Shadow Watch

FIVE

The bald eagle launched from the tall trees downhill to their right, soaring above the old pilings at the marshy tidal band, its long outspread wings a serrate outline against the sky, the untinged whiteness of its head and tail feathers contrasting so strikingly with its blackish body they seemed almost like luminous, painted-on accents to guide the eye across its perfect form.

Megan watched it circle the pilings twice, rise gracefully on an updraft, and then swing out across the shiny waters of the bay. The shore below her was silent. Nothing moved amid the rushes. Nor was there any motion in the tangled scrub sloping off from the deck where she sat with Nimec and Ricci, a cup of strong black coffee on the table in front of her.

“It’ll generally stay quiet for five, ten minutes after she’s gone. Then you’ll see the gulls, terns, and ducks come back, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes hundreds of them at once, like there’s been an all-clear,” Ricci said. “The eagles prefer eating fish to anything else, but when they’re really hungry or nursing a brood, they’ll make a meal out of whatever they can sink their talons into. Smaller birds, rodents, even house cats that stray too far from their backyards.”

Megan reluctantly dropped her gaze from the eagle’s path. Its sudden appearance had given her a thrill of excitement, but Ricci had promised an explanation for the ugly scene on the road, and she was more than ready to hear it.

She shot a glance across the table at him. “How about urchins?”

Ricci smiled a little. “Them too,” he said.

She kept looking at him pointedly.

“I think Megan was offering you a neat little segue there,” Nimec said from the chair beside her. “Might not be a bad idea to take it.”

Ricci paused a moment, then nodded.

“You two want to go inside first?” He gestured toward the sliding door leading back into his house. “It’s getting pretty brisk out here.”

Nimec’s shoulders rose and fell. “I’m okay.”

“Same,” Megan said. “I can use the fresh air after all the schlepping around we’ve done. To use an Irish word.”

Ricci sat there, his face showing not one iota of concern about the headaches he’d caused them. That irritated Megan, and she hoped the expression on her face made it abundantly clear to him. The schlep she’d mentioned had included following his pickup for nearly an hour as he’d led them to a fish-smelling wholesale seafood market on a wharf at the foot of the peninsula, where they’d had to wait while he’d spent another hour hustling back and forth between one saltbox shed and another, haggling with buyers over the value of several large plastic trays he’d been carrying in the flatbed of the truck… or more accurately the layers of spiny, tennis-ball-sized green sea urchins inside those trays, what he’d earlier referred to as his catch. And all that after she and Nimec had traveled three thousand miles across the country by air and ground, and the unexpected confrontation with the warden and deputy sheriff.

“I suppose,” Ricci said at length, “you’d like me to tell you why those uniformed humps were on my case.”

Megan watched him coolly over the rim of her cup.

“That would be nice,” she said.

Ricci lifted his own coffee to his mouth, sipped, and then set it down on the circular tabletop.

“Either of you know anything about urchin diving?”

Megan shook her head.

“Pete?” Ricci said.

“Only that urchins are a specialty item in foreign seafood markets. I’d assume they can bring good money.”

Ricci nodded.

“Actually it’s the roe that’s valuable. Or can be, anyway. You ever been to a sushi bar, it’s what they call uni on the menu. The bulk of it gets shipped out to Japan, the rest to Japanese communities in this country and Canada,” he said. “Its price depends on availability, the percentage of roe in comparison to its total weight, and the quality of the roe, which has to be a bronzy gold color — kind of like a tangerine — if you want to fetch a premium. Those trays I unloaded had about two and a half bushels of urchins each and were worth almost a grand to me.”

Megan looked at him. “If somebody had told me that when I was ten, I’d be worth millions today. My big brother and I would walk along the beach and collect them off the jetties in our plastic buckets. Then we’d fill the buckets with ocean water and try to convince our parents to let us bring them home as pets. My dad would tell us to get those damned sea porcupines out of the house.”

Ricci smiled faintly.

