“He always like this?” she said.
“Mostly, yeah,” Glenn said. “Except when he’s worse.”
She pursed her lips and exhaled with a low whistling sound.
“It must’ve been a long, long flight for you.”
Glenn looked at her.
“The food was super-duper,” he said. “Drinks, too.”
Noriko studied him quietly, tipped her head toward the coatrack, and pushed her chair back from behind her desk.
“You feel up to another round or two?” she said.
Glenn grinned, winked at her.
“I can only promise to try my best,” he said.
Yousaf stood out behind the Bakarwal hut in the tarpaulin-covered ditch that passed for a latrine here, thinking the cold was so intense his prick was liable to freeze and break off in his hand before he finished his piss. But the need to relieve himself was only one of the reasons he’d excused himself from Ahmad. There had been a notion of sending out a radio call to those who awaited him on the mule trail, both to warn them about Ahmad’s advance scouts and signal his departure from the nomadic camp… an idea over which Yousaf was grateful his good sense had prevailed. Though he had deceived Khalid and the rest of his men about a great many things as they’d rolled toward the Chikar roadblock, the concerns he’d expressed about intercepts had been truthful — and they had not yet left his mind. Not at all, in fact. Even in these remote regions, it was best to be on guard against eavesdroppers.
Zipping his trousers now, Yousaf started back toward the hut and his soon-to-be guides over the mountains. He had come too far now to let fear exert any pull over his decisions. Dragonfly would soon make him a wealthy man, and that prospect alone ought to steer him away from a recurrence of foolish impulses.
His customers knew the dangers of this highland frontier better than he and would not need any warning to be on the alert.
Tom Ricci peered through the viewfinder of his digital camera, crouching amid the pines and leafless oaks of a forested ridge above the Kiran Group’s company grounds. The req slip Grand Prix GTX he’d pulled out of Sword- Manhattan’s downtown garage had been left some thirty or forty yards behind him in the night, at the side of an unmarked country road that ran parallel to the western edge of the grounds for several hundred yards before turning north toward an eventual dead end. Designated Rainer Lane on his map, its dark, wooded sameness was interrupted only by a long-forsaken drive climbing steeply uphill from the road’s right shoulder.
Ricci had thought it an opportune spot to leave the car. The isolated drive would be easy to find when he returned, and the two separate passes he’d already made around Kiran suggested there would be a good overlook directly across the lane through the trees.
As he’d eased to a halt off the road, Ricci had noticed that a ten- to fifteen-foot-high barrier of fencing and razor coil had been erected at the foot of the drive. His headlights offered glimpses of chewed, rotted out blacktop where its sheeting of snow and ice gapped open, revealing a reflective no-admittance sign on the gate. And just beyond it, another, much older, sign. A large, weathered wooden rectangle on sagging double posts, its hand- painted lettering was chipped, peeled, and faded — but still legible. The top line said: HOTEL IMPERIAL, A FUTURISTIC RESORT. Beneath it in smaller characters were the words: DAY CARE, FILTERED POOL, AIR- CONDITIONED ROOMS, CELEBRITY NIGHTCLUB. Hanging separately from its bottom on a pair of rusted eyehole hooks, a much more slender wood banner announced: BUDDY GROOM, MASTER OF CEREMONIES, BACK AGAIN FOR THE 1969 VACATION SEASON!
Ricci had stared at the sign and wondered. Nineteen sixty-nine, Summer of Love. If that had been Hotel Imperial’s last hurrah, maybe one factor in its demise had been Buddy Groom and his Celebrity Nightclub acts getting the show stolen out from under them by the Woodstock festival a handful of miles away.
Cutting the ignition, Ricci reached over to the passenger seat for the gear bag containing his flashlight, camera, and binoculars, got out, and crossed the road. He’d gone less than twenty yards into the trees before finding an advantageous hump of mountainside from which to look down on the Kiran Group’s corporate development.
That was a little over an hour ago.
He had been on the look ever since.
It was now a quarter past eleven according to the virtual dial on his WristLink wearable. Everything cold, quiet, and pitch black around him under the barren treetops. Considerably brighter below him, where Kiran’s groomed and level grounds were circled by high-output stadium lights on steel frame towers that dispersed an almost glareless white radiance over the entire site.
Ricci kept his eye to the camera, a fourth-generation night-vision with microelectromechanical sensors that brought its intensifier tube and ocular lens into rapid focus wherever he pointed and zoomed. He’d prepared to be out a while, dressing in a black leather cruiser jacket, thermal fabric vest, and full-finger shooter’s gloves, pulling a night camo heat-exchanger balaclava over his head as he left the car. Its mouth port would help retain the heat and vapor normally lost through his exhalations, recycling them into the frigid air he breathed in to keep his internal body temperature raised.
He clicked the shutter-release button, added a fresh telescopic image of the U-Haul van parked outside Kiran’s service gate to the snapshots he’d already taken. There were pictures of the van itself. Pictures of the three business-suited men he’d seen repeatedly appear from the gate and roll dollies of mid-sized packing cartons out to the van’s cargo section. And pictures of the tall man in the car coat — it was black leather, like Ricci’s own — who had stayed close to the van throughout their comings and goings. Blond, fair-skinned, wiry, all arms and legs, he had alternated between sitting in the driver’s seat and pacing around the van in the cold, chain-smoking as he watched them climb aboard with their boxes and then emerge at different intervals to wheel what were presumably the same boxes, collapsed and emptied, back through the gate.
The operation had triggered Ricci’s curiosity. He wasn’t clear on what he’d expected to see here tonight. What he
Ricci had read the intelligence workups on Hasul Benazir, learned all about his genetic condition and habitual night hours. He’d also gotten a related short from an outside source. Information Noriko Cousins either didn’t know or was intent on holding back from him. He had no idea which it was. No idea if she might be the only one at UpLink, and by extension Sword, who was keeping secrets. Whatever the score, he found it hard to be that concerned about it. Not with a secret or two of his own tucked away in his pocket.
He steadied the camera on the tall man, clicked again. Couldn’t get too many photos of him. It was a safe guess that the others were Kiran personnel. Coatless, wearing uniform dark suits, they carried swipe cards that gave access to the service gate, a motor operated rolldown that would automatically close behind them after each of their trips in and out of the building. Their distinctive South Asian features had made Ricci remember something in the Kiran files about a core group of veteran employees — executives, advisors, and techs, or so it described them — that Benazir had brought over from Pakistan on H1Bs: specialized work visas.
Tall Man was another story. The obvious outside man. And an impatient one waiting near the conspicuous U-Haul parked in a secondary parking area around the corner from the building’s main entrance. The only other vehicles, a small fleet of Mercedes sedans Ricci figured for company cars used by the dark-suits, were in the regular employee parking lot in front of the entrance.
No, Ricci thought, the van didn’t fit any more than Tall Man. Even granting Benazir’s late schedule, its presence was very suspect. A business like Kiran would ship in freight trucks, not cheap daily or weekly rental vans. But why else would it be here? Somebody in the building choosing this time of night to clean out his desk, maybe cart his old files or office equipment off to a warehouse? A ridiculous thought. Crazier to imagine corporate professionals wheeling those things out in handcarts when they could hire other people to do the lugging for them. No explanation came close to making sense — unless it involved a transport of goods that was meant to be covered up. But what would be the point in unpacking those boxes while they were still aboard the van?
