greek, yes?”

“You got it. My great-grandparents came over from Corinth.”

“A magnificent city.”

“So I hear,” Anagkazo replied. “I’m kind of embarrassed to say I’ve never made the trip. All kinds of relatives there I’d love to meet, but it’s always one thing or another keeps me tied down.” He glanced into the living room. “You’re a professional photographer, right? Bet you get around some.”

Kuhl looked at him. He had deliberately placed his camera on a mission bench against the wall — not the digital, but a 35-mm Nikon. Beside it in a deliberate clutter were accessory cases, a light meter, a folded tripod, and scattered rolls of Kodak film.

“Some,” he said after a moment.

The visitor angled his head back toward his parked van. A second man had exited and was striding around its right side.

“That’s Greg Clayton, my best trial helper,” Anagkazo said. “It’ll take him about five, ten minutes to get suited and ready for the demo.” He hefted his portfolio case. “Meanwhile, we probably should sit down, go over a few things. I’ll show you the pedigrees and trial certifications, answer whatever questions you have about my program.”

A pause. Then Kuhl said, “I’ve owned Schutzhund trained dogs before. My assistant made that clear in your conversations, did he not?”

“He did. Well, generally—”

Tired of the man, wishing him gone, Kuhl remembered these banalities of interaction were woven into the fabric of his camouflage veil. “A Rottweiler and a German shepherd — at different times,” he said. “Please, though, have a seat.”

Anagkazo stepped through the room, lowered himself into a rustic oak couch, and regarded the camera gear again. He seemed intrigued.

“Here to shoot anything special?” he said, unzipping his case. “If you don’t mind my being curious.”

Kuhl looked at his visitor from an armchair opposite him.

“No, not in the least.” He smiled. “I’m working on a book to be published in Europe. A pictorial record of my modern-day journey over the Royal Road.”

“El Camino Reaàl, sure. Connects the old mission chain from San Diego to Frisco,” Anagkazo said. “I guess you’d find most of those settlements along Route one oh one. Or near it. There are maybe twenty altogether, that right?”

“Twenty-one.”

Anagkazo nodded, his brow creasing with interest.

“You know, I’ve heard San Antonio de Padua’s something else,” he said. “It’s way out past my breeding farm in the middle of nowhere. A hassle to reach because you’ve got to take a twisty local road, G-sixteen, leads you through the mountains. But seeing it must give you an idea how rough life must’ve been for those original Spanish priests.”

“Yes,” Kuhl said. “I’d planned on making the drive.”

“Just don’t forget to pack lunch and a coffee Thermos,” Anagkazo said. “Also better make sure you have loads of identification. There’s an army base, Fort Hunter Liggett, in the Ventana backcountry. Government land covers maybe a hundred seventy thousand acres, believe it or not. Most of it’s plain wild. The base itself was deactivated almost ten years ago, but they still use it for military reserve and National Guard drills. There are tanks, choppers, fire ranges, ammo dumps. I hear they conduct some special-op training, too, though they keep that part sort of hush-hush.” He produced a pocket folder embossed with his company’s name from the briefcase on his lap. “The reason I say to bring your ID is that the mission happens to be smack in the middle of a valley on the base’s land. You actually need to drive through a checkpoint to visit it, and security’s gotten tighter nowadays. Like I told you, it can be a challenge.”

Kuhl had reason to be amused.

“But worthwhile, I think,” he said. He took the pocket folder from Anagkazo, opened it, and hastily riffled through the thin stacks of clipped-together documents in its sleeve. “All the paperwork is in here?”

“Pedigree records, award certificates, and point breakdowns for every phase of training. Everything signed and sealed by Schutzhund master officials,” Anagkazo said. “I included our owner’s information packet and guarantees of course—”

“The dogs have Level-Three titles?”

“And other special ones besides,” Anagkazo said. “You’re getting really terrific animals. Lido, Sorge, and Arek. They’re littermates, pure-black shepherd males from west German working lines. The dogs have to be a minimum of twenty months old to qualify for Level-Three certification, and I spent an extra four months training them for advanced titles in protection and tracking. You won’t find too many around that have earned the trial scores they did.” He shrugged. “But I should show and not tell. Greg must be set by now, and you’re probably anxious to meet your new best friends for yourself.”

Kuhl looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “Very much so.”

They rose and went toward the door.

On the grass about thirty feet from the cabin, Anagkazo’s helper had gotten the three coal-black German shepherds out through the van’s side panel. A broad, hulking man who stood well over six feet tall, he waited beside it holding them on a leather multiple-dog leash clipped to their steel choke collars. Motionless, they sat side by side at his heel.

Kuhl studied Clayton’s oversize flannel shirt and baggy coveralls, noted the odd bunching over his arms, legs and chest, and realized his huge appearance was due in some measure to concealed body padding.

Anagkazo turned to Kuhl outside the cabin door. “Your assistant told me you’d be interested in protection,” he said. “Alone up here on the mountain, that’s a sensible requirement. Having owned Schutzhunds before, you’re probably familiar with what I’m about to say, but some people don’t appreciate that effective guard work goes with obedience and control”—he interlocked two fingers—“like this. You can’t separate them. Over-aggressiveness is considered a flaw either in a dog’s inbred disposition or trained behavior. It shouldn’t display any aggression unless ordered. They’re protection dogs, not guard dogs in the ordinary sense… they only do what their owner tells them, won’t attack anyone without his direct command.”

Kuhl gave him a silent nod.

“We’re going to demonstrate how those important qualities I mentioned combine in a simulated protective engagement,” Anagkazo said. “The reason Greg’s wearing a hidden bite suit, and not the ordinary kind that would fit outside his regular clothes, is because an intruder ’s going to be dressed in regular clothes. We want to be sure our dogs will perform under realistic conditions. It’s part of the extra training I mentioned before, and not even necessary for Level-Three certification.” He paused. “Don’t be disturbed when Greg brings out his pistol. It’s a Bruni practice gun… looks and sounds like the real thing, but chambered for firing blanks.”

Kuhl smiled at him. “Thank you for the warning,” he said.

Anagkazo waved to his helper as a signal to get started. Let off the leash, the dogs remained heeled in position at Clayton’s side until Anagkazo called out to them. Then they sprang onto all fours and came rushing over to him at once like a midnight wind.

“Sit,” he said in a firm voice.

The shepherds obeyed without hesitation. Kuhl studied them. They were truly impressive: wide-boned, thick-furred, and muscular, with triangular ears erect above the domes of their large shaggy heads.

Anagkazo signaled again.

“Okay, Greg!” he shouted. “Roll it!”

Clayton reached into a pocket of his coveralls for the training handgun. Kuhl noted it was indeed an accurate replica of a Colt 9-mm semiautomatic.

Both hands around its grip, tilting its barrel slightly upward, the helper raised his gun, pulled the trigger. A shot cracked into the air, loud, its echoes bounding off and away into the nearby trees.

Kuhl’s eyes went to the dogs. They were still. Perfectly still beside their trainer, facing Clayton across the grass.

In this way, and perhaps others, Kuhl thought, their attitude was reminiscent of Ciras.

Clayton gave the high-country silence scarcely a moment’s chance to settle back down around the cabin, and then shattered it with a second round of gunfire, a third, a fourth.

More echoes reverberated through the treetops, scaring up birds everywhere on the ridge.

Kuhl watched the dogs.

None of them had shown any sign of startlement or so much as flinched. They just sat there staring at the man with the gun, their bright brown eyes fixed on him.

Kuhl looked at Anagkazo. “They are in complete control of their natural impulses,” he said.

The breeder nodded.

“And without fear,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean.”

