Bio-Strike

veins.

Somehow Palardy managed to stand perfectly still, managed to keep his body between his hands and the doorway until he’d finished peeling the gloves from his fingers and stuffed them into a patch pocket on his thigh.

He turned toward Norma. She was leaning into the room through the open door.

“No,” he said. Realizing nervously that he hadn’t looked himself over, hadn’t made sure the gloves weren’t sticking out of his pocket. Wondering if she could see them. “Not a bit.”

The receptionist studied his face a second, shrugged.

“Sorry, my dear,” she said. “But in the meantime, don’t look so worried, I’m sure your thingamajig will turn up.”

She didn’t notice, Palardy thought. Merciful God, she didn’t notice.

He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I can manage without it, meanwhile.”

Then the phone on her desk chirruped.

“Better answer that, hope you don’t mind letting yourself out,” she said and ducked her head back into the outer office area. “I’ll remind the cleanup crews to stay on the lookout.”

Palardy took a gulp of air, smoothed his coveralls over his body with sweaty palms. The gloves weren’t showing. She hadn’t seen anything. He was going to be okay.

A moment later, he followed Norma into the anteroom, exchanging a smile and a wave as he went past her desk, got into the elevator, and rode it downstairs.

Moving on legs he could hardly feel through a world that would never again seem to be the one he’d always known.

“Hi, Ash,” Gordian said into his office phone. “Your wheels down at LAX yet?”

“On the ground, safe and sound,” she said. “I’m calling on my cellular from the arrivals terminal, so you can stop biting your nails.”

Gordian smiled. Nearly four decades of flying planes ranging from Air Force bombers to his private Learjet had made him a well nigh unbearable backseat pilot, and he became even more fretful whenever his wife or kids took to the air with someone else’s hand at the controls.

Grown kids, he reminded himself.

“Trip okay?”

“Couldn’t have been smoother,” Ashley said. “How are things at the office?”

“Not without pockets of turbulence,” he said. “I just retreated to my desk after running into one, matter of fact. You know Mark Debarre? The Marketing veep?”

“Sure. Nice guy.”

“Usually,” Gordian said. “You should’ve seen him sprout fangs at today’s sales conference. Almost sank them into one of the guys from Promotions when they got into a flap about whether to call those information download kiosks we’ve developed Infopods or Data-pods. ”

She laughed.

Even from hundreds of miles away, the sound warmed him. It was like being able to hear a sunbeam.

“Which was Mark’s preference?”

“The first.”

“And yours?”

“I’m back and forth.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “I’ll think about it over the weekend, give you my opinion, if you’d like.”

“I’d like.”

“Then consider me on it,” she said. “Meanwhile, Laurie, Anne, and yours truly are about to hold a marketing conference of our own at the luggage claim. We wish to become the most enthusiastically vulnerable, suggestible consumers we can be.”

Gordian smiled, reached into his tall can of rolled wafers, fished one out of the can, and let it steep in the cup of coffee on his desk. Ashley’s pre-Thanksgiving shopping weekend with her sisters in L.A. was a lollapalooza that had grown in size, scope, and budget each year, seemingly by conscious design.

“Did I hear you say luggage claim?” he said. “Since you’re only going to be away from home for two days, my impression was you’d be okay with carry on.”

As always, Ashley knew a setup line when it was pitched to her.

“The suitcases, my love, are for bringing home the bounty,” she said.

“Guess I’d better wait till you’re done with the charge cards before filing for Chapter Eight, then.”

“That would be considerate.” She laughed again.

A sunbeam touching the wings of a butterfly, Gordian thought. On the brightest and bluest day of summer.

“I really should get cracking,” Ashley said after a moment. “Meet you at Julia’s house Sunday afternoon, okay?”

“Why don’t I pick you up at the airport,” he said. “We could drive there together afterward.”

“Really, Gord, you don’t need to bother. It’s easier for me to arrange for a car.”

“Well…”

“Besides, some father-daughter alone time might be good for the two of you. And I know you’d like to finish that doggie corral you’re building for Jack and Jill.”

“That I would…”

“Then knock yourself out,” she said. “I certainly will.”

Gordian pulled his wafer out of his coffee, examined it idly, dunked it back into the cup.

“You win,” he said. “Have fun. And give my regards to your partners-in-buying.”

“Will do on both counts,” she said. “Love you.”

“Love you, too, Ash.”

Gordian hung up the phone, reached for his cup, sipped, and decided the wafer stick had imparted all the hazelnut flavor it was going to. The result wasn’t quite as satisfying as the high-sat-fat coffee blend he’d relinquished at Ashley’s insistence, but having the wafer to snack on with his hot beverage offered something of a consolation.

He took a bite of the end that had been soaking in the coffee, like a man playing Russian roulette without even an inkling that he holds a cocked and loaded revolver in his hand.

This, his second rolled wafer of the day, was not among those Palardy had injected.

Three hours later, Gordian would sneak a third into his daily allotment as a perk to himself after hearing more cries and lamentations from his fueding execs.

That was the bullet that got him.

“You have any thoughts about why I asked to see you here this late on a Friday afternoon?”

“Well, sir—”

“Tom’s fine for now,” Ricci said. After seven months on the job, he guessed he was past due making up his mind how he wanted to be addressed by his subordinates.

“Yes, sir,” Nichols cleared his throat nervously. “Tom.”

Ricci looked across his desk at the kid.

“And what might they be?”

The kid’s face was confused.

“Your thoughts,” Ricci said.

“Oh.” Nichols cleared his throat again. “Well, it’s late Friday afternoon…”

“Which I already established,” Ricci said.

“Yes, you did, sorry, Tom…”

Ricci wound his hand in the air.

“My assumption was that you’d waited till the end of this week to complete your evaluation of my actions during last week’s training exercise. And, uh, that you wish to discharge me from the RDT before next week gets under way.”