by Tom Clancy
No, they didn’t have her. Or at least it helped a little to think so.
He kept staring at Luan in silence.
The Thai’s face had grown sorrowful. “It shouldn’t matter to me, but I want to give you fair warning. While you may not remember how to use your tongue at the moment, it is certain that you will before I leave here. You understand?”
Max swallowed dryly. No, maybe he didn’t understand, not altogether. But he had an awful feeling that he soon would. He’d kept an eye on the big guard, watched him sidle over to the table, reach for a knife sheathed against his leg, then stand there near the burner with the weapon in his hand. It was a kris, its blade about six inches long and shaped like a sine wave….
Something new and differenty he thought
Luan was standing right in front of him now, regarding him with careful appraisal, his false sympathy only serving to counterpoint the menace in his gaze.
Finally he pursed his lips and discharged a sighing breath.
“No,” he said resignedly. “I don’t think you’re going to take my advice after all.”
He turned partially toward the big watchdog.
Nodded.
Max glanced over at the table and felt his stomach tighten.
The watchdog had raised his knife to the flame, was holding it over the flame, its blade rapidly heating up, becoming radiant in the dimness of the bam.
“Xiang,” the Thai said.
The big man turned and advanced on Max, the knife flashing red-hot, almost seeming to pulse in his grip. Out of the comers of his eyes. Max saw two other guards suddenly appear from the shadows, one on either side of him. Each clasped a shoulder and pressed it hard to the chair, pinning him against the backrest. He strained against them, but their hands were as unyielding as the steel cuffs on his wrists.
He tensed throughout his body, his heart striking mallet blows in his chest.
In no hurry, Xiang hung over him a moment like a living, breathing mountain. Then he lowered the kris to his arm and sliced into his skin about an inch above the wrist, making a shallow, razor-thin incision that almost instantly withered around its edges from the heat of the blade. Max was seized with pain as Xiang carved into him, gliding the knife upward beneath his skin, stripping it away little by little, pushing the blade higher … higher … higher….
Squeezing the chair’s armrests. Max fought not to scream, clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t scream, a raspy, wounded-animal sound tearing out of him instead. Veins bulged in his temples. His head whipped back and forth. He smelled the sickly-sweet odor of his own cauterized flesh and nerve tissue as it peeled away from the rising blade. He thrashed convulsively, heard the legs of the chair pounding the floor, banging on the floor, the loud thump of wood against wood matching the jerky violence of his spasms. He could see nothing beyond the insane, brilliant pain, think of nothing but the scream locked away in his throat, trying to tear free of his throat like a trapped thing with claws and teeth flinging itself against the sides of its cage.
Max only realized the cutting had stopped some thirty seconds after the Thai ordered it done. He thought it must have taken longer than that for Xiang to actually slide the knife out of his arm, flicking a long .. . six inches long, at least… shaving of skin to the floor.
Finally, the guards who had been holding him down backed off and he sagged into the chair, gulping down huge lungfuls of air, the muscles of his ravaged arm twitching and jumping.
He felt his consciousness draining and willed himself back to clarity.
Luan’s face hovered in front of him.
“Your employer, Roger Gordian,” he said. “Tell me what he wants.”
Max sat there, motionless. Rivulets of sweat poured down his brow and stung his eyes. His arm felt coated with scalding oil.
Luan showed him the syringe.
“Tell me,” he said. “I can make things better for you.”
Blackburn met his gaze. Inhaled. Exhaled. And then gave him a slow nod.
Luan grinned and leaned in expectantly.
“My boss is … P. T. Bamum … and I’m looking for freaks for his tent show,” Blackburn said in a weak voice. “Got them all here,” he said. “A fat man”—he nodded toward the Thai—“a giant”—he nodded toward Xiang— “and more geeks … than you can count,” he said, and rotated his head to indicate the guards standing to either side of him.
Luan’s grin turned downward and mutated into something horrible and forbidding. He straightened, allowed the full weight of his gaze to press on Blackburn for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
“Stupid,” he said, and then gave Xiang a command in Bahasa, pointing at Max.
