Wild Card

their careers setting me up to pull off the lid.”

Scull chortled.

“No good for a politician to have a rep for honesty with his cronies, huh,” he said.

“Either that or have somebody get even with him by looking into his rotten business affairs,” Nimec said, and shrugged. “Hard enough finding a straight shooter in our own government, Vince. How much do we really know about what goes on behind closed doors in Trinidad?”

Scull looked at him a moment, then grunted again.

“Fucking Trinidad,” he said. “You and the new missus take a boat ride and almost get turned into guppy food… helluva way to remember a vacation.”

Nimec was silent. He thought about that long afternoon in the villa with Annie after he’d gone kite-boarding, thought about her lying with her head on the pillow beside him, both of them out of breath, their bodies relaxed and coated with sweat. I think we did it, Pete, she’d whispered in his ear. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve carried two children in my belly, and think I feel that we did.

No, he told himself, Vince was wrong. Whatever bad had happened to him on Los Rayos, Nimec believed he would always remember it more for something else.

He rose from his chair now, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.

“Taking off on me so soon?” Scull said. “Where’s the love gone, handsome?”

Nimec gave him a look. “Got a meeting with Rollie and Meg later,” he said. “I need a chance to prepare.”

Scull snorted.

“Your meeting about Ricci by any chance?” he said.

“Yeah,” Nimec said, “Ricci.”

He stood there a second, hoping Vince would leave it alone, thinking he really did want to ponder the matter some more before he talked about it with anyone.

“So’s it gonna be thumbs-up or thumbs-down for your boy?” Scull said.

Nimec looked at him again, released a fatalistic sigh.

“Before this morning I’d pretty much decided we needed to cut him loose… he’s going to stay out of touch, what can we do?” he said. “Then I see he left a voice mail on my cell phone last night, called right out of the blue, and I’m practically climbing right back on the fence.”

Scull made a face.

“Hah!” he said. “Figures he’d show up exactly in time to make life complicated.”

Nimec shrugged, turned toward the door.

“Not another step, Petey,” Scull said. “You want to leave my premises, you first gotta tell me what Ricci said in his message.”

Nimec paused halfway into the corridor, glanced over his shoulder.

“Just that he wants to talk,” he said.

BONASSE, TRINIDAD

“You’re positive the line’s secure?” Baxter said.

The satphone to his ear, Jean Luc stood looking out the window at the men in flack jackets below, holding him under house arrest in his Bonasse mansion.

“Reed,” he said with a dead calmness that surprised even himself. “Anything I hear stays right here with me in this room.”

There was that odd, hollow silence in the earpiece distinctive of coded electronic communications.

“I had two visitors arrive at my office together first thing this morning,” Baxter said. “One was a prosecutor from the Attorney General’s office, a spic named Herrera attached to the Terrorist Financing Task Force. The woman practically holding his dick in her hand was with Commerce. Ingrid Price. Agent Price, that is. The Export Enforcement Office.” He paused. “How’s this sounding to you so far?”

Jean Luc gazed past his police guards at the elegant topiary gardens out front, let his attention roam to the thick ruff of cedars sweeping around the foot of the hill. Then he turned toward his desk and the flintlock atop it.

“It sounds as if we’ve suddenly become very hot tickets with the law-enforcement set,” Jean Luc said. “A whole lot of those people are waiting in line to see us.”

“How you can make jest of this?” Baxter snapped. “Didn’t you hear me use the word terrorist?”

Jean Luc sat down at the desk, studied the demon-headed stock of the pistol, and took a small wedge of flint from the objects arranged beside it.

“I heard,” he said. “And rest assured, I’m able to grasp the seriousness of our problems.”

“They’ve prepared an indictment to put before a grand jury,” Baxter said. “Twenty counts, you should have heard that cunt rattle them off to me. Like she was reading a grocery list. Conspiracy to ship products to designated state sponsors of terrorism. Concealing shipments from authorities. Money laundering. And they’re threatening to tack on murder conspiracy charges. The Secret Service, Internal Revenue, even the State Department… they’re all jumping aboard.”

Jean Luc lifted the gun and wedged the flint into the jaws of its hammer, slyly designed in the shape of a serpent’s mouth.

“As I said, Reed, I understand,” he said.

“I hope you do,” Baxter said, his voice raspy with nerves. “Because if one of us goes down, the other goes with him. Like it or not, that’s how it is.”

Satisfied that the flint was securely in place, Jean Luc thumbed the pistol’s hammer into a half-cocked position and reached for another of the items that had been laid out next to it, a leather flask he’d bought at an antique gun shop a while ago. He removed its stopper, poured some gunpowder from inside it down the barrel of the weapon, then picked up the ball and ramrod and loaded up.

“Reed, you border on insulting me, though I realize that isn’t your intent,” he said. Calmly again. “I know it’s tough where you sit. I understand the pressures you’ve always been under better than you might think. In Washington, it’s all in your face, all the time, and now more than ever I suppose it must be tempting to imagine it’s somehow easier for me to cope here in my tropical paradise.”

“I’ve never said anything to give you that idea,” Baxter said. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Not in your head, though,” Jean Luc said. “I’ve developed a good sense of how you think, Reed. How you characterize our roles. You’re the mover and shaker. The executive who needs to be at the office at nine A.M. and the boardroom by eleven. The insider that plays the hard part. And I’ve always been the flighty one. The rootless traveler, dilettante inheritor of land and oil fields who returns from his wanderings to reap the free-flowing rewards of the family enterprise. Or do you want go on insisting that I’m off the mark?”

“I’m not about to insist on anything,” Baxter said. “Look, this isn’t the time for either of us to be speculating about what’s on the other’s mind. Or arguing—”

“You’re probably right,” Jean Luc said. “But I still feel it might be worth reminding you there would be nothing without the oil. No shining office towers, no conference tables, nothing. And the same goes for every dollar that you’ve pocketed or gambled away or stuffed into the fingers of your expensive casino whores these past few years. The whole thing, Reed, all of it, has flowed from my wells. From me to you.”

Andrew Reed Baxter made a harsh, dry sound in his throat. It had an unhealthy quality, as if he were straining for air.

“Damn it, Jean. Goddamn it. I don’t know where you’re coming from today,” he said. “We are in the deepest shit possible and need to stick together. No, it’s more than that. We’re bound together by fucking history.”

Jean Luc was silent, taking a moment to admire the pistol in his hand, the cool gleam of its barrel in the daylight pouring through his window. He slid his thumb appreciatively over the detail work on its butt plate, over the demon’s head, and then his free hand went for the last of the implements he’d set out on his desk. It was a useful gadget that resembled an expensive brass cartridge pen, and a concession to modernity that hadn’t been invented back when old Redbone had given the gun to his ancestor… but hadn’t he once told Eckers he was a now kind of person?

Inserting its tip into the flintlock’s pan, Jean Luc pushed down on the finely calibrated little primer to eject