Only in recent weeks had Rojas awakened to how deeply he was enmeshed in DeVane’s affairs. The things he was being asked to do were becoming riskier, and the pressure to carry them out increasingly direct. But there were limits. There had to be limits. And it sounded as if the problem he was being asked to fix went beyond any he could have imagined.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The Mato Grasso is outside my jurisdiction. I could ask some questions. Find out the status of the prisoners without too much difficulty. But if the regional authorities want to conduct an interrogation, I can’t think of how to stop them.”
Kuhl was staring at him.
“You’ll cope with it,” he said. “There is no other choice.”
Rojas looked into his eyes and was quiet for close to a full minute. The sun seemed suddenly hotter. His palms and underarms were moist with sweat. It had been mad to believe he could link himself to DeVane without losing his independence. Completely mad. He had been bought and paid for in regular installments, and was now expected to obediently jump to his master’s wishes.
At last he turned to DeVane and said, “You understand that I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.”
“Nor would we want that, obviously,” DeVane said. “All we expect is that you give it your best.”
Rojas raised his drink to his lips and drained it. The mimosa’s shade had dwindled, making the heat almost intolerable. For an irrational moment he pictured himself spontaneously erupting into flames while DeVane and Kuhl looked on without expression.
“Is anything wrong, Francisco?” DeVane said. “You seem disconcerted.”
Rojas shook his head. He heard the noisy rumble of the Beech’s engine starting up, and looked out toward the head of the airstrip. The cocaderos had emptied their trucks and were moving them back onto the dirt road as the plane prepared for takeoff. His general practice of never traveling with a shipment aside, he almost would have preferred to be on board. He did not think his nerves could stand the company of these men much longer.
“I should be leaving,” he said. “There are very few flights out of the country and their schedules are erratic.”
DeVane nodded, then signaled to one of his bodyguards with a wave of his fingertips. The guard nodded slightly and spoke into a handheld radio.
“Your car is on its way,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to be stranded here.”
Rojas manufactured a smile.
Like them, he had ventured into a place where it was hot and dark, and learned all too well how to appease its gods.
SEVEN
The thing was, she never played music before having her morning coffee, and that puzzled him.
In the veranda of his Palo Alto home after many long hours on the telephone, Roger Gordian sat with an untouched plate of scrambled eggs and toast on the table in front of him, a steaming cup of coffee near his right hand, and his cordless within fast reach of his left. Making decisions was for him an adaptive reflex, a coping mechanism that pressure only honed and energized, and he’d reacted to the news from Brazil as he would to any emergency, gathering whatever information was available, then digesting as much of it as circumstances allowed before settling upon a logical and systematic plan of action.
In this instance, the information-gathering process had kept him in his study all night. There had been a string of updates from Cody, interspersed with his own calls to advisors and political contacts, including one to a high-placed official in the Department of State, and a subsequent late-night conversation with his close friend Dan Parker, who had been the congressman from California’s 14th District until his recently lost reelection bid, and was somebody whose opinion Gordian never failed to solicit in times of crisis.
With each of them pursuing intelligence about the Brazilian situation through his own respective channels, Gordian’s next order of business had been to contact Charles Dorset, the top executive at NASA. The call had had two purposes. The first was to inform Dorset of events at the ISS compound before news reached him from other, unpredictable sources whose accuracy might be questionable — the media being foremost on Gordian’s mind. The second involved a slew of matters relevant to the
Thus, his final call of the morning had been made to Yuri Petrov, Dorset’s counterpart at the Russian Space Agency, through a Sword translator, its purpose having been to keep him abreast of unfolding developments and strongly advise that security around the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan — and other RKS complexes in his directorate — be placed on heightened alert.
Right now, however, his phone had gone silent, giving him a chance to poke his head out of his study and sample the morning. Dorset had promised to get back to him within the next hour with word on an especially important issue, and Gordian had delayed heading out to the office until then, wanting to be certain he was absolutely free to take the call.
He looked over his plate, shifted around a forkful of eggs without raising it to his mouth, then decided to wait for Ashley’s return before getting started on breakfast.
He sat back, noting that his daughter Julia had fared just slightly better than himself in working up an appetite. Across from him were the vestiges of her own half-eaten meal — a picked-apart blueberry muffin and a cold and mostly full cup of coffee. Tied up in knots, she’d rushed off for her first painful meeting with a divorce attorney just as he’d stepped into the sunlight, leaving her dishes where they were, and her grayhounds in his and Ashley’s care. Actually, Gordian’s exclusive care at the moment, since his wife had sprung up from the table and gone into the house to put a CD into the stereo, something that he could not for the life of him recall her doing in over twenty-five years of marriage, and which was particularly baffling because of the abruptness with which she’d abandoned him, her muffin, and her coffee to do it.
Wondering what had gotten into her, wishing he could clear his mind of distractions and relax, Gordian glanced to one side of him, then the other, and frowned at the utter impossibility of it. The dogs tended to favor him at mealtime, and were flanking his chair like bookends, staring up at him with their bright, brown, pleading eyes.
He reached for a wedge of his toast, broke it in half, and gave each of the dogs a piece. As usual Jack, a brindle male and the larger of the two, sucked his down whole and went back to staring at him. Considerably more high-strung, Jill excitedly sprang onto all fours and spun in a full circle while gobbling her portion, slamming her backside into the legs of the table.
Gordian’s breakfast settings rattled and bounced, coffee sloshing over the rim of his cup and flooding the saucer underneath it.
He released an aggravated breath.
“That’s how you always get yourself in trouble, you know.”
Gordian turned, and saw Ashley reappear from inside the house to the recorded accompaniment of Fats Waller’s stride piano.
“Hmmph,” he said, dabbing up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin. “What do you mean?”
“I mean feeding the dogs off the table,” she said. “Besides being against Julia’s orders, it’s sure to cause a disaster.”
He frowned.
