Ruthless.Com

Chapter Seventeen

"This," Noriko cousins said, "is one amazing room."

Nimec reached for the little blue cube of chalk on the bridge of the pool table.

"So people tell me," he said, rubbing the chalk on the tip of his cue stick with a circular motion. "It's where I come to loosen up, get my thoughts right."

They were in the billiard parlor on the upper level of his San Jose triplex, a painstaking recreation of the smoky South Philadelphia halls where he'd spent his youth ducking truant officers, while pursuing an education of a sort that certainly wouldn't have moved them to reexamine his delinquent status. But in those days Nimec had only cared about one man's approbation, and in attempting to gain it had been a most attentive student… or, as he liked to put it, if SATs and grade-point averages could measure one's aptitude at bank shots, combinations, and draw English, he'd have been a shoe-in for a full college scholarship.

At any rate, he'd captured every detail of the old place — at least as filtered through the subjective lens of his recollection — from the cigarette burns on the green baize tabletops to the soda fountain, swimsuit calendars, milky plastic light fixtures, and Wurlitzer juke stacked with vintage forty-fives circa 1968, a machine he'd picked up for a song at an antique auction and which, after some minor repairs, could still shake and rattle the room to its ceiling beams with three selections for a quarter.

Right now it was belting out Cream's cover of the old blues standard "Crossroads." Clapton's improvised guitar lead slipped around Jack Bruce's bass line like hot mercury, taking Nimec back, conjuring up a memory of his old pal Mick Cunningham, a few years his senior and newly back from a hitch in Nam, bopping between rows of regulation tables, raving about Clapton being fucking huge in Saigon.

Mick, who'd had a problem with junk, which had also been fucking huge in Saigon, had been shivved to death in a prison exercise yard in '75 while doing a nickel for attempted robbery, his first offense, a heavy sentence by anyone's standards.

"One ball, over there," Nimec called, waggling his stick at the left corner pocket in the foot rail. He had won the opening break.

Noriko nodded.

He leaned over the side of the table and set the cue ball down within the head string, just shy of the center spot. Then he placed his right hand flat on the table's surface and slid the cue into the groove between his thumb and forefinger. Sighting down the length of the stick, he stroked twice in practice, then drove for the cushions on the opposite rail, giving the cue some left English and follow. The ball banked off the cushion at a slightly wider angle than he'd intended and hit the one thin, but still pocketed it neatly and scattered the triangular rack, leaving him with a couple of easy setups.

"You know what you're doing," Noriko said. When he'd shot, she thought, his eyes had shown the steely concentration of a marksman.

"I ought to," he said. "My father was the sharpest hustler in Philly. Shooting pool is what he did. His dream was that I'd carry on the family trade after he was gone, and I worked hard at learning it."

"Your mother have anything to say about that?"

"She wasn't around, maybe wasn't even alive. Blew the nest when I was three or four. Guess she wasn't impressed that I could count all my toes and fingers." He took his stance again. "Three ball, center pocket."

He aimed and shot, kissing his ball off the eleven. It pocketed with a solid chunk-chunk-chunk.

Noriko looked at him with mild wonder, waiting, twirling her stick vertically between her palms, its butt end on the floor. Nimec had always seemed the epitome of the straight-arrow cop — or ex-cop as the case happened to be. The side of her chief she was seeing was a revelation.

"If you don't mind my asking," she said, "how'd you wind up wearing a badge?"

Nimec faced her and shrugged.

"There was no dramatic turning point, if that's what you're curious about," he said. "Besides playing pool, our other favorite sport in the old neighborhood was hanging out on street corners and getting drunk and starting fights. Everybody wailed on everybody else, seven days a week… grown men pushing teenagers through windshields, teenagers pounding on little kids with trash cans, kids smashing bricks down on alley cats. It was hierarchical like that." He shrugged again. "I got tired of it after a while, and suppose the structure and the pay and the benefits of being a police officer appealed to me. One very typical day I took the exam and passed. A few months later I got my appointment, figured I'd see how it went at the Academy."