“People have different nicknames for them around here, but they shared your father’s sentiments till recently, when everybody heard about the Asian demand and got a yen for the yen,” he said. “Before that, they were just considered nuisances. Most of the old-time lobstermen still refer to them as whore’s eggs because they mess up their traps. Clog the vents, eat the bait, even chew through the headings and lathe to get at the bait. The nasty little buggers have some sharp teeth to go with their spines.”

“You gather the urchins yourself?”

“Harvesting’s done in teams of at least one scuba diver and a tender, who waits above in the boat,” Ricci said. “I like to do the underwater work alone. Take a big mesh tote below with me and pick the best-looking urchins. When a bag’s full, I send up a float line so my tender, this guy named Dexter, can spot it and hoist it aboard.”

“Tender?” Megan said. “Define, please.”

“It’s the diver’s equivalent of a golf caddy. He’s supposed to maintain the scuba equipment, look out for the diver’s safety, make sure the catch doesn’t freeze, and if time allows, cull the urchins. Something goes wrong, how he reacts can be critical.” He paused. “That’s why the profits get split down the middle.”

Nimec raised an eyebrow. “I heard you mention a Dex when you were facing off with the deputy….”

“That’s him,” Ricci said.

“Didn’t sound like your partnership’s exactly rock solid.”

Ricci shrugged.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “I’ll get to that.”

Megan watched him, warming her hands around her cup. “Is it always your job to bring the catch to market?”

He leaned back slightly in his chair.

“I’m getting around to that too,” he said, and drank more coffee. “The urchins are found in colonies, usually in subtidal kelp beds. Once upon a time they practically carpeted the bottom of the Penobscot from the shoreline on out, so you could scoop them up without dunking your head.” He paused. “Past few years have been slim pickings. Overharvesting’s driven the value of the catch up into the stratosphere, and made people so protective of their zones they’re baring their teeth and beating their chests if you come anywhere close to them.”

“These zones… I presume they’re demarcated by law.”

Ricci nodded.

“There’s a license that costs almost three hundred bucks, and with the conservation restrictions nowadays you have to wait your turn in a lottery to get one. When applying for it, you have to choose the area and season you want to dive in. Wardens inspect it very carefully. Tells them whether you’re legal in black and white.”

“Your trays were packed full,” Nimec said. “Seems to me you’re doing okay.”

Ricci nodded again.

“Also seems to me that would get noticed fast during a period of decline in the overall yield. By other divers, buyers, and the warden if he’s got his eyes open.”

Ricci looked straight at him and nodded a third time. “You won’t find a whole lot of guys who like going out as far, or down as deep as I do… especially not this time of year, when the water temperature can still drop near freezing and the currents are rough. But there are hundreds of tiny islets in the bay, a few of them within my diving area, and I hit on one that’s got a deepwater cove where the urchin count’s wild and wonderful.”

Nimec looked thoughtful.

“Word got around,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Ricci said. “When you’re talking about a stake that’s worth serious cash, and men who are having a hard time feeding their families, it’s a volatile combination. There are resentments toward people from away that go back a long, long time and are maybe even a little justified. Back around the turn of the century, rich out-of-towners started buying up acres and acres of bay-front land around their summer mansions as privacy buffers against the fishermen and clam diggers they thought of as white trash. Stuck ‘No Trespassing’ signs up everywhere, restricting their access to the water that was their livelihood.”

“Somebody twist the locals’ arms to sell?” Megan said.

Ricci gave her a sharp look.

“Either you’ve never been poor, or you’ve forgotten what that can be like,” he said brusquely. “Watch your kids starve through a Maine winter, and you won’t need any other kind of arm-twisting.”

She sat there in the brittle silence that followed, wondering if his reaction had made her feel guiltier about her remark than she should have.

“Dex and the warden cut some kind of deal?” Nimec said. The last thing he wanted was to get sidetracked.

Ricci turned his coffee cup in his hands, seeming to concentrate on the steam wisping up from it.

