Wild Card

They shoved Felipe into the rear of the station wagon as his legs crumpled underneath him, and moments later jammed Marissa through the same door, a gunman climbing into the backseat on either side of them, the others rushing around into the front.

This is my fault, she thought again mutely. It’s true, it’s my fault, I should have known.

And then the wagon’s motor came to life, and Marissa was jerked back in her seat as it kicked into reverse, cut a sharp turn away from the beach, and went speeding off in a cloud of spun-up sand.

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

“Trinidad,” Megan Breen said to Nimec.

“What?”

“And Tobago,” Megan said. “With Annie.”

“Huh?”

“Annie, your lovely and beloved wife.” She regarded him across her desk with mild amusement. “The place I mentioned… on Tobago, not Trinidad… is called Rayos del Sol. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

Nimec sat with a blank expression on his face.

“Testing one-two-three, Pete,” Megan said, and pointed to her ear. “Can you read me, or is it cochlear implant time?”

Nimec frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about your hearing. I’ve noticed it seems to conk out whenever I ask you to do something that conflicts with plans you’ve already locked in on.”

His frown deepened.

“I sat here listening to your Caribbean project update for half an hour,” he said. “You want me to run every detail back to you, I’ll be glad to oblige.”

“Which I guess would make your deafness selective.”

Nimec crossed his hands in a time-out gesture.

“We going to talk straight?” he said.

“I’d be peachy with that.”

“I’m not getting shipped out to Trinidad. Not with Ricci on our front burner.”

“Then we’ll shift burners.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“To him or us?” Megan said.

Nimec shrugged.

“Both, I suppose,” he said. “Our lead field op being on indefinite suspension is the kind of thing that leaves everybody betwixt and between. UpLink’s stuck without a replacement, Ricci can’t move on with his life.”

She looked at him, her large, intelligent green eyes holding steady on his face. Nimec braced for a difficult contest. He’d been in this spot with Meg before, or in similar spots, and didn’t see any easy give in her right now.

“I’m prepared to occupy a solitary corner of limbo for a while,” she said. “In a sense, we’ve been in it for over a month. Tom Ricci’s got us in a bind with all three branches of government and every major law-enforcement agency you can name. Even our best friends at the Pentagon have started to distance themselves, which puts our pending defense contracts at risk. And you know the table’s set for us to become the target of a public furor the moment any information about his one-man road show on the East Coast is declassified.”

“Figure the people whose lives he saved from those terrorists might be a few million exceptions to popular opinion.”

“And if it had gone the other way, I don’t know that even God in all his mercy could forgive us,” Megan said. “Ricci’s secretive actions could as easily have made those people casualties, Pete. But that’s over and done. He took us out of the decision-making loop by going it alone. Now it’s his turn to wait outside it while we deal with the consequences.” Megan paused. “You need some physical and mental distance from San Jose. A chance to order your thoughts before making a comfortable decision on whether he stays or goes.”

Nimec held his silence. Behind Megan, her office window gave a curiously smog-bleared view of Mount Hamilton away to the north. He remembered its rugged flank as everlastingly vivid and imposing from Roger Gordian’s office, which was just catercorner up the hall. But then, Meg’s window was just that, a window. Gord’s occupied an entire side of the room from floor to ceiling… really, it might be considered a glass wall. With that much light pouring through, Nimec supposed you would see well into the distance regardless of hazy environmental conditions. Anyway, it was impossible to make comparisons. And unfair. Gord was more or less retired. Megan had gotten a deserved promotion in rank to CEO and was more or less in charge of UpLink International’s corporate affairs. The outlook from her office was the one Nimec had here before his eyes these days, and it remained consistent with the view he’d always appreciated next door. How could Meg be blamed if it wasn’t as impressively crystal clear?

The simple fact was that, little by little, things had changed. And he’d have to accept it.

“Bottom line,” he said after a moment, “you’re telling me I need a vacation.”

Megan shook her head.

“Wrong,” she said. “Though I was afraid you’d see things that way.”

“How am I supposed to see them?”

“It goes back to the project update you can supposedly recite back to me by heart,” she said. “We’ve finished wiring Sedco Petroleum’s deepwater rigs for fiberoptics. Within a month to six weeks we should be finished laying our submarine cables between Monos, Huevos, and Chacachacare—”

“Those islands in that strait over there?”

“Boca del Sierpe, right,” Megan said. “The Serpent’s Mouth. It separates Trinidad and Venezuela.”

“Colorful name.”

“Give due credit to Christopher Columbus,” she said. “Anyway, we have to get on with some logistical decisions and I don’t think we should wait too long… for our own sake, and because we owe it to the Trinidadians, who’ve done everything within their political and economic capabilities to make us feel welcome.”

“As in footing a chunk of the bill for our fiber network.”

“And hammering out that bargain rate government land lease for our base.” Megan smiled wryly. “It’s nice to know you really and truly were paying attention to me before.”

Nimec shrugged in an offhand way.

“So we’re looking at either converting our temporary hq on the southern coast to something permanent, or moving the facilities inland and closer to a developed area,” he said. “I got that part. I realize there are different security issues depending on which site we choose…”

She flapped a hand in the air.

“Your turn to hit the pause button, Pete,” she said. “Security could determine our choice, and that’s the part I may not have stressed nearly enough. By this date next year we’ll have upwards of a thousand employees living and working on that base, a substantial number of them with their families. You know, and I know, that what’s convenient in terms of transportation, getting supplies in and out, those sorts of things, don’t necessarily dovetail with what’s safest for our personnel… and their well-being’s my top concern.” She paused. “I want your eyewitness perspective on which site makes the most sense. If you say we ought to stay put, fine, give me a list of suggestions on how existing security systems can be upgraded to the highest possible level. If you think changing locations would be best, I’d like your reasons laid out in a nice, bulleted report I can hand the board of directors along with my proposed budget.”

Nimec considered that.

“I might’ve been sold on the trip if it wasn’t for the vacation pitch,” he said. “It’d take three, maybe four days for targeted inspections with Vince Scull’s risk assessments in my hip pocket. But I can’t see how to justify two weeks away from here.”

Meg smiled, combed her fingers back through a long, thick sheet of auburn hair. “Pete, you’ve got to be the only man on this planet who’d fight to avoid this assignment. And you still haven’t heard me say ‘vacation.’ ”

“You call staying at some tropical resort work?”

Megan looked at him.