Zero Hour

being Pat’s best friend, I was scared I might be next in line. And just between us, Detective, no damned promise is worth dying over.”

* * *

Lathrop was at a desk in the furnished shoebox of an apartment on Lexington Avenue with a bottle of beer beside his notebook computer and Missus Frakes perched on the other side of it staring at him. She’d managed to spring up there without needing a lift, and Lathrop supposed that made this one of her good days. He didn’t yet know what kind of day it would be for him, but some complications had emerged in the broad scheme of things, and he meant to decide whether or not he could minimize their damage to his plans, or even turn them to his advantage.

Lathrop took a drink of beer and looked at the old coon cat, his fingers around the bottle’s long neck.

“I thought we could sit tight a while longer,” he said. “If I’d gotten the Dragonfly keys out of Sullivan’s girlfriend, we’d be in a better position. But it is what it is, Missus Frakes. It is what it is. The house of cards I built for the two of us is feeling pretty shaky right about now, you agree?”

The cat watched him. Her gleaming limpid eyes were in contact with his, and they narrowed at the sound of his voice.

“Can’t pretend not to know what this thing with the girlfriend means,” Lathrop said. “It doesn’t leave much time, eliminates options.”

The coon stared at him from the top of the desk, her eyelids rising and falling in a demonstration of serene feline rapport. Lathrop approximated it with a blink of his eyes. In front of him his computer’s power was off, its screen raised but blank.

He lifted his beer bottle by its neck again, tilted it to his lips, took a long swallow.

“If I wanted to be conservative, I’d cut those options down to two,” Lathrop said. “And when time’s at a premium, conservative might be just the way to go.”

The cat continued to watch him. Lathrop ran a fingertip around the inside of the bottle’s mouth to wet it with a drop of beer and then held the finger straight out toward her face, moving it closer slowly to avoid startling her. Conditioned by past abuse, she flinched back a little anyway and straightened as if preparing for a defensive bat of her paw. Lathrop became very still, held the finger about a half inch in front of her nose until she leaned forward and sniffed it. Then she relaxed her guarded posture and licked off the beer, her tongue like sandpaper against his skin.

Lathrop let her finish having her taste, pulled back his finger, and switched on the computer.

“It’s coming up on zero hour, Missus Frakes,” he said. “Zero hour in the house of cards. And if we intend to come out ahead, we need to grab a joker or two out of the air, run with them fast as we can.”

Lathrop thought a moment. He already knew who one of his e-mail recipients would be. The other, though… he wanted to give the other a spot more consideration.

He recalled an interesting night in the park a few years ago. Balboa Park in San Diego, to name the place. He’d been right in the middle of some heavy fireworks between a couple of narco barons serving payout on a blood feud, and for Lucio Salazar and Enrique Quiros, the end result had been mutually exclusive to their lives— buenas noches, amigos, no loss. UpLink’s security ops had been in the thick of that donnybrook, too, and Lathrop’s brief encounter with their man in charge had left him feeling there was a deep, rich vein of secrets running in that particular gent, secrets he might plumb and use to his advantage somewhere down the line. But that was only part of what he’d sensed, and maybe even the lesser part. For the brief moment they had faced one another in the shadows, Lathrop had felt an inexplicable kinship with him, a resonance of a sort he’d never known before or since. It had been as if he’d seen a figure on the surface of a dark, still pool that conformed so closely to his outlines it could not have been mistaken for anything but his own reflection… and then had looked over his shoulder and suddenly realized it belonged to someone else, someone standing right there behind him at the edge of the mirrored water. Lathrop hadn’t forgotten that jarring impression, couldn’t have forgotten it. In fact, it had driven him to find out the man’s name and store it away in his mental book of people to remember.

Now Lathrop brought up UpLink International’s corporate Web site on his browser, skipped the animated graphic introduction, clicked on the icon for its main American bureau, and then went through several drop-down menus until he reached the contacts list for its security staff. There was an electronic mail link to the chief of security—peter.nimec@uplinksanjo.sword.com—but nothing for the person in question.

Lathrop didn’t think guessing it would be a problem — organizations the size of UpLink almost always used consistent user-ID — host-domain address formats. If two or more employees had the same name there might be initials or some other characters attached to the user IDs to distinguish between them. But his man’s name wasn’t too common… certainly he was no John Smith… and Lathrop thought the odds were low that anyone in his division would share it. Still, he’d keep his message vague enough so it would mean absolutely nothing if it reached the wrong person, and at the same time embed it with a verbal cue to assure his intended party knew full well who’d sent it. Unless, of course, it simply bounced… in which case he would have to do some more guesswork.

Logging on to his anonymous client server, Lathrop opened a new message window and addressed it to: thomas. ricci @ uplinksanjo. sword. com.

Then he wrote and sent his e-mail, snapped off another to the candidate he’d originally decided to reach out and touch, and finally leaned back in his chair.

The choice was either to play the wildcards in hand or get caught holding a wasted bluff, Lathrop thought.

He was curious to see how his latest play turned out.

* * *

Tom Ricci had a face of hard stone carved in extreme, jagged contrasts. His brow formed a prominent ridge over deep hollows that trapped his eyes in shadow. His high, wide-spaced cheekbones seemed in danger of piercing the skin stretched tight over their sharp points and juts. His nose was straight except at the bridge, where it was thickened and a bit skewed from an old, badly repaired break. His long, angular chin ended in a blunt wedge, as if the hand that sculpted it had been seized by a fit of impatience, bringing work on it to a finish with an abrupt, dead blow of the mallet. These contours flouted predictability; a fine cut this way or that, a careful tap of the chisel, and it would have been easy to call them handsome. Instead one regarded them uneasily, sought balance where none could be found.

Hard stone, too, his expression. Cold and unvarying, it chilled the eye. For years Pete Nimec had been able to see a rough compassion — a stark decency — embedded within its angry lines and angles, but that had ended when the Killer did his damnable work on those young recruits in Ontario. And with the Killer dead, even the anger had been scraped away.

While Ricci had physically showed up in Nimec’s office after being summoned earlier that morning, it remained an open question whether he was mentally accounted for. Sitting across the desk from him, Nimec could see nothing but distance and emptiness in his features.

There had been nothing in them as he flatly reported on his session at the AG’s office in Sacramento. There had been nothing in them — except, possibly, a sort of neutral acknowledgment — after Nimec told him he’d been right to stay on top of the computer-cracking case, indicated he had no problem with his hurrying to attend, but then suggested it might have been best if he’d notified somebody about it before heading off. There had been nothing in them when Nimec turned to the Sullivan business, outlined the picture as it looked at the moment, mentioned its tangential connection to the separate probe of Armbright that Noriko Cousins had gotten underway, and then informed Ricci of the decision to have him go east, oversee things, and hopefully help get it all wrapped up to everyone’s satisfaction.

When Nimec sprang the news that he’d called Derek Glenn down in San Diego and arranged for him to accompany Ricci, he finally thought he saw something.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t pleasant.

“Why Glenn?” Ricci said. His eyes held on Nimec, unmoving. “You’re going to send along another warm body, we have people here at SanJo.”

Nimec had been prepared for the objection. He’d also been ready to give the unshaded, if partial, truth in response.

“The two of you’ve been successful together in the past,” he said. “I figured you could use the help.”