Anagkazo waved a hand above his head yet another time. Clayton stepped toward the cabin, his pistol thrust out before him, the uptilt of its snout now barely perceptible even to Kuhl.

Two shots crashed from it.

“Attack!” Anagkazo commanded.

The dogs hurtled forward, racing straight at Clayton, making no sound, midnight wind. The pistol was fired again, a series of rapid bursts, but they did not stop, kept on charging in his direction.

He lowered his gun as the dogs reached him, aimed it at them.

They lunged. One of them drove high, rose onto its hind legs, and Kuhl saw the flash of bared white fangs as its massive black jaws clamped over Clayton’s gun arm below the elbow. Another shepherd went for his right thigh. The third, his left ankle. Clayton twisted his body, shouting loud threats at the dogs, pulling them around with him, dragging them around with him, but they hung on, silent, silent, throwing their combined weight against him, finally making him lose his balance, forcing him off his feet. As he dropped hard onto his side, the pistol flew out of Clayton’s grasp, landed several feet away in a patch of grass.

From Anagkazo now: “Hold!”

The three German shepherds released his helper, backed off, and got onto their haunches without turning away from him, staying within a yard of the spot where Clayton had fallen, forming up in a close ring around him. They were still silent, their thick wooly tails whipping back and forth over the ground.

Anagkazo turned to Kuhl.

“Fearless, as promised,” he said. “They won’t budge until I call them down.”

“And if the intruder were to run into the woods?” Kuhl was watching the dogs. “Try to escape rather than press ahead toward a confrontation?”

“As long as you give the command, they’d track and find him no matter where he hides,” Anagkazo said. “Bear in mind you don’t have to be in danger or any extraordinary circumstances to get the same level of obedience from them. It extends to their routine behavior. Whether it’s walking beside you on the street, retrieving a Frisbee at a picnic, whatever. With these dogs there’s no negotiation.”

Appreciating that last phrase, savoring it, Kuhl waited a long moment before he offered the breeder his reply.

“Excellent, Mr. Anagkazo,” he said, then. “Truly excellent. That is just what I’d wanted to hear.”

Steve DeMarco was one of nine members of Sword’s advance team to have met the plane out at the landing field.

A Boeing 737 freighter, it had flown in with about twenty thousand tons of cargo for the satcom ground station and fiber network head-end center going up near the Sette Cama Forest thirty miles south of Port-Gentil. The bulk of its load consisted of parts ordered by the horde of engineers, plumbers, and other specialized utility systems experts at work in the compound’s buildings. There were pallets of everyday office fixtures, including desks, chairs, computers, LAN modems, phones, fax machines, copiers, paper, toner cartridges, and so on. And there was an initial shipment of expensive upgrade and replacement components for the Planétaire optical communications infrastructure, such as long-haul light amplifiers, wavelength division multiplexers, demultiplexers, and routing devices. The telecom equipment alone was worth upward of a couple million dollars, which would have been reason enough for fully three-quarters of Nimec’s security contingent to be on hand for the Boeing’s reception.

And they had another.

A comparatively smaller portion of the valuable cargo transshipped to Gabon via UpLink Europe had been requisitioned by the Sword boys. This ranged from electrified perimeter fencing, ballistic glass panels, and concrete Jersey barricades for vehicle entry points to fancier hardware like fixed intruder-alert systems, countersurveillance sweep units, mobile robotic guards (dubbed “hedgehogs” by Rollie Thibodeau), and many of the same weapons and chembio threat detectors Thibodeau had described to Tom Ricci during their brief, strained catch-up session at UpLink San Jose. Also arriving with the Sword req were the first three of what would eventually grow into an entire fleet of armored-and-modified-to-order Land Rovers, and a delivery of weapons and gear Nimec’s team had been licensed to use for personal and facility defense under special agreement with Gabonese authorities. Among these were several crates of conventional firearms, third-generation “Big Daddy” variable-velocity rifle-system submachine guns, and other lethal and less-than-lethal munitions.

Once the goods had been unloaded they were expedited to temporary warehouses, checked in, sorted, and prepped for final transport — and that was where Steve DeMarco and his teammates entered the picture. Everything was eventually headed out to the Sette Cama for on-site storage and distribution, begging careful supervision as the first loads were transferred onto off-road trucks and heavy lift choppers by airport personnel. Four of the Sword ops had ridden with the wheeled convoy along remote jungle roads, which might present tempting ambush points to thieves and hijackers. Each of the two birds making the initial air run had swept off with a guard of its own. As agent in charge, DeMarco had also assigned three men to the warehouse beat until the rest of the freight was cleared out of them, a process expected to take seventy-two hours at the very least.

With things well under control at the airport, DeMarco had gotten into his company vehicle and driven back to the Rio de Gabao. His plan was to freshen up in his room, then grab a bite to eat at the hotel restaurant before giving Pete Nimec the lowdown on the successful transit operation.

He would wind up with a whole lot more to tell him.

As he got out of the elevator, DeMarco’s curiosity had nudged him to give one of the new pieces of equipment that had arrived with the 737 a quick test. Though far from the most expensive or important item in the shipment, it was nonetheless a nifty little gadget… assuming it worked as touted. At a glance it appeared to be a long, thin silver cigarette lighter. Another version of the same device, designed to look like a key chain fob, had been chosen by some of the ops. To each his own.

Whichever outer configuration was preferred, the miniature guts of the thing remained the same. Its true function was neither to fire up a smoke nor to help a person locate keys buried in a trouser pocket — although the latter was something the fob did quite handily because of its shape, perhaps accounting for its favored status in contrast to the fuel-less, wickless, single-purpose mock-cigarette lighter version. The device’s true function, at any rate, was to snoop out hidden surveillance cameras. Inside the case was a very low frequency directional receiver sensitive to electromagnetic emissions in the fifteen- to twenty-kilohertz range, corresponding to VLF levels radiated by the horizontal oscillators that typically allowed remote-operated cameras their side-to-side movement. The detector had two switchable modes of alert. At the touch of a button, it could signal the presence of a hidden camera with a discreet pulse similar to that given off by a cell phone set to silently vibrate, or sound a series of beeps through an attached headset. The closer it got to the source of the low-band radio emission, the faster a tiny red LED on the case would blink, allowing pinpoint location of the camera… in theory, insofar as DeMarco was concerned for the present. His trust in any gadget or weapon had to meet the same standard he applied to women: He would reserve judgment until he saw how well it treated him.

Thus, DeMarco’s test. On his first day at the hotel, he had noticed a couple of minidome cameras in the hallway outside his room. The first to snag his careful eye was mounted flush with the ceiling near the elevator bank and might easily have been taken for one of the domed light fixtures with which it was aligned in a long row. The second minidome was more visibly mounted about two feet to the right of his door — and four or five feet above his head — in a corner formed by the juncture of the wall and ceiling. Neither bothered him by its presence. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Rio was a five-star hotel catering to upper-echelon international travelers. And any decent lodging nowadays was obliged to provide security for its guests. At its most basic, this would consist of an in-house security staff and twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week video monitoring of common areas.

DeMarco’s idea was to give the camera near his door a covert pass with his detector simply to find out whether it would buzz and flash its little indicator light as touted. If the gadget worked, he would accept the good things he’d heard about it. Make it his steady, so to speak. If it didn’t, he would have to reevaluate their relationship and likewise warn his men against putting too much faith in it.

As the Dylan song went, just like a woman.

Now DeMarco turned down the hall toward his room, the locator nestled in his right palm. At the door he took his swipe-card key from his shirt pocket with his free hand and inserted it into the reader, simultaneously thumbing on the locator to pass it under the camera, keeping it turned away from the bug-eyed enclosure… just a weary guest about to give himself a little neck rub after a long morning of hustle and bustle.