“Let’s get back to whether it’s usually me who drives the catch to market,” he said at last. “I’ve been working with Dex for over a year and never went there without him before today. Guy likes wheeling and dealing, likes to get the wholesalers bidding. The whole thing from soup to nuts, you know?” He paused. “He also looks forward to having his cash in hand. But this morning he tells me something about needing to rush home to watch his kids after school. Said his wife had to work late and there was nobody else. The minute we pull the boat in, he’s up and away.”

“Happens when you’re a parent,” Nimec said, thinking he could have cited any number of comparable situations from when his own children were young and his wife was not yet his ex-wife.

Ricci shook his head.

“You don’t know Dex,” he said. “Ask him to recommend a local bar, he’ll rattle off the names of two dozen watering holes from here to New Brunswick and tell you every kind of beer they have on tap. Ask him his kids’ birthdays, he’d be stumped.”

“So you think he arranged for you to be driving by yourself when you got stopped,” Nimec said.

Ricci turned his coffee cup but said nothing.

Nimec sighed. “Was it the warden who pulled you over?”

“Yeah. Cobbs is one of those down-easters I told you about resents outsiders… and just about everybody and everything else besides, but that’s just his endearing personality. I move here from Boston, earn a decent buck, it’s like I’m taking something away from him. Add that I’m a cop… an ex-cop… and he gets even more bothered.”

“He feels intimidated and threatened by you, and that translates into a sort of competitive hostility,” Nimec said. “Common equation in places where they don’t get much new blood. Especially when it’s coming from the big city.”

Ricci shrugged.

“There’s all that, and with Cobbs it goes even further,” he said. “He’s a weasel and he’s dirty. I’d heard stories about him from divers as well as lobstermen. Give him a skim of your profits, he’ll let you operate without a license or outside your zone, even look the other way if you row out at night and raid somebody’s lobster traps. Up until now, you didn’t play along, he’d hassle you for the slightest infraction of the rules, but wouldn’t actually squeeze anybody outright. The stunt he tried to pull on me takes him to a new level.”

“Claiming he’d seen you dive outside your zone so he could confiscate your entire catch,” Nimec said. “That it?”

Ricci snapped his pointer finger out at him and nodded.

“Like you said, times are rough,” Nimec said. He exhaled, deciding to take another stab at a question Ricci had already angled past twice.“I want to try this with you again… you think Dex and Cobbs have something going?”

Ricci stared at his cup, still turning and turning it in his hands. It was no longer steaming.

“Been trying to work that out in my own mind,” he said in a hesitant tone. “Cobbs and his deputy dog were waiting for me on the road, and I doubt it’s a coincidence that they knew exactly when I’d be driving out to the market, and what route I’d take. Also bothers me that the day they chose to pull me over happened to be the one and only day Dex wasn’t around to keep me company.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better for him if he came along for the ride?” Nimec said. “To act surprised, I mean. The way it went down just makes him look suspicious.”

Ricci moved his shoulders. “Dex is no genius. Assuming the worst about him, could be that he was only worried having to look me in the eye when I drove into their little setup. Or maybe he doesn’t care what I suspect. Maybe with Cobbs he gets a better than even slice of the action, and all that matters to him is running me out of it.”

“And out of town in the process,” Nimec said.

Ricci nodded. “Like I said, assuming the worst-case scenario. But right now that’s all just for argument’s sake.”

They sat in silence for a while. Megan watched them, feeling strangely like an observer. She sensed the easy intersection of their thoughts, the unspoken communication of men who had done police work for much of their lives, and all at once thought she had an inkling why Nimec wanted Ricci for Max’s position.

“Let’s stick to Cobbs for the moment,” Nimec said finally. “He’s not going to just leave things as they are. You know his type. The way you embarrassed him, he’ll be twisting like a corkscrew until he can get back at you. And that’s probably going to happen sooner than later. He’ll lick his wounds, convince himself you got lucky today.”

