Cutting Edge

was common knowledge. His personal and professional linkages were to a considerable extent open, apparent, exposed. Some of them had already come under Kuhl’s pitiless lens, and he believed their order of importance in Gordian’s life to be a relatively simple determination. Once he was convinced beyond doubt of the link best broken, it would be no less simple to assess its vulnerabilities, and learn whatever remaining facts he needed to move with potent, decisive speed.

He moved his glance to the clock on the table next to him, then returned it to the miniature of San Gines.

The hour and minute had come.

There was only one thing left for him, one thing before he closed out.

Kuhl slid his hand down to the shopping bag he’d leaned against the foot of his chair and took hold of its handle. Then he rose and went over to the worktable where the church of his diligent fashioning glowed bloodred in the ashes of nightfall.

He stood there looking down at it, appraising its every feature, recalling the intensity of his labor with a sense of powerful and intimate connection. Feeling an investment of self that in some indescribable way connected him, in turn, to the old church on Calle del Arenal, after which his exacting replica had been crafted.

Calle del Arenal, the Street of Sand, ancient cemetery of Jews, their dust and bones razed at the order of an inquisitor tribunal.

Kuhl thought of the lustful dancers at Joy Eslava, gathering in the shadow of the cross like freed birds outside a cage that had held them from flight, as if that near reminder of confinement somehow added fervor to their kinetic mingling.

After a moment, he reached into the shopping bag for the sculptor’s mallet he had purchased at the nearby art-supply shop. The iron head did not weigh much — one and a half pounds, to be precise — but it was quite sufficient to do the job intended for it.

He leaned down, placed the shopping bag on the floor next to the table, and opened its mouth wide. Then he straightened, raised his sculptor’s mallet over the church, and with clenched teeth brought it down hard on the newly completed and attached bell tower.

It took only a single blow of the mallet to drive it down through the model’s splintering roof to its inner core. Three additional blows reduced the entire miniature to crushed and unrecognizable scraps of colored wood.

Kuhl did not pause to regard its shattered remnants, merely cleared them from sight with a broad swipe of his right arm that sent them spilling over the edge of the work table into his shopping bag.

Brushing the last pieces of the obliterated church off the table, he lifted the bag again, carried it to the door of the apartment, gathered up his luggage, and vacated without a backward glance.

Kuhl left the shopping bag in a waste receptacle in an alley behind the building, and could feel the tightness in his jaw starting to relent by the time he hailed a taxi to the airport. His existence in Madrid was indeed closed out; he had been released for a mission that he almost believed himself born to fulfill.

Across the ocean, Big Sur awaited.

* * *

“I’m telling you, Gord, no qualifications, this is the juiciest steak I’ve ever eaten,” Dan Parker said, and swallowed a mouthful of his food. He had ordered the prime New York strip with a side of mashed potatoes. “I feel like we haven’t been here together in years.”

“That’s because we haven’t,” Roger Gordian said. He had gotten the filet mignon with baked. “Three years, if you’re counting.”

Parker looked up from his plate with mild wonder. “No kidding? That long?”

Gordian nodded, pressing some sour cream into the potato’s flesh with his fork.

“That long,” he repeated. It was a bit hard to believe. Lunch at the Washington Palm on Nineteenth Street was once a regular monthly appointment for them, but that was before Gordian’s illness. It was also before Dan had lost his congressional seat in Santa Clara County, having succumbed to the political fallout for helping Gordian lobby against indiscriminate dissemination of U.S. encryption tech abroad. This had proven a resoundingly unpopular stance among his constituents in Silicon Valley’s software industry, who, with the exception of UpLink International, had not seemed to care a whit whether the al Qaedas, Hamases, and Cali Cartels of the world had access to products that could thwart the best surveillance efforts of global law enforcement, their rationale having been that the terrorists and drug lords could get their hands on similar encoding programs from foreign countries, or bootlegged copies of U.S. programs regardless of legal obstacles. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em for a buck, Gordian thought, even if they’re planning to flood your borders with heroin or level the foundations of Western civilization.

“A lot’s happened to keep us busy,” he said.

“Truer words have never been voiced.” Parker tipped his head toward the good-humored caricature of Tiger Woods on the wall above their formerly usual corner table. “At least Tiger’s still here with us.”

“That he is. And for my money the kid’s a permanent fixture.”

Parker grinned. The sports and political cartoons mounted everywhere in sight were a tradition at the restaurant harkening back almost a century to the original Palm on Manhattan’s East Side. Before Woods rose to fame on the green, his current spot on the wall had for over a decade been occupied by the caricature of a retired star football player who’d been well-loved by fans young and old until he was accused of a grisly double homicide, one of the victims being his ex-wife and the mother of his children. Then the football player’s picture had come down and been replaced by a drawing of a television sportscaster who was soon to be booted from his job after allegations that he’d taken large bites out of his mistress while dressed in women’s clothing, or something of that nature. Woods had replaced the sportscaster on the wall around 1998, and remained there since, even though the sports commentator had eventually found sufficient sympathy among fans and network executives to be restored to his approximate slot on the airwaves.

Now Parker reached for his martini to wash down another chunk of steak, drank, produced an ahhh of sublime relish, and set his glass down on the white tablecloth.

“Okay, Gord,” he said. “We’ve talked plenty about my chronic political hankerings. How are you these days?”

“Very well,” Gordian said thoughtfully. “Older,” he added with a slight shrug. “And…”

His reflective expression deepened but he just shrugged again and cut into his steak.

Parker waited for about thirty seconds, then gave him a vague gesture that meant “What else?”

Gordian studied his friend’s curious face.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you in suspense,” he said. “Couldn’t come up with the exact word. You know how it is with me.”

Parker smiled a little. A brown-haired man of middle age and medium build, wearing a black hopsack blazer, pale blue shirt, and gray flannel trousers, his appearance was unremarkable in almost every respect until you inevitably noticed his eyes. In them was a look Dan had not lost since his days as wing man to Gordian in their hundreds of sorties over Nam, flying F-4 Phantoms through waves of antiaircraft fire as they searched the forested ground for VC entrenchments. It was a look so similar to the look in Gordian’s eyes that people would sometimes mistake the two for brothers.

“Granted, self-expression isn’t your most notable personality trait,” he said. “You want to try taking a stab at it anyway?”

Gordian hesitated, his knife and fork suspended over his plate.

“It’s a kind of feeling. Or my wanting to hold on to a feeling, if that helps at all,” he said. “I don’t think I can explain it any better. But sometimes when I’m getting out of bed on a workday, and my blanket’s tossed off, and I have one foot halfway to the floor, I look over at Ashley, and I’m perfectly content with how things are at that split second. It gives me incredible peace of mind knowing I don’t really have to leave her for UpLink to be okay. More than okay. That everything I’ve built is strong enough to stand, to grow, if I decide to stay right there in that house.” He paused, sipped his drink — mineral water with a lemon twist. “On the other hand, I don’t want to stay put, become complacent. Don’t want to stop. And that’s as essential to the mix as any sense of accomplishment or fulfillment. Wanting to stop and not stop… to keep attaining things and at the same time let go. I honestly don’t know the word for the feeling, Dan. It might sound like there’s some contradiction in it, but I’m not sure. And I want to figure it out, find whatever will let me keep riding it.”