Pointing at his face.
Blackburn saw the giant take a step toward him with the kris, the two watchdogs who’d restrained him once more appearing at the fringes of his vision.
He thought about how to prevent them from carving him up alive, decided there was probably nothing he could do, and figured he would try anyway.
Summoning what strength he had left, Max threw his weight forward as hard as he could, and managed to rock to his feet while still cuffed to the chair—his wrists chained to the armrests, the back of the chair a rigid plank against his spine, forcing him to bend at the waist so he was almost doubled over.
The two guards’ surprise at his sudden move made them hesitate for only an instant, but that was all the time Blackburn needed to launch himself at the Thai, slamming him backwards into the table where he kept the works. As the heroin packets and still-flaming burner crashed to the floor in a welter, the fire hurling a wavery mesh of shadows about the room, he saw the watchdog on his left come charging straight at him, waited for him to get close enough, and wheeled in a semicircle, catching him across his middle with the upturned chair legs. The watchdog yelped in pain and dropped to his knees.
Max took a breath and steadied himself. Heard footsteps now, from his opposite side. The shadow pushing toward him might have been startling in its immensity had he not been braced for Xiang’s attack. Still, his limitations of movement and balance made it impossible to avoid.
Gonna get hurt no matter what I do, he thought. Might as well dish some hurt of my own.
Whirling toward the giant, he lunged forward in a bullish rush, Xiang’s torso looming up like a marble pillar as he drove in and butted him with his head.
Xiang snorted in anger and surprise, the kris dropping from his fingers. Max kept his head lowered and again slammed himself into his columnar chest. The gigantic islander staggered back but did not fall. His knife forgotten in his rage, he lurched forward like a wounded bear, his colossal arms spread wide, biceps expanding and rippling under his flesh. Snarling, he clamped his hands over Blackburn‘s shoulders and hefted upward.
Max felt a wrenching pain as his feet left the floor. Though he weighed a solid hundred-eighty pounds, Xiang lifted him seemingly without effort.
Blackburn saw an atavistic savagery in his features that instantly made him cold inside. The giant wasn’t thinking about the information they were trying to get out of him. Wasn’t thinking about what his boss wanted him to do. Wasn’t thinking, period. His fury was a cyclone that had pulled him into its maw as it gained destructive energy and momentum. He was just along for the ride.
In a sense, they both were.
Xiang shook Max furiously, holding him suspended above the floor so they were almost eye-to-eye. He rattled out a groan, the strength he’d mustered through sheer willpower draining away, his body too hammered from abuse to comply with the demands he was making of it. Suddenly he knew what was coming, knew with such a sure sense of inevitability that he could almost hear a door shutting in his head. There would be no last-minute escape of the sort that might occur in a novel or film, no orchestral swells as the larger-than-life hero fought his way to safety. It stank, yes, but real life was like that sometimes, you never knew when the smell would come wafting up out of the kitty litter, and the best he figured he coul
d do was express his feelings about it in a manner that would translate across any language barrier.
Filling his mouth with moisture, he spat in Xiang’s face.
Xiang growled, actually growled, his cheek glistening with bloody saliva. He took a broad step forward, another, pushing Max up against the wall. Then, with a tremendous heave that bulged the muscles of his upper back and shoulders into a corded mass, he slammed Max backward with stunning force, pulled him in toward his chest again, slammed, pulled, slammed. Max tugged unavailingly at his cuffs, his upper body writhing, a mire of blood flooding his mouth, the chair splintering between his back and the wall, cracking into jagged pieces of wood that spilled to the floor underneath him as Xiang slammed and pulled and slammed….
Lost in a roseate haze, Blackburn felt a snap somewhere in his neck, followed by a bright sparkle of pain. The haze darkened and solidified. From what seemed a great distance, he heard the Thai shout something in an agitated voice and a language he didn’t understand. He had a sensation of disconnected free fall, as if he were a small stone plummeting into a bottomless chasm.