“I know,” Ricci said.

“Being hooked into the sheriff’s office, he’ll think he can get away with whatever he wants. Your warning about getting in touch with outside agencies won’t stop him. Far as he’s concerned, they’re a world away.”

“I know.”

Nimec looked at him.

“What are you planning to do?” he said.

Ricci grunted indeterminately. He took a drink of coffee, frowned, and set the cup down on the table.

“Flat,” he said, and pushed it away from him.

More silence.

Megan’s gaze wandered briefly down to the bay. The sunlight was fading, and white patches of sea smoke had begun rising from the water as dusk’s cold breezes slipped over its warmer surface. The birds had returned with the eagle’s departure, bearing out Ricci’s prediction. She could see rafts of ducks near the shoreline almost straight below, and further off, gulls descending through the mist to alight on shoals exposed by the receding tide. Broad-chested and gray-patched, they seemed instantly to enter a state of repose, puffing out their feathers against the dropping temperature.

Suddenly it seemed very late in the day.

“We should talk about why Pete and I came to see you,” she said. “You still haven’t given us your feelings about it.”

Ricci looked at her. “Now that you mention it, why did the two of you come?”

Megan blinked.

“You don’t know,” she said. It was a statement rather than a question.

He shook his head.

She turned to Nimec. “You didn’t tell him?”

Nimec shook his head. “I thought we’d wait until we got here,” he said without explanation. “Discuss it face-to-face.”

She rubbed her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger, shook her head a little, and sighed resignedly.

“We’d better go inside after all,” she said. “Seems this is going to take longer than I expected.”

A little past five-thirty in the afternoon P.D.T., two urgent calls were placed from the Brazilian space station facility to UpLink’s corporate headquarters in San Jose.

The first was to Roger Gordian.

Standing near his office window, looking out at the rain that had just started pouring down on Rosita Avenue, Gordian was about to leave for the day when his desk phone chirruped. He stared at it a moment, tempted to let it remain on the hook, one arm halfway inside his trench coat. Whoever it was could leave a message.

Chree-eep!

Ignore it, he urged himself. Ashley. Dinner. Home.

The phone rang a third time. On the fourth, the caller would be automatically transferred to Gordian’s voice mail.

Shrugging out of his coat, he frowned in acquiescence and grabbed the receiver.

“Yes?” he said.

The man at the other end identified himself as Mason Cody from the Sword operational center, Mato Grasso do Sul. His voice seemed to come out of an odd, tunneling silence that put Gordian in mind of what it was like holding a conch shell up against his ear — listening to the ocean, they’d called it when he was young.

He sat behind his desk, realizing immediately that he was on a secure digital line. And that the call was therefore anything but routine.

“Sir, there’s been an incident,” Cody said in a tone that made his back stiffen.

Gordian listened quietly as the violent events at the ISS compound were outlined for him in a rapid but collected manner, his hand tensing around the receiver at the news of injuries and fatalities.

“The wounded men,” he said. “How are they doing?”

“They’ve all been medevaced from the scene,” Cody said. “Most are in fair shape or better.”

“What about Rollie Thibodeau? You said he’d been pretty badly hurt.”

“He’s still in surgery.” A pause. “No word on his condition.”

Gordian willed himself to be calm.

“Has Pete Nimec been told about this?” he asked.

“My feeling was that I should brief you first, Mr. Gordian. I plan to call him the moment we sign off.”

Gordian rotated his chair toward the window, thinking about what he’d just been told. It was all so difficult to absorb.

“Is there anything else?” he said. “Any idea who was behind the raid?”

“I wish I could tell you we know, sir,” Cody said. “Maybe we’ll get something out of the prisoners, though right now I’m not even sure how long we can hold onto them.”

