Though Nimec had been at the Johor ground station on only one prior occasion, and though it had occurred to him before departing the States that it might be wise to have somebody from the local Sword contingent come out to the airfield and meet them, he had finally decided to drive to their end destination himself. He supposed that part of it was a natural predisposition toward seeking camouflage, a trait that made him lean toward maintaining a low profile until he was clearer about where Max's probe had been taking him.. and what might have gone wrong. But there was also a part of him that simply liked cowboying it, and while he would have admitted it to no one — including, to some extent, himself — the truth was that being lifted from his ordinary milieu had aroused that long-dormant facet of his personality.
At any rate, it was just shy of five in the morning when Nimec found UpLink's corporate emblem on a sign marking a dirt service road and, looking off beyond the tree line to his right, glimpsed the concrete and aluminum buildings of the ground station in the near distance.
He swung up over the hard-pack toward the station's perimeter gate and braked about twenty feet before reaching the guard booth. There was an ATM-sized biometric reader on a concrete island to his left — one of the recent improvements Max had made to the security net. Whereas most UpLink facilities used either iris or fingerprint scanning at various levels of access, Blackburn had wanted to tighten the identification requirements at restricted entry points by using multiple biometric passkeys, and had the scanner platforms designed to his specifications.
Nimec lowered his window now and swept his thumb over the platform's thermal-imaging strip while simultaneously waiting for the iris scanner to digitally photograph his eyes — two cameras matching them to a computerized facial template, the third taking a high-res snapshot of his iris. All three images were then checked for a variety of characteristics and compared with information previously enrolled in the security mainframe's database.
Seconds after he'd pulled up to the multiscanner, the "toll light" above the motorized gate in front of him shifted from red to green and a computer-synthesized female voice issued from a speaker in the platform.
"Identification complete, Peter Nimec," it said in English. "Please proceed."
Nimec drove on through the gate toward the complex, nodding to the uniformed man in the guard booth as he passed him.
"This isn't quite the sort of place I expected," Nori said from the backseat, looking out the window in the dawnlight. "It's so… I don't know.. colorless."
Nimec shrugged with his hands on the wheel.
"Utilitarian's the word I'd use," he said. "Didn't realize you hadn't been to any of our ground stations. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. After a while you get used to the no-frills decor."
"I suppose." She sat back and yawned.
Nimec glanced into the rearview.
"Tired from our journey to the East?" he asked.
"And wired," she said.
"Not a good mix if you plan to get any sleep." He lifted a folded newspaper from the passenger seat and held it out to her over his shoulder. "Here, take this copy of the Straits Times I grabbed at the KL airport. Maybe it'll help you relax."
"I don't remember seeing you read it."
"That's because I haven't yet," he said. "And I doubt I'll manage to keep my eyes open long enough to do so."
Nori took the paper from his hand, set it down beside her, and yawned again.
"Thanks," she said. 4Til be sure to fill you in on the local news over breakfast."
He nodded.
"Just don't forget my horoscope," he said in a tone that might or might not have been serious.
Sian Po had no sooner gotten to bed after returning home from his night shift at the precinct than he closed his eyes and dreamed he was in a gambling parlor managed by Fat B. There were women and flashing lights and he had somehow won an astronomical sum of money, hillocks of which surrounded him on every side.
The knock at his door awakened him just as, in his dream, he had begun to dance with a magnificent blonde who'd slid down off a pole and then told him she'd come all the way from Denmark to make his acquaintance.
Sian Po opened his eyes, jolted from the sparkle and glitz of his fantasy to the bland, curtained dimness of his studio apartment. Where had the sexy dancer gone?
He frowned with the realization that she didn't exist, and glanced at his alarm clock. It was five A. M. Had he thought he'd heard something?
There was another rap on the door.
Still a little disoriented, he got out of bed and went over to it in his pajamas.
"Who is it?" he grunted, rubbing his eyes.
"I've something for you from Gaffoor," a hushed male voice said from out in the corridor.
Sian Po's Weariness instantly dissipated at the mention of his insider with CID. He unbolted his lock and pulled open the door.
The man was about thirty and dressed in civilian clothes, a light cotton shirt and sport jacket. Another investigator, or so Sian Po believed.
"You in Gaffoor's unit?" Sian Po asked.
The man shrugged noncommittally, extracted a white legal envelope from his jacket's inner pocket, and held it out to Sian Po.
"Take it, ke yi bu ke yi," he said.
Sian Po snatched it from his hand.
The man stood there giving him a blank look. "I'll tell Gaffoor you received his message," he said, and turned down the hall.
The door shut behind him, Sian Po eagerly tore open the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper. He slipped it out and read the note that had been written across its face.
Excitement flooded his squashed features.
Unbelievable, he thought. Just unbelievable.
Heedless of the hour, Sian Po hurried over to his bedside stand, located Fat B's phone number in his datebook, and rang him up.
As though the dream had been a true and marvelous premonition, his jackpot had arrived.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In the corridor outside the East Room of the White House, a room throbbing with reporters, prominent members of Congress, and other official guests invited to the Morrison-Fiore bill-signing ceremony, the President was both aggravated and anxious to put pen to paper.
He was aggravated because he had wanted to sign the bill while sitting behind the staunch and sturdy solidity of the Resolute Desk in the sound and secure comfort of the Executive Office, wanted to sign it at midnight when the folks around him were home in bed, or elsewhere in bed, or in some cases skulking between beds, zipping up, unzipping, getting tangled up inside their zippers, whatever the hell they chose to do with themselves when the sun went down and the lights were out here in the golden city on the Hill.
He was anxious because now that he'd been induced to make a huge ceremonial affair of the signing — C-SPAN cameras dollying about, kliegs in his face, the whole nine yards — he wanted it over and done with so that public attention could be turned to something of real significance to him, namely SEAPAC, a child he had guided from infancy, watching it take on polish, refinement, and sophistication under his savvy political eye. A treaty that he viewed as the most important policy effort of his tenure in the White House. That he believed was the blueprint for a new strategic and logistic collaboration in the Pacific Rim. That he was certain would reinforce America's ties with its Asian partners, and decide the future of its own security interests in the region. What was Morrison-Fiore in comparison, besides a piece of moot legislation, easing commercial restrictions that had already been bypassed with countless loopholes?
Impatient to get to his desk now — no Resolute by any means, no strong, lasting article of furniture made from the timbers of a bold expeditionary vessel, but rather a comparatively lightweight and characterless hunk of wood rolled out under the portrait of George Washington especially for this morning's swinging Big House hullabaloo — the President glanced into the room, where the function's primary mastermind, Press Secretary Brian Terskoff, stood to the right of the entryway schmoozing with a young woman Ballard recognized as an executive from the news department of one of the major television networks. A place where Terskoff might very well be seeking employment once the sorry, obstinate bastard got the ass-kicking he'd long deserved.