The gadget began to vibrate in mid-pass.

Good, he thought.

DeMarco brought it down between his shoulder blades with a smooth movement, raised it, slid his eyes onto the LED. It was blinking rapidly. He made an adequate show of massaging himself through his shirt, then lowered his right hand to his side, away from the overhead camera, and took another peak at the red light. The blinking slowed, stopped.

Even better.

Satisfied he’d gained a trustworthy companion, DeMarco pushed open his door and stepped into the room. He headed straight over to his dresser and tossed the card key on top of it, already unbuttoning his shirt below its open collar, eager to get under the refreshing shower spray and rinse the sweat and airport dust off his body. Although it was still well before noon, the outside temperature had to be somewhere in the upper eighties, and the soupy humidity made it feel even hotter.

As he went to put his camera locator down beside the card, his finger on the power button to click it to the OFF setting, DeMarco felt a sudden vibrational shiver from it, and realized the LED was blinking through his fingers again.

Rapidly.

Very rapidly.

His brows arched. Red light flickering between his knuckles, he continued to feel the silent pulsations of the locator’s alert signal. Then he thumbed it off, his eyes cutting left and right, taking in the room — its walls, ceiling, furnishings, picture frames, mirrors, central air-conditioning unit. Everything.

DeMarco swore inwardly. Not moving his lips. Betraying no hint of surprise through a muttered word or gesture.

After a moment he finished undressing, went into the shower, and turned on the tap, feeling tense and exposed, trying his best to act as if nothing were amiss.

His equipment tryout had proven to be more informative than he’d bargained for. A lot more.

He would have to talk to Pete Nimec right away.

After a night of bad dreams, Julia Gordian had hoped to shake off her mild funk at work Sunday, but the chill, gray weather was doing nothing to give her a lift.

The shelter had been quiet since she’d arrived, Rob off to do his double-duty accounting out at the San Gregario Beach resort, Cynthia dealing with a colicky infant in their house down the lane, leaving Julia to mind things alone. She was okay with that part, but would have been happier if it weren’t such a slow day for adoption prospects. There were no appointments scheduled for that morning, and only two penciled in for the afternoon. Quiet, and the low mist pressing against the shop window added to her downbeat mood.

Julia knelt over a bulk order of dog kibble delivered the day before, slid a box opener between the carton’s taped flaps, spread them open, and did a quick count of the three-pound bags inside against the total listed on the packing slip. Behind the counter with her, Vivian loafed on her cushion, raising her head off her crossed paws to nuzzle the carton with mild interest.

“Thanks for the hardy assist, Viv. But everything’s here,” Julia said, scratching the grey behind her ears, which were folded like a bow on a bonnet — the left ear flipped limply to the right, the right flopped to the left, the two overlapping over the fine, tawny fur betwixt. “No shortages to report.”

Viv produced a kind of whistling yawn, stretched, and rolled onto her back. Since being rebuffed by the Wurmans she had become Julia’s honorary sidekick, winning the position through charm and sympathy.

Julia smiled at her with affection.

“The tummy rub has to wait, kid,” she said. “I’ve got to earn my nonsalary.”

Julia reached into the carton. And while she unpacked and filled the shelves, found herself thinking about the dreams.

They had plagued her every so often since her divorce from Craig. Less often recently, but it seemed their run had not quite concluded and would recur for disturbing encore presentations anywhere between once and twice a month. Julia never knew what events would stir up the pockets of unconscious turbulence or why she’d go plunging into them on any given night. And she was stumped by their power to throw her out of whack almost two years after she’d last had any direct contact with her former husband. They were, like most dreams, insipid. Formulaic variations on a stock theme; confused, weak, even silly recalled in the light of day. But the sleeping mind was both captive audience and uncritical judge of its own regurgitated material, and they had once again kept her tossing and turning in bed.

Leading off last night’s bill had been the creepshow she thought of as Julia Can’t Find Her Home. The title said it all. She’d been driving home from somewhere — home being the residence Julia had shared with Craig for their entire six-year marriage — then swung off the usual highway exit and suddenly found herself in the wrong neighborhood. Or, to be more accurate, in a weirdly transformed version of what she somehow knew to be the right neighborhood. The street layout was vaguely familiar. There were landmarks that seemed to belong where she saw them, houses she seemed to recognize, but they had been altered in some uncertain way, and shuffled around like pieces on a Monopoly board. As Julia turned corner after corner, her initial bafflement escalated to panic. There was no sign of her driveway, her front yard. She was lost. The house wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t anywhere. She couldn’t even retrace her route to the highway. She was without any sense of direction, her bearings gone, driving up and down increasingly alien and unknown streets, circling them in a futile, endless search for a home that had vanished.

That realization had awakened her with a scream, prompting a trip into the kitchen for a glass of cold water. It hadn’t ended the nightmares, though.

Julia in a House Full of Strangers… Almost! had followed shortly after she’d fallen back asleep. In this dream, the beleaguered heroine arrived at her residence without any trouble, but opened the front door to find it filled with complete strangers. As she rushed through its interior she saw people everywhere. Cozying up on the sofa, at the refrigerator, seated in the dining room, chatting and laughing in the halls. None of them knew her. None was interested in knowing her. In fact they didn’t seem to notice her at all, just went about their affairs as if she were invisible. She’d wandered the house like a ghost, found herself outside her bedroom. The door was wide open. Inside a couple was vigorously making love, tangled naked in the sheets. The lights were on. They ignored her when she appeared in the doorway. Julia could see the woman’s back, see a man underneath her, his face blocked by her riding body, his ecstatic groans muffled against her breasts. It had sounded like Craig. It had sounded exactly like Craig. And that had brought Julia back to reality with a start, left her crying into the pillow of her own darkened bedroom for perhaps half an hour.

At least she had been spared a reprisal of Nobody Knows Julia, a subtler but equally disturbing script in which she would come home to find her former in-laws watching television in the living room. In these dreams, they would acknowledge her presence with cool detachment and instruct her to leave at once. Their devoted son and his wife were returning any minute and would not appreciate uninvited visitors, particularly a strange woman drifting in off the sidewalk to cause trouble for them. When Julia insisted she was his wife they would quietly repeat that she had better vacate the premises for her own good and then would turn their attention back to the tube. Again, as if she were no longer there. The volume on the set was turned up loud. And whatever they were watching had a laugh track.

Julia sighed. Her urge that dreary morning had been to pull her blankets over her head and stay put. It had been a powerful temptation she’d felt many times before. But she had resisted it today, as she’d always done, except for a couple of instances in the weeks immediately after she learned of Craig’s affair. Dreary or not, it was a new morning, and she had her responsibilities. Her work at the shelter was for a good cause, one very personal to her. It was also insurance against the deadly appeal of her drawn window shades, blanket, and pillow.

Finished replenishing the shelves with dog food now, Julia sidled around the counter, inspected its adjoining showcase, decided it looked sort of bare, and went into the little side stockroom for some dental and nail trimming kits to fill it out. Despite the store’s limited front space, Rob was nitpicky about keeping at least one piece of every item he carried on display, but worrying about two jobs and a baby seemed to have spun his attention kind of thin. Yesterday he had driven out thirty miles along his way to the Fairwinds before realizing he’d forgotten an important ledger. He’d needed to return home for it and arrived at the motel over an hour late, aggravated and embarrassed.

Julia was reentering the storefront with a handful of supplies when she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Don’t tell me Rob’s come back ledgerless again, she thought… and then told herself she didn’t want to jinx him by even half seriously considering it. No sirree, not this morning. What more fitting, lousy capper could there be to it than the poor, overworked guy having to double back after another bout of absentmindedness?

