Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

Here, Kuhl instantly noticed that the ad began with “My Darling Anya” and ended with “Your Unforgetting Lover, Michael-Sebastian.”

  These routine elements of the message elicited no reaction from him besides a rapid noting of the timetable. The short window of contact would open at one o’clock Greenwich Mean Time that afternoon—the GMT standard was used, again for consistency’s sake—and shut at two o’clock after the predetermined hour passed.

  It was something in the body of the message that quickened his pulse.

  The text between salutation and closing said:

  Our ardor lifted me to a place beyond the stars, and I cannot bear the fall now that you are gone. Could we have gone too high, too fast, too far? Did our hearts burn too brightly for their flame to last? As I must endure the lonely darkness of love’s ashes, I think it would have been better if we had taken flight without them.

  Kuhl stared at the newspaper, his eyes locked on a brief possessive phrase in the message’s fourth and last sentence.

  Love’s ashes.

  Moments passed. Kuhl kept staring at the paper, at that pair of simple words, the sounds of automobiles and pedestrians in the intersection tamped and dulled by the bloodrush in his ears.

  Love’s ashes.

  Together they formed a second mnemonic. Codewords he had hoped for, but never truly allowed himself to expect.

  Kuhl thought of the flame he had lit in the church, that tiny surrendered spark of memory and passion. Then he closed his newspaper and resumed walking quickly toward his apartment hotel as the traffic light across the street changed from red to green.

  For the next several hours he would do nothing but wait in his suite to make contact.

  “This place is exquisitely nifty,” Megan said. “All we need now is for the Blob to come glooping over us.”

  “The what?” Nimec said.

  “The Blob,” Megan said. “As in that old fifties make-out movie. Starring Steve McQueen and a thousand tons of gelatin.”

  “Oh, right,” Nimec said. He was staring out the windshield of his reconditioned ’57 Corvette roadster at an orange neon sign shimmering the words BIG EDDIE’S SNACK SHACK into the night.

  Megan looked at him from the passenger seat.

  “The gelatinous lump was known to be gracious and humble in real life, but tended to play very slimy characters. I suppose it was the usual Hollywood typecasting.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Winning an Oscar for its role must have been some consolation, though,” Megan said. “The story goes that nobody in the Academy knew whether to nominate it for best actor or actress, so they created some kind of special category. Best Performance by an Amorphous Gender-Neutral Green Thing.”

  Nimec kept gazing silently at the entrance to the drive-in restaurant as a pretty, ponytailed carhop who seemed about the right age for a college sophomore came roller-skating out to the car.

  He pushed in a chrome dashboard knob to douse the lights and glanced over at Megan.

  “What are you having to eat?”

  “I’m torn between the fried popcorn shrimp and fried clam strip baskets.”

  “That time we stopped in Maine a couple years ago, you told me you didn’t like clams.”

  “Whole clams,” Megan said. “Much too chewy.”

  Nimec looked at her.

  “Let’s get one basket of each and split them,” he said.

  “Yum, yum,” Megan said. “And don’t forget our side of potato skins. And my Diet Coke. While you’re treating, dear man.”

  He grunted and rolled his window halfway down. Rockabilly music burst into the ’Vette from speakers above the diner’s wraparound awning—somebody who sounded like Buddy Holly but wasn’t.

  “Hi.” The carhop outside leaned toward him with a pad, a pencil, and a very cute smile. “Will the two of you be needing menus?”

  Nimec told her they wouldn’t and placed their orders and watched the carhop roll off across the parking lot with the diminishing clatter that skate wheels make when spinning away over paved surfaces.

  Then he became quiet again.

  “About the Blob winning an Oscar,” Megan said. “A nonhuman superstar of undetermined sexual identity must have caused quite a ruckus at the time. This was 1957 or ’58 and couldn’t have been more than three or four years after the McCarthy hearings, blacklisting . . . did you know even Lucille Ball came under investigation, by the way? Lucy, of all people in the world. But what’s odd about how it came about was that Desi—”

  “Meg, give me a break.” Nimec glanced over at her. “There’re some things we need to discuss.”

