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
