Bio-Strike

“The payoff’s in the catching, not the keeping.”

“Let me hear you argue that to the fishermen I knew up in Maine,” Ricci said. “Funny thing, you won’t find one of those guys who’ll ever describe the sea in terms of its beauty. For them it stands for waking up in the cold before sunrise and long hours hauling nets on damp, leaky tubs. But it’s the source of their livelihood, and there’s a different kind of appreciation for it.”

Nimec looked over at him. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

Ricci leaned forward over the rail.

“Me neither, exactly,” he said, shrugging. “I’m an East Coast boy, Pete. Grew up ten minutes from the Boston shipyards. I’ve always thought of the Atlantic as a workingman’s ocean. Might not be reasonable, but to me the Pacific coast is catamarans, blond surfer dudes, and blonder Baywatch girls.”

“Ah,” Nimec said. “And you think you might be constitutionally unsuited to temperate waters, that it?”

Ricci started to answer, hesitated, then slowly turned to face him.

“I wasn’t looking to get into it with Thibodeau at the meeting,” he said at last.

“Nobody said you were.”

Ricci shook his head.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “What anyone did or didn’t say isn’t important to me. I don’t need that kind of bullshit.”

Nimec’s expression was reflective.

“Agreed,” he said. “The question is how you choose to handle it.”

Ricci stood in the breeze, his shirtsleeves flapping around his sinewy arms.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everybody who was at the meeting… except for me… has been with Gordian for years. You’ve all got similar ideas about what Sword ought to be. You’re all used to sticking to certain operational guidelines. You developed them.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve already decided you don’t fit,” Nimec said. “Or can’t — or won’t.”

Ricci looked at him.

“I’m trying to be realistic,” he said. “Come on, Pete. Tell me you don’t have your doubts after what happened today.”

Nimec thought about it. Sword was the intelligence and security arm of his employer’s globe-spanning corporation, its title derived from a reference to the ancient legend of the Gordian knot, which had defied every attempt at unraveling its complicated twists and turns until Alexander the Great cast subtlety aside and split it apart with a definitive stroke of his blade. This illustrated Roger Gordian’s own no-nonsense attitude toward the modern day problems that might jeopardize his interests, utilizing country-specific political and economic profiles to help anticipate the vast majority of them before they became full-blown crises, and tackling the unpredictable emergencies that cropped up to endanger UpLink personnel with the most highly trained and well-equipped counterthreat force he could assemble.

Every twelve months before the happy distractions of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays kicked into high gear, Gordian gathered Sword’s leadership aboard his yacht for a sort of informal year-end review and freewheeling blue-sky session, an open forum at which they could examine the organization’s recent accomplishments and shortcomings, evaluate its current state of preparedness, and hopefully reach a consensus of opinion about its future direction.

This year’s roundtable, however, had produced less in the way of common understanding than acrimonious confrontation, at least between two of its key participants.

The session had convened before lunch amid the plush carpeting and rich mahogany furnishings of the Pomona ’s spacious main salon. Besides Nimec, Megan, Ricci, Thibodeau, and Gordian himself, it had been attended by Vince Scull, UpLink’s chief risk-assessment analyst, freshly returned from a long stint in the South Pacific, where he’d been scouting out locales for new satellite ground facilities and had very noticeably added inches to his belly roll, as well as a tiny but expert helical tattoo to the back of his right hand that, he explained, had been applied by a Malaitan tribeswoman as a lasting souvenir of their acquaintance.

Scull had kicked things off with an endorsement of French Polynesia as a potentially excellent site for a monitoring and relay station, scarcely needing to refer to his copious notes while offering detailed facts and figures about the country’s natural and industrial resources, trade statistics, governmental structure, etc. After taking several questions about his recommendation, he had moved on to a broader overview of UpLink’s international standing.

Given his deserved reputation for crankiness, Scull’s sanguine tone was remarkable.

“All in all, we can knock wood,” he’d said in summation, rapping his fist twice against the tabletop. “It’s been peace and quiet since that nasty affair last spring. There hasn’t been a single territorial or ethnic flare-up anywhere we’ve committed our resources that couldn’t be defused before it got out of hand, thanks as much to our company’s pull as diplomatic massages. And lots of places that were giving me worries about their internal stability have managed to avoid the coups, genocidal bloodbaths, even your garden variety power plays that usually bite us in the ass.” He had smoothed an errant strand of hair over his increasingly bald pate. “Take Russia as a for instance. With our old drook President Starinov resigning and the nationalist opposition coming on strong again, I figured we might be looking at payback for helping him hang onto his Kremlin office suite awhile back. But what we’re worth in jobs and cash inflow seems to have gotten us past any vendettas.”

“And your forecast?” Gordian asked. “I’m talking about Russia and elsewhere.”

Scull shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever, I guess, but I don’t see any major blips on my screen, bumps on the road, pick your favorite metaphor. Name a spot on the map that hosts an UpLink bureau or is linked to our satcom net, and you’ll see people with a better quality of life. And not even the most balls-on tyrant wants to be known as the Grinch who’d mess with prosperity. Goes to show free market democratization works, folks.”

“And that the fear of political backlash is a viable substitute for conscience with most heads of state,” Megan said. She glanced at Scull. “You’ll notice, Vince, I made my point without a single mention of the lower anatomy.”

Gordian smiled thinly.

“I’m pleased in either case,” he said, sipping from a glass of Coke.

More discussion had followed across a range of subjects. How was the Sword hiring drive in India going? In South Africa? Where were they in terms of testing that new firearm developed by the nonlethal weapons division? The implementation of intranet software upgrades? What about those negotiations with Poland? And the possible ramifications of the sudden death of Bolivian president-elect Alberto Colon? The tragedy of it went beyond his youth. His humanitarian values and aggressive challenge to the minicartels had promised to spark a regional trend and led to preliminary talks with UpLink about joint commercial initiatives with his country. What were the prospects for those efforts without Colon at the young administration’s helm?

And so on and so forth. At noon they broke for a lunch of cold poached salmon with hollandaise, and capers and cucumber salad, freshly prepared in the Pomona ’s galley, brought in with decorum by a pair of adept servers, and eaten with corresponding appreciation.

It was not by chance that they had waited until after their meal to bring up the previous spring’s sabotage of a NASA space shuttle carrying UpLink orbital technology, and Sword’s presumably connected encounters with paid terrorists in southern Brazil and Kazakhstan — the “nasty affair” to which Scull had alluded. A number of solved, and Gordian had wanted everything else on the agenda out of the way so they could devote the latter half of the meeting to them without digression.

The empty dishes carried off, he’d turned his penetrating blue eyes toward Rollie Thibodeau.

“Okay,” he said. “Any progress to report?”

Thibodeau pursed his lips.

“Some,” he said. “Got to do with Le Chaut Sauvage.”

Nimec would later recall seeing Ricci tense with something between edginess and anger at Thibodeau’s mention of the tag he’d given the terrorists’ otherwise nameless field commander, Cajun French for “The Wildcat.” A man who had twice eluded their efforts to capture him, the second time after tearing away from Ricci during a fierce hand-to-hand struggle at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

“Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have anythin’ would give us a firm lead on him,” Thibodeau had continued. “Was plenty for guesswork, though, startin’ with what we knew about that American botanist in Peru got kidnapped