Gordian inhaled, exhaled. Cody’s meaning was clear. As members of a private security force that operated internationally, Sword personnel were obliged to abide by stringent rules of conduct, some of them preconditions set by host governments, some internal guidelines, occasionally complicated formulations premised on the simple reality that they were guests on foreign soil. While adjustments for different cultural and political circumstances were built into their procedural framework, it would be pushing beyond acceptable bounds to interrogate the captured attackers even if the on-site capabilities to detain them existed — which was doubtful. Moreover, an incident on the scale he’d been told about would have to be reported to the Brazilians, assuming they hadn’t already learned of it through their own domestic intelligence apparatus. Once the prisoners were in their custody, it was impossible to guess whether Brazilian law enforcement would share any information obtained from them. The politics of the situation were going to be touchy, and the last thing Gordian wanted was to start stepping on toes.

“Have you been in contact with the local authorities?”

“Not yet,” Cody said. “Thought I ought to hold off, see how you wanted that handled. Hope that was the right thing.”

“It was exactly right,” Gordian said. “I suspect they’ll be showing up without word from us, but notify them as soon as possible anyway. Tell them that we mean to provide our absolute cooperation in terms of whatever questions they have. And that we’re confident they’ll reciprocate. It’s in our common interest to get to the bottom of this.” I assume, he thought, but did not add. “You have my home telephone number on file?”

Gordian heard the tapping of computer keys.

“Yes, it’s right up in front of me.”

“Okay. Keep me posted on any developments. Doesn’t matter what hour it is.”

“Understood,” Cody said.

Gordian took another breath.

“I suppose that’s it,” he said. “Hang tight, I know you’ve got hell on your hands.”

“We’re doing our best, Mr. Gordian,” Cody said.

His voice dropped into that hermetic tunnel of silence again.

Gordian cradled the receiver and sat looking out his window in sober contemplation. Rainwater splashed against the glass, washing down its surface in long rippling streams. From his angle, he could see nothing of the street below, no pedestrians scurrying through puddles for someplace dry, no cars crawling along with their windshield wipers on. Mount Hamilton too seemed beyond the reach of his vision, rendered a gray, featureless blur by the heavy curtains of moisture blowing across the sky.

It was, he thought, as if the world was made of rain.

Only rain.

As Gordian had been assured, Cody’s next call was to Pete Nimec. He was not in his office, and the recorded greeting on his voice mail said he would be away overnight and checking his incoming messages regularly. His cell phone number was given for emergencies.

Cody quickly terminated the connection and dialed it.

“So you want me to be your, what, eyes and ears around the world,” Ricci said. He crouched and put a log into the woodstove opposite the comfortable leather sofa where his visitors were seated. “That about it, Pete?”

“Not quite, if I may interject a point or two,” Megan said, glancing at Nimec.

He gave her a shrug. They were in Ricci’s spacious living room, a mid-1980’s rear addition to a Colonial home built a century earlier, with natural wood plank walls and glass sliding doors that gave onto the water-front deck where they’d been talking until a few minutes ago.

“The person we select will be responsible for implementing and coordinating security functions at UpLink’s various international and domestic sites,” she said. “He or she will be second in authority only to Pete. But I want to stress that we’re primarily here so you and I can get acquainted, and to gauge your interest in us.”

“And yours in me,” Ricci said, facing her.

They exchanged looks.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a unique and demanding job. We naturally want to see if you’ve got what it takes to meet its challenges.”

Ricci considered that a second, then nodded.

“Fair enough,” he said. “You still assembling your candidate list?”

“The only other person whose qualifications we’re presently weighing is a current member of our Brazilian team named Roland Thibodeau. And to be frank, his interest in the position hasn’t yet been determined. I plan on speaking to Rollie sometime within the next couple of days.”

Ricci turned to Nimec. “How come you wouldn’t tell me anything about the reason for this visit over the phone?” he said.

“If I’d tried, I would have heard a click in the receiver before the words were finished leaving my mouth. Figured it would be best to come and talk. See how you felt about it face-to-face.”

