by Tom Clancy
Night after next, Balboa Park, eleven o’clock sharp. You got it.
And they’d hung up.
His face lined with thought now, Lucio continued to gaze out at the satiny water beyond the strand edging the Del Mar cliffs, his hand tugging away at his Saint Joseph pendant.
He would keep his appointment at the park. Absolutely. He’d given his word that he would attend, and it would be to the mutual benefit of their families to reach a settlement and resume their activities without battling around. But that did not mean he was about to make a mark of himself. If Enrique had a razor blade in the casserole, he intended be prepared, bring along a few surprises of his own. There were still two days until the meet, two days for him to conduct some research, do whatever possible to gain some insights into what was happening inside Enrique’s camp, get the lowdown on whether he might have a hidden agenda. And it only made sense that the first step in his investigation should be to contact Mr. Lowdown himself.
Grabbing the phone off the table again, he set it on his lap, lifted the receiver, and hit the speed dial button that would put him in touch with Lathrop.
FIFTEEN
VARIOUS LOCALES
NOVEMBER 14, 2001
LATE MONDAY AFTERNOON, ROGER GORDIAN LAY asleep in his room at San Jose Mercy Hospital, having been given a series of physical examinations, blood tests, and chest X rays throughout the earlier part of the day. At four P.M. on Sunday, he had been transported to the hospital aboard an ambulance, accompanied by his daughter, Julia Gordian Ellis, after losing consciousness in the backyard of her Pescadero residence. When the emergency vehicle appeared in response to her frantic 911, Gordian had a fever of 102.7°, was suffering from dehydration, and had lost several ounces of blood from a superficial wound to his left hand inflicted by the power tool he had been using at the time of his blackout.
The medical technicians aboard the ambulance were able to control the bleeding and dress his injury on scene, and they administered oxygen and an electrolyte IV, which revived him during his transport to the hospital. Gordian was fully awake and alert upon reaching the ER, where he was joined by his wife, who had been contacted via her mobile phone by Julia while en route to Pescadero from San Jose International Airport.
At that time, Gordian’s temperature remained elevated, and he was experiencing respiratory difficulties, a painful sore throat, abdominal pains, nausea, muscle aches, and chills. An initial examination by interns on rotation led them to a preliminary diagnosis of influenza and stress due to overexertion. In spite of his repeated insistence that he was fit enough to be discharged and recover at home, the severity of his symptoms led doctors to suggest that he be admitted for routine monitoring and testing, a recommendation to which he eventually acquiesced at the strong urging of his family members.
Within an hour of his arrival at the ER, Gordian was moved to a private room on the hospital’s fifth floor. As was standard procedure for high-profile individuals, hospital security offered him the option of registering under an alias to deflect attention by ambulance- and celebrity-chasing reporters. Though he was disinclined to accept this preferential treatment, his wife and daughter prevailed upon him to reconsider and finally got him to capitulate with reminders of his past unhappiness with the media, striking a particular nerve by mentioning the outrageous factual distortions of Reynold Armitage, the financial columnist and television commentator with an unknown ax to grind who had been unduly eager to pronounce UpLink International DOA in the middle of a shareholder’s crisis the year before, and who might be expected to jump at the chance to write Roger Gordian’s premature obituary if word of his illness leaked to the press.
On Ashley’s recommendation, the door sign beside room 5C would read: Hardy, Frank.
By Monday morning, Gordian’s fever had lowered to 101° and he was feeling stronger, though his breathing continued to be strained and he showed little desire for food. His standardized physician’s treatment sheet—known by the memory key ABC/DAVID to every fourth-year medical student, physician’s aid, and registered nurse—listed his condition as stable on its third line, between the Admit to: and Diet information. The next line (A for Activity) had a check mark in front of the words Bed Rest. Blood and sputum samples were ordered in the space that read Studies and Lab on this particular hospital’s form (synonymous with Intake and Output in the next-to-last line of the trainee’s mnemonic). The final line, listed as Medications (i.e., D for Drugs), called for a moderate dosage of acetaminophen every four hours pending the lab results, which were not expected to return positive for anything more severe than the flu.