She glanced out the window and was pleased to see it wasn’t his Montero, but one of those Subaru 4×4 utility wagons… an Outback. It had pulled up to Rob’s house, a thirtyish clean-shaven man in a tan leather car coat and jeans stepping out to ring the door bell. After a moment Cynthia appeared on the front porch, babe in arms, and pointed him toward the shelter.

Back in his wagon, the driver rolled into the parking area near the shop, then got out again and came hustling over through the fog, which was now starting to turn into a fine drizzle.

He pulled open the door and leaned inside. Cut in short, purposely mussed snippets, his hair was already sprinkled with droplets of moisture.

“Hi,” he said, and glanced at his wristwatch. “I didn’t know your Sunday hours, but figured it was after eleven, and took a chance. The woman in that house told me you’re open.”

Julia waved him in out of the wetness.

“Sure, come on in,” she said. “We’re just slow this morning.”

He entered, paused, quietly looking around the shop. Julia set her stockroom merchandise onto the counter, stood with her back to it. “If there’s anything special I can help you find, let me know,” she said.

He gave her a smile, gesturing with his chin.

“Actually,” he said. “I’m interested in somebody like your friend over there.”

Julia looked around, momentarily puzzled. Then she laughed. Vivian had gotten off her cushion and stuck her head out from behind the counter.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize…”

“Pooch is a little shy, huh?”

“Don’t let Viv fool you, she knows how to get her way.”

Now the guy chuckled, too. “Especially with you, I’ll bet.”

“I guess.”

He put out his hand.

“Barry Hughes,” he said.

“Julia Gordian,” she said.

They shook.

“So,” he said. “Tell me what I need to do to rescue a greyhound today?”

Julia hesitated, did a quick memory check, and glanced down at the open schedule book beside the cash register. As she had thought, there were only the couple of afternoon appointments, and neither of them was for anybody named Hughes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t see you listed…”

“Oh,” Hughes said. “Do I need to be?”

“I’m afraid so,” Julia said. “Other than for buying supplies or gifts, that is.” She paused, her brow creasing. “You mean you didn’t know?”

Hughes shook his head.

“I’m always noticing the sign for your shelter on the road,” he said. “Figured I’d drop by whenever I could.”

Julia produced a sigh. “I really am sorry,” she said. “We have a lot of dogs that need placement, but there’s a telephone screening process. It’s given to every candidate owner before they come look at the greys.”

Hughes shrugged.

“I’d be glad to answer any questions right here. If you’d like to ask them, that is—”

“I’d like nothing more,” Julia said. “It isn’t my choice, though. You’d need to speak with Rob Howell. He’s the shelter’s organizer and conducts all the phone interviews himself.”

“Oh,” Hughes said again. “Mr. Howell available, by any chance?”

Julia shook her head. “Best thing would be to give him a ring. Monday through Friday.”

“That’s kind of difficult for me… I’m a power company technician, always climbing utility poles, crawling around people’s basements, running everywhere on emergency calls,” Hughes said, and frowned. “You sure you can’t grab hold of him for a few minutes?”

“I would if the timing weren’t so bad,” Julia said. “Unfortunately he’ll be out the next two weekends.”

Hughes made eye contact with her.

“And I couldn’t ask for an exception—”

“As I said, there’s nothing I’d prefer. But I’m new at the job. And rules are rules.”

A pause.

“Well,” Hughes said, and expelled a long breath. “I guess I’ll try back another time.”

Julia pulled a business card from the holder by the register.

“In any event, why don’t you take this,” she said, handing it to him. “It’s got our regular business hours. Phone and fax numbers, too, of course.”

Hughes reached for his billfold and slipped in the card.

“Thanks.” He motioned toward the counter again. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and nobody else will take your adorable friend before I have my chance at her.”

Julia glanced over at Vivian and was mildly surprised to see she hadn’t come out from behind the counter, but was poking her head out around its side, sniffing away, her ears flat back against her head, the bonnet bow undone. Viv didn’t often lay on the bashful routine that thick.

“Maybe,” she said, feeling an odd twinge that she immediately chalked up to her own growing attachment to the dog — another violation of Rob’s thou-shalt-nots. The two of them really had become chums, but she had to recognize somebody would take her one of these days. And that it would be very much for the best. “Anyway, I hope you give us a call. Our rescues desperately need good homes.”

Hughes nodded, gave her another smile, and left.

A moment later Julia turned from the door and got back to work.

In the Outback, the man who’d introduced himself as Barry Hughes passed the Howell residence, reached the bottom of the lane, turned left, and then drove west over the blacktop toward the coast.

His own particular morning’s work was over, and it could not have gone any better.

“So what do you think?” DeMarco said.

“From what you tell me,” Nimec said, swatting away a mosquito, “we’ve got some worries.”

“Yeah.”

“Serious worries.”

“Yeah.”

“Which you obviously know, or we wouldn’t be here,” Nimec said.

DeMarco nodded but said nothing.

They were standing together on an aged steel foot-bridge over a drainage channel in the city’s Romb’Intchozo precinct, their elbows propped on its pedestrian guard rail. In the rainy season, the channel would be gurgling with overflow from the flooded Ogooué River delta. But this was a different season, and the water below them was low and still and muddy. Insects swarmed around thick clottings of food wrappers and other paper litter that floated on or just below the surface.

Nimec wished he hadn’t worn short sleeves. Or that he’d splashed on some pest repellent.

“Hell of it is, I can’t think of anything but the obvious,” he said after a long silence. “We need to find out who’s put a watch on us. How wide it is. And we need to find out the reasons why. What they’d have to gain.”

DeMarco nodded again. He felt a tiny stinging bite on his bare left forearm, slapped his right hand down on it, examined his palm, and saw the mosquito’s wings, legs, and carapace mashed together in a smear of blood. He scraped it onto the guard rail with a sense of vengeful reward.

“Damned bugs,” he said.

“No pun intended, I hope.”

DeMarco puzzled a moment over the vinegary humor in Nimec’s tone, then got it.

“No,” he said with a thin smile. “None.”

They stood looking out past at the stagnant, refuse clogged, insect-teeming murk under the bridge.

After a while Nimec decided on the first step in what he supposed might be labeled a plan.

Or something close to one.

The Ogooué Fan. Eighty leagues below sea level. Fifteen feet long, its leech-white outer hull devoid of markings, the deep submersible had passed beneath the sand ridge’s crumbled terrace to assume a stable automatic hover close to the ocean bottom.

In the steel-walled forward pressure cabin, two men in overalls that matched the color of the craft’s fiberglass exterior occupied its command station behind a hemispheric acrylic viewport — the large half bubble allowed for wide field, low refractory visibility, giving a near illusion that there was nothing to separate them from their aqueous surroundings. One of them sat in the pilot’s chair, ready to take manual joy-stick control of the craft and push its ducted, silent-running, eight-horsepower electric thrusters to a speed of better than ten knots in the event that sudden detection or imminent threat drove them to launch an escape. Behind the backup controls to his right, the copilot monitored his frontal and overhead status boards and handled their periodic radio communications with the surface team.

The four crewmen in the aft pressure chamber also wore pale overalls. Two had manipulated the clawed robotic arm that had plucked the segment of fiber cable from its bed of sand and sediments. Their companions behind a separate instrument console had followed the marine cable’s exposure with the deployment of a tubular protrusion from the submersible’s underbelly midway between bow and stern, running it to the rubbled sea floor, mating it to what almost appeared to be an ordinary splice enclosure in the line. But the bidirectional data port in the enclosure’s upper surface would be certain to draw attention from a knowledgeable eye such as Cédric Dupain had possessed… and indeed did when he’d spotted its watertight cover some months earlier, making the discovery that would seal his and Marius Bouchard’s fate.