Then he ceased to feel anything at all.
“Stop!” The Thai clambered across the bam toward Xiang and grabbed his arm. ‘That’s enough lunacy!”
The giant glanced over at him. An instant later, his face changed—the furious, wildly unreasoning look clearing from it. He turned toward the limp form he was pressing to the wall, stared at it a moment as if seeing it for the first time, and let it drop.
Luan knelt over Blackburn and hurried to check his pulse. He didn’t like the way his head was leaning, the rubbery tilt of his neck.
When his eyes jumped up to Xiang, they were glacial.
“He’s dead,” he said.
THIRTEEN
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA / SOUTHEAST ASIA
SEPTEMBER 22/23, 2000
EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING AT 5:30 ROGER GORDIAN LEFT his home outside San Jose, got into his raven-black 1984 Mercedes SE, then headed east along El Camino Real to the San Carlos Street exit and through the downtown area to UpLink’s corporate headquarters on Bonita Avenue. Like Gordian, the Benz was in generally fine condition despite showing a few signs of age: a cranky starter here, a clogged line and worn part there, nothing that, in his estimate, couldn’t be remedied with regular maintenance and an occasional highway workout.
Still, those around him fretted. Concerned about its reliability, Ashley had been pressing him to drive one of their newer vehicles to the office, but the Land Rover seemed too damn big and the ‘01 BMW too damn small, lacking substance and character, and resembling an electric shaver or a soap bar. Concerned about his personal safety, Pete Nimec had tried convincing him to hire a driver or bodyguard, but Gordian liked having the solitary time for thought as overflowing rural greenery became neatly fenced suburban yards and then a crowded metropolis, the transition seeming to mirror the thrust of human advancement itself.
And he liked driving along with his hands on the wheel as the big V-8 engine ran with a low satisfying sound that reminded him of a perfect, sustained note coming from deep in the belly of an operatic tenor.
And he liked how there were just enough motorists on the freeway to give him a sense of forward progress, of linkage to other people pursuing their daily objectives, each of them slightly ahead of the pack, moving toward their destinations in lanes that would jam tight only a few hours later.
On his way to work now, he was undeniably pleased that he’d resisted Pete and Ashley’s urgings. There were a number of things on his mind, things he needed to sort through without interruption, and the driver’s seat of his car was the ideal place to do precisely that.
It always comes down to willy timing, and maneuverability, he reflected. You have to avoid getting stuck on any one battleplan and make sure you’re ready to exploit any possible chance to take the opposition by surprise.
That was modem combat doctrine in a nutshell, although in this instance Gordian was thinking neither about armed conflict, nor even the martial art of highway driving, but business, which he had long ago learned was its own species of warfare—coldly opportunistic, full of hidden traps, and capable of heaping loss and carnage upon the unprepared, the indecisive, and the inflexible.
The night before, Gordian had gotten his call to war from Chuck Kirby, who had phoned to confirm what he’d already known in his gut, and what legal disclosure requirements would reveal to the public within days: The tender offer for the Spartus holdings had been made by Marcus Caine through a rather thinly disguised corporate surrogate … specifically, a Midwestern concern called Safetech.
Okay, next item, he thought. Having established what Caine wanted, the issue of why he wanted it still remained to be tackled. A takeover seemed the obvious objective, but things were not necessarily that clear. The Williams Act and a whole slew of California securities and anti-takeover statutes compelled Safetech to state the reasons for its stock acquisition in a Schedule 13D filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in other documents it was required to exhibit to shareholders. Even playing strictly by the rules, however, Caine had plenty of wiggle room in which to obscure his intent.