Ricci silently took three sheets of newspaper from a shallow wine crate beside him, crumpled them, and pushed them underneath the grille of the stove. Then he struck a match and held it to the newspapers to start them burning. Flames crackled up and licked at the bottom of the log.

When the log had caught, he carefully shut the glasspaneled door of the stove and looked at Megan again.

“I figure you’ve heard the long sad story of how I lost my badge,” he said.

“Pete gave me his take on it,” she said. “I’d already gotten another from the papers.”

“You can see why I like using them as tinder then,” he said.

She smiled a little.

“The thought had occurred to me,” she said. “In light of today’s events, it also strikes me that you have a knack for making enemies in the wrong places.”

Ricci hesitated for the barest moment. “You read the version where they say I’m an uncontrollable maverick, or the one where I’m called an outright disgrace to the Boston police department?”

“Both, actually, but I tend to ignore the descriptive nouns and home in on the bare facts,” she said. “A kid falls to his death from an Ivy League campus rooftop. The group of frat boys who were up there with him claim it’s a terrible hazing accident. Too many beers, reckless behavior. As the city’s chief homicide detective, you head what everyone expects to be a perfunctory investigation, until the coroner’s report reveals there was no alcohol in the deceased’s bloodstream. You start digging around, find out the boys who were on that roof are heavily into dealing drugs and other unsavory after-school projects, then find out there’s been some bad blood between the group leader and the kid who was killed. The alpha gets charged with first-degree murder; his friends deal down in exchange for their cooperation as state’s witnesses. There’s a trial and he’s found guilty, which should mean a mandatory twenty-five-to-life sentence. But the jury’s verdict is overturned by the judge and he walks on a technicality. Something about an error in how certain evidence was processed by the medical examiner’s office.” She paused. “How am I doing so far?”

Ricci’s eyes held to her firmly.

“You don’t mind, I’ll wait for the next part before rating you,” he said.

Megan nodded. The log in the woodstove popped and spat sap, flames flaring brightly around it.

“Next you do a spate of media interviews repudiating the judge, arguing that the error shouldn’t have been enough to get the case into Appellate Court, let alone warrant nullification from the bench,” she said. “Even more seriously, you allege that the judge was bought and paid for by the killer’s father. They go on television with their counterclaims, say you have some kind of personal ax to grind. A number of details from your departmental records are leaked to the press, including information that you’d received counseling for problem drinking and depression while on the force. There are stories that you have a bad attitude. When it’s all over, the kid is still free and you’ve turned in your badge. The general impression is that you were given the choice of either resigning or being discharged without pension.”

She sat quietly again, watching him.

“That’s not bad, far as it goes,” Ricci said. “But there’s also what you left out.”

“I didn’t want to sit here giving a recitation,” she said. “It might be better to hear the rest from you. If you care to tell it.”

Ricci nodded. “Sure,” he said. “In the interest of good public relations.”

She waited without comment.

“The murdering little prince’s father was a Beacon Hill millionaire,” he said. “I learned during the trial that the judge belonged to the same A-list country club as Dad, which in my opinion ought to have been enough to have him removed from the case. Prosecution could’ve taken it up in district court, but didn’t, and since it’s their call I couldn’t let myself worry about it. After the trial’s over, though, I hear from a couple of staffers at the club that there were three separate meetings between Dad, the judge, and the oak wainscoting while the jury was in deliberation. One of them’s the manager, a solid guy who’s been working there forty years and has no reason to be spinning tall tales. Came forward out of feeling guilty, like the other two.” He shrugged. “They denied it later on, when I went public.”

“Somebody cured their guilt,” Megan said. “Money and power being the prescribed remedy. If I’m to believe your version.”

Dead silence. Ricci looked hard at her, the fire tossing shadows across his angular features.

“What is it exactly that bothers you about me?” he said at last.

His blue eyes level and probing.

She opened her mouth as if to reply, closed it, and merely stared back at him without saying anything.

“I believe it,” Nimec said, breaking into the silence. “His account, that is.”

