“Help or a baby-sitter?”
Nimec hesitated.
“You tell me,” he said. “We carry a lot of weight in New York. The mayor’s office, NYPD, the whole city government gives us a lot of leeway to operate. If it turns out we need them on this one, decide to ask for their assistance, you’ll be there to represent us.” He struggled a moment with the rest. “Those bruises on your face and knuckles… you’d have to admit they don’t send a good message.”
“Inside UpLink or out?”
“Take your pick.”
Ricci looked at Nimec in silence for a long time. Nimec didn’t look away.
“Shipping me off to the Big Apple,” Ricci said. “This an idea somebody kicked around the boardroom?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Put it any way you want,” Ricci said. “I’m asking whose brainstorm it was.”
Their eyes remained locked.
“I wouldn’t go along with it unless I thought it made sense,” Nimec said. “It’s mine, it’s someone else’s, doesn’t make a difference.”
“Does from where I sit,” Ricci said. “People here aren’t happy with me, they’re entitled to their reasons. Maybe I don’t like them. Maybe I don’t care enough to find out what they are.” A pause, his gaze very still. “People are making decisions about me, then I have to know how they’re lining up. If I’m on my own.”
Nimec hesitated.
“I’m no front runner,” he said after a moment. “I brought you into UpLink because I felt you could be the best. Nothing’s changed that. But we can’t make believe things have been working out lately… and I think everybody needs to take a little time to figure out how come.” He paused. “You have an objection to the assignment, tell me right now.”
Ricci sat. His eyes pressed flatly on Nimec’s. And more than his eyes. Nimec could feel the heavy and impervious bar of his thoughts pushing up against him.
Then Ricci finally shook his head.
“No,” he replied. “No objection.”
And they said nothing more to each other as Ricci rose from his chair, turned his back, and left Nimec to watch him step out of the office — the door shutting behind him with a soft but noticeable click of the latch.
Ricci entered his office, locked the door, and went to his computer to clean up his hard drive. He had quickly eliminated the cryptic e-mail message he’d received a little earlier that afternoon from his INBOX and DELETED ITEMS folder, clearing cache memory at the same time, but that really just scattered everything around the hard drive instead of really getting rid of it, and he’d wanted to perform a thorough wipe as soon he was back from seeing Nimec. Although access to the machine would require biometric hand-key user authentication — coupled with the standard password ID — Ricci had no intention of taking any chances with what might or might not happen while he was gone.
Seated at the machine, Ricci opened his hard disk scrubber and chose the high-security menu option that would destroy any traces of erased e-mails scattered in the drive’s free disk space and file slack. Then he leaned back in thoughtful silence and waited for the software to complete its function with multiple passes of the drive sectors.
New York City had sent out an unexpected call even before Ricci had known he was headed there.
What surprised him even more than the call itself was his interest in finding out where it would lead.
Turning from his computer to the aquarium in his office wall, Hasul Benazir watched the tiny blue-ringed octopus jet from its artificial cove, and then fall upon a live crab he had dropped into the feeder panel above the tank. When dormant, the nocturnal octopus was a yellowish-brown that camouflaged it against the habitat’s rocks. As it struck now, blue circles flared brightly on the eight pale yellow tentacles that clenched its prey, its beak piercing the crab’s shell to flood the soft meat underneath with sufficient poison to kill two dozen grown men.
The crab twitched, its legs dancing spastically over the bottom gravel as the injected toxin paralyzed it. Already it was being devoured.
Benazir studied the tank a moment or two longer and then shifted his attention to his computer’s flat-panel monitor, which was encased in a contoured radiation filter to shield him from its ultraviolet emissions. When at the computer, he typically limited his sessions to an hour maximum and wore sun-block for additional protection. Since his deliberate exposure several days past, he had been applying a special lotion impregnated with Dimericine, a molecularly engineered enzyme harvested from yeast and algae enzymes that entered the skin cells through liposomal absorption and was believed from preliminary testing to repair light-ravaged DNA. While the research on its medical effectiveness was still inconclusive, Benazir was relieved that his lips and cheeks, stung by a treacherous dusk, had not become sore or blistered.
He could find no comparable relief from his trepidations, however. In his office tonight, he had spent the greater portion of his allotted sixty-minutes staring at a two-sentence message that had arrived with his e-mail, scarcely able to believe the words on his screen.
The e-mail said:
From: One Who Knows
To: Hasul Benazir
Subject: Dragonfly
I’ve caught one that flew from your hand.
Stay tuned or it will come back to bite you.
The message, its timing… the lines that connected them could only run back to Sullivan. And beyond him. But how far, and to whom?
The answers were unknown; Benazir had deliberately kept himself at a fair distance from Sullivan’s demand-side linkages. But what he
He would need to move, and do so at an accelerated pace.
Benazir reached for his desk phone to contact the unlikeliest of all possible agents of their arrival.
PART 2
Zero Hour In the House of Cards
SIX
From the
AREA COPS LINK TWO MISSING PERSONS CASES — EYE PUBLIC HELP WITH INVESTIGATION