"And it went well," Noriko said.

"Yes," he said. "It did. And sort of killed my budding career as a pool shark."

He turned back to the table, called his next shot, and put it down the chute. On the juke "Crossroads" ended and Vanilla Fudge's rendition of "Keep Me Hangin' On" keyed up. Noriko waited.

"You know Max Blackburn?" Nimec asked, his eyes moving over the table.

"Only by reputation," she said. "He's supposed to be the best at what he does. Ever since Politika, everybody's been talking about him like he's Superman."

Nimec saw a possible combination rail shot at the eleven ball, and lined up for it.

"Max is a good man, no question," he said. "Enjoys connecting the dots to solve a problem, which is why I often use him as a troubleshooter. The past six months he's been assigned to the Johor Bharu ground station, taking care of a range of things, some of which were, shall we say, not for the record. And dicey." He looked over his shoulder at Noriko. "Almost a week ago he dropped out of sight in Singapore, and nobody's heard anything from him since."

She watched him without saying anything.

"Max would never stay out of contact this long unless something were very wrong," Nimec went on. "He's too dependable a man."

He took his shot, but his wrist tensed at the last instant and he stroked the cue harder than he'd wanted. The ball missed the hole and caromed off the cushion, too fast, its angle too narrow.

"The dicey stuff Blackburn was doing," Noriko said in a slow, considering voice. "Is it something we can talk about?"

"Later, certainly," he said. "First, though, I need to know if you'd be willing to head out to where he is. Or was. And help me track him down."

"I get a team?"

"Just me," Nimec said. "If we need support we can get it from the Johor crew."

She looked at him.

"I'd understand if you don't want to get involved," he said. "Your participation would be strictly voluntary."

"And off the record," she said.

"Right."

There was a pause.

"One question," she said. "Was I asked on this job because I won't stick out in a crowd of Asians, or because of my experience in the field?"

"You sensitive about your ethnicity?"

"Sensitivity has nothing to do with it. I'm half Japanese. It's a logical question. Was. It my slanted eyes or my ability?"

Nimec gave her a small, tight smile.

"Both," he said. "Your background might open some doors a little quicker. It might make certain things easier for us in certain situations, and with certain people. It's a leg up. But I wouldn't want you without knowing absolutely that I could trust you with my life, no matter how thick it gets."

She looked closely at his face a while, then nodded.

"I'm in," she said. "What's our game plan?"

"Step one, we finish playing pool. Step two, I clear our trip with Gordian. Step three, we go get our suitcases."

"And if the boss doesn't give us the go signal?"

Nimec considered that a moment.

"Max is my friend," he said. Firmly. "Which means we'd have to skip right on ahead to step three."

Early on the day Roger Gordian was scheduled to depart for Washington, he was joined by Chuck Kirby and Vince Scull in the glass-enclosed veranda of his Palo Alto home. The three of them were seated at a large cane table talking seriously over their breakfast, drinks, papers, and open briefcases. The morning was bright and warm, and there was a flower-scented breeze wafting in through the louvered panels. On a freestanding easel near the table was a chart Gordian had prepared for their meeting. His daughter Julia had stopped by to wish him luck in D. C., and brought the greyhounds with her, and she and Ashley were running them outside on the grass.

Gordian had just finished summarizing his plan, and could already see the unhappiness on Chuck's face. He waited until the attorney wasn't looking and checked his watch, thinking he had a good half hour before his third visitor showed, time enough to deal with Kirby's inevitable objections. Not that it would be easy.

He glanced out at the yard, bracing himself. Whipping downhill in pursuit of a tossed plastic rabbit, the dogs were curves of graceful motion against the greenness of the sprawling lawn. As usual Jack, the brindle male, had outsprinted Jill, the teal-blue female. Though both had been bred for the dog track, and Jill was sleeker and younger, her skittish temperament had disqualified her from competition, while Jack had run a great many races before he'd been retired.

