Politika

THIRTY

The sex was quick and dirty. So was the conversation that preceded it—“dirty,” in this instance, meaning distorted and semiaudible on playback.

It wasn’t the fault of the recording equipment. Nick Roma had simply been speaking in a low voice when the woman in the black leather coat entered his office.

“Let’s see that part again,” Barnhart said.

“You mean when he’s behind her, or on top?”

“Don’t get smart.”

“I’ll cue it up from where it’s still rated PG, and just about to segue into triple-X,” the thin, long-haired man at the audio-video processor said with a mock frown. He pushed a button on his console, and Barnhart heard the faint whir of the hard disk spinning in the silence.

They were in a sound studio in the basement of the Sword headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Barnhart and the techie seated shoulder-to-shoulder at the workstation, Pete Nimec and Noriko Cousins standing behind them.

Barnhart leaned stiffly forward in his chair, feeling his stitches pull under the bandages around his midsection. His wound still gave him a lot of discomfort, but the bleeding had made it look more critical than it actually turned out to be. Though a long, shallow furrow had been plowed into his right side, the slug had been deflected from his internal organs by a ridge of hard muscle before exiting. According to the emergency room physician his superb physical condition was what saved him.

“You think you can get us to what he’s saying?” Nimec asked.

“If I hadn’t been reasonably certain the audio streams could be cleaned up to your exacting demands, I wouldn’t have bothered committing this blue romp into digital form,” the man at the workstation said. “After all, the moans of ecstasy were already loud and clear enough to get my motor running.”

Nimec and Noriko exchanged looks of pained commiseration. Jeff Grolin was one of the most skilled forensic A/V specialists in the country — Megan wouldn’t have snagged him for their organization if he wasn’t — but he was also a vexingly juvenile pain in the buttocks. Was social maladjustment something that people in his field acquired, a sort of professional hazard, Nimec wondered, or some intrinsic characteristic of those with a high degree of technical aptitude?

“Okay, guys and gal, hold onto your cookies,” Grolin said, fiddling with a dial. “It’s Nick Roma’s Big Adventure, alternately titled Badguy Lust. Scene one, take two.”

Their eyes turned toward the workstation’s twenty-one-inch monitor.

On the screen, a door opened into Roma’s office and the woman came in, then stepped toward the lens of the stationary surveillance camera. Her dark hair was pulled back, her lips were parted, and she moved with an apparent awareness of her body and the reaction it elicited from the man she was approaching.

The date/time stamp on the lower left-hand corner of the image read: “01.01.2000 1:00 A.M.”

Nimec studied the woman intently. Though the room’s fluorescents were dimmed, there was sufficient ambient light coming in from the windows to reveal her features without any sort of computer enhancements. In fact, a still image had already been extracted from the video footage and was being cross-indexed with Sword’s file of known and suspected international terrorists.

“You could have knocked,” Roma said through compact Audix speakers. At this point only the back of his head was visible.

“Yes. 1 could have.” Shutting the door.

“There’s a light switch on the wall…”

“Bounce it to where it’s been giving us trouble,” Barnhart said, watching.

“Sure,” Jeff said. His finger stabbed a button with the double-arrow fast-forward symbol on it. “Though I personally get a charge out of the suggestive dialogue during the buildup — clichéd as it may be.”

The video zipped ahead.

Grolin hit Play again.

Now the woman was much closer to the desk, her coat partially unbuttoned, unmistakable desire in her expression.

“Why are you here?” Roma said, and then paused. His voice had become husky, dropping to a near whisper.

“Right. Like he’s really that clueless,” Grolin commented. “The guy’s choking on his own drool—”

“Shhh, this is it,” Noriko said.

“Yno… zrrywn’t… hvyrrpstl… mrrow… pssed… syight.”

“It’s still nothing but gobbledygook,” Barnhart said.

“That’s because I haven’t worked my electronic wizardry yet.” Grolin froze the image, then shifted his hands to a smaller console which consisted of more dials and pitch slides, as well as a dozen or so keys the size of the Tab button on a standard computer keyboard.

As his fingers clicked over the keys, a tool bar appeared across the top of the screen and the video image shrank into a window, with graphical level meters and editing controls appearing to its right.

“Now, let’s try it again, giving it a little mid-range gain, eliminating some audio dither.”

Grolin hit Rewind, Pause, then Play.

“Why are you here?” Roma said from the speakers. Paused.

Grolin quickly tweaked a dial, and then another, his eyes narrow behind the intentionally nerdish horn-rimmed glasses.

Roma said, “You know… zarry… wnnt have your parrrrrsrdy until tomorrow—”

Grolin stopped the progress of the virtual image, ran it backward to the point just before Roma’s voice dropped off in volume, started it going forward again.

His fingers clattered over the buttons of his console. Graph lines and status bars rose and fell in the edit window.

“Why are you here?” Roma husked. “You know zakrry won’t have your papers rdy until tomorrow. And 1 don’t suppose you’ve just come to syngnnnight.”

