Zero Hour

He felt for it on his belt clip, couldn’t locate it, glanced down at himself. The phone wasn’t there.

It rang again.

Gordian searched the area immediately around him, didn’t see it there either, then looked toward the slope where he’d been rock-gathering in a minor panic, positive it must have fallen somewhere among the jumbled chunks of broken hillside.

“Over here, Roger.”

He glanced over at Ashley, surprised to see the phone in her hand.

“Where did—?”

“I picked it up off the ground after you dropped it half an hour ago.”

Twee-dle!

“You should answer before the caller thinks you’ve fallen asleep on your rocking chair,” she said with a lopsided grin.

Gordian scowled in response to her open amusement, took the phone, flipped up the earpiece.

“Hello?”

“Boss, great, I was getting ready to leave a message.”

Gordian opened his mouth, closed it. The two or three seconds it took him to place the voice at the other end of the line had nothing to do with it being unfamiliar to him. Rather, it was the unfamiliarity of the context in which he was hearing it. He supposed it had been years since he’d spoken with Lenny Reisenberg outside a business office, whether in person or long distance.

“Lenny?” he said.

“Yeah, Boss.” A pause. “This a bad time to talk?”

“No, no.”

“You sure? It should only take a couple minutes, but I don’t want to keep you from anything…”

“No, really, right now is fine,” Gordian said. “It’s been a while, Len. How are you?”

“Okay,” Lenny said. “Yourself?”

“Working hard at semiretirement.”

Lenny chuckled. “You were always so busy running the show at HQ, it must be an adjustment having some time on your hands.”

“That’s what I expected,” Gordian said. “But I’ve found out keeping busy isn’t the tough part.”

“Oh?”

Gordian leaned back against the outcrop beside his shovel and glanced over at Ashley. She was reorganizing some of the rocks she’d stacked in their wheelbarrow.

“It’s all still about negotiation and compromise,” he said. “Just happens to be of a slightly different nature than before.”

“You’ll have to promise to give me the lowdown on that one of these days.”

One of these days, Gordian thought. “What can I do for you, Len?”

There was momentary silence in the earpiece. Then Lenny exhaled.

“A favor, I hope,” he said. “I feel awkward even asking… guess it’s pretty unusual…”

“Business or personal?”

“I’m not sure there’s a clear line,” Lenny said. “Or if there is, it’s sort of fuzzy in my head.”

“Then I suppose you’d better lay everything out before that fuzziness spreads into mine.”

Lenny released another tidal wash of air from his lungs and started to explain.

Gordian listened closely. There was the Kiran salesman, Patrick Sullivan. The Long Island detectives who’d arrived at Lenny’s office while investigating his disappearance, followed by Sullivan’s wife appearing to solicit his help. His initial unwillingness, and her striking a resonant chord inside him that overcame it. Then his pledge to do what he could, Noriko Cousins shooting him down at Sword HQ, a Chinese herbalist named Yan offering sagacious advice, and an epiphany at a kosher deli triggered in some ambiguous way by a bite, or perhaps several bites, of a pastrami sandwich.

Five minutes later Lenny had almost gotten through his struggle to explain what was weighing on him.

“I wandered around half of Manhattan yesterday telling myself I had no right asking for Sword to meddle in something that’s happened to a guy who isn’t one of our employees,” he said, seemingly out of breath. “That I had to let it go. Hell, I don’t even know Sullivan well enough to get his daughter’s name straight. Thought she was in first or second grade till his wife mentions she’s away at college. But then… Boss, you remember the old TV show, This Is Your Life? Since Mary Sullivan came into my office, it feels like my brain’s been taken over by the spirit of the host… what was his name…?”

“Ralph Edwards.”

“Right, him, and he’s been walking my past out in front of me. And I’ve got to admit, the one memory that keeps coming out from behind the curtain… well, you know the day we met… the night, that is… it was right here in New York. Times Square…”

“How could I forget, Len?” Gordian said. “You were, ah, quite the character. Decent salesman, too.”

“I was a screwed-up mess with an attitude, a minimum-wage job in a record shop, and a little knowledge of jazz,” Lenny said. “ ‘You want to bop, there’s Ornithology.’ Remember?”

A reflective smile touched Gordian’s lips.

“ ‘I’ll do it with Dizzy if you’ll give me Anthropology,’ ” he said. “I remember, Len.”

“Never can tell where you’ll find one of life’s little shoehorns.”

Gordian considered that one, smiled.

“The crossroads of the world would seem just the right place.”

“Yeah,” Lenny said. “I suppose it would.”

Gordian waited in silence.

“Boss, I don’t want to sound sappy,” Lenny said after a moment. “But the reason I called… I know you trust the people at Sword to decide where and where not to stick our noses. I know Noriko Cousins had solid reasons for taking a pass in this situation, and I don’t like making an end run around her. But twenty years ago you turned me around for no good reason I could figure, and probably none I deserved. You took a chance on me. And I think what I’ve carried away from it is that there are times when you’ve got to reach out just for the sake of helping. Or when something inside a person reaches out to something that’s inside you, and you know it’s only right to help. That if you don’t, you’re dropping the ball.”

Gordian thought in silence some more. It had been six months since he’d turned the daily responsibilities of running UpLink over to Megan Breen, which meant he probably wasn’t up to snuff on the doings of the Kiran Group or its parent company, Armbright Industries. But however unsaintly it might be, one of Sword’s regular, necessary functions was to compile and evaluate competitive intelligence on other tech firms… in blunter terms, shadow UpLink’s market rivals. Gordian was sure he did not need to remind Lenny of this, and wouldn’t have discussed it over the telephone anyway. CI was a vital, accepted part of business that every major corporation conducted, guarded against, and artfully pretended to know nothing about. The ethical and legal issues associated with it primarily arose when using information for strategic advantage crossed over to intellectual theft or sabotage, boundaries Gordian had always made sure weren’t overstepped.

So here came Lenny wanting Noriko Cousins — and now Gordian himself — to have Sword look into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a Kiran employee. Or poke around in a missing-husband case, however you chose to frame it. Either way, the first question that request had provoked in Gordian’s head was whether it violated any of his basic tenets for CI activity. And while he’d concluded it might not be a typical recon, it still fell more or less into his definition of what went with the program. Which left Gordian to decide if Lenny’s appeal warranted an allocation of corporate resources… either because he felt it was in UpLink’s best interests, or because he was ready to yield to it out of friendship.

Gordian remained thoughtful, watching Ash continue to shift around the stones she’d gathered inside the wheelbarrow. He wondered in a vague sort of way what was wrong with how they’d been stacked in the first place, then realized all at once that she was only fussing with them to give him a chance to talk on the phone. At about the same instant it struck him how much he wanted to get back to her. Then it occurred to him how much he also liked having to make a determination of some significance that concerned UpLink.

He turned his mind back in the direction of Lenny’s request, focusing in on his core justification for wanting Sword involved. What exactly was the point he was making?