“Hello,” Malisse said. “I’m Mr. Friedman, here to see Norman Green.”
“Got your name right here, sir.” A mediocre actor at best, Jeffreys had glanced at his guest book a touch too quickly, looking uncomfortable, betraying anticipation of his lines. Still, he was new to the craft, and his stiffening informant’s guilt could have been expected to keep him out of the moment. “Go straight on up to the tenth floor. I’ll buzz upstairs so he can meet you.”
Malisse thanked him and exited stage left via the elevator. It had been a clumsy transition but would serve its purpose.
Green was waiting outside the car as its doors opened. His resemblance to Lembock, his first cousin, was strikingly noticeable. Ancient, bone-thin, and snowy-haired, he wore a dark pinstriped suit with a white breast-pocket handkerchief, and gold-framed pince-nez glasses on the bridge of his sharply downcurved nose. His knitted yarmulke was black with a blue trim pattern, held firmly in place with a solid gold clip.
Malisse extended his hand to Green and smiled, appreciating his lenses and careful, elegant dress as reminders of an old-world refinement that many would consider quaint. How had so much been lost nowadays? he wondered.
“You’re looking well, Duvi,” Green said in Flemish. Although the two had never before laid eyes on each other, he stood pumping Malisse’s arm as if they were the fondest of friends. Here, now, was a fine, seasoned performer. “How was your flight in?”
“A success.” Malisse shrugged. “I landed alive.”
Green chuckled, put a hand across his shoulders, steered him around toward the turnstiles.
“Come, Duvi, I’ll show you where to hang your overcoat.” And then, dropping his voice to a bare whisper: “As well as where Hoffman has left his coat and attaché case while he prays.”
It was a quarter past noon in San Jose as Pete Nimec stood looking out at Rosita Avenue through the window beside Megan’s desk. If he’d leaned his cheek flat against the pane, bent back on his knees, and cranked his neck a bit to the right, he might have seen the very edge of Mount Hamilton’s eastern flank overlooking the city skyline to the northeast. From where he stood, however, the view was fairly restricted. This had taken some getting used to, and with understandable reason. Megan’s office at UpLink SanJo was catercorner to the boss’s far plusher suite next door — which Gordian only visited three or four times a month, max, since his stepdown — and the great rugged heave of the slope had always seemed to smack right up against your eyes through its floor-to-ceiling window.
“How did things go with Ricci?” Megan asked now, drawing his attention from the office towers across the street.
“I haven’t spoken to him,” Nimec said. “Plan to do that in about an hour.”
Megan shot him a glance.
“The conference he conveniently skipped out on was yesterday,” she said.
“Meg, he accounted for—”
“I want him leaving for New York tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”
“I know.”
“So why haven’t you already had your talk?”
“WOW,” Nimec said.
Megan looked confused.
“Wow?” she said.
“WOW, capital letters, right,” Nimec said. “It’s short for Women Opposed to War.”
Megan’s puzzled expression had deepened.
“Are we participants in the same conversation here?” she said. “Because I’m having a tough time following it, Pete.”
Nimec stepped away from the window and sat down opposite her.
“WOW’s a group based in San Fran, claims to have maybe five thousand members all told. There’s an Internet site for it, natch,” he said. “The organizers are big into peace, and lately they’ve had it in for us.”
“By ‘us’… you mean UpLink.”
Nimec gave her a nod.
“They’ve posted all kinds of negative stuff,” he said. “From their standpoint, we’re belligerent global agitators.”
“You’re joking.”
Nimec shook his head.
“It’s a free country,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what they believe.”
“Because we’re a DoD contractor?”
“Designing the mechanisms of carnage, right,” Nimec said. “And because of the security forces… they call them quasi-militaristic units… we put at our foreign stations.”
Megan gave him a look.
“You are kidding me,” she said.
Nimec reached out and tapped the back of her computer screen.
“You want to log on to their home page?” he said. “I did it last night. What’s on there comes from open sources. Newspaper reports, politicians, even our own press releases… the facts are accurate, but they know how to cut and paste them in ways that hurt.”
Megan frowned thoughtfully.
“Context is everything,” she said. “Can you give me examples?”
“Sure,” Nimec said. “They’re critical of how we handled our run-in with those rogue paramilitaries in Gabon last year. They say we violated Brazil’s national sovereignty that time we fought off the sabotage team in Mato Grosso. The same for when terrorists came after our satcom ground station in Russia—”
Nimec saw Megan’s eyes widen.
“I lived through that one and we were almost massacred there, Pete,” she said. “They also went after the Russian president, whom our Sword ops saved from cold-blooded assassination.”
“So we could sink our hooks into him and his government,” Nimec said. “It’s part of a grand scheme we’ve hatched to muscle up on vulnerable, cash-strapped societies for our own omnicapitalistic motives.”
“Omnicapitalistic?”
“Don’t look at me,” Nimec said. “I’m still trying to figure out quasi-militaristic.”
Megan shook her head.
“These WOW people,” she said. “May I assume they offer their bright ideas about what we should do to defend ourselves against attack?”
Nimec gave a nod.
“Their position’s that sharing art, music, and poetry is always the best response to violence.”
“Always.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Against any aggressor.”
“Uh-huh.”
“In every instance, whatever the circumstances.”
“Something about it elevating the human condition, right.” Nimec shrugged. “Bongo dancing might be recommended, too, but I’d have to check online to be positive.”
Megan gave him a look and then went back to shaking her head.
“We weren’t being singled out alone, if that makes you feel better,” Nimec said. “They’ve got a whole list of evildoers who are keeping everybody else from the next step in evolution. Corporations, political parties… there’s even some writer who cranks out paperback thrillers, I forget his name.”
Megan was quiet a moment. She tucked a loose tress of auburn hair behind her ear.
“Okay,” she said. “How does this nonsense connect to Ricci?”
“Last week a couple of women tried to get through security at our Cupertino R and D plant,” Nimec said. “No fancy tactics involved. They piggyback their way into a main entrance around lunchtime, when they know there’s a lot of foot traffic. Wait for employees to get smartcard authorization, slip in behind them.” He shrugged. “Our tailgate sensors picked them up at the door, tagged them as intruders. Then security watched to see what they were up to. The procedure’s routine… we have visitors all the time who don’t bother checking in at the guard desk for a pass. Act like it’s an inconvenience we impose on them for no good reason, and they’re in too much of a hurry. Usually it turns out the person’s okay — a salesman, a staffer’s friend or relative — and he or she just needs to learn that kind of thing won’t wash in our facilities.”