Ricci turned to Nimec, leaving Megan surprised by her own relief at being out from under his steady gaze.

“I don’t need an advocate,” Ricci said.

“Your credibility shouldn’t be at issue here.”

Ricci’s features beamed with sudden intensity. “I told you I don’t need to be defended. Not by you or anybody else.”

Megan raised her hand in a curtailing gesture.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m not trying to be antagonistic, and apologize if that’s how I came across. It’s been a wearing day.”

Ricci looked at her in silence, those penetrating eyes back on her face.

“I think we should take a step back,” she said. “Concentrate on your feelings about the job with UpLink.”

Ricci looked at her a while longer. At last he exhaled audibly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “To be straight, I’m not sure it’s something I’d want any part of, or even that I’ve got the background for. This is big stuff. Seems to me you ought to be looking at heavy artillery, not a Police Special.”

Nimec leaned forward, his hands clasped on his lap.

“Except that the background you’re so quick to dismiss includes four years with SEAL Team Six, an elite within an elite created for antiterrorist operations,” he said. “And that’s just for openers.”

“Pete—”

Nimec cut him short. “After leaving the military in ’94 you joined the Boston police, earned your first-class detective shield in record time. Worked deep cover with the Organized Crime Task Force, an assignment for which you were particularly well-suited because of your experiences with ST 6, where one of your special areas of expertise was infiltration techniques. Upon conclusion of a major racketeering investigation you requested a transfer to the Homicide Division and stuck with it until the bad affair we’ve been talking about.”

Ricci knelt there by the stove, looking across the room at him.

“Running down my stats doesn’t change how I feel,” he said. “There are ten years between me and the service. That’s a long time.”

Nimec shook his head.

“I don’t get you, Tom,” he said. “Nobody’s twisting arms, but this isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It deserves fair consideration. By all of us. We should at least agree to—”

He abruptly broke off. Set to its vibration mode, the palm phone in his shirt pocket had silently indicated he was receiving a call.

“One second,” he said, holding up his pointer finger.

He took out the phone, flipped open the mouthpiece, and answered.

His features showed surprise, then sharp attention, then a mixture of both.

It was Cody from Mato Grasso.

Speaking in the same tone of controlled urgency he had used with Roger Gordian, Cody ran down the situation in Brazil for the second time in less than ten minutes, his voice routed via that nation’s conventional landlines to an UpLink satellite gateway in northern Argentina, transmitted to a low-earth-orbit communications satellite, electronically amplified, retransmitted to a tracking antenna operated by a local cellular service in coastal Maine, and sent on to Nimec’s handset all virtually instantaneously.

Nimec asked something in a hushed voice, listened, whispered into the phone again, and ended the call.

“Pete, what is it?” Megan said, reading the deep concern on his face.

He kept the phone open in his hand.

“Trouble,” he said. “A level-one in Brazil.”

She looked at him knowingly. His use of the code meant a crisis of the gravest nature had occurred, and that he did not want to go into details about it in Ricci’s presence.

“Roger been informed?” she asked.

He nodded.

“We’d better check in with him,” he said. “Got a feeling he’s going to want us back in San Jose right away.” The doctors knew they had their job cut out the moment he was brought into the emergency room.

It would have been clear even to an untrained observer that he was in terrible shape; clear from his near-comatose state; clear from all the blood that had soaked from the gaping hole in his belly through his clothing, the thin blankets covering him, and the uniforms of the technicians who had delivered him on the stretcher; clear from the blue cast of his skin and the weak, irregular rhythm of his breath.

To the expert eye, these physiological signs pointed toward specific life-threatening complications that would have to be assessed and treated without losing an instant. The severe hemorrhaging alone would have led them to evaluate him for shock, but his lividity left scant doubt of its onset, and the blood pressure cuffs placed on his arm as his stretcher was rolled in had given systolic and diastolic readings of zero over less than zero, indicating a near-cessation of his circulatory processes. His thready breathing also suggested that a tension pneumothorax — in laymen’s terms, an air pocket between the lungs and their surrounding tissues developing as a result of shock — was putting pressure on the lungs and causing them to fully or partially collapse.

