disapproval.
'Have a good rest, sir,' he said.
'I'll try,' Gordian said.
And still wrestling back a smile, turned, flapped his arm up over his shoulder in a loose, weary wave, and strode out of the hangar.
'So, Alex, what I'm saying is that it looks like I can get you to dine with the POTUS and the other heads of state in the officers' wardroom.'
'Is that what you're saying?' Nordstrum said.
'That is exactly what I'm saying,' Stu Encardi said. 'Right there in the belly of the beast we call Seawolf.'
They were talking over a lunch of quesadillas, cactus salad, and chili at the Red Sage on Northwest Fourteenth, roughly midway between the Kennedy Center and the White House.
'And who's setting this up?'
'Terskoff.'
'The Press Secretary.'
'The Press Secretary himself,' Encardi emphasized.
Nordstrum ate some of his quesadilla. 'What's the catch?' he said.
'Excuse me?'
'The catch, the snare, the hook,' Nordstrum said. 'Whatever it is that's going to sink into my flesh if I take the bait.'
Encardi combed back a wave of his lush black hair with his fingers.
'Oh,' he said. 'You mean President Ballard's request.'
Nordstrum looked at him. 'Stu, I think you're a decent fellow,' he said. 'But if you don't stop playing dumb, and get to the point, I'm going to leave this table, stroll into the kitchen, find one of the cactus plants they use for the salads before its spines have been removed, then come right back here and shove it up your ass.'
Encardi frowned. 'Ouch,' he said.
'Yes,' Nordstrum said, and speared another wedge of quesadilla with his fork. 'Very definitely ouch'
Encardi leaned forward confidentially. 'Okay,' he said. 'All the President requests is that you absent yourself from Roger Gordian's press conference tomorrow. That is, assuming you've considered attending.'
'Ah-hah,' Nordstrum said, chewing.
'Now don't think the White House is trying to restrict your ability to express your opinions,' Encardi went on. 'Ballard merely feels SEAPAC is a far more vital part of his agenda — and his legacy — than approving the crypto legislation. And that it's slipped out of the spotlight because Gordian versus Caine makes snappier news copy.'
'Ah-hah,' Nordstrum said.
Encardi spread his hands.
'Think about it,' he said. 'You're the one heavy hitter in the press who's reported on SEAPAC from its earliest stages of negotiation to the present. Who's consistently stressed its importance to our regional interests in Southeast Asia. Don't you think it'll further sidetrack the public if they see you with Gordian at the podium? There are already enough things distracting their attention.'
'Ah-hah,' Nordstrum said, chewing placidly.
Encardi frowned with exasperation. 'God damn it, Alec, now who's being incommunicative? You asked me to be right-on with you and I'm doing it. So, please, let's have some feedback.'
'Sure,' Nordstrum said.
He carefully set his knife and fork down on his plate and straightened.
'I had planned on standing beside Roger Gordian tomorrow and will do that come hell, high water, or sugar- coated coercion from the highest levels of government,' he said.
Encardi brushed back his dense swirl of hair again.
'Alec, you could be interviewing Prime Minister Yamamoto over caviar and champagne instead of chowing down in the goat locker with the enlisted personnel. Don't pass up the opportunity of a lifetime.'
Nordstrum crossed his arms. 'You're annoying me,' he said.
'Alec—'
'Don't whine, it makes you look like a schoolboy.'
Encardi frowned, wiped his mouth furiously with his napkin, and tossed it down on the table.
'Okay, I quit,' he said.
'Good,' Nordstrum said. 'Anything else you want to ask while I finish eating?'
Encardi looked at him and sighed.
'Yeah,' he said after a brief interval. 'You ever hear of Diver Dan and Baron Barracuda?'
Nordstrum shook his head disinterestedly.
'Some help you are,' Encardi said.
The transcontinental haul from San Francisco to Johor Bahru had been a grueling and seemingly endless affair for Nimec and Noriko Cousins, with a late-night changeover from their 747 to a prop-driven rattletrap in Kuala Lumpur, and, following their jump to JB, a treacherous forty-minute drive over dark, winding, poorly mapped roads in the rental car Nimec had reserved at the airport.
Though Nimec had been at the Johor ground station on only one prior occasion, and though it had occurred to him before departing the States that it might be wise to have somebody from the local Sword contingent come out to the airfield and meet them, he had finally decided to drive to their end destination himself. He supposed that part of it was a natural predisposition toward seeking camouflage, a trait that made him lean toward maintaining a low profile until he was clearer about where Max's probe had been taking him.. and what might have gone wrong. But there was also a part of him that simply liked cowboying it, and while he would have admitted it to no one — including, to some extent, himself — the truth was that being lifted from his ordinary milieu had aroused that long- dormant facet of his personality.
At any rate, it was just shy of five in the morning when Nimec found UpLink's corporate emblem on a sign marking a dirt service road and, looking off beyond the tree line to his right, glimpsed the concrete and aluminum buildings of the ground station in the near distance.
He swung up over the hard-pack toward the station's perimeter gate and braked about twenty feet before reaching the guard booth. There was an ATM-sized biometric reader on a concrete island to his left — one of the recent improvements Max had made to the security net. Whereas most UpLink facilities used either iris or fingerprint scanning at various levels of access, Blackburn had wanted to tighten the identification requirements at restricted entry points by using multiple biometric passkeys, and had the scanner platforms designed to his specifications.
Nimec lowered his window now and swept his thumb over the platform's thermal-imaging strip while simultaneously waiting for the iris scanner to digitally photograph his eyes — two cameras matching them to a computerized facial template, the third taking a high-res snapshot of his iris. All three images were then checked for a variety of characteristics and compared with information previously enrolled in the security mainframe's database.
Seconds after he'd pulled up to the multiscanner, the 'toll light' above the motorized gate in front of him shifted from red to green and a computer-synthesized female voice issued from a speaker in the platform.
'Identification complete, Peter Nimec,' it said in English. 'Please proceed.'
Nimec drove on through the gate toward the complex, nodding to the uniformed man in the guard booth as he passed him.
'This isn't quite the sort of place I expected,' Nori said from the backseat, looking out the window in the dawnlight. 'It's so… I don't know.. colorless.'
Nimec shrugged with his hands on the wheel.
'Utilitarian's the word I'd use,' he said. 'Didn't realize you hadn't been to any of our ground stations. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. After a while you get used to the no-frills decor.'
'I suppose.' She sat back and yawned.
Nimec glanced into the rearview.
'Tired from our journey to the East?' he asked.
'And wired,' she said.
'Not a good mix if you plan to get any sleep.' He lifted a folded newspaper from the passenger seat and held