Julia had gotten the dogs from a greyhound adoption program out of Orange County about six months ago. Had they not been rescued and placed, they would have been euthanized, which was the common practice of racetrack owners when their dogs were no longer competitive, whether for reasons of age, disposition, or any physical deficit that hampered their coursing performance. Gordian had been originally amazed to learn from his daughter that, on average, unadopted track dogs were retired and put down when they were five years old, having barely reached a third of their natural life expectancy.. and always when he watched their spirited and energetic play, the amazement returned in its fullness.

After all the acts of inhumanity he'd seen people carry out on other people, all the personal losses he'd accumulated as a result of war and terrorism, Gordian didn't know why such waste — lesser by far in the grand scheme of things — ought to surprise him anymore. But it did, and somehow he felt that was better than if it hadn't.

He took a sip of his coffee, and listened to Kirby begin arguing that he was about to commit the worst blunder of his life.

"Gord, I've heard every word you've spoken and tried my damnedest to keep an open mind," Chuck said. "But to do what you've proposed before considering a less extreme strategy—"

"Sometimes you have to lose a limb to preserve the health of the body," Gordian said. "Sometimes survival itself depends on it."

Kirby shook his head. "You're talking about wholesale dismemberment," he said. "Not the same."

Gordian's clear blue eyes were so calm it was almost unsettling. Like Moses after receiving the Ten Commandments, Kirby thought.

"Chuck, I haven't said this would be painless. And because you're my friend, I believe that pain is the thing you're trying to spare me," he said. "But I've already accepted it, you see. Mentally and emotionally, I've already let go."

"Let go? Of everything you built up over a decade? Everything you've worked your ass off to—"

"If you stop for a second you'll realize you're overreacting," Gordian said with unassailable forbearance.

Chuck turned to Scull. "Vince? Is that what you think? I know your analysis is that Gord's plan is doable, but my question is really whether it ought to be done. Whether you're endorsing it."

Scull nodded affirmatively.

"All we're asking is that you give us a chance here," he said. "Listen to what the coach has to say."

"And look at my graphic while you're at it," Gordian said. "Please."

Kirby pressed his lips together, breathed deeply through his nose, and looked. It was an organizational chart of UpLink broken down according to the market areas served by its corporate divisions and subsidiaries.

"As you pointed out yourself, Chuck, we've grown tremendously since the early nineties," Gordian said after letting him study the diagram. "When we secured the contract to provide our GAPSFREE missile-targeting system to the military, I knew the company's future was assured, and realized I was in the position I'd been hoping to reach all my life. I was successful and financially secure… my individual needs were taken care of… and that opened up a whole range of choices. Choices I'd never been able to consider before. Choices about how to put my money and energy into things that mattered to me, into making a positive difference in this world." He rose from the table and approached the easel, gesturing broadly at his chart. "My mistake was trying to do it in too many different ways."

"Heaven help us, you're sounding like Reynold Armitage," Kirby said. "And that gives me the chills."

Gordian smiled wanly. "We'd be foolish to discount his assessment of our strengths and weaknesses merely because the language in which he's couched it troubles us," he said. "It's always possible to learn from our enemies, and Armitage's essential point is valid. We need to look at the areas where we're bleeding away resources and liquidate them."

Kirby searched for a response, but Gordian continued speaking before he could think of one.

"Chuck, I'd be confident of our expertise in the defense business even if I didn't have the earnings to back me up," he said, placing his hand on the box at the diagram's upper left. "We're the best because I've been guided by my past experience as a combat pilot, and can remember the sort of technological improvements I'd have wanted when I was in the cockpit flying air strikes over Khe San." His hand moved one box to the right. "I also know our communications unit represents UpLink's tomorrow, irrespective of early-stage profits or losses on our investment… and that its potential has yet to be unlocked." He paused. "Those two are our core operations. The ones that are integral to what I want to accomplish. The ones we have to protect. But ask yourself, do we really belong in computers? Medical tech? Or how about specialty automotive? We only got into that because I wanted to make improvements to the factory-standard dune-hoppers we were using in our more rugged gateway locations."

"Which you did."