“You hear that?” Barnhart jerked his head around toward Nimec, wincing in pain from the abrupt movement. “He’s talking about providing her with papers. Presumably travel documents.”

“I’ll bet,” Nimec said. “That son of a bitch facilitated the attack from beginning to end.”

“Speaking of which,” Grolin said, “one more run-through, and I’ll have every last word on this tape popping out at us like braille.”

Noriko’s fingertips rapped an impatient quintuplet against the back of Barnhart’s chair.

“Come on,” she said. Thinking: Aggravating twerp.

Grolin rewound, paused, played, tinkered with his MIDI controls.

“Why are you here?” Nick Roma said to the woman unbuttoning in front of him. “You know Zachary won’t have your papers ready until tomorrow. And I don’t suppose you’ve just come to say good night.”

“By Jove, and fucking-A, I think we’ve got it,” Grolin said. “Who’s Zachary, by the way?”

Nimic was looking at Barnhart. “You think that’s a first or last name?”

Barnhart shook his head. “Could be either, but I’ll ask around. My guess is he’d be one of Roma’s forgers. Or somebody who works for one of his forgers. Roma’s steadiest, ugliest source of income is the flesh trade. Smuggling desperately poor women from Russia to America as prostitutes… essentially sex slaves… with fraudulent visas and identification. That’s also how the organizatsiya imports its soldiers and hit men.”

“The bunch that did the job in Times Square would have wanted out of the country pronto,” Noriko said. “We find this Zachary, seems logical he’d be able to lead us to them.”

“Or steer us in their direction, anyway,” Barnhart said. “And that’s providing we can get him… or her, now that I think about it… to talk.”

“Leave the second part to me,” Nimec said, his eyes still on Barnhart. “How soon can you dig up the information we need?”

“Won’t take long, assuming we’re right about this person’s specialty and connection to Roma. I know G-men, detectives on the NYPD, even people in the Attorney General’s Office, who keep tabs on every player of importance in Roma’s outfit. And who’ll talk to me no questions asked.”

“Make sure that’s the way it is,” Nimec said. “I’ve been pulling strings for two days to see that the record of your ER treatment gets erased before it’s released to the police. I don’t want anybody tumbling to our investigation.”

Barnhart nodded, started to push himself up off the chair, but then sank back into it, obviously hurting.

“If one of you’d give me a hand, I’ll head upstairs to my office and start making some calls,” he said.

“And miss the climax to the flick?” Grolin said. “I plan on repeating it in its prurient entirety.”

Noriko looked at him with sharp irritation.

“Jeff, trust me,” she said. “You’ll have a much better time watching it alone.”

Roger Gordian sat alone, with his cell phone in his hand. With all the chaos at work, with all the emergencies he had to react to, plan for, juggle, and worry about, his home situation was threatening to overwhelm him.

He loved his wife.

His wife had left him.

It had been nearly three weeks, and she hadn’t come home, and she hadn’t called.

Sometimes he felt like marriage was a game in which women made the rules and the poor slobs who married them had to figure those rules out blindfolded.

He still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong.

The things he felt for the woman he married had never faltered from the moment he saw her. They’d changed, but only to become richer and deeper.

The better he came to know her, the more he loved her.

And the more he realized he would never solve the mystery of her.

In all the years since they’d been together, he’d never once felt more than a fleeting tug of attraction to the beautiful women who moved through the corridors of power. Like any man, he’d see a pretty woman and his basic reaction was immediate. But acting on those feelings was out of the question. No matter how beautiful they were, they weren’t Ashley.

She was as beautiful to him for who she was as for what she looked like.

He’d had more than enough sex, especially during his fighter jock days, to learn the difference between that momentary tug of attraction and the real thing.

Love. Commitment. Marriage.

He’d been scared to death of all of them, terrified he’d miss out on the fabulous smorgasbord of women in the world, until the day he met Ashley.

He learned the difference the first time they touched.

What he couldn’t understand was that she didn’t believe that he loved her still. Even more than he had when they first married. Why didn’t she understand that?

That wasn’t fair. Deep down, he knew what the problem was.

Time.

He’d had it to spend with her back when they were first starting out. The business was smaller then, the problems manageable.

Nowadays, it felt like the fate of the free world was impacted every time he made a decision. It was kind of hard to justify chucking it all and going home at the end of a business day when kids in Russia wouldn’t eat if he left things undone.

But had he ever taken the time to explain that to her?

It was time that he did.

He picked up his cell phone and dialed Ashley’s sister in San Francisco.

Even before her sister Ann handed her the telephone, Ashley Gordian knew by the look on her face that it was Roger. Nobody but her husband could bring that tight look of disapproval to her sister’s face with a simple greeting.

It had been like that ever since the beginning. Back then, Roger had been young, driven, and — by Ann’s standards — poor as a church mouse. Not nearly good enough for her baby sister. She’d been opposed to the marriage before she’d even met the man. All the respect, the acclaim, the financial success Roger had accumulated had never changed Ann’s mind. In her posh world, it was all too new to count.