Had Dupain lived long enough to further scrutinize it, his inquisitiveness would have surely led him to find the data port and the special multifiber coupler fitted within the splice enclosure: a microchip-activated beam-splitting pod that, when switched on, would tap into the lightwave signals passing through the cable and divert a fraction of them into the optical fibers of the extended feeder tube. Because the pod had been built into the system near a splice housing known to Planétaire’s, and now UpLink International’s, system managers, the temporary signal degradation would be considered unremarkable. The heat-fusing of fiber ends at splice points will always result in some attenuation of signal strength, intrinsic losses that are ignored within certain established levels, and there would be many of these points along the route of a typical long-distance network’s architecture.

At each parasitic siphoning off of the cable, its flood of raw high-speed data was transmitted from the submersible’s array of receiving/buffering computer terminals to Cray superprocessors aboard the Chimera using a direct, narrow-targeted underwater-to-surface Intranet link maintained via an extremely high frequency (or EHF) acoustic telemetry modem and on-hull antenna about the size and shape of a carrot. Were they to hear a mission-abort command from the pilot’s chair, the men at the aft consoles would be responsible for disengaging the feeder tube and, if time and opportunity allowed, retrenching the cable to hide any visible sign of their tap.

Although these emergency measures were practiced in drills, the reality was that their implementation never had been required. A cautious and prudent man in any circumstance, Harlan DeVane was at his best functioning in the depths.

As DeVane himself often mused.

Port-Gentil. Late Sunday afternoon. Pete Nimec and Vince Scull strode through the main lobby of the Rio de Gabao to the street, past the accommodating concierge, the smiling doorman, the ready taxi drivers parked near the entrance.

On the pavement they turned right and started walking unhurriedly toward the big outdoor market at the north side of the city, a couple of commercial travelers enjoying a welcome weekend respite from their high-powered business affairs.

Soon afterward, Sword ops Charlie Hollinger and Frank Rhodes left the hotel together and strode south toward the casino district. They were talking about things like their luck at the slots and exchanging tips for cashing in big at baccarat and roulette.

A half hour passed before Steve DeMarco and three more members of the Sword advance team — Andy Wade, Joel Ackerman, and Brian Conners — hit the street. The group stood chatting in front of the hotel, casually discussing their separate plans for the rest of the afternoon. DeMarco and Wade said they wanted to see some historic sights. Ackerman mentioned a free Makossa concert in the city park he was anxious to catch, and Conners, who played guitar as a hobby, indicated he’d like to tag along with him. DeMarco suggested that all of them ought to try hooking up with Nimec and Scull at the bazaar a bit later on, maybe going out for dinner afterward. Conners said he wasn’t sure, but would probably decide to pass on that, expressing his interest in some local sights he wanted to visit on his own after the concert. And besides, he’d already promised Hollinger and Rhodes he would join them in blowing his week’s pay at the tables.

The group stood there talking for another five minutes or so and then moved on.

DeMarco and Wade went right, following the direction Nimec and Scull had taken to the market quarter with only few detours en route.

Ackerman and Conners walked left toward the park together, though Conners would eventually go off on his own.

As had been true since their arrival in the country, all eight men were being watched.

This time, however, they were watching the watchers.

For the second time in as many days Jean Jacques Assele-Ndaki had been shocked and horrified by the photograph of his lifelong friend Macie’s gruesome murder. But having the president himself confront him with it this time added a new and entirely different element to his reaction.

He’d been prepared to see neither as he arrived at Senateur Moubouyi’s colonial mansion and was ushered into the salon by his houseman.

Assele-Ndaki stood in the doorway now, looking into the room with frozen features. President Cangele. Here. How was this possible? It was everything he could do not to physically jump when the paneled oak door shut behind him.

“Assemblyman, hello.” The president sat at the head of a long table, two of his closest aides to his right, the rest of the chairs filled with more than twelve of Assele-Ndaki’s legislative colleagues. “We’ve been waiting for you with unanimous anticipation. And unanimity among politicians is too rare and short-lived to neglect for any period.”

Assele-Ndaki did not move. He felt staggered and weak kneed, as if struck by a hard concussion.

“Mr. President…”

“Please, come in,” Adrian Cangele nodded toward a single empty chair on his left side. The snapshot of Macie lay in front of him, its lower border pressed flat against the table by the thick fingers of his hand. “Now that you’ve arrived, there is no reason for you to stand apart. Is there?”

Recognizing the clear edge of sarcasm and double-entendre in the president’s remarks, Assele-Ndaki struggled to gain possession of himself. He had expected a huddle of government officials gathered to challenge the power and authority of the very man who was at the table with them and to determine how the UpLink license might be suspended or revoked. Expected representatives of both parliamentary chambers linked by their participation in a conspiracy, and a common warning — which had come to each of them in the form of an anonymously mailed photograph.

Instead…

Assele-Ndaki surveyed the room. Only Cangele and his aides were looking at him. All the rest of the men were focused everywhere but in his direction… some of them on the two-hundred-year-old rapiers and poniards against one wall, some on the cased set of eighteenth-century French pistols mounted opposite the sword collection, some examining the Chinese porcelain vases and expensive trinkets that filled various cabinet shelves. Others were merely staring at their hands or at vacant points in the air.

Assele-Ndaki turned his attention onto the senator whose invitation he had accepted. Seated at the president’s left with his eyes on the table, Moubouyi appeared to sense his gaze. He met it with his own for the briefest of moments, then looked back down.

Cangele’s deep-set eyes, meanwhile, continued to scrutinize Assele-Ndaki from his broad ebony face. The smile on his full mouth was quick, and often charming, but also unspontaneous and rarely invested with humor. It had a demanding severity even at the most casual and relaxed moments… and the mood in the room was worlds from either.

Assele-Ndaki pushed forward across the floor to the table. The president wore an orange and white patterned kente batik shirt, collarless with wide bell sleeves. It was unusual attire for him. Cangele typically favored Western dress, custom suits from the renowned European boutiques.

The assemblyman sat.

“I trust,” Cangele said to him, “no one present requires an introduction.”

Assele-Ndaki gave a silent nod. How could the president have learned about the meeting? About the photograph? Could someone in this room have told him, committed an act of duplicity seeking to curry favor in the belief things would sooner or later come to light? Or perhaps he had found out through his secret eyes and ears throughout the government? But in the end these questions were unanswerable. Nor did his informant’s identity and reasons matter. Cangele knew. He knew. One way or another, they would each of them who had planned to obstruct his goals bear the consequences.

“I mean no disrespect, but there are places I would much rather be,” Cangele said. His eyes held steady on Assele-Ndaki’s face. “Other ways I would have chosen to spend my Sunday afternoon.” He triggered his smile again and gestured expansively with his left hand. His right continued to rest on the picture of Macie Nze, its touch flat and heavy. “Instead, I’ve been pressed into this working visit to Port-Gentil… into slipping out of the capital like a thief.”

Assele-Ndaki said nothing. His tension was hard to separate from that of his fellow parliamentarians. It was a kind of flux in the room that seemed to radiate from each and accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. He could feel it prickling his skin like current. When he breathed, it left the taste of steel nails at the back of his tongue.

“Mr. Assemblyman,” Cangele said to him, “I know you and Macie Nze had close personal ties, and I wish to express my regrets and condolences over his death. My own direct dealings with him were infrequent, but I remember him as a committed and estimable public servant worthy of respect.”

Assele-Ndaki nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “There are many who will miss him.”

“His savage abduction and murder was a waste. An intolerable act. You may take it as a given that the crime will not go unsolved… and that its perpetrators will not elude justice.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Cangele took a deep breath, then released it through his nose and mouth. He was a large man with a bulging middle and his girth somehow gave the exhalation a tidal quality.

