Kirsten felt her throat getting thick with moisture, and swallowed.
"May I request," she said, "that 'forgiving' be added to your multiple choice?"
Anna held her gaze for a long, silent moment.
The silence grew.
"Yes," she said finally, nodding. "You may."
Kirsten expelled a ragged sigh. "I'm so mixed up, Anna," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Max… he knows my cell-phone number, and promised to be in touch within days. When I got into the cab, he was starting to give me someone's name, a person to call if I didn't hear from him, but I didn't catch it…."
"Kirsten, if you want my opinion, the people you ought to be calling are the police," Anna said. "This Max is the one who got you into trouble in the first place. I understand that you have feelings for him, but how do you know for a fact that he isn't a criminal? That the men who were waiting outside the hotel weren't the authorities?"
Kirsten shook her head vehemently.
"No," she said. "It isn't possible."
"But you've only known the man a few months. Why are you so positive?"
"Because, while I may be five years younger than you, I'm not some little schoolgirl who's got her head screwed on backwards," Kirsten said, her throat filling again. "Look, I won't deny I'm in love with Max. Nor will I deny having had doubts about whether he shares that feeling, or even wondering on occasion whether my position at Monolith made me.. useful to him. But I know… I know… he cares for me." Kirsten wiped her hand across her eyes, and it came away wet. "You can go on arguing about whether he respected me in the morning, but he's not some kind of manipulative crook, or con man, or whatever. He risked his life to lead those men away from me. I can't just turn my back on him now."
Anna sighed. "That isn't what I was suggesting, and if you'd stop being defensive for a second you'd realize it," she said. "All I'm saying is that you — we — are in a very serious situation, and need to get help. What's so terribly wrong with the idea of calling the police? With at least considering it before some harm comes to you, me, Lin, or the children?"
Kirsten opened her mouth to speak, and realized she didn't have a clue what she wanted to say… but no, that wasn't right. That was being dishonest with herself, and she was supposed to be coming clean here. She had more than a clue. She knew, absolutely knew what needed to be said, and she could not allow pride and stubbornness to get in its way.
Suddenly she found herself overtaken by emotion, hitching out uncontrollable sobs.
Anna set her knife down on the counter, then came around to Kirsten's side and took one of her hands.
"Kirst, I didn't mean—"
"No, don't," Kirsten said, furiously swiping tears from her eyes with her free hand, hating the tears as they poured down her cheeks in an unbottled stream. "You did mean it, every word, and you're absolutely right. You let me stay here unconditionally, and in return I've put your entire family at risk. And that can't continue."
Anna stood beside her in silence, looking at her, still holding her hand.
Meeting her sister's gaze, Kirsten leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek.
"It's time for me to take some advice besides my own," she said. "I'm calling the police."
Chapter Fourteen
"You want to what?" Charles Klrby said, gripping the telephone in his Broadway office. "I can't believe you're serious."
"Believe it," Gordian replied from clear across the United States. "I've given some hard thought to the idea."
Not easily jolted, Kirby felt like hanging onto his chair.
"We spoke less than two days ago, and you didn't mention—"
"That's because it hadn't occurred to me yet," Gordian said. "I said I thought hard about the whole thing. Not hard and long." He paused. "Sometimes it's a matter of recognizing when you've gotten a genuine inspiration."
Still trying to recover his equilibrium, Kirby held the phone away from his mouth, inhaled, then slowly counted to ten. He glanced out the window, where many stories below and across the street people were hoisting placards in protest of something or other near the steps of City Hall, a more or less daily occurrence for as long as he'd had his office here. What was it that had brought them out today? He squinted to read the signs, realized he couldn't make out a word they said, and promptly forgot about them as he exhaled.
"Our paperwork for the antitrust suit's already three inches thick," he said. "We're almost ready to file it."
"Then go ahead and do so," Gordian said. "We both know its real purpose is to buy time, and we can use all we can get."
Kirby frowned. "Gord, my job is to give you legal counsel and representation. I can't make decisions for you. But I hope you're aware of the risk you'd be taking by going ahead with this."
"I can accept it," Gordian said. "Talk to somebody with a cold and you might get sick. Stroll past a construction site and a brick might fall down on your head. You can't crawl into a burrow."
Kirby was silent. Breathe. Count to ten. Let it out
"You know, it's always a little scary when you get philosophical," he said after a while. "Just tell me you won't lock yourself on this plan until after you're back from Washington."
"I'd rather get things in motion sooner," Gordian said. "As a matter of fact, I was going ask that you head out here to meet with me and Richard Sobel the morning before we fly."
"But that's Thursday. The day after tomorrow," Kirby said, flipping through his appointment book.
"I'll obviously understand if you can't make it, Chuck. Just as long as you understand that if you have any compelling reasons to dissuade me, it'll be your last chance to offer them."
Reaching for his pen, Kirby crossed a Thursday lunch date with a very attractive female colleague out of the book, and substituted the words "To San Jose."
"So quick bright things come to confusion," he muttered.
"What was that?" Gordian said.
"I said I'll be at your meeting," Kirby replied.
Just as Alexander the Great severed the Gordian knot with a swift and decisive whack of his sword — thereby gaining the favorable auspices of Zeus — so had Megan Breen and Peter Nimec concluded early on in UpLink's worldwide expansion that it needed a similar rapid-response capability, a security team that could cope with crisis situations where both regional stability and the company's interests were threatened, sharing intelligence with host governments, using scenario-planning techniques to defuse most problems before they hatched, and prepared to counter violence with forceful action of its own should that option be unavoidable.
Since their employer had been cooperative enough to have a surname (and bold disposition) that invited comparison with the legendary Macedonian, they had dubbed this arm of their far-flung organization Sword. And because of Nimec's access to the generally inaccessible society of law-enforcement professionals — he'd started out a beat cop in South Philly, moved to Boston in mid-career to garner an illustrious and still-unmatched record of closed cases for the BPD's elite Major Crimes Unit, and after yet a second geographical move wound up Chief of Special Operations in Chicago, all in less than two decades — they were able to lure the cream of the crop away from police and intelligence agencies around the world, staffing their pet project with men and women who were equal to any job.
One of the impressive Young Turks with Sword's New York branch, Noriko Cousins, had been a handpicked member of Nimec's team during the Code Name: Politika investigation of about a year back, and was credited with being a major reason for its speedy progress and successful resolution. After her section chief, Tony Barnhardt, took early retirement due to injuries sustained during that probe, she had been a natural to fill his post, which, in keeping with Pete Nimec's loose-reigned executive approach, allowed her to run her show with very little topside interference. She rarely heard from Nimec unless it was important.