His offer-by-proxy left no doubt that he at the very least wished to remain discreet—and one thing Gordian knew about Caine was that he never stayed in the background unless there were some very compelling reasons to do so. While Marcus was often unsubtle, he was not unsophisticated. If he was preparing to mount a raid, he would bide his time until he was in the best tactical position to execute it. Hands down, he would represent himself in the schedule as seeking not to wrest control of UpLink from Gordian and its board of directors, but rather to obtain a substantial minority interest that would give him a say in managing its assets, and allow him to protect his investment. Whether that position would bear up under scrutiny was immaterial, because all the courts were likely to do in the event of false or incomplete disclosures was order that they be revised.
Meanwhile, Caine would be getting exactly what he needed: time to woo other large shareholders to his side, time to sidestep the Williams Act’s disclosure provisions by purchasing smaller blocks of UpLink stock on the open market, time to develop and refine any number of additional takeover strategies … assuming, of course, that a complete acquisition was his goal.
How, then, to anticipate it? Kirby and his trustbusters were already formulating a civil action on the grounds that there were several sectors of the communications and technology industries where Marcus Caine’s various interests were in direct competition with UpLink. The lawsuit was a showstopper in that it would keep the lawyers and judges wading through a sea of complicated litigation, but unless the feds climbed aboard with a criminal antitrust suit of their own to bolster UpLink’s challenge— something they were typically slow to do—it would result in a long battle of attrition with unpredictable results, and hunkering in had never been Gordian’s style. As Sun Tzu once said, the possibility of victory lay in the attack. With all the resources at his disposal, there surely had to be a—
Gordian eased into the left lane to pass a lumbering trailer truck in front of him, a look of deep concentration on his features. Quite unexpectedly, his mind had turned back to the piece he’d read by Reynold Armitage in the Wall Street Journal the other day. What was it he’d had to say about Gordian’s resources? The leadoff essentially had been a rant about his corporate diversification having led to wrongheaded management decisions, after which Armitage had drawn his grotesque Siamese twins metaphor, something about mismatched limbs and unsustainable growth. The article had prickled—but could it be Armitage had a point?
Gordian hesitantly had to admit that he might, and supposed part of his irritation over what he’d read stemmed from his having realized it from the beginning, if only on a semiconscious level. He could not afford to let his disdain for Armitage—or suspicions about his motives—prevent him from intelligently evaluating his assertions. Emotionalism in a fight was blinding and c
orrosive. Regardless of its ultimate merit, his enemy had unwittingly given him a tip worth exploring.
And if it turns out he’s right, what path does that take me down? Gordian thought, knowing full well that wasn’t the question he needed to ask himself. The path was there before him, its direction clearly marked, and what he really had to learn was whether he’d have the strength and will to walk it… and accept the painful sacrifices to which it would inevitably lead.
Inhaling deeply, he glanced out the driver’s window to see the sun perched fat and lazy above the mountains, as if it had found a comfortable nest where it might linger for all eternity, describing a constant, knowable horizon against which he could steer a warmly lighted path through the world.
Pity indeed life was never that simple.
It would have been a harried and difficult twenty-four hours for Pete Nimec under the best of circumstances. With only a couple of days to go until Roger Gordian and his closest advisors flew to D.C. for their press conference, a million and one security arrangements—everything from personnel selection to the job’s involved Beltway logistics—needed to be finalized. In addition, there had been a series of unexplained lapses in the alarm net at the Nevada data-storage facility. And two of his Sword administrators at the Botswana satellite station had let a squabble over authority escalate into a bar fight that left one with cracked ribs, the other in a local jail, and Nimec with the problem of whether both deserved to be canned.
These were all matters requiring prompt attention, but it was Max Blackburn’s unaccountable disappearance that had been occupying most of his thoughts… and the phone conversation he’d just had with Max’s secretary had done a lot to exacerbate his worried mood.
On his previous call, which he’d placed from the UpLink building at six o’clock Tuesday night—eleven A.M. Wednesday, in Malaysia—Joyce had told him Max still hadn’t returned to the ground station or contacted her with any explanation for his absence, making it almost four days since anyone had seen or heard from him. The protectiveness Nimec had detected in Joyce’s voice when they’d had their initial talk had been replaced with a disconcerted, anxious tone.