  She gave him a look of mock surprise.

  “No kidding,” she said. “Here I thought you only dragged me out of my apartment at ten o’clock at night to go hot-rodding around the Bay Area and chowing down fast food.”

  Nimec sat there unconsciously tapping the steering wheel.

  “Ricci was over at my place before,” he said. “I asked him to come for shooting practice at the range. Figured it might loosen him up, get him talking. The way it did sometimes before he left here.”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  Nimec shook his head no.

  “A big piece of him’s still gone,” he said. “Maybe most of him. He won’t tell me what he’s thinking, or what he’s feeling. I can guess some of it. But just enough to know he isn’t right.”

  “Does it worry you?”

  “Some, yeah,” Nimec said. He moved his shoulders. “Could be I’d feel different if I wasn’t heading off for Gabon the day after tomorrow. Once Ricci got back, I had myself convinced the normal routine would help him. You start on an everyday grind, it can smooth the edges from the outside in.”

  “And you haven’t seen any change?”

  “Not for the better.” Nimec said.

  Megan mulled that over.

  “I haven’t missed getting nicked by those edges you mentioned,” she said. “But I also haven’t been back in SanJo very long, and it’s an understatement to say I’m not close to him. I don’t believe he likes me too much. Sometimes I doubt he even respects me.” She paused. “I suppose that’s my way of making excuses for leaving you stuck with a problem that really needed attention from both of us.”

  Nimec looked out over the sportster’s hood scoop and through the restaurant window and watched its short order cooks working over their deep fryers and grills. Big Eddie’s was a family business that had first opened its doors when Eisenhower was president and stayed under the same family’s continuous management for going on half a century. It still held annual sock hops and for all Nimec knew Big Eddie, if he’d ever existed, continued to run the show. Though more likely it would be Big Eddie Jr. or Big Eddie III.

  “Don’t sweat it,” he told Megan. “You’ve had to make your own adjustments. I can see the boss handing over more responsibilities to you. See him easing himself out of things little by little. He’s still Gord. He’s looking healthier. But he isn’t what he was before the bio strike. And he won’t be again, will he?”

  Megan looked at him.

  “No,” she said. “He won’t.”

  Nimec sat facing the windshield for several moments, then turned partially toward her.

  “So you see where I am tonight,” he said. “Thinking about changes. The ones that are happening, and the ones that aren’t. And none of it’s in my control.”

  Megan nodded. The carhop rolled up with a tray of food in disposable containers and hooked it over the half open window. She reached into her apron pocket to fill her hand with tubs of cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, and ketchup, set them on the tray with the meals, and then asked Nimec if he cared for anything else besides the check. He told her he didn’t, noticed her sweet, easy smile again, and added a generous tip to his payment.

  Megan held a hand out over the stick shift.

  “Okay, pass me the greasy delights,” she said.

  They leaned back in their bucket seats and ate quietly.
/>   “I’ll tell you something,” Megan said after a while. “When you wanted to bring Tom Ricci into a command position with Sword, I was convinced he’d never work out, and went along with the move assuming you’d eventually see how wrong it was. Yet now I feel I’m having to defend the rightness of your choice to you. Tom came through tremendously in Kazakhstan, and then again in Ontario. He lays everything on the line, and it’s probably true that sometimes not all of him comes back from it. But if that costs us, imagine what it has to cost him. How hard it must be to live up to what he demands of himself.”

  Nimec considered that a second. He dipped a shrimp into some tartar sauce with his fingers and put it in his mouth.

  “You’ll need to keep an eye on Ricci while I’m gone,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a lot of anger and frustration between him and Rollie Thibodeau, and I can see a blowup in the making. It’s pretty clear from all the little things. Like how they say each other’s names. And the way they act whenever they’re together in the same room. You’re going to have to watch out for that, too.”