But Ashley had taken one look at the burning intensity in Roger’s eyes and known she’d found her soulmate. And she’d been right. She’d married the man, not the pedigree, and she’d never regretted it. She loved Roger. In every way that a woman could love a man. And for the past twenty years she’d built her life around him. It wasn’t a sacrifice, despite what her sister said. He was such a good man, so caring about the world, and so fiercely determined to make it a better place. But that world had been stealing him from her, bit by bit, moment by moment.

In the last few years, she’d seen less of Roger than she’d seen of her hairdresser. And, unlike many of the society women she knew, she didn’t spend that much time with her hairdresser. Though she’d given up her own career to more easily accommodate her schedule to that of her husband, she had a life, a good mind. But when Roger was free, she didn’t want her own activities to fill that precious time and keep them apart. She wanted to be able to be with him, talk to him, enjoy his presence. She wanted to be able to drop everything and accompany him on his frequent business trips, if he wanted her along.

But lately, he’d been so busy that, no matter how flexible she was, she still rarely saw him. She’d tried to fill her time with volunteer activities and subsist on the moments they spent together, but those moments were now often in the middle of the night, as she watched him sleep after he’d come in so exhausted he could barely manage to say hello before he crashed. Her life was hollow, empty, lacking in purpose.

Roger had his work.

She had nothing, not even Roger.

It was too much. She’d used this time at her sister’s house to do some hard thinking. For her own survival, she had to change things. One of them had to give. Roger had to make more time for her, for them, or she’d have to make a life on her own.

As she took the phone from her sister, she took a deep breath. “Roger?”

“How are you, Ashley? I’ve missed you.”

Trite words, perhaps, but Ashley could tell he meant them. As she rejoiced in the sound of his voice, she wondered how long it had been since he’d spoken to her like this, since he had really listened to her. Too long. It hurt to think about exactly how long. “I’m surprised you even noticed I was gone,” she said.

“Believe me, I noticed,” he said. “You’re not at the breakfast table. 1 start every day missing you, and it gets worse from there.” Roger sounded so tired.

“Since when do you eat breakfast at home?” Ashley asked quietly. “Usually, you’re out of the house before seven, grabbing something on the way to the office.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line as Roger digested that. Knowing him, he’d want to deny it; then, because he was a fair man, he’d start counting back in his head. Roger’s memory was legendary, photographic. At this moment, he’d probably gotten to the hundredth muffin he’d consumed at his desk, and he was now starting to count back through fruit plates and toasted bagels. The silence stretched on, a little strained.

“You’re right.” The admission undoubtedly hurt him like fire.

“I know I am.”

“It was never because I didn’t love you.” Roger swallowed. The sound carried clearly over the line. “No matter what I’m doing, I’d always rather be spending time with you.”

“Then why don’t you? How many meals have we shared in the past six months?”

Again, silence. Finally, the answer. “Thirty-eight?”

“Subtract banquets, political functions, work-related functions, and parties.” Ashley knew this wasn’t fair, but she was fighting for time and life with the man she loved. “By my reckoning, the answer comes to eighteen — three meals a month.”

“I know it’s hard for you, but it’s been tough for me, too.” Roger stopped for a moment, clearly picking his words with care. “I don’t always have the freedom to make my own choices.”

“Why not? You own the company.”

“Lately, with the ground stations going in, I’ve been so embroiled with politics worldwide that my time isn’t my own. Once this stage is over, things should get better.”

“And how many times have you told yourself — and me — that before? Will they really get better, or will you just launch into the next big project once you get some breathing room?” Ashley wanted to cry, could hear in her voice the sound of tears too close to the surface. She could only hope that Roger was too preoccupied with his own pain to notice.

“I know I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it.”

“Roger,” Ashley said, “you mean it every time. I probably don’t tell you this enough, but I am so proud of you — of who you are and what you’ve done. I know that everything you’ve accomplished out in the world makes a huge difference to people everywhere. I know that it’s your calling, something you have to do. What I don’t know is if I’m strong enough to wait until you’re done.”

“Ashley, all the success in the world doesn’t matter to me if you’re not by my side to share it.”

“Do you mean that?” Ashley felt that faint, terrible thread of hope. Maybe, just maybe, they could work this out. “Can you come up here, spend some time with me, maybe go to a therapist with me until we find some common ground?”

There was a long pause. Again she could hear Roger swallow, take a deep breath. “Honey, work is in a real uproar right now. There are global consequences if I leave at this exact moment… maybe in a week or two?”

“And in a week or two some new hot spot will erupt, and you’ll be called in to deal with it — because you’re the best.” The tears she’d kept at bay through the whole conversation finally overflowed. “You’re the best,” she sobbed, “and I don’t know what I can do about it. I love you. Good-bye.” Before she could change her mind, she pushed the Disconnect button on the phone. Then she put her head in her hands and sobbed as though there were no tomorrow. Because for her and Roger, that might just be the case.