“Although they lack solid proof, my sources have cause to suspect Macie Nze’s murder was connected to his falling awry of a mysterious political-influence peddler,” he said. “An unidentified foreigner who has sought to hinder my telecommunications initiatives through means varying from financial incentives of questionable legality, to overt criminal bribes. And it pains me to say that some in our government might have been receptive to them.”

The president’s dark eyes remained clamped on Assele-Ndaki, who looked back at him in silence, not knowing how to answer, afraid to turn away.

“Jean Jacques,” Senateur Moubouyi said at last. “Before you joined us, the president was asking our opinions—”

“Off the record, we must underscore,” Ali Nagor said from farther down the table. He was an assemblyman from Mounga Province, to the east.

“Of course, I should have mentioned that,” Moubouyi said. “President Cangele polled us, informally, about a proposition of amnesty for anyone who may have been lured into accepting the foreigner’s inducements. As I understand it, explicit admissions of impropriety would not be required, but rather a simple and confidential pledge among all parliamentarians that none will occur in the future… with particular regard to the telecom issue.”

Silence again. Then Nagor said, “The president is gratified by the National Assembly’s approval of his UpLink licensing policies despite the shadowy lobbies that would have hindered them. And while he welcomes honest and open political debate, he likewise wishes to see the licenses ratified without further sabotage.”

Assele-Ndaki did not react. He was trying to plainly understand the meaning of what he’d heard. President Cangele’s dark eyes, still fixed on the assemblyman, made it difficult for him to think straight.

“So,” Cangele said, then. “What have you to comment?”

Assele-Ndaki hesitated another moment.

“Loyal and good men may make mistakes they regret, Mr. President,” he said. “As one who believes in the possibility of atonement, I would prefer such individuals be granted a chance to rectify their mistakes, rather than have their shame compounded by scandal and punishment. And I am convinced most would of them look on it with humble appreciation.”

“And yet there is a hesitant note in your voice.”

Assele-Ndaki’s throat was dry and tight. He drank from the glass of water on the table beside him.

“Only because I would respectfully suggest that some might shy away from the opportunity to make amends out of self preservation,” he said, and glanced at the photograph under Cangele’s fingertips. “My dear friend Macie Nze was surely innocent of wrongdoing. But it could be that he was under strong persuasion to compromise his integrity, commit an indiscretion that would have weighed on his conscience… and was tortured and killed for his refusal. It gives me fear that the same could happen to the guilty who wish to redeem themselves. Or worse yet, to the people they love. These are men with families.”

President Cangele was quiet, his smooth features thoughtful. He kept his gaze on Assele-Ndaki a while longer, and then let his eyes slowly move over the faces of the conclaved parliamentarians.

“No one in this room today has seen me. No one in this room has heard me,” he said. “None of you… are we agreed?”

Heads were nodding around the table. Assele-Ndaki’s was no exception.

Cangele smiled his ready, hard smile.

“I know what it is to be a family man. A husband. A father. And to my own bemusement, a recent grandfather,” he said. “It is with my growing brood in mind that the commitment I’ve made toward a democratic future for our nation is constantly renewed. It is for them I wish to see Gabon become a model of social and governmental reform on our continent… and in doing so, someday make dinosaurs of autocrats like myself and insatiable bought-out scoundrels such as you gentlemen.” He paused, the smile gradually dwindling from the corners inward. The fingers of his right hand tapped the photograph of Macie Nze, his left fist thumping his chest over the wax cloth shirt. “Still, I am African. My blood and heritage is African. I am therefore, by nature, an unromantic dreamer. The reality is that my plans for our republic have come under attack from forces of subversion and terror. And the attack must be repulsed. My pledge here is this: Stand with me now, as one, and you will have my fullest protection. Any past weaknesses you have shown will be excused. But let a single man in this room stand against me, continue his faithlessness, and you will see the offer pulled back from over you, leaving your heads open to whatever may fall on them — again as one. All of you will be reminded that I, too, know how to be terrible and threatening. Remember who I am, good sirs. Remember my African blood.”

A hush fell over the parlor. Though he’d continued to address the entire group as he concluded, the president’s eyes had momentarily snapped back to Assele-Ndaki. Now he shifted them to the death photograph of Macie Nze, slid it away from himself, calmly leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands over the great mound of his stomach.

The silence stretched out a while longer. His face mild, Cangele studied the section of tabletop he had cleared of the photograph.

Assele-Ndaki drank from his glass, a long swallow. He knew the question had been left for him to ask.

“How will our unity be announced?” Despite the water moistening his throat, his voice seemed to be issuing from the smallest pinhole.

Cangele smiled, as much to himself as to the others in the room. Quiet and impassive since Assele-Ndaki’s arrival, one of the presidential aides turned toward the assemblyman and regarded him with sudden interest, as if having become aware of his presence for the first time.

“We have arranged for an article to appear in the morning paper,” he said.

Pete Nimec and Vince Scull waited under the hot yellow sun in the market of Le Grand Village, holding pain beurre they had bought on their way into the plaza, the pan fried, heavily buttered breads greasy in their wax-paper wraps. There were throngs of people around them. Hawkers, shoppers, beggars. Many of the latter were children with the filmy stares of oncho—a parasitic river blindness — who squatted at the periphery of the square. In a wildlife dealer’s stall some yards to the right, a bright green parrot fluttered on its perch in a crude screen cage atop a display table fashioned of two wooden barrels that had been bound together with a thick hemp rope. Fluffs of emerald down clung to the cage’s rusty metal bars like dandelion seeds. The newspapers lining the bottom of the cage were covered with a thick dry encrustation of droppings and cracked nut shells. A second parrot lay unmoving in the layer of waste, dead or close to dead. In a bloody canvas sack hanging from a post above the cage, an unseen creature released a shrill animal cry as it thrashed repeatedly against the cloth in a vain struggle to free itself.

Nimec turned from the stall, swallowing a bite of his fry bread without appetite. It was like he’d hurled the food down into a ditch. The happy traveler.

He desperately missed Annie and the kids.

He looked over Scull’s shoulder toward the north end of the outdoor market and spotted Steve DeMarco and Andy Wade approaching through a crowded aisle. They were a conspicuous pair. Both men had on pastel short-sleeved shirts, while the Gabonese strongly preferred colorful prints… or simple undyed kaftans in the case of the population’s devout Muslims. DeMarco’s whiteness and Wade’s blackness made them even easier standouts. Whites in this country were almost always foreigners — expats or short-term visitors — and lived in a sort of proximate separation with the nationals. Stranger that he was here, Nimec’s study of his mission briefs, and his first-hand impressions of the place, pointed toward very little true social mingling between people of different races. They shared the same streets, stayed at the same hotels, and ate at the same restaurants in self-segregated clusters. What interactions they had seemed driven mainly by commerce and politics.

The relaxed companionability of the two Sword ops as they walked together would leave observers with scant doubt they were of another place and culture.

Scull had noticed Nimec looking past him.

“See anybody?” he said.

“Yeah,” Nimec said. “DeMarco and Wade.”

Scull grunted and bit into his fry bread. He was sweating profusely, his sparse hair pasted to his head, dark rings of moisture staining the underarms of his shirt.

“Ackerman’s on his way in, too,” he said. “Coming from behind you.”

Nimec gave him a nod. That accounted for everybody except Conners, who was decoying.

He and Scull waited in the pressing afternoon heat and humidity. After a few moments the men reached them.

They exchanged nods.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Scull said.

DeMarco looked briefly at him, then turned to Nimec.

“You think we ought to take a walk?” he said.