At 8:30 A.M. sharp, Ashley and Julia arrived to visit, Julia leaving at 10 o’clock to attend a meeting at the fashion design firm where she’d recently been hired as a public relations consultant, Ashley staying on until Gordian shooed her home at noon with reassurances that he was doing fine—though she made a point of reassuring him that, fine or not, he could count on seeing her again by dinnertime.
Around three in the afternoon, Gordian’s attending nurse came to take his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure readings, give him his prescribed Tylenol capsules, and scribble something on his chart. A few minutes afterward, he became groggy and let himself doze off for a while.
At four P.M., as Gordian slept on the fifth floor, a nurse on station duty two floors below briefly left her desk for the ladies’ room. The moment she did, a man in the crisp white uniform of an orderly entered the station from where he had been drifting near a supply closet, treading quietly in crepe-soled shoes.
Keeping an eye out for the nurse, he pointed-and-clicked through several menus on her computer and retrieved the bed assignment information on all patients admitted in the past twenty-four hours. He could have chosen to use any of the networked unit computers at any station in any ward in the building. This was simply a convenient opening; amid the constant movement of a busy hospital, he would have had no trouble finding others.
Seconds later, the data on the patient in room 5C appeared on the computer, minus his falsified name.
Returning to the opening screen, the man left the nurse’s station and strode along the hall until he found a small, unoccupied patients’ lounge and entered it. There he slipped a wireless phone from his pocket and placed a call on a digitally encoded line.
“He’s here,” he said into the mouthpiece.
The bottleneck elevator rose from the upper sublevel and opened to release him with a pneumatic sigh. Emerging into the corridor, he turned to the right and walked past high-security doors marked with signs for the laboratories in the connecting hallways behind them. Some displayed the universal biohazard symbol at eye level, their red-and-black trefoil pattern conspicuous against the surrounding grayness.
He carried himself lightly for a man of his muscular proportions, and this partially went to explain the dead silence of his progress down the hall. But as the fluorescent panels overhead neutralized shading and shadow with their suffused radiance, so did the thick concrete walls seem to dampen sound, flatten color, deduct from between them all except the essential and functional.
While the drab work environment required varying degrees of acclimatization from most of the personnel who spent their days and nights physically isolated even from the outlying northern wilderness, Siegfried Kuhl found it to his decided liking. There was a sense of impregnable weight and austerity that suited him. But he felt something beyond that, an unseen force. On occasion, he would put his two hands against a wall and feel the strong vibrational pulse of machinery behind it, the pumping of compressed-air streams to microencapsulation chambers and “space suits” in the Level 4 laminar flow enclosures underground. At such times Kuhl imagined himself to be touching a hard womb of stone, the life forms within seething and twisting in furious gestation.
Kuhl advanced through the hall, men and women in surgical scrubs moving singly and in groups toward the laboratory entrances on either side of him. Comparable in his mind to Los Alamo
s at its inception, this was the only facility of its type on earth, at the frontier of the development and mass production of biological weapons—of which the Sleeper virus was the current acme. Its operations covered every stage of the pathogen’s creation from genomic analysis and DNA splicing to its cultivation, stabilization, and chemical encoating. The microbe’s trigger mechanism additionally required the concurrent and coordinated applications of protein and molecular engineering processes. And experimentation to refine the virus continued with the goals of accelerating its lethal progression within the target host or hosts, increasing its resistance to potential cures and inoculations, and addressing the need for variant strains that would provide buyers with widened options, allowing them to select from among diverse packages of symptoms.
There was still work, much work, to be done before perfection was achieved.
