gonna have armed search teams operate across borders?”
“Our own,” Ricci said at once.
Thibodeau’s frown deepened.
“That might’ve washed when you was a city cop lookin’ to haul some gangbangers off the street, but not when you got to abide by international rules of law,” he said. “We can’t be goin’ anywhere we want, doin’ anythin’ we please.”
Ricci had fixed him with a sharp look.
“Like when you got yourself shot to bits playing Wyatt Earp in Brazil, that right?” he said.
The sudden tension in the room was palpable. Thibodeau stiffened in his chair, glaring at Ricci with open resentment and hostility.
“Knew plenty of tough guys in ‘Nam,” he said. His voice was trembling. “They either gave up their attitudes or choked on ’em.”
Ricci said nothing in response. He sat absolutely still, his face impassive, his eyes locked on Thibodeau’s.
Nimec hadn’t been sure what was going on between them but had felt deep down that it had little to do with their differences over the investigation. There had been scarcely a moment to think about that, however. He’d been afraid Thibodeau would lunge at Ricci and was watching him closely, preparing to haul them apart if that happened.
Fortunately, it never did, thanks to Gordian’s intervention. He had made a loud business of clearing his throat, breaking into the strained silence.
“I believe we should call it an afternoon, spend some time enjoying the fresh air,” he’d said in a deliberate tone.
Thibodeau had started to reply, but Gordian cut him short.
“Meeting adjourned,” he said, abruptly rising from his seat. “Let’s try to relax.”
And that had about finished it, or at least discouraged the hostilities from boiling over on the spot. And here Nimec stood topside two hours later, Ricci beside him at the rail, both men staring contemplatively into the blue distance.
What was Thibodeau’s problem, exactly? he thought. Why had Ricci provoked such blistering rancor from him, the Fish That Got Away notwithstanding? Pete had always known Thibodeau to be a grounded, fundamentally reasonable man, and it was hard to reconcile that with his mercurial outbursts. His mind once again insisted that the root cause of his behavior was as yet unspoken and unknown… which got him where insofar as being able to keep the show he and Megan had scripted from folding?
Nimec wasn’t quite certain — more or less standard for him lately, he supposed — but it had struck him that maybe part of the answer could be found in his recollection of another meeting, one that took place at UpLink’s corporate headquarters just over a half year earlier and ended on a note very unlike the crashing discord of today’s grand finale. It had been three, four days after Ricci had returned from his mission in Kazakhstan, something like that, and he’d joined Nimec, Megan, and Gordian to confer about the troublesome loose ends they’d been left to grapple with. At that point, their spirits had been anything but high, and it had been Ricci’s thoughts on the affair that had helped to bring them around.
Nimec glanced over at him now, remembering.
“Small steps, that’s how you count your gains,” he said quietly. “Those words sound familiar?”
Ricci didn’t move for several seconds. Then he turned toward him, the faintest hint of a smile on his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “Familiar.”
“It’s solid advice,” Nimec said. “I can’t think of a better way of saying you ought to give things a chance to work out.”
Ricci grunted and studied the water again.
“Assuming for a minute that I would,” he said. “If Thibodeau shoves, from now on, I’m shoving back harder. That bother you?”
Nimec shrugged.
“Whether or not it does, I’d be willing to carry it,” he said.
Ricci gave no comment, just leaned forward with his elbows on the rail.
“The bay’s pretty this late in the afternoon,” he said after a long while.
“Yeah,” Nimec said. “It’s how the sun hits the swells when it dips toward the horizon.”
“Just sort of glances off their tops, makes it look like they’re sprinkled with a few zillion gold flakes.”
“Yeah.”
Ricci looked over at him.
“I’ll stick around, Pete,” he said. “For now.”
Nimec nodded, and this time it was his turn to smile a little.
“That’s about all I can ask,” he said.
A distancing from consequence salves the betrayer’s guilt. Do not look toward crime and politics for examples; that facile sense of remove is bait for the waiting trap, and we’ve all heard the excuses in our ordinary lives. The woman next door that leaves the cat behind on moving day — van’s here, have to go, who’d have thought the dumb thing would wander off for so long after she let it out? The family man enjoying a peccadillo with his secretary after office hours — his wife’s happily provided for, bought her an expensive gold bracelet last week, and he’s sure his kids prefer their computer games to hanging around with dull old Pop.
Remove any act from a broader context, and one can become convinced it means nothing. You see how easily this happens? Just close the eyes to cause, look away from effect, and walk on down the road.
Alone in Roger Gordian’s office at UpLink in San Jose, Don Palardy told himself it was only a few hairs he was taking.
Only a few hairs, what was the terrible crime?
White cotton gloves on his hands, he stood behind Gordian’s open desk drawer and used a tweezer to pull a strand from the comb in one of its neat compartments. He carefully dropped it into his Zippit evidence collection bag and then plucked two more from the teeth of the comb, dropping them into the plastic bag as well.
As head of the sweep team that performed weekly electronic countersurveillance checks in the building’s executive offices and conference rooms, Palardy had no concerns about being discovered in an awkward or compromising position.
He knew that Gordian was at the yearly blue-water conference and would not be walking in on him today. He knew that he wasn’t being observed through hidden spy cameras first and foremost because it would have been he, Palardy, or one of his subordinates who performed their installation, had Gordian ever requested it— and he had not. Moreover, Palardy had carried into the room with him the broad-spectrum bug detector known in his section as the Big Sniffer — a twenty-thousand-dollar device that looked like a somewhat larger-than-standard briefcase when closed, and that was now opened and unfolded on the floor to reveal a microcomputer-controlled system of radio, audio, infrared, and acoustic correlation scanners, the output of which was displayed on LED bar graphs or optional hard-copy printouts. Among the Big Sniffer’s package of advanced tools was a Very Low Frequency receiver sensitive to the 15.75 kilohertz frequency emitted by the horizontal oscillators of video cameras. And the VLF detector was neither beeping nor flickering, which indicated none had been located.
Alone and trusted here in the office — safe from “surreptitious intercept,” as it was known in the trade — Pa — lardy slid the evidence bag between his thumb and forefinger to seal it, dropped the bag into a patch pocket of his coveralls, and pushed the kneehole drawer shut.
The deed done, he plugged the cable of his boom detector into its socket in the rear of the Big Sniffer and went about his routine sweep with due diligence. Taking care to avoid the antique Swiss bracket clock he so admired, moving the mop-shaped antenna across the walls of the office, Palardy probed for the harmonic signals of tape recorders, microphones, and other passive and active bugs. Had he found anything amiss, he would have been quick to disable it and report his findings to his higher-ups in Sword security.
Don Palardy considered himself a decent and caring man, though not without human frailty. Had he found an expensive piece of jewelry on the carpet here, a missing cuff link or tie clip studded with diamonds, he would have returned it to his employer, regardless of how much taking it with him would have helped with his debts.
