Cutting Edge

“What’ve you filled it with now?”

Ashley held it up. “See for yourself.”

Gordian glanced at the label.

“Astringent,” he said, reading it aloud.

Ashley nodded.

“There you are,” she said. “You’ll be glad to have it with you in the hot weather.”

Gordian paused. Impeccably scrubbed and unblemished.

“And the foil?” he said.

“A safety seal to replace the original one.” Ashley said. She carefully fitted it over the neck of the bottle, pressing the edges tight. “If the cap comes loose and there’s a leak, it might ruin something in your suitcase.”

Gordian gave her a look that was perhaps nine parts appreciation and one part amusement.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” he said.

She nodded, unsmiling. Then she twisted on the bottle cap, took the Ziploc from the second transparent pocket, added the astringent to the rest of its contents, and returned it to the travel kit.

“I have to go, Ash,” Gordian said after a while, nothing amused about his tone now. Her dead-serious expression had made him feel a little guilty. “I couldn’t avoid the trip to Gabon even when it was all about closing with Sedco. But now it’s become about a lot more.”

“You feel you have to make a point.”

Gordian nodded.

“A show of commitment,” he said. “The surveillance on our advance team… that hit-and-run on the supply convoy… whether or not they’re tied together, they make it vital that we move forward as planned. We can’t seem to be intimidated by anyone.”

She looked at him. “Sedco knows what’s been happening to your people in Africa?”

“Dan Parker was briefed, and he’s informed Hugh Bennett and the rest of its company officers.”

“And they’re with you on going ahead with things.”

“All the way. Especially Bennett. On Sedco’s board, he’s got the last word.”

Ashley considered that a second.

“I understand your reasons,” she said. “But what are his? From what you’ve told me, he doesn’t share your particular interest in supporting nation builders.”

Gordian thought a moment.

“King Hughie’s used to doing business in difficult environments. He would realize you can’t be effective in the region, build upon any accomplishments you’ve made, by backing down from threats,” he said. “And our joint venture aside, my guess is that he believes UpLink to be the prime target of hostile interests in Gabon, figures we’ll be the ones to bear the brunt of any escalation.” Gordian shrugged. “I also suppose it’s possible he simply won’t be deterred from staging a corporate tent show with himself as ringmaster. Probably it’s a little of this, and a little of that. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that we’re providing extra security for everyone and footing the entire tab. In the end, though, it doesn’t make a difference. I can be concerned only with my own motivations.”

Ashley continued looking at him across the room.

“I know,” she said. “And you know better than to think I’d suggest that you cancel. But I’m not talking about now. This conversation is about our future.”

“I’ve never asked my people to do what I won’t.”

“Things have changed, Roger. Sometimes I think everyone knows and recognizes it except you,” Ashley said. “You can admit to your physical limitations, handle them, or choose to pretend they don’t exist.”

Gordian stood by the bed, his gray eyes holding on her green ones.

“I feel fine,” he said. “The doctors gave me their full consent.”

She shook her head.

“I probably know the results of your checkup better than you do. And all things considered, I’m happy with them. But they don’t mean we can erase the damage that’s been done to your body.” She sighed and leveled her voice. “Two years ago I came closer to losing you than I like to remember. But I’m not able to wish away those memories. We can’t afford the luxury. It isn’t for nothing that I packed away a nebulizer of albuterol. There’s scar tissue in your lungs. Fibrosis. You have shortness of breath sometimes—”

“Be fair. It’s generally okay unless I overexert myself. And I’ve tried hard to be careful—”

“Let me finish,” she said. “I’m not accusing you of being cavalier with your health. But you are determined. Protective. When the stakes are high for the things you care about, you tend to push yourself further than you should. Over the last few weeks, you’ve taken how many vaccines? Yellow fever, typhoid, diphtheria, hepatitis A. And I’m sure there are some that slip my mind right this instant. Any one of them can have side effects on people whose immune systems never took anything close to the blows yours did.”

“Ash, you said it yourself. It’s been two years since I got sick.”

“You didn’t just get sick,” she said. “You were almost murdered with a biological weapon, deliberately infected with a virus nobody had ever seen before. A strain grown in a laboratory by a process so sophisticated government scientists are still incredulous.” She paused and waved a hand toward the window. “Whoever created that germ, whoever tried to kill you, is still out there somewhere. We don’t talk about it much these days, I think because you know how it worries me. Maybe we should, though. It’s not a trifling detail we can ignore because it’s convenient.”

Gordian stood there feeling her gaze on him.

“Our marriage is my proudest achievement, what I care about more than anything,” he said. “But I’ve never made you a promise I couldn’t keep, and I won’t now.”

Ashley folded her arms across her chest and gave him a little shrug.

“Then how about trying to make one you can,” she said.

Gordian watched her a while without saying anything. Then he strode across the room, came close in front of her, and put his hands on her shoulders.

“I’ll think about what you’re asking,” he said. “Give me until I come back from Africa, and you’ll have my answer. I don’t know if that does anything to make you worry less. But I want you to feel easier.”

She looked at him, then nodded, her eyes overbright.

“It’s a start, Roger,” she said. “It’s a start.”

* * *

There was soft music coming from the jukebox at Nate’s, a saloon on San Diego’s east side that was an exhausted but tenacious holdout against the pressures of neighborhood gentrification, something that also could have been said of the battered rowhouses shouldered around it on the street like allies in a neglected, fading cause.

Tom Ricci and Derek Glenn sat in a mustard-colored booth toward the back, Ricci sipping a Coke loaded with ice, Glenn drinking imported stout from the bottle and taking long hits on a Marlboro in violation of a clean air law the gray-haired barkeep had resolutely disavowed as unconstitutional, or if not that, then at least undeserving of constitutionality. The four or five other people spaced out along the bar were representative of his dwindling client base, which was almost exclusively male, black, working class, and on the far downhill side of retirement age.

“Business isn’t what it was last time I came down to see you,” Ricci said.

“Wasn’t much, even then,” Glenn said. “Notch another win for the civil boosters.”

“You sound mad,” Ricci said.

Glenn tipped the neck of his beer bottle toward Ricci.

“Sounds like, huh?” he said with a faint smile. “Now I see how you earned your reputation for being an astute son of a bitch.”

Ricci watched him take a long pull of the stout. A tall, large-framed black man in his thirties, Glenn headed the bantam security crew at UpLink’s regional offices, established in a single renovated warehouse on the Embarcadero waterfront mainly to handle administrative overflow from its Sacramento data-storage facility.

“No reason you have to stay where you are,” Ricci said. “I could hook you up at SanJo. A command gig, worth a big pay hike. The rapid deployment team program needs somebody to pull it back together.”

A surprised look formed on Glenn’s face.

“I thought that was your baby,” he said.

“Had to put it down when I went into the field.”