Now Kuhl reached a reinforced steel door that divided the corridor beyond from the rest of the building. No signs marked the entry. He put his hand against its intelligent push plate and paused for his subcutaneous vascular patterns to be IR scanned and matched against a binary file image in an allied database.
A millisecond later, a green indicator light flashed on. Then the vaultlike door swung inward without a sound as the flow of current to the armature of its electromagnetic lock was briefly interrupted.
Kuhl entered a short passage. He was alone here. The walls to his left and right were featureless, the door to the single office at the passage’s opposite end made of dark, heavy wood. Its knob was of gleaming brass.
He went to the door and waited. There was no need to announce himself. The biometric scanner that had allowed him into the hallway would have identified him to the office’s occupant, and his approach would have been monitored with hidden cameras.
A moment later, the door opened, Harlan DeVane standing on the other side, his hand on the polished brass handle, wearing a white shirt, white tie, and custom-tailored black suit of perfect outline that might have been stenciled onto his bony frame.
“Siegfried, come in,” he said, and motioned him inside with a flick of his pale, thin hand. “You’ll be pleased to hear the news I’ve received about Roger Gordian.”
Back at Salazar’s palatial house by the sea, Lathrop was enjoying himself tremendously.
Facing Lucio across the room, watching his expression go in stages from astonishment to acceptance to resentful anger, he couldn’t have said whether the greater kick came from a regard for his own expert connivance or the reaction it had instigated.
Six of one, he thought.
He sat looking out at the breathtaking view of the sea and waited for Lucio to digest what he’d been told.
“Okay,” Lucio said at length. “Help me be sure I’ve got this right. A step at a time. Because you threw me for a loop here, and a whole lot depends on me not misunderstanding you.”
Lathrop nodded.
“First off, you’re saying absolutely Felix is dead. You’re sure there’s no mixup it’s him they found in that car trunk.”
“Couldn’t be surer,” Lathrop said, poker-faced.
“Now, second, you can confirm it was Enrique who killed him—”
“Ordered him killed,” Lathrop corrected.
“Ordered his own nephew killed. Because Felix was holding out on the profits from the load he swiped from me.”
“It’s a little more involved,” Lathrop said. “Everybody tolerates some skimming. But Felix was greedy. Claimed he was the one who did the tunnel boost, took all the risks, and deserved to keep every cent of the earnings. Bragging about it to anybody who could warm a barstool next to him. And that was only the last straw. He was running hustles left and right, and it was common knowledge he was on the pipe. Getting crazier and crazier. Becoming a major embarrassment.”
Lucio shrugged. “Was me looking to burn the competition, steal their goods, I wouldn’t have trusted the kid with the job. But say I’m Enrique, and I do, and then hear he’s spending my percentage. Being family, I talk to him direct. Let him know he’s making a big mistake and better get on track.”
“Enrique did that plenty of times. He called Felix in last week to give him one more chance. And instead of apologizing to Enrique, offering him a percentage of the take from the hijack, Felix told him to shove his grievances where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“Stupid,” Lucio said and shook his head.
“Yeah.”
“Took cajones, though.”
“Yeah. But dumb and ballsy can be a bad combination.”
Lucio was thoughtful.
“Let’s get to the next step,” he said, shifting his large frame on his wine-colored sofa cushions. “Enrique decides enough is enough. Sees the kid isn’t afraid of him. Sees he can’t be disciplined. So he’s gotta go. That on the mark?”
Lathrop nodded.
“Lousy position,” Salazar said. “Felix being his nephew.”
“Which is the reason he’s been claiming it was your family that had Felix scrubbed,” Lathrop said. “Like I told you before, Enrique’s story to his sister is that the Magi of Tijuana held a conference across the border about how to handle the problem of the tunnel boost. According to him, you’d already planned the hit to make an example of Felix but wanted a vote of confidence from your brothers before moving ahead.”
Lucio seemed affronted.