Nimec jerked his head slightly to indicate the surrounding crush of market buyers.

“I like it where we are,” he said. “Best place to be right now.”

DeMarco nodded his understanding. A congested area offered its own type of cover — the people in circulation around them would present a constant and changing impediment to an observer’s line of sight.

“Okay, let’s compare notes,” Nimec said to him.

“We were tailed.”

“Wheels or heels?”

“Wheels,” DeMarco said. “A-B.”

Meaning he and Wade had been subjects of a two-car vehicular surveillance.

“The lead driver was a cabbie outside the hotel,” Wade said, looking down as he spoke to partially mask his lips from view. “He wasn’t interested in fares, ignored a whole bunch of people at the stand. Pulls out behind us, follows slow and tight. Then he turns off, and somebody else in a regular car picks up the tail.”

“The hack show himself again?” Nimec said.

“Cruises by about five blocks farther on, disappears,” DeMarco said. “I think he might’ve been worried he got burned.”

Nimec stood in thoughtful silence.

“Heels for Scull and me,” he said after a moment. “A-B-C.”

Meaning the surveillance placed on them had consisted of a three-man foot team. And it hadn’t been half bad. There had been a man in an embroidered kufi hat and dashiki talking into a cell phone as he stepped from an apartment building near the hotel. Another two men in casual Western clothes, strolling together on the opposite side of the avenue, moving almost abreast of them. The men across the street had seemed to be conversing with each other, but then Nimec, noticing one of them wore an earbud headset, realized he was also on a cellular. Just as Dashiki had passed Nimec and Scull and turned into a store, Earbud crossed to their side of the avenue, dropping back, taking Dashiki’s position at the rear. A few blocks later they pulled another switch. Earbud quickening his pace, then passing. Dashiki reappearing behind them, trailing them again, a quick shopper that one. Meanwhile, lo and behold, Earbud’s friend had kept pace across the avenue. The leapfrogging had continued almost the entire way to the market.

Nimec glanced at Ackerman.

“How about you?” he said.

“A pair of gendarmes in a patrol car,” Ackerman said. He was shaking his head in the negative, a ploy to confuse hidden eyes. “Right up until I got into the market.”

Nimec kept looking at him. “You sure?”

“Positive. Black uniforms. They split off after Conners.”

Nimec was quiet again. When DeMarco had told him about being caught on camera at the Rio, the first thing to enter his mind was the possibility of corporate espionage. Several Asian and European telecom carriers had been competing to become the African fiber ring’s savior when Planétaire went belly up, and it was conceivable one or more of them could have gotten upset enough to go over the top when UpLink won its contract with the Gabonese government, figuring they could still gum up the deal. There were also various national lobbying groups that had joined in opposition to yet another dominant foreign company moving in its assets and tried to block UpLink’s entry with a passel of legislative maneuvers once they happily bade adieu to Planétaire. A few were still making moves despite the ruling party’s obvious support. Any of these interests, or combination of interests, could have decided to do some peeping.

Except Nimec had nothing but questions about what their game might be. Add them to the questions he’d been left with after talking to Pierre Gunville, and there were more than he could count… though bundling them all together in his head was almost certainly a bad idea. He had a vague mistrust of Gunville, but at this stage, it was merely that. Nimec didn’t know whether it meant Gunville was connected to anything he needed to be concerned about, let alone to whoever was messing with UpLink. The truth was he didn’t know what was going on. But the involvement of the gendarmerie was heavy, and he would need to start producing some answers fast.

Nimec took a bite of his fry bread and chewed. Happy, happy business traveler enjoying a treat on his off day… and how was he to know talking with a mouth full of food was hell on lip readers?

“The termite that hopped out at you this morning,” he said. “You know the real problem?”

DeMarco indicated he did with a grunt as he shook his head no, borrowing Ackerman’s little mixed signal trick.

“For every one you spot, there’s a hundred more you don’t,” he said. “If they’re infesting us, we’d need a Big Sniffer to find all of them.”

Nimec swallowed perfunctorily. The Big Sniffer was Sword’s most sophisticated countermeasure sweep unit. But the device was hardly inconspicuous. Used with a boomerang antenna for scanning walls and other surfaces, its microcomputer-controlled instrumentation was carried in what amounted to a medium-size hardshell suitcase.

“If the termites on the surface twitch their feelers, they’ll stir up the nest,” he said, wiping his lips with his napkin. “We’d get rid of the soldiers and workers, but the breeding colony would just go deeper into the wood.”

DeMarco nodded.

“I’ve been hashing that over,” he said. “And I haven’t come up with a solution.”

Scull shrugged.

“Think garnets,” he said.

DeMarco looked at him.

“And ilmenites,” Scull said.

DeMarco continued to stare.

“Think what?” he said.

“Garnets. Ilmenites. Diamond hunters look for ’em when they analyze soil samples from termite mounds here in Africa,” Scull explained, as if the termite reference would surely make the pertinence of his declarations clear. “They aren’t worth much by themselves, but come from the same underground layers as diamonds. Termites carry tiny ones up from something like a hundred fifty feet underground, where their breeders live, and deposit them in their little hills. That’s how the Orapa mine in Botswana, richest in the world, got discovered.”

DeMarco remained clueless. As did the others.

“I have to confess, Vince,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Nimec was thoughtful. The fact was, neither did he.

Scull frowned, put an arm around Nimec’s shoulders, turned a hundred eighty degrees to his right, and gestured at random toward a vender’s stall. Nimec squared around with him as though to study an item of mutual interest, gazed absently at a woman selling thick cuts of bush meat. They were laid out on a table in the open sunlight, under netting meant to repel clusters of large black flies. The handwritten signs on the table behind them read: MALLE DE ÉLÉPHANT, SERVEAU DE SINGE.

“Elephant trunks, monkey brains,” Scull said, translating aloud. “In case you’re interested in buying, the monkeys around here can carry ebola.”

“Thanks.”

“Any time.” Scull pursed his lips and spouted air up over his face to dry off some sweat, simultaneously fanning himself with one hand. “That problem you mentioned… it occurs to me the best idea might be we don’t do anything.”

Nimec looked at him in silence a moment. Then his eyes narrowed.

“Leave the termites alone?”

Scull squeezed his arm, his expression that of a teacher who had broken through to a slow but earnest student.

“There you go, Petey. We wait. Keep the lights off. Let those droops keep working away figuring they’re safe in the dark,” he said, using Scullian shorthand for “dirty rotten snoops.” “The stuff they leave behind’s worthless crap, ’long as we know it’s there.”

“But it tells us where to find the diamonds.”

“You got it. When we’re ready, we dig down into the nests where the breeders are crawling around and make sure to bring along our cans of Raid… you remember the slogan from those old TV ads?”

Nimec looked at him.

Kills bugs dead, he thought.

DeMarco had joined them in pretending to be interested in the meat seller, comprehension dawning across his features as he listened.

“What do you think?” Nimec asked him.

“If we run with Scull’s idea,” he said, “I’m guessing our execs and engineers would need to be informed.”

Nimec gave him a nod. They would. Informed of everything. So they could know what not to say and do in the false privacy of their hotel rooms or elsewhere.

“It might not appeal much to them,” DeMarco said. “I can testify getting naked in the shower this morning wasn’t a comfortable experience. And the rest of my personal business was even less fun.”

“You don’t need to get graphic on us,” Scull said. “I just ate.”

Nimec looked at them.

“Unless somebody’s got a better solution,” he said, “they’ll have to live with it. The same as we will.”

DeMarco took a deep breath, blew the air out with a long sigh.

“I’d hate to be the one who tells that to Tara Cullen,” he said.