  “Yes.”

  They ate some more of their food. Outside, the Buddy Holly simulacrum had done a gradual fadeout and Elvis Presley, the genuine article, was singing about how he couldn’t help falling in love with someone.

  Nimec looked at Megan.

  “I’ve also got a personal favor to ask, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “It involves Annie.”

  Megan waited.

  “Before she came along, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to worry about anything or anyone besides UpLink,” Nimec said. “I’ve had to rethink that, though. Take a new look at my responsibilities. What they are, and what they should be. I figure Africa’s probably going to be business as usual. But you know how it is.”

  Megan nodded again.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do. You can’t afford to let things slide.”

  Nimec paused, transferred his food container from his lap to the top of the dash, and moved forward a little in his seat.

  “Jon’s got his mother to take care of him, and I know he’ll always be okay,” he said after a bit. “With Annie it’s different. She’s tough. Good at handling things, been relying on herself a long time. But I don’t want her to have to do that anymore. Don’t want to be thinking there’s a chance she’s ever going to be alone.”

  Megan gave him a third nod.

  “Annie’s my friend, Pete,” she said. “More, she’s one of ours now. Package deal. You know what comes with that.”

  He looked at her, then grunted.

  “She’ll be in town a couple of weeks from now, staying at my condo with the kids. Hers and mine. We were supposed to see a ball game . . . and if you have time—”

  “At your service,” Megan said. “I’ll invite them over for dinner and ask if they want to stay overnight. Annie’s been scoffing at my claim to virtuosity in the kitchen, so it’ll give me a chance to show her up and feed the brood all at once.”

  “Uh-oh,” Nimec said. “Double jeopardy.”

  “Is this what you consider being grateful?”

  “No,” he said. “Realistic.”

  Megan stretched her lips into an exaggerated frown, reached for his food container, and set it back onto his lap.

  “Eat a clam, buster,” she said.

  Madrid. One o’clock in the afternoon. His model church on a table near the apartment window, Kuhl’s curtains were drawn, a pale light filtering through their sheer white fabric to throw a shadow of the church, still towerless, onto a wall and corner of the ceiling. Under a fluorescent swing-arm magnifier clamped to the table, the tower subassembly awaited his last touches of detail.

  Across the room, Kuhl sat at a notebook computer joined to a cable Internet connection, his eyes fastened to its screen as he clicked onto a private conferencing site and typed in his security key. Headset on, he waited a moment and was forwarded to the next level of channel-specific authentication.

  The prompt for his first spoken pass phrase appeared.

  “On Maple White Island,” he said into his headset’s microphone.

  Another moment passed. Kuhl sat in the cropped shadow of his church. His computer’s client software converted his analog voice signals into a binary stream that was encrypted and transmitted to the server.

  He was prompted for his second pass phrase.

  “Deep in the Brazilian jungle,” he said.

  Kuhl waited. The prompt for his third and last pass phrase flashed onto the computer screen.

  “Professor Summerlee found the Lost World,” he said.

  Kuhl waited again. The three-step process ensured exceptionally accurate client verification, allowing the server’s voice biometric program engines to conduct a comparative analysis in much the same way that a fingerprint would be scanned for its unique characteristics—his words broken into phonemes and triphones, basic units of human speech that were analyzed for their dominant tonal formants and matched against a digitally stored speech sample in the database.

  Kuhl’s identity confirmed, his computer showed the ENTRY ALLOWED notification. A brief animated icon flashed onto it: the Chimera of Greco-Roman legend standing in profile, its lion’s head twisting toward him, its jaws splitting open to breathe a great billow of fire that went curling and churning across the display until it became a coruscant sheet of orange. The orange quickly dispersed in brilliant slips and shreds and left only the monstrous head of the lion—now static except for a pair of sparkling ember-red eyes—facing Kuhl onscreen.

