Cutting Edge

“Like some coffee?” he asked, and nodded toward a pot on the warming tray.

“What’s the roast?”

“Excuse me?”

“The roast,” she said. “I was wondering if you can offer me any of that great Italian coffee you always used to make or if it’s more of that weak stuff your dear, sweet, gustatorily desensitized personal assistant’s been brewing.”

“No idea, I stick to my ocha these days… strict orders from Ash,” he said, sounding oblivious. “I can ask Norma—”

Megan hastily flapped her hand.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll pop out to Starbuck’s later on this morning.”

Gordian shrugged, returned to his side of the desk, sat. There was a box of assorted doughnuts to his right. He peered inside, selected one with chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and took a bite as the tea steeped on his blotter.

“Are the doughnuts permitted by Ashley’s dietary edicts?” Megan asked.

Gordian chewed, swallowed, gave her another mild-mannered shrug.

“I haven’t mentioned them to her,” he said, his expression all innocence. “Her big concern lately seems to be that I get my tea polyphenols. Something about their antioxidant and antiviral properties.”

“I see,” Megan said. She was thinking that the boss did seem incredibly hale and hardy. Perhaps not quite back to the robust fitness he’d exuded before the disease — really an attempted assassination with an insidious bioweapon — that nearly ended his life almost two years ago, but immeasurably better than when she’d left for her nine-month stint in Antarctica. His hair was all gray now, true, and you could see more scalp underneath, but there was little else in his appearance to remind Megan of the anemic fragility he’d shown throughout his early recuperative period. He looked, in a word, restored. And while Megan wasn’t inclined to dispute the beneficial properties of tea tannin, or flaxseed oil capsules, or whatever else Gord’s wife incorporated into his therapeutic regimen with each of her frequent trips to the health food store, she believed that Ashley herself — her unfailing devotion and perseverence — had been at the true center of his comeback. Ashley, yes, without question, and the combative spirit that beamed from his steely fighter-pilot’s eyes and had sustained him through five years of nightmarish captivity in the Hanoi Hilton.

“So,” Gordian said now, lifting the filter from his teacup and placing it on a small tray near his elbow. “What are your thoughts?”

Megan looked at him, pulled her mind off its momentary detour.

“About the article, you mean,” she said.

Gordian nodded. “Articles, plural. And I’m referring to their journalistic merit rather than prose stylings. A lot’s been written about our African plans since we laid them out to the financial press, and none of the pieces I’ve seen is applauding our judgment.”

Megan shrugged.

“You’ll notice the total absence of shock on my face,” she said. “Those pieces might give a rosier view of things if the splendid and talented wordsmiths behind them bothered with their easy homework… And what gets me ticked is that it wouldn’t mean shelling out so much as fifty or sixty expense- account dollars for one of those overpriced country investment guides. Any legitimate reporter has budgeted — id est, free — access to online information services. What would it take to find an economic profile on Gabon? Or West Africa in general? A five-minute search, and they’d have loads of data about the oil and gas field development that’s been going on offshore… especially Sedco Chemical’s licensed acreage blocks.”

Gordian abruptly broke into a grin.

“Fiery,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t look shocked,” he said. “I’m just hoping the flames you’re spitting won’t set off the sprinkler system.”

Megan felt a smile steal across her own lips.

“Maybe I don’t have much tolerance for people who run on negative charges. Less than ever after Cold Corners, and seeing how everyone there came together to tough out the worst of situations,” she said. “But it’s like Alex Nordstrum says. After the military contracts UpLink landed a decade ago, you could have gone into instant retirement. Spent the rest of your life chasing hot-air-balloon-around-the-world records, climbing mountains in the Himalayas, crossing the Atlantic in replica Viking ships… what Alex calls jolly follies. The naysayers don’t carp about anybody who makes that sort of choice. I’m not sure I particularly wish they would. You’ve stayed in the real world, though. Put everything on the line to make a difference, corny as that sounds. And they’re always expecting you to fall on your face.”

Gordian raised his teacup, inhaled the flowery-scented steam wafting up from it, and sipped. He put down the cup, took a large bite of his doughnut, chewed quietly, swallowed. Then he dabbed a bright pink sugar sprinkle from the corner of his mouth and had another sip of tea.

“Megan, I’m flattered, but these are my questions,” he said after a while. “First, do you think we’re getting in over our heads with this fiber project? And second, can I assume the more conscientious homework you implied the newsies should have done relates to Dan Parker holding a chair on Sedco’s board of directors?”

Megan looked at him for about thirty seconds, thinking.

“I’ll try to roll my answers together,” she said. “I studied the figures we received from the number crunchers, and gave Vince Scull’s risk-assessment report some careful attention. Then I factored in Murphy’s Law and concluded our spending in Africa’s going to surpass what the negative-charge people expect by two to three billion dollars over the next couple of years. To be honest, four billion wouldn’t surprise me if we start integrating our broadband fiber and satellite facilities. That would deplete us to an extent we might not be able to sustain, even with the credit guarantees we’ve secured from Citigroup.” Megan paused and leaned forward. “That said, we also have a great shot at success. But I really believe it hangs on doubling up our projects in the Ogooue Fan. And that means we need to clinch the deal to wire Sedco’s deepwater platforms to each other and then build the cable out to their land-based offices. The advance capital from Sedco can carry us for a minimum of two years, and by then we should be seeing a slow but steady return on our African telecom expenditures as a whole.”

Gordian had moved his cup of green tea — still about two-thirds full, Megan noticed — aside and out of his way on the desktop. Now he reached for a second doughnut and got started on it.

“Qualified optimism,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of fried dough, grape jelly, and chocolate frosting. “Is that how you’d describe your Monday morning outlook?”

Megan shrugged.

“I’d say it’s considered optimism,” she answered. “There’s a difference.”

Gordian sat, nodded, and ate his doughnut.

Megan looked past him out the office’s polarized glass wall at Mount Hamilton in the southern distance, its great flank rearing over the Diablo Range like a hump of bunched and knotted muscle. It was a clear, sunny day and she could see the Lick astronomical observatory domes gleaming white on its four-thousand-foot summit. The view reminded her of something.

“I stopped by Pete’s office on the way to mine, but he wasn’t there,” she said. “Do you know if he got hung up in Houston?”

Gordian shook his head. “Pete took a long weekend,” he said. “He’ll be leaving for Gabon with the advance team on Friday, and wanted to spend some extra time with Annie Caulfield.”

Megan smiled a little, her expression hinting at an un-stated thought.

“They’ve become quite an item,” she said.

“Seems the case.” Gordian looked at her. “It’s interesting to me how they got together romantically. The circumstances, that is.”

Megan tapped the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Gordian finished his second doughnut, reached for a napkin, wiped his lips, and then tossed the crumpled napkin into his wastebasket.

“They first met in Florida. When Pete went down there to help investigate the space shuttle tragedy at Cape