gem case from his side, held it out toward Ricci. “Take it. Poor Enrique here’s a dead end, so you’d might as well. What’s there to lose? Maybe you’ll feel you owe me one. But that will be up to you.”
Silence.
Ricci did not move for a long moment. Then he slowly reached out to the man and took the case from him, keeping his gun trained on his chest.
The man’s hand dropped back to his side. “I’m going to steal away into the night now,” he said. “Just tell me I don’t have to worry about you putting a slug into me for some odd reason.”
Ricci was still watching his eyes. “You already have that figured,” he said.
The man smiled and dipped his head in a gesture that almost resembled a bow.
“Be careful now,” he said.
Then the man turned and walked into the darkness, heading toward a nearby footpath, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees rising tall on either side of it, leaving Ricci crouched over the body of Enrique Quiros, alone in the silent green, one hand around his gun, the other holding tightly on to a mystery.
TWENTY-THREE
The capacity to balance emotions that would seem bound for shattering collision is a wonder of the human heart.
They had gathered in this room more times than any of them could recall. UpLink International was a vast organization with interests in many countries that were only an armed or political power play away from disintegration, and its very presence in those unstable regions often threw it into the center of violent conflict. In this room, they had plotted strategies and determined their reactions to swiftly unfolding crises in Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, Malaysia, Brazil… even to a terrorist strike that had killed thousands in America’s largest metropolis. In this room, with its steel-reinforced concrete walls, its embedded sound-masking equipment, its bug detectors, phone and fax encryptors, and myriad other surveillance countermeasure systems, they had felt able to deliberate and exchange intelligence with an unexceeded level of privacy. Reserved for UpLink’s inner circle, it had been their closed chamber, their sanctum sanctorum. But, though their minds told them to trust Phil Hernandez’s assurances that its security remained intact, their hearts would permit no such confidence. How could they, after a hands-on custodian of their privacy had become their worst betrayer?
In the confines of this windowless room one level below the lobby of their San Jose headquarters, UpLink’s inner circle had gathered around Roger Gordian like knights at a modern round table, dedicated to helping him shape his dream of a freer, better world, offering him the sum of their insight, expertise, and counsel at moments of urgent decision. Now his chair at the table was vacant, and their hearts ached from his absence. How could they not, when it was his vision and strength of character that gave them inspiration? Yet somehow the members of this group took comfort in simply being here together, with their wide diversity of backgrounds and personalities, consolidated around a shared goal, determined to prevail over the challenges they faced. And stirring in the hearts of several of them — deeper in some than others — was an embryonic awareness that if the unthinkable did happen to Roger Gordian and his chair were to remain empty, one of their number had the attributes to pick up his fallen standard and guide them on toward the further realization of his dream.
“Now that everybody’s arrived, I think we’d better get the meeting under way,” Megan Breen said. She looked around the large conference table at Nimec, Scull, Ricci, Thibodeau, and finally at the morning’s unexpected visitor. “Alex, it’s good to see you back, these god-awful circumstances aside.”
He gave her a somber but genuine smile. A lean, fit, smartly dressed man in his late forties whose corrective laser eye surgery had made his once-familiar wire glasses a memory, Nordstrum had been UpLink’s chief foreign affairs consultant before his retirement for personal reasons the year before.
“I just wish I could have returned sooner,” he said. “Gord’s fighting for his life, and I’m off trekking in Morocco, footloose and oblivious.”
“Bad things can happen, Alex,” she said, “whether you’re here or gone. That’s life.”
“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe I’m finished with being gone.”
Megan’s was less of a true response than a signal she wanted to get down to business. They had much to cover, and the clock was ticking.
“We’ve all seen the information on the compact disk Tom brought back from San Diego, and it’s an incredible amount to digest,” she said. “I’d hoped to organize the material in a report or have something ready on the digital projector. But there wasn’t a chance, so I had to settle for an old-fashioned chalkboard and pointer.” Megan paused and gestured at the transparent clamp binders she’d given to each of them. “As everyone can see, I did manage to make up printed transcripts of the audio portion of the carousel surveillance and the conversation between Quiros and Palardy.”
“We don’t need to get too fancy,” Ricci said. “With what Nameless gave me in Balboa Park, the threads are pretty easy to follow.”
“Some blanks gonna have to be filled in before we can do the boss any good,” Thibodeau said. “Otherwise it
Alex was nodding his agreement. “It’s like what I used to drum into the heads of my journalism undergrads. The six questions that are critical to any story,” he said. “Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We’ve gotten partial answers to most of them. We can make some fair guesses about the rest. But we need to find out more. And decide what needs to be found out
“No argument from me,” Nimec said. “But before that, I figure it might pay for us to go through a quick rundown of everything we know.”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Starting with the blonde.”
He motioned toward the green chalkboard on the wall behind Megan.
Written on it in her hand was:
Megan went to the board, lifted her pointer, and held its tip to the line of aliases beneath the second arrow.
“The blonde it is,” she said. “The digital video we acquired from Nameless, as Tom calls him, establishes that she gave Quiros what Eric Oh believes to be some sort of activator for the viral agent—”
“This is from Quiros-Palardy, correct?” Nordstrum said. He was flipping through his copy of the transcript. “Apologies, everyone, but I’m still playing catch-up…”
“Yes,” Megan said. “We can guess the conversation occurred when Quiros passed along the activator to Palardy.” She had moved her pointer down one line. “Some of our major unanswered questions still revolve around how Roger contracted the dormant virus and who else might be carrying it. Eric’s working with the Sobel gene tech people to assure that we’ll have a rapid screening test for the germ very soon. It’s frightening to contemplate, but virtually all of us could have been infected… you being the least likely, Alex, having been overseas. Which I hope won’t set you on a guilt jag again.”
He produced another wan smile. “And the activator?”
“A separate problem,” she said. “Unless Quiros was selling Palardy a complete load, we know they can be designed or adapted for individual targets. There were mentions of an ampule and liquid, so the assumption is that it was dispensed with a syringe. Injected into something Roger ate or drank. It would be a huge benefit to obtain a specimen of the activator Palardy slipped Roger. And we’re trying.”
“That what those guys in space suits are doing in the boss’s office this morning?” Scull said.
Megan nodded. “And in the cafeteria, and kitchen, and anywhere else in the building that edibles and drinkables might be kept,” she said. “I had a phone conversation with Eric at the crack of dawn, and he gave me some of the basics of viral biology. Most of it was leagues above my head. This is probably a terrible oversimplification, but from what I gather, viruses infect other living organisms by producing molecular proteins that let them fasten on to and penetrate the outer surfaces of the target cells. Eric thinks whoever designed the bug started out with a hantavirus, or something close, and modified it in important ways. We can’t know how many, but one of them allows it to be transmitted to humans by some route other than contact with rodents. Another
