“I wasn’t talking about you
Lenny stared at her. His sympathy notwithstanding, he really and truly didn’t like the turn their conversation had taken.
“Mrs. Sullivan… Mary… we’re a telecom,” he said. “We develop
“And other things, too. For the military, yes?”
“Well, sure. There are the defense contracts. I suppose it’s common knowledge Roger Gordian built our company on them. But that doesn’t give us any strings with—”
“I try to follow the news, keep up with the main stories,” she said. “None of us in this city will ever forget what happened a few years ago, that terrible time we went through. So many thousands of people killed by those maniacs for no reason. And I remember a report on TV, the program might have been
In fact it was
“On that show they talked about the security team UpLink’s pulled together to keep its employees safe around the world,” she pressed on. “How it’s supposed to be the best. And the part that stuck with me, sticks to this day, is when the police commissioner was asked about Mr. Gordian helping our government find the terrorists who attacked us.”
Lenny didn’t need to be reminded, having played a relatively minor, tell-me-no-secrets-and-I’ll-ask-you-no- questions role in UpLink’s investigation and eventual pursuit of the conspirators in four separate countries. The boss had wanted it kept under wraps for a slew of reasons, as had the Feds, and the PC had obliged them all to the extent that he could. But then, maybe six months after the tragedy, a former aide at One Police Plaza gave a videotaped interview — his face an unrecognizable smudge on the screen, his voice electronically wound and stretched to a distorted pitch — in which he’d bared much of a classified department file on UpLink’s participation. That had put the commissioner in the hot seat. Rather than offer lame denials, he’d acknowledged the “debt of gratitude,” or some such, that New Yorkers and the nation in general owed Gordian and company for their patriotic actions. While his answers didn’t completely douse the fire under him, they kept the back of his pants from catching until the press scrambled off after the next headline.
Lenny sat gathering his thoughts. He knew he was about to take his cue from the commish and felt kind of lousy.
“Mary,” he said. “When our city got hit, all kinds of volunteers committed to picking us up. I know my boss pitched in, but couldn’t say how. The situation back then was so far from normal…”
Her eyes flashed, the green irises suddenly bright.
“I’m not trying to compare. Not in the way it might have sounded,” she said. “Pat’s only one man. His disappearing into thin air isn’t a crisis except for his family. But are you telling me
Lenny shook his head.
“You’re going through hell,” he said. “I realize that. But I’m a shipping officer. I work with freight forwards, import regulations, customs documents… I really don’t know what I’d do—”
“Anything you can,” Mary Sullivan said. Sounding composed, even resolute now. “It isn’t easy for me to come here and ask a favor of you, a person I’ve never met before. And I wouldn’t if I had somewhere else to turn.” She paused. “I once read, or heard somebody say, the missing are presumed guilty… that when they first drop out of sight, the police treat it like they’ve run off on their own, and wait too long before they start looking for them. You can see what they’re thinking on their faces, tell by their voices. Why waste manpower on an angry wife, or a husband who loses it when the charge cards get run up too high?”
He hesitated, returned to playing with his paper clip. He felt a load of compassion for the woman sitting across from him. He liked her husband, thought he was a nice guy, and sincerely hoped he came back to her okay. But it was not his responsibility. She was asking him to become involved in something that was none of his affair. Moreover, she was asking him to ask UpLink’s security division to get involved. They would want no part of a missing persons investigation unrelated to their duties on behalf of company interests… as he was sure to be reminded if he brought the matter to their attention. And knowing the person he’d have to approach, it would be a snub bordering on ridicule. He had no juice with her. Or close to none. And less than he’d had before at the main office in San Jose, what with all the changes going on there lately. Far too much was being expected of him, and he would have to lay that out to Mary Sullivan as delicately as possible.
He looked down at the clip in his hands. Looked up at her.
And before he could say anything heard a pair of voices in his head, his own and another’s, a startlingly clear auditory transmission bursting across a quarter century of time:
For a second Lenny was rocked by those words from the distant past, warped back to the fluke encounter that had reversed the steady downward slide of his life. It hadn’t seemed that way to him then, but he’d been at the edge. The very brink of a dark someplace he would surely have fallen into if one man hadn’t held out a line for him to grab.
Damn it, he thought. Damn that stinking memory. Why did it have to come to him now?
Lenny sat in silence a brief while longer, feeling as if he needed to catch his breath. Then he dropped the paper clip into the tray where it belonged.
“No promises, Mary,” he said. “But I’ll see if I can’t get you some answers.”
“Forget it,” Noriko Cousins said without looking up from behind her computer screen.
Lenny didn’t say anything. That had been just the response he’d expected.
“No way,” Noriko added.
Lenny was silent. She seemed inclined to give her rejection further embellishment, and he figured he’d wait for it before mounting his comeback.
“There’s isn’t a chance I’m about to get us embroiled in a situation that has absolutely zero bearing on our corporate interests,” Noriko said. “If this woman who came to see you needs somebody to sniff out her wayward spouse, she can check the Yellow Pages for bedroom-peeping gumshoes.”
Lenny stood facing her desk with his hands in the pockets of his tweed overcoat, uncertain whether the chill he felt was a result of her brusque reception, the low temperature in the room, or his long walk down to Hudson Street from his midtown office. Hudson was a bitter, blustering channel of wind in January. This building, a converted nineteenth-century meat-packing factory, remained full of cold, slippery drafts that would seep through its redbrick facing despite myriad layers of interior renovation. And Noriko tended to keep the thermostat way down for inexplicable reasons of her own. So maybe it was the physical environment making him want to shake off icicles. But Lenny hadn’t found it quite so inhospitable when Tony Barnhart had been running things here at the local headquarters of Sword — the official tag for UpLink’s intelligence, security, and crisis-control arm, and a clever allusion to the old legend of Alexander of Macedonia undoing the supposedly undoable Gordian knot with a swift, sure stroke of his blade. Roger Gordian, Gordian knot, decisive and pragmatic solutions to tough problems,
Lenny took a deep breath. He had liked Barnhart exponentially more than Noriko Cousins, who’d succeeded him as section chief after wounds he suffered in a gunfight with some lowlife Russian hoods had sent him into early retirement. But the plain truth was that Lenny never felt quite at ease around any Sword personnel. It was their collective attitude, mostly. He could tolerate some remoteness given the perilous nature of their work, safeguarding the lives of UpLink employees in hot spots around the world… and probably an untold number of people who knew nothing about UpLink. Given, also, that they were culled from law-enforcement, covert intelligence, and military special operations groups and thus conditioned to secrecy through years of training and experience. Lenny got that without a problem,