Aboard the Chimera, Harlan DeVane stood looking west over the deck rail as the evening sun swooned into the sea, its sputtering tropical fire reflected in orange dabs on the water’s surface.

DeVane’s fingers wanted to tighten around his black line cell phone, but he resisted the angry urge, willing the hand to remain steady.

“This word you’ve gotten from your source at the newspaper,” he said into the cellular’s mouthpiece. “There is no question about its accuracy?”

“No,” Etienne Begela said from his end of their connection. “A declaration of multiparty government ratification of the telecom licenses is to be announced on the front page of tomorrow morning’s edition. In accordance with the Cangele agenda, they are to be ratified without further review for a minimum of fifteen years. All key members of the president’s parliamentary opposition have adopted a revised stance in his favor, and there is to be a public display of solidarity in the capital.” A pause. “I hold in my hand a facsimile of the article’s first draft. It is to appear in L’Union.”

“The government’s voice.”

“Correct.”

DeVane thought in silence, felt the mild heaving of the deck under his feet. The still air smelled of brine and throbbed faintly with the sound of the offshore pumps.

This would look bad for him, and he could not afford it. Not once more could he afford it. While he had always expected his endeavors here would be of finite duration, he would need time to maximize their profitability. And winning it meant taking a calculated gamble.

“When is the UpLink team to tour the headquarters site in Sette Cama?”

“Also tomorrow.”

“Their head of security will be among those going?”

“As it stands, yes. I’ve readied the contingency plan for implementation.”

“Its threads must not lead to me. Nor anywhere close.”

“That was of highest importance, naturellement. My only concern is its amplitude. That the scope of its enactment will lead them to look beyond appearances.”

Of course it would, DeVane thought. It was what he wanted — something to stagger and confuse UpLink at its moment of success, and foster insecurities among its financial backers. Let them imagine their enemies coming from all sides, and wonder who they were… so long as the answers to their questions remained entwined in mystery.

DeVane stared out at the dying sunlight and nodded. Begela made for the perfect functionary; his mind was like an orderly desk drawer in a drab office. Reach inside, and you would find every needed supply in the right place, but never a single surprise.

“Proceed,” he said, and did not wait for a response before terminating the call and going below to send Kuhl his notification.

Big Sur. The balance of the day trembling at midnight’s edge. Occasional breezes blowing across the open canyon from the sea, strong and thick with moisture, blurring the long drop down in kettle swirls of mist.

Siegfried Kuhl sat before his notebook computer, reading an e-mail he had received only moments ago, his rigid features bathed in the amber firelight of a kerosene storm lamp on the living-room mantel. Around his desk, the huge black Schutzhund dogs lay quiet. Two of them slept, their sides rising and falling with their slow, regular breaths. The third watched the cabin door at Kuhl’s back. It was a pack instinct reinforced through training. By turns, one of the shepherds would remain awake and vigilant at all times.

The coded message displayed in front of Kuhl said:

In European folklore, the song of the cuckoo heard in September or October — when the hedge is brown — is an ill portent to farmers. An omen that the autumn food harvest is imperiled, warning them to be ready to take counteractive measures, and fill their stores with that which is most precious for survival throughout the long, cold months to come.

Kuhl stared at the computer. His time, then, was coming. Coming very soon.

He closed his e-mail program and opened his digital image viewer. Arranged in several rows across the screen now were scrupulously labeled folders of photographic stills. Kuhl opened one of them, selecting an image set of a blond woman he knew to be of early middle age, although his eyes glinted with cold appreciation of her exceptionally youthful appearance. Tall, slender, elegant, and stylishly dressed, Ashley Gordian possessed the refined beauty that came of good genes and exquisite care.

The first series of high-resolution frames showed her lunching with another woman at an outdoor café. In the next, Kuhl saw her through the clear glass walls of Palo Alto’s main library branch on Newell Street, the camera following her as she checked out her pile of books at the loan desk and carried them onto the patio. The next group was taken from outside a clothing boutique. Through its storefront window, she had been photographed at the sales counter signing for a credit card purchase, then smiling at the cashier as she was handed her bags, then carrying them to the door. On the street, she had walked directly to her parked Lexus sedan and driven off with her purchases in the backseat.

There were more images of Ashley Gordian that Kuhl could have examined. Dozens more. Ciras and the others had recorded her movements on camera for almost two weeks, storing and sorting them in computer memory, e-mailing the encrypted files to him in Madrid.

But it was not the wife he leaned toward targeting.

Kuhl reached for his glass of mild wine and drank. Then he closed the folder he had been browsing, moved down a row, and selected another.

In this one, he found the daughter. She was lovely in her own right. Slim, dark haired, a firm well-proportioned body. Kuhl saw echoes of the mother in her — the smooth skin, the large green eyes, a certain underlying confidence in the lift of her shoulders, the straightness with which she bore herself.

He carefully studied the numbered screen shots in front of him. They composed a sequential record of Julia Gordian’s daily patterns of activity. An album of mundane, forgettable events that would allow Kuhl to plan and execute the unforgettable. There were images of the daughter in the company of friends, male and female. There were images of her shopping for groceries, bringing clothes to the dry cleaner, visiting the post office. There were images of her driving out to the canine rescue shelter where she volunteered her services, turning onto its hidden country drive outside the state park’s verdant spread of woodland. There were images of her pulling the vehicle into her garage on her return home. And images taken through her bedroom window. Kuhl studied these for a while, sipped his wine, then moved on. One series of photos followed her as she left the house in jogging clothes, the two race hounds attached to their leash at her side. They seemed to vibrate with tension, their taut whiplike forms emphasizing their predisposition toward flight. Nature had given them swiftness at the expense of courage; their breed was wind without stone. Faced with a threat, they would offer no protection, but attempt to escape from harm. Kuhl could almost see the fear glazing their eyes as they were pounced, their throat-blood spilling over the clamp of toothy jaws.

Kuhl stared at his computer screen and contemplated his mission in silence.

Find what Roger Gordian most loves. Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.

But if his heart’s utmost love were shared in equal measure by wife and child? Where then to deal the piercing blow?

The wife was a viable prospect, yes. Because she was often in the hardened security of Gordian estate, or with Gordian himself, she would be the lesser target of opportunity as a practical matter. But Kuhl’s surveillance also indicated she regularly ventured off alone — and on those instances there would be openings.

Practicality, however, could not be a determinant. Kuhl had studied Gordian for years now. Hard target or soft, he would go after whichever won him the ultimate objective. And for that reason he was leaning toward the daughter for maximum effect.

Gordian’s marriage stood on a commitment made by two. On assumptions of mutual responsibility; paired choices, hopes, and dreams. And paired risks. Take the wife, and some part of the foundation they had built together might survive, leave Gordian with the spirit to recover. But the child was meant to carry the future on her wings. The risks they had chosen for themselves were not hers to bear. And this child. This daughter. Strong, living freely, forward-moving and sure of herself…

With his daughter held hostage, Gordian would be paralyzed, unable to function. And when her wings were crushed, and the hopes and dreams she embodied died in Kuhl’s clenched fist, it would irreparably break Gordian, ruin him in every way.

Kuhl sat silently in the lamplight as the marine fog crawled up against his cabin windows and unsettled gusts of wind whipped across its roof. Eyes alert, ears pricked, the watchful black shepherd canted its head up toward the creaking beams and rafters.

After a time Kuhl tapped the keyboard of his laptop and once again accessed Harlan DeVane’s secure e-mail server. Then he typed:

A robin red-breast in a cage, Puts all heaven in a rage.

The message sent, Kuhl turned off his computer and sat still again.

Outwardly, he appeared to be relaxed in his chair.

At his center, he felt Destiny’s great spoked wheel rumble heavily through a momentous turn.