"And now that we've assembled a large fleet of vehicles, and our competition has incorporated our modifications into their own product — and in some cases outclassed us, if you want my frank opinion — why not release the company to management who can give it proper guidance? After all, its profitability as an UpLink company has been been marginal from the very beginning."

Kirby rubbed the back of his neck.

"I don't know," he said. "Putting aside the automotive unit for a minute, you've done well in the other supposedly nonessential areas. Just as a for-instance, the prosthetics subsidiary meets both of your fundamental criteria for an UpLink company. It helps people and makes money. The artificial limbs it produces are first-rate and have captured a respectable share of the global market—"

"And I'm very proud of that," Gordian said. "But my passion and knowledge don't lay in medicine. I've shortchanged the division in terms of personal attention, and have never quite gotten my market bearings. And the R&D budget for our biotech firm eats up something like forty million a year."

"Which is not at all excessive," Kirby said. "Your people are working on new drug therapies for everything from male impotence to cancer. Cutting-edge research costs money, but the financial and humanitarian payoff from a single major pharmaceutical advance certainly justifies the initial expenses."

"I'd agree with you if this were a normal, as opposed to a predatory, business environment," Gordian said. "The fact, however, is that we are under attack and need to focus. Because the medical division is in the red, it is lowering the valuation of UpLink's shares. As it stands, if I want the medical operation to continue, my choices are to either slash its budget or sustain it with the profits we earn from, say, our avionics branch. Money that could otherwise go toward higher-performance transmitters and receivers for our cellular network, or reducing the debts we incurred after the Russian debacle… and face it, Chuck, those are just two of many obvious examples I could offer."

Kirby drank his Bloody Mary and was quiet a while. On the lawn one of the greyhounds had caught the plastic rabbit and flashed behind an alderberry bush, where it was throttling the toy between its jaws. The sound of its squeaker had apparently gotten the other dog envious, and it was jumping antic circles around the hedge. Standing nearby, Ashley Gordian and her daughter looked like they were having fun.

He wished he could have said the same for himself.

"Gord, listen to me," Kirby said at length. "If I read you correctly, your strategy for averting a takeover is based on the assumption that the value of UpLink stock, and thus shareholder confidence, will be boosted once you've gotten back to basics and released capital to your most profitable ventures. Ordinarily I'd agree that it's a sound defensive approach, since a higher corporate valuation will curb sell-offs, force up a hostile acquirer's bid, and make him wonder if his move is worth the trouble and drain on his checkbook. Except this is no ordinary situation. Marcus Caine has already obtained a large chunk of UpLink stock. He's committed. Furthermore, UpLink's market decline has less to do with any real or perceived overdiversification than with investor fears that your stance on crypto will put you way behind rivals who are eager to sell overseas. And since you're obviously not going to sell off your cryptography firm—"

"Who says?" Gordian interrupted, the patient, forbearing expression back on his face.

Kirby looked at him a moment, then turned briefly toward Vince Scull.

"Both of you are shitting me here, right?" he said.

Scull shook his head.

Taken aback, Kirby waited a minute before saying anything more.

"Gord, I don't understand," he said disbelievingly. "You've fought so hard to maintain control of your cryptographic technology… to turn it over to someone else… to chance that it will be distributed abroad…" He spread his hands. "You've never quit a fight before. I can't believe you'd do it under any circumstances."

"Not just any," Gordian said. "Chuck, I—"

Gordian broke off, his eyes going to the sliding doors that opened from the house to the veranda. Andrew, his domestic, had appeared with Richard Sobel, the third guest he'd been expecting for breakfast.

"Sir, I've shown Mr. Sobel in as you asked," Andrew said.

"Morning," Sobel said, tipping the other men a wave.

Gordian motioned him to an empty chair at the table. "You're right on schedule, Rich," he said. "Join the party."

Kirby gave Gordian a level glance, saw his spreading grin, and suddenly understood everything.

"You can relax now, Chuck," Gordian said* his smile growing even larger. "Our White Knight has arrived to save the day."