“That don’t even make sense,” he said. “I want the kid taken out, I’m gonna be damn sure his body disappears permanent. The way Felix was living, it could’ve been weeks before anybody figured he wasn’t off on some fucking jag.”
Lathrop looked out the window, appreciating the expansive view of the sea without end.
“Enrique’s head of the family,” he said. “His sister admires him. She believes what he tells her.”
“But I’d have to be tonto, an idiot, to order a dump job that leaves Felix in a car in his own place of business.”
“She’s not in the life. She probably doesn’t know how things work. Or if she does, she could be too overcome with grief to think that clearly about it. All I can say is he convinced her you’re responsible, and now she’s demanding that he retaliate.”
Lucio was shaking his head again.
“This would be funny, if it wasn’t so incredible,” he said. “Enrique has Felix steal my shit. Kill my people. Then they have a falling out over revenue from the hijack. Enrique does Felix, fingers me to his sister as a scapegoat. She tells him I have to die for whacking her son. Next, I get a phone call from Enrique, who says he wants to meet. Work out our problems. And I agree to it. Figuring maybe he’s realized he made a mistake and wants to offer reparations. But his real purpose is to do me now.” He thumbed his chest. “I’m going about my thing, not stepping on anybody’s toes, and Enrique’s trying to make me a victim twice over.”
Lathrop looked at him. The yarn was quite a nifty little twister.
“This isn’t just about Enrique satisfying his sister,” he said as a finishing touch. “You have to remember where and how this started. The tunnel job was a message. He absolutely means to shove you out of California and knows he has El Tío’s fist behind him. Felix was a marionette when he was alive, and now that he’s dead, Enrique’s still using him as a prop for his act.”
Lucio scowled with contempt.
“El Tío,” he said. “Everything’s disorder since he’s come into the picture. Fucking disorder.”
Lathrop said nothing.
Lucio sat there sucking his front teeth for a while. When he leaned forward on the couch, Lathrop was amused to notice the back of the cushion underneath him lift high off the springs from his ample weight.
“You got anything else?”
“That’s it.”
Lucio sucked his teeth some more.
“All right, Lathrop. You’re the best. And you can count on this tip being worth a nice bonus,” he said. “As far as how it goes between me and Enrique, we’ll see which of us is the fucking idiot two
nights from now at the park.”
Lathrop nodded.
It did indeed promise to be an interesting showdown, and he fully looked forward to being ringside.
“It is interesting how we measure our accomplishments,” DeVane said. “I have many successes behind me, and envision more to come. Widespread ventures that yield abundant rewards. Yet the satisfaction I feel at this moment cannot be reckoned. A single person downed. A problem resolved. I hadn’t realized Roger Gordian had gotten quite that deeply under my skin.”
Kuhl sat across the desk from him in silence. Behind DeVane, slightly to the left of his chair, was one of the few windows in the entire building, a fixed pane of one-way multilaminate glass able to absorb the impact of a bomb blast or high-powered sniper fire. Perfectly square and soundproof, it somehow imparted a greater sense of separateness from the outlying woodlands than would have been presented by a solid wall. Kuhl saw deer tracks in the snow running toward the white-frocked forest spruces and understood the wild longing of the confined predator to lunge against the glass wall of a zoo or aquarium exhibit, a pull older than anything that could be devised to suppress it. And DeVane didn’t fool him. His mannered behavior was embroidery. A wrap he wore as neatly as his expensive suits, and to deliberate effect. But he, too, knew the impulse to strike and taste blood.
“Gordian’s condition,” Kuhl said. “Were you told of it?”
“He remains among the hospital’s general population, which means we can infer that he’s still in the early stage,” DeVane said. “But the symptoms will progress quickly enough.”
Kuhl was without expression.
“I propose that our backups be put in full readiness,” he said.
DeVane smiled, his lips flitting back from his small, white teeth.
“Your exactitude is always appreciated,” he said. “Yes, I agree, let’s surely be prepared for anything.”