The condition would lead to respiratory failure and certain death unless relieved by external means.

Managing a medical crisis requires a constantly unfolding and frequently accelerating series of prioritizations. In this case the priority was to stabilize his vital functions even before the injuries to his internal organs could be determined by Xrays and exploratory abdominal surgery. Only then would it be known with certainty how many times he’d been shot, or what path the bullet, bullets, or bullet fragments had taken.

With the clock ticking, the surgeon in charge at once began giving directions to his assistants in a rapid and assertive manner.

“I want MASTs…”

This being an acronym for medical shock trousers, which could be slipped onto the patient and inflated with air to force blood up from his lower extremities to his heart and brain.

“… seven units of packed RBCs…”

Shorthand for red blood cells, the hemoglobin-rich component of blood that provides life-giving oxygen to body tissues. In a typical situation requiring transfusion, the patients’s serum is cross-matched for compatibility with a sample of the blood product to be administered, but because he was an employee of UpLink, this man’s type was already on file on the doctors’ computer database, eliminating that step and conserving precious minutes.

“… a big line…”

A wide intravenous catheter used to get the RBCs into his system by quick, massive transfusion.

“… and a needle aspirator in him stat!”

The needle aspirator being a large syringe used to drain the air out of the pneumothorax, inflate the lungs, and restore normal breathing; stat, medical jargon for I need it done five seconds ago, a word derived and abbreviated from the original Latin statim, meaning immediately.

While the image of medical professionals working in conditions of ordered, clockwork sterility is a common one, nothing will dispel it faster than a glimpse inside a trauma room, where the battle to save lives is a close, tense, chaotic, messy, sweaty affair. Jabbing a 14-gauge big-bore needle into the chest of a powerfully built two-hundred-pound man, clenching the attached syringe in your fist and unsuccessfully attempting to insert it between hard slabs of pectoral muscle once, twice, and again before finally making a clean entry, then drawing out the plunger and getting a rush of warm, moist air in your face as the pocket that had formed around the lungs decompressed, was nobody’s idea of a picnic — as the young doctor who had been hastily summoned on duty tonight, and who was now toiling away over Rollie Thibodeau here in the ISS facility’s critical-care unit, trying to prevent him from dying before he made it onto an operating table, would have attested if he’d had the time. But he was too busy following the instructions called out by the chief physician, himself standing over the patient, working to get the big line and saline IVs connected to him in a hurry.

With the syringe in place and the air suctioned from the pneumothorax, it was essential to prevent its recurrence and keep the patient breathing. This meant going ahead with a full closed-tube thorascostomy.

The first step was to create an airtight seal around the tube. Barely registering the frantic activity around him, the young doctor lifted a scalpel from an instrument tray and sliced into the flesh between the ribs, making a horizontal incision. Then he took a Kelly clamp off the tray and pushed it into the incision, holding it by the shaft, expanding it to spread the soft tissue and create a tunnel for his finger. Blood splashed up around the clamp as he removed it from the opening and pressed his gloved finger between the lips of the cut, going in as deep as his knuckle, carefully feeling for the lung and diaphragm. After assuring himself that he had penetrated through to the intrapleural area — the space between the lungs and ribs where the air pocket had formed — he asked a scrub nurse for the chest tube and carefully guided it into the opening.

He paused, studied the patient, and exhaled a sigh of relief. The patient’s breathing was stronger and more regular, his skin color vastly improved. A water collection system at the opposite end of the chest tube would keep the air draining from the patient’s chest while insuring that no air was drawn back into it. To complete the procedure, the young doctor would suture the skin around the tube to preserve the seal.

A very long night still lay ahead, but Thibodeau would have something like a fighting chance as the doctors hustled him into the OR, opened him up, and got a look at the extent of the damage that had been done inside him.