He had taken a half step toward the entryway when he paused, turned to look back at the wall of kennels, and went over to crouch in front of the wounded greyhound.
His fingers reached through the mesh and gently, gently touched its snout.
“Good girl,” he whispered. “You’re a good girl.”
Then Ricci was up on his feet again, racing from the clinic into the night.
TWELVE
The Chimera’s master bedroom. Wearing a silk robe dyed the shaded grays of twilight by the handloom weavers of Andhra Pradesh, Harlan DeVane sat at his computer in the depths of the African night and appraised the second e-mail to his enemy. He wanted to carefully reread the words he had written and view the animation his technicians had embedded with graphic image files, assuring himself that each component enriched the other, that the entire product met his every criterion.
In his intense, unmoving concentration, DeVane’s tightened lips were the same noncolor as the rest of his features. He almost could have been a waxwork figure, showing no outward sign of his satisfaction with the message’s wording and form.
Yet, satisfied he was.
Here was an example of manipulative power wielded with brilliance. Here was real wallop. How often was a hoodwink conceived to smack the eyes with its falsity… make one aware he was being toyed with?
It brought a symmetry to things that DeVane did not believe he could have manufactured, but could only have wrested from existing circumstance.
Pain did indeed cut many different ways; the child that was loved could bring about the father’s fall as surely as the child shunned and hated.
Locked onto this thought, fascinated by its many ironies, DeVane fired his ultimatum into electronic space.
Palo Alto. Morning. A downcast brow of clouds over the hills threatened another day of chill rain and mist.
In the Gordian home, Megan Breen had been running on coffee and nervous energy for hours and found her caffeine level in increasingly frequent need of a recharge. She had spent the greater part of the night doing what she could to comfort and support Ashley, and the rest of it conferring with the Sword ops who’d turned the living room into an ad-hoc base of operations. Inside, their surveillance techware occupied every available surface. Outside, their vehicles had crowded the entire drive. The thirty-acre estate had been secured by armed patrols to ensure Ashley Gordian was as safe from physical harm as anybody on earth… but Megan knew her heart could not be protected in similar fashion, and that very deeply worried her.
The e-mail arrived at the precise tick of eight o’clock. Ash had fallen off into a doze that not even total exhaustion would sustain for too long. Megan was in the kitchen dumping a soggy coffee filter into the waste bin with one hand and scooping fresh grinds into the maker’s basket with another.
One of the ops — Lehane — thrust his head into the entry.
“Ms. Breen,” he said. “Something’s jumped into your queue. We think it could be—”
Megan didn’t hear the rest as she ran past him into the living room.
The subject line of the e-mail read:
Aria di Bravura: A Song of Love and Sacrifice
Megan dropped into a chair, started to reach for the computer mouse, and then realized she’d carried the heaping plastic coffee spoon from the kitchen.
“Will somebody take this damned thing from me?” She passed it off to one of the men without turning her eyes from the display. “Thanks.”
The op stood with his hand out and glanced downward with mild surprise.
She had let go of the coffee spoon before he’d managed to reach for it, spilling a small heap of dark roast on top of his shoe.
Roger Gordian watched the e-mail open on the screen of the notebook computer he’d set up in his guest suite at Thomas Sheffield’s place.
The image that filled most of the display was of a large upraised hand of fire, its glowing orange fingers spread wide. Gradually materializing across its open palm in black text was this message:
The conditions of Julia’s release are simple. We demand no ransom, no portion of the father’s wealth. Only a promise made to all the ears of the world — and has not reaching them been his lifelong goal?
At nine o’clock tonight aboard the Sedco oil platform, Roger Gordian is to renounce his dream of freedom through information, declare UpLink International and its subsidiaries utterly and permanently dissolved, and require that its stockholders forsake their shares by legal agreement without any form of compensation, including financial reimbursement from insurers.
All UpLink’s corporate operations will then cease. All personnel must be evacuated from its facilities worldwide. All its projects must be abandoned, its communications networks dismantled.
Full implementation of these terms is to occur within a time frame not exceeding 48 hours after the announcement or Julia Gordian will be executed.
The black text remained in place for thirty seconds and then coalesced into a rotating sphere that rapidly underwent another smooth transformation against the fiery palm, changing colors, reshaping itself into the UpLink logo: an Earth globe surrounded by intersecting satellite bandwidth lines.
Another half minute passed. The hand clenched into a fist, morphed into an red-orange fireball, and brightened. Then it suddenly plunged to the bottom of the screen like a falling comet, leaving behind an empty white void.
Gordian turned from the screen and looked over at Pete Nimec in the chair beside him.
“What’s this about?” Gordian said. His face was ashen. “Say I complied with the declaration to pull up stakes, how could anyone think I’d be able to go about convincing our investors to do the same thing? It’s inconceivable. You’re talking about fortunes. There are thousands of our employees alone who have their life savings attached to our stock. Tens of thousands. They’d be wiped out. I’m not even sure what they’d be expected to do with their shares.” He paused a moment, running a hand through his thin hair. “But I don’t know why I think I can apply sane reasoning to these demands. Not one of them is grounded in reality. There’s no way they can be met… not if I had months available.”
Nimec took a breath.
“Nobody expects you to meet them,” he said. “The whole thing’s outrageous. It’s meant to put you through your paces.”
Gordian was shaking his head. “But if that’s the case—”
Gordian fell silent. Nimec waited. They exchanged glances.
“If that’s the case, Pete… and this is all about taunting me… causing me heartache… then what’s going to happen to my daughter?” Gordian stared at Nimec. “What are the people who took Julia planning to do to her?”
Nimec hesitated, dismissing every hollow word of encouragement that came to mind. Gord deserved better from him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
His name was Fred Gilbert, and he was vocally irate about someone ringing his telephone off the hook at seven o’clock in the morning. According to what he’d already told Glenn three or four times during his lengthy rebuke, the fact that it was a business call only worsened his unhappiness.
“This is an outrageous imposition,” he said. “Or don’t we agree a man has a right to choose his own schedule?”