Heather recovered quickly, though. She shook her head; long gold tresses swept from side to side. Her extraordinary—and, Caine knew, artificially—lavender eyes engaged him for a full second before she spoke. “I heard rumors that the coldsleep had damaged your memories, Caine. But evidently it didn’t affect your intellect, or your ability to be aggravating, to push my buttons. Occasionally.” She leaned back; on the surface, it was simply a shift to a more relaxed posture. Somehow, Heather made it the inviting recline of a courtesan. “So—have you missed me?”
“Haven’t had the time to miss much of anything, Heather.”
“My, my, you never used to wake up this testy. But I suppose sleeping through fourteen years could make one a little more arch than usual.”
“Or maybe I just woke up with a decreased tolerance for reporters.”
Heather remained quiet for a second. “Such a semicivilized insult. But I suppose we’ve both grown old and boring. Which reminds me, are you in touch with any of your friends from the Independent Interplanetary News Network?”
Caine managed not to roll his eyes. “Oh, yeah, all my IINN ‘colleagues’ who loved me so much.”
He felt Brahen’s eyes move sideways to study him. “Actually, sir, wardroom scuttlebutt says you were a pretty successful—”
Heather tossed a bang aside. “Oh, he was very successful, Ensign. A bit too successful, actually. You see, he didn’t go to the news networks: they went to him. On bended knee.”
Caine made himself laugh. “You still don’t mind a bit of exaggeration if it makes for a more evocative story, do you, Heather?”
“And I never will. You see, Ensign Brahen”—her sudden inward lean and facetiously intimate tone were Heather’s most antagonistic provocations yet—“when I was at IINN, the senior editors were big fans of Caine’s first book and his way with words. And then they discovered he was good on camera, even though he was shy about being in front of one.”
“That wasn’t shyness. That was aversion.”
“See? He is good with words. So there he was, on an open-ended contract, free to come and go as he pleased, allowed to snatch up the choicest research projects involving the Pentagon or the cloak-and-dagger types a few miles away in Langley.
“But of course, not all of us girls and boys who had worked and sweated and lied and slept our way up the ladder were happy when Caine became the darling of the aging news chiefs who rediscovered, in their near-senility, that journalism was still about informing the public. As if it ever had been. But Caine Riordan was the perfect salve for their pangs of career-end guilt: a bona fide public intellectual who was self-effacing, honest, energetic, eloquent, even charming. And the rest of us could only look on in envy.”
“Or hatred,” added Brahen, fixing Heather with her own assessing gaze. “Sounds like you still haven’t figured out exactly how you feel about your old boyfriend, Ms. Kirkwood.”
Heather leaned back with a clap of her hands. “Bravo! Rising to the bait at last, are you, Ensign?”
Judging from Marilyn Brahen’s lowering brows, Caine suspected he’d better steer the conversation back to the original topic. “Heather, you already know I’m not in touch with anyone in the media. That’s the first place you’d try to pick up my trail.”
“One of the first. I tried tracking down your family, but no contact there, either.”
“Never had much to be in contact with. Less now.” As in “zero.”
“What about your college friends? You had a pretty close circle of them from your undergrad years, if I remember correctly.”
“You do—and you’ll leave them out of this. As I have. I keep a low profile so that people who knew me can’t contact me. It might not be—healthy—for them.”
Heather leaned back with a frown. “So the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“That what you know is worth killing for.”
Martina Perduro turned away from her commplex with a sigh. “Damn it. I didn’t even know we had half that many reporters in the civilian sector. And of course we just happened to send Riordan right out into the midst of them.”
Trevor watched the monitors, tracking the progress of the blip that denoted the private maglev car which had whisked Caine away from the journalists and protesters. “Don’t worry, Admiral. Riordan can handle the press.”
“Handle them? He was one of them, wasn’t he?”
“No, ma’am, not really.” Trevor tapped the monitor as the interactive maglev-system diagram flickered uncertainly, then reasserted. “He just took some freelance reporting gigs to make ends meet in lean times.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“Different things. Worked for Jane’s Defense Weekly as an analyst for a while, then wrote books. Consulted, too. Defense and intelligence: all the major three-letter agencies. A few others, besides.”
Perduro made a huffing noise. “I know those consultancies and their fees. How ‘lean’ could the times have been?”
“Pretty lean, because Caine has a serious flaw when it comes to working for the government.”
“Which is?”
“Well, he has this real bad habit of telling the truth.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. So he had an irregular career because he was always willing to wonder out loud about the so-called experts’—and his own—methods of analysis, and about the conclusions derived from them.”
“So he got in trouble for doing his job properly?”
“Yep, particularly when his observations ran afoul of Ancient Agency Traditions. One time, he pointed out that age stratification in the intelligence organizations was crippling their counterintelligence analysis. Specifically, the generation gap had senior experts unaware that contemporary ciphers were incorporating pop-culture memes and semiology—which the under-thirty junior analysts could have recognized and decoded in their sleep. Caine wound up getting two supreme recognitions for that discovery.”
“Which were?”
“Well, first he got a huge consultancy bonus.”
“And the second?”
“They let him go. Never hired him back. Buried the files and findings.”
“So he was the proverbial prophet, unwelcome in his own land.”
“Well, there’s that—but frankly, he’s also not your typical beltway type.”
“How so?”
“Admiral, have you ever worked with a polymath? A real polymath?”
Perduro smiled. “I served under Nolan Corcoran—remember?”
“Touché. But Dad—well, he liked managing people. Not Caine.”
“Strange. He doesn’t seem antisocial.”