  Then an electronically altered voice in his earpiece, its frequencies bent and phased to a low pitch:

  “Siegfried, at long last,” Harlan DeVane said. “How splendid it is to hear from you.”

  In the study adjoining his yacht’s master stateroom, DeVane sat very still as the wall-mounted plasma display went dark. Then he slid off his headset, lifted his wireless computer keyboard from his lap, and put it on the richly inlaid walnut table beside him.

  A chill smile trickled across his face. The user icon Kuhl had chosen for himself was a nice bit of drollery that suited his temperament as well as DeVane’s animation did his own personality . . . or at least a part of it. The chimera was an amusing outlet, but Kuhl had no similar touch of flash, no taste for the razzmatazz. A barbarian warrior who stood out of his time, he could have been a Viking, a Saxon, a Mongol Khan.

  DeVane reclined in his chair, his elbows propped on its armrests, fingers woven into a cradle under his chin. If Kuhl was surprised by his activation notice moments earlier, it had not showed. But the actual mission assignment—that had given him quite a shot of juice. Not even the digital processing that stripped all mood and emotion from the human voice had concealed Kuhl’s eager satisfaction over his instructions. The words DeVane used were deliberate echoes of comments he had made to the good economic minister Etienne Begela in his governmental office—why bother to fiddle with something that worked?

  “Find what Roger Gordian most loves, and we will know his greatest weakness,” DeVane had said. “Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.”

  “I will be moving on from here right away, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “To America.”

  “That’s correct, Siegfried. America. Where Gordian’s heart is. And where opportunity is a wild running horse to be roped and ridden.”

  Kuhl had asked only a few practical questions after that.

  Though far away, DeVane had felt his arousal.

  Slowly now, he let his eyes glide over the row of four African masks aligned on the wall above the plasma screen. There was a reptilian gold fetish mask that Ebrie chieftains had carried to laud the killing of their tribal enemies, a blockish, primitive Dogon hunter’s helmet worn for protection against the spirits of slaughtered prey, an Ashante ghost mask with curling horns and sharply filed teeth, and the Fang Ngi secret society mask of which
Begela’s face had somehow reminded DeVane—or more accurately, Mr. Fáton—at their recent appointment in Port-Gentil.

  Gerard Fáton. Jack Nemaine. Henry Skoll. The Facilitator. El Tío. All of them were masks of DeVane’s creation, available to him when necessary. Even his Harlan DeVane identity was a guise of sorts. Form-fitted, true. Designed and developed around basic elements of his personality. Yet no less a careful invention than the others, a role he had learned to play fully and well . . .

  A vivid memory bobbed up into DeVane’s thoughts and he closed his eyes as if to stave it off, his fingers unmeshing, pressing lightly against his temples. He sat a while in quiet struggle with himself. It was useless, though. Impossible. The recollection pulsed with a kind of independent, insuppressible life.

  DeVane knew he could only let it unfold and hope it did so quickly. He lowered his hands from the sides of his head, rose from his chair, strode across the carpeted floor, and drew the curtain back from a brass opening porthole.

  Sunlight washed over him. He lifted the porthole and stared outside without seeing anything. Fresh sea air breezed through into the study, but DeVane’s nostrils registered heavy urban smog as the images and sensations came on.

  First, the building.

  It always started with the building.

  As he’d approached from the street, it had seemed to rise infinitely above him.

  Nervous, he had walked through the entrance to a security desk and told his name to a uniformed guard who consulted a visitor list, cleared him for entry, and then pointed him toward the elevators.

  His stomach had lurched as the car sped him up to a corporate suite filled with employees. They were darting busily between doorways, though he’d sensed their quick, concealed glances. It was as if they were the inhabitants of a lush, sheltering forest, unsure what to make of the stray and anxious creature that had wandered in from some outer barrens.

  He had stood before the receptionist, again given his name, and she had risen from her chair and shown him to the office of the man he had learned was his father.