Wild Card

His ex-wife’s screeching message was the first to come up.

Shit, shit, Baxter thought, and popped a couple of the peppermint antacid tablets into his mouth.

She was, predictably, calling to remind him the alimony check was late. With her it always started out with a complaint about the alimony. Then the rest of the litany would follow. Alicia’s school in New York City had contacted her. The tuition was overdue, why hadn’t it been paid? Forty-four thousand dollars a year to keep the kid on an LD track; Baxter knew he should have insisted on being the one to decide where to send her. Failing that, he should have had his lawyer insist on rolling the cost of Alicia’s education into his child support, let her mother have to budget it from the blanket payments. Maybe then she’d have found a special ed program that didn’t bleed him dry. He’d heard there was a boarding school right next door in Virginia that cost half what he was laying out — why not that one? Everybody knew who ran things down there in New York. Fucking kike moneygrubbers. They didn’t nail you to the cross, they hung you from it by your purse strings.

Baxter listened about halfway through her message and then pressed the keypad button to skip to the next one. No break from his misery here; it was old man Bennett—“King Hughie”—on a harangue of his own about the new investment deal Sedco’s partners in that Kazakhstan project were negotiating with Beijing. The Chinese, he reminded Baxter, were set to import twenty million tons of oil a year from that Caspian pipeline; how much more were they going to gobble up? Western Europe was already starting to get paranoid about their out-of-control acquisitiveness and consumption, even rumbling about economic sanctions if they didn’t curb their appetite. And then there were Dan Parker’s opponents in the senate race batting the issue around on the Sunday news shows, wondering aloud where the hell he’d been when the Chinks made their move to buy up those stakes. King Hughie didn’t intend to see Sedco’s reputation, or his favorite son’s election campaign, besmirched with charges that he’d gladhanded former Soviet pawns to the detriment of America’s traditional allies. He wanted to call a special meeting of the company’s directors and major shareholders, insisting they would have to put on the brakes or else.

If King Hughie only knew the reality of what was happening in his own boardroom, Baxter thought. The old man could still bark with the loudest of them, but he wasn’t the watchdog he used to be.

Baxter crunched down his antacids, put a couple more onto his palm, and tossed them into the chute. His eye had been on the Caribbean operation, what he’d gotten going there over the past year. But he knew Parker had been involved with behind-the-scenes talks to rebuff the Chinese proposal and convince the Kazakhstanis it wasn’t in their long-term interest to feed another hungry giant on their borders. They were accustomed to handling things quietly in that part of the world and Parker hadn’t wanted to throw pie in the faces of his working contacts… though the general public wouldn’t appreciate these subtleties, would just see Parker having to defend himself over and over against accusations they barely understood. And Baxter hoped he went ahead and knocked himself out. Whenever he heard some politician or other talk about the wisdom and sound judgment of the average American voter, he’d wonder how the son of a bitch didn’t bust a gut in midspiel. Man for man, woman for woman, the average American voter was a half step from brain-dead.

Baxter jabbed at the keypad button again to cut off King Hughie’s inflamed rant. It was followed by a series of relatively innocuous messages — a PR assistant with questions about Sedco’s latest corporate media packet, the president of a greenie advocacy group who wanted to discuss the impact of offshore wells on the Louisiana crawfish population, those contractors he’d hired to renovate his Chesapeake beach house letting him know they’d prepared a final estimate. Baxter paid the least possible attention to them, thinking emptily about that last night at the casino… actually the last hand he’d played on the last night. He’d been at the no limit table, three hundred grand’s worth of chips in the circle, holding a soft fifteen — an Ace and a four — with the dealer showing five up. His instincts had been to stand pat, but instead he asked for the hit and caught a deuce.

The dealer had stood on a soft seventeen, and that was that for Baxter. He’d been beaten, and badly, according to house rules. Three hundred thou to their coffers, added to the six hundred thousand they’d taken from him earlier in the weekend… a loss of almost a million dollars.

The realization slapped him hard.

Baxter had headed for the elevator almost as his cards were being swept off the table, weak in his knees, a little faint, afraid he might be physically sick right there in the casino’s gambling room. This was yesterday, Sunday, just hours before his flight back to D.C. The previous night he had taken an even bigger loss, but it hadn’t seemed that discouraging when he got back to his room. Not once he’d phoned out for that blonde, a couple bottles of wine, and a tin of expensive Petrossian caviar. By morning he had cleared out the negativity and was full of restored optimism, sure he would be able to recoup, or better yet head home a triumphant winner. And he still believed he would have if he’d done a gut check and stuck to his customary game.

Next time, Baxter promised himself. Next time it would be the tried-and-true, and with any luck a different fucking outcome…

He suddenly heard Jean Luc’s recorded voice in the earpiece and sat up straight. What was that he’d said?

He punched in the playback code and listened. The time/date stamp told him the call had come in Friday afternoon. Then, again, the terse message:

“We need to talk about the deleted file, Reed. The one that almost crashed our system. Get in touch with me as soon as you can.”

Baxter sat behind his desk a moment, unsettled. Those words had shot through his thoughts like bullets, propelled by the level but unmistakable urgency of their tone.

He hit the phone’s disconnect button, started to key in the country code for Trinidad from memory, and then reconsidered. Although the office telephone line was supposed to be secure, Baxter wasn’t so much the gambler that he’d bet his entire future on it.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his suit jacket for his handheld satphone, he placed the call on it instead.

“Hello?”

“Jean Luc,” Baxter said. “It’s Andrew.”

“Reed, I’ve been wondering when you’d get in touch.”

“I was out of town.”

“So your admin informed me,” Jean Luc said. “I’d hoped you might check your messages remotely while you were gone.”

Baxter cleared his throat.

“I took a long weekend and I’m back,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“How openly can you speak?”

“We’re on a crypted line, but I’m at the office, so take that for what it’s worth,” Baxter said. “I need to know about the file you mentioned.”

Silence.

“There was another attachment,” Jean Luc said after a moment. “One that wasn’t wiped.”

Baxter felt his stomach tighten.

“You didn’t know about it?” he said.

“We didn’t know of its connection to the original,” Jean Luc said. “By the time that became apparent we’d lost it.”

“Jesus Christ.” Baxter thought about those crates that had arrived at the Florida airport. It had been all over the news. The human remains found in them were unidentifiable… but still, he didn’t need something like this on his head right now.

“Listen to me, Reed,” Jean Luc was saying. “There’s no cause to be too concerned right now.”

“No?”

“Not to where either of us overreacts. We aren’t positive what’s in the other file. It might not contain anything that could cause further damage. Very likely, it doesn’t. And in any event, it’s bound to turn up. We’ve got our top men working to trace it.”

The tightness across Baxter’s middle became a hot coil of pain.

“Goddamn it, Jean, I warned you,” he snapped. “How long ago? Months? Years? Hire those fucking jungle bunnies and situations like this are inevitable.”