“Ain’t it grand?” he said, and excused himself to the bathroom.
Life was good. He was in love with his wife for the third time and all his kids were more or less flying straight and level. Entering the master bathroom, he saw that the window was up an inch. Funny, this time of the year, with the cold weather, Tracy didn’t normally leave the windows ajar. He closed it.
He urinated, still a little worried about the slow flow. “If it’s not your brain, it’s your prostate,” he muttered.
In the mirror he checked his teeth, found the piece of meat that had been bothering him, wet his toothbrush, and gave a quick brush. He winced-something seemed to have stung his gums. He looked closely at the brush and saw a tiny wire. As he did so, his chest felt a terrible compression, his vision blurred, he swayed on his feet, and he knew that he was falling and that he would die.
There was an extraordinary brilliance and exhilarating warmth. In the brightness he called out to God.
Four men were dead, one of them a close friend. Instead of sitting depressed and drunk or mourning, Sam took a cab down to Greenwich Village and walked into Babbo, a restaurant known for its out-of-the-ordinary cuisine. Sam was after the Brandiso, a delicious white fish cooked with fins and head, then deboned to order.
The place was a relatively simple, long hall-like affair, white-walled and with upstairs and downstairs dining. It was described as Italian Nouveau cuisine-Italian for those who liked Italian, and Nouveau for those who enjoyed perfectly looped lines of avocado paste on bone-white china impeccably designed with a colorful arrangement of vegetables and greens that even included a flower.
Sam knew that a Babbo care package would help Anna find her equilibrium. He had persuaded Lenia, an assistant chef, to put together all the makings of a Brandiso dinner that Sam would bake at Anna’s.
With the loss of these good men, he didn’t care if he ever ate again, much less whether it was gourmet fare, but he knew it was expedient that they keep living in every sense. Anna might not understand at first, but soon she would feel the same.
Sam allowed Lenia to include some cream sauce for a side of pasta and a marvelous mushroom salad. He listened carefully as she explained the presentation, although he had no intention of following directions when it came to that. It was ghastly enough to think of flavors and appetites or anything of warmth and comfort in this time of mourning. But the fellowship of those who were fighters was imbued with an unwritten rule that allowed remembrances but no funerals. The mourning would be private; this dinner was to be a celebration of the life lived and a commitment between the survivors to keep on living.
As he waited for Lenia to finish he called Anna.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I think so.” Then she was silent.
“Anna?”
“I’m sad. And I’m worried about Jason. We need to do something right away.”
“We will.”
When Lenia emerged, she paused a moment to look at him. Taking the bag, he kissed Lenia on the cheek, gave her a hug.
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “And come and see me when I can cook for you.”
It was when he walked onto the street, the cars beating the air into a steady whir, their lights tracing white lines and red bubbles in the night, that he realized he was struggling to answer a question that he only barely understood. As the cabdriver made a blur of the electric light marquees of New York up Seventh Avenue and through the incredible bustle of Times Square and onto Broadway, he gave up the pondering and decided to act.
He called Paul.
“Remember what we heard about six months ago-that Wes King believed someone had gotten to his software codes?”
“Yeah, but we figured we couldn’t tie it… you know, just a coincidence.”
“I was tired. Now I’m not. I want to dig it out.”
“But we’ve got everyone, every resource, dedicated to figuring out DuShane Chellis and Samir Aziz… and how to extract Jason.”
“While you are doing that, in spare moments, I want any connections between Suzanne’s case and this one. Anything.”
“Got it.”
“How are we doing on Jason?”
“Good. The Canadians are on board.”
“Did Harvard get the transmission from Weissman?”
“They got a lot. Some of it is encrypted. Quite a bit actually. They’re working on it. You can call Carl at home tonight.” He gave Sam the number.
They talked as Sam rode up Broadway to the Upper West Side. By the time he arrived at Anna’s block, he was satisfied that all the minds at work in his office were focused on the right issues.
Inside Anna’s building a security man, dressed in blue blazer and gray slacks, greeted him as he approached the counter. Another armed security guard wearing a side arm and crisp blue uniform sat in the corner.
“Whom will you be visiting this evening?”
“Anna Wade.”
“And you would be Sam with no last name?”
“That would be me.”
“I was told you won’t be showing us any ID,” the man said with a tone of disapproval. “But you might tell us Anna’s favorite flower.”
“Herb’s lilies.”
“Go on up.”
Engrossed now in how exactly he would conduct the next couple of hours, he floated in his mind while his feet took him without thought to her door. Amidst all the death he began to think about being close
… making love. He imagined seducing Anna over dinner. Shohei would approve, of that there was no doubt.
The man in the hall in front of her door, a contract private investigator, looked like he could wrestle alligators. The man knocked for Sam, and Anna opened the door.
“You feel afraid,” Sam said.
“Kind of shaken up. They were good people and now they are dead because of complications in my life. But still I want to get Jason, to act, before something else happens.”
Sam carried his package into the kitchen and put it on the counter. “It’s easy to jump off a cliff. It takes more effort and planning to climb one. We gotta climb the cliff and it will take preparation.”
“What do we do?”
“We’re already doing it. I’ve got a team assembled to get Jason out of Canada. We’re doing surveillance to see how much soldier power they have around him. We’re lining up the psychiatrist, a guy in Seattle. There’s a whole lot to this and we’re going full speed, but if we just roll on in there without preparation we may tip them off, fail, and lose Jason.”
“I guess you have a point. It’s hard to wait.”
“Right now we’re going to make ourselves eat, breathe, drink in Shohei’s honor.”
“You say that so easily.”
Sam removed the baguettes along with the mushroom salad. “Knives?”
“In there,” she said. She sighed, seeming to resign herself to Sam’s plan, and got out some olive and garlic hummus to go with the bread.
“Let me tell you what we’ve found out.”
“Okay,” she said as if willing to wait but not convinced.
“Pots and pans?”
“There.”
“Let’s start with the therapist Grace has Jason seeing. Dr. Galbraith. We found that he went to Harvard, apparently has no publications, at least of note, has practiced for twenty years, is considered an expert in memory
