Sunlight washed over him. He lifted the porthole and stared outside without seeing anything. Fresh sea air breezed through into the study, but DeVane’s nostrils registered heavy urban smog as the images and sensations came on.
First, the building.
It always started with the building.
As he’d approached from the street, it had seemed to rise infinitely above him.
Nervous, he had walked through the entrance to a security desk and told his name to a uniformed guard who consulted a visitor list, cleared him for entry, and then pointed him toward the elevators.
His stomach had lurched as the car sped him up to a corporate suite filled with employees. They were darting busily between doorways, though he’d sensed their quick, concealed glances. It was as if they were the inhabitants of a lush, sheltering forest, unsure what to make of the stray and anxious creature that had wandered in from some outer barrens.
He had stood before the receptionist, again given his name, and she had risen from her chair and shown him to the office of the man he had learned was his father.
The glass boardroom table was long, dominating the room. There was a smaller table in a corner, a vase with fresh flowers, a coffee urn, some comfortable looking chairs. Shelves of books, many of them leather bound, on a wall near the chairs. He had guessed this to be some sort of informal greeting area, used for pleasant talk.
It was unoccupied as he entered, and there was no smell of brewed coffee in the room.
After several minutes the father had entered and stood regarding him from the head of the long glass table. He, the son, waited beside a window looking down on the great city skyline’s tallest office towers. None of them were close to reaching its height.
Instructed to sit at the foot of the long glass table, the son watched the father he had never met before that moment, the stranger with a face so much like his own, settle into a chair at its opposite end. He was a tall man, his posture very rigid. They had seemed separated by many miles. The father wearing a perfectly tailored suit of some fine, light fabric. The son hoping the sleeve of his sport jacket would not ride up to show the frayed threads on his right shirt cuff. He had saved to buy the jacket for their meeting. The old shirt was his best. There had been no money for another after he bought the jacket.
The father observed the son across his long glass table and asked why he had come to him. His voice was calm and without inflection. His exquisite suit was like soft but impermeable armor. He truly seemed miles and miles away.
Seated by the window, the son answered him and wondered if his voice would fail, fall as short of reaching the father’s chair as the tops of the skyscrapers below. Still, his request seemed a fair, even modest one. The son knew of a deep and broad accumulation of family wealth, but did not then appreciate its meaning, and would have mistaken its neglected leavings for the brightest and rarest of jewels. The son knew of respected legitimate children, but he did not then consider himself their equal, let alone their better by vast degrees.
The thrust of what he wanted was recognition.
The father looked at him without any whatsoever.
“Listen to me this once, because once is all you get,” he had said. “You have no place here, no help, nothing to gain. Your mother is a piece of loose candy in a common bowl. Any man can reach into it for her, and I may have had a taste. If the bowl was passed to me or put in easy reach, why not? I can’t be sure. Hard candy, it’s a cheap temptation. Sweet but uninteresting. Meant to be indulged and forgotten.”
The father had stood, then. His gaze flat and noncommittal, no room in it even for contempt.
The son had hated his eyes for their resemblance to his own.
“I’ll give you some advice, off the record,” the father said. “Go about your life, make what you can of it. But know your boundaries. Don’t look past the rim of the bowl. Don’t expect to share my name. And don’t ever dare to return here. I said this was your one and only chance, and I meant it. If you try to see me again, contact me in any way, you’ll be pissing in a very goddamned strong wind.”
The father had allowed a few seconds to pass, as if to make certain his warning had been absorbed. Then he waved his hand toward the door in a gesture of dismissal, held it out until the son had risen from his chair and turned his back.
Now, as the memory finished running its cold, cold course through his mind, DeVane lingered by the Chimera ’s open porthole for several moments, as he had lingered before departing the table of his father those many years gone by.
He realized his pallid hand was spread open in front of him, looked down at it with constricted anger, and lowered it to his side. Then he shut and latched the porthole, and pulled the curtains across them with a sharp jerk of his wrist, expelling both breeze and sunlight from the room.
Traces of his memory stayed in the air with him somewhat longer.
DeVane had listened carefully to his father’s words, let them sink in and work their changes. He had remembered them, as advised, and in that sense proved himself an obedient son.
But he had bided his time—and returned.
And when he did, the wind, that goddamned strong wind, had been blowing relentlessly in his favor, feeding his sails all the way.
FOUR
GABON, AFRICA CALIFORNIA
AS HE LUGGED HIS FEET TOWARD THE RIO DE GABAO Hotel’s atrium and wearily braced for the dinner reception organized by his cultivated Gabonese hosts, Pete Nimec pressed a multifunction button on his wristwatch twice to check its Annie-Meter, which was not what the integrated feature was actually supposed to be called. What the feature was supposed to be called, going by the user’s manual he’d barely skimmed, was either “To-Do List” or “Reminder Calendar” or “Countdown Alarm” . . . or maybe something else kind of similar he’d given up trying to remember.
There were, Nimec thought, too many brand names and trademarks and jargonese catch words for all the countless gadgets floating around these days. Or possibly it just seemed there were too many when you cruised into your forties, and were old enough to remember a time when the pocket transistor radio was considered a modern marvel, and the black-and-white portable television became an affordable household fixture that would eventually render the behemoth family console obsolete.
Still, the name game seemed complicated to Nimec. Even his digital watch wasn’t a watch, or exclusively a watch if you wanted to be nitpicky. It was, rather, a WristLink wearable minicomputer with a high-res color liquid crystal display panel and infrared data-transfer port, designed and marketed by no lesser outfit than his own employer, and sporting everything from an integrated 5× zoom digital camera with sufficient built-in memory to store a hundred fifty snapshot images, to a personal global positioning system locator, to satellite e-messaging software, an electronic memo pad, address book, onboard video games, and—proving it could still could be used as a timepiece by Cro-Magnon throwbacks such as himself—programmable displays for every time zone in the world and a receiver module that synched it to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s atomic clock out in Boulder or Denver—Nimec forgot which Colorado city—rendering it accurate to the split second by an official federal government agency. Besides touting these many bells and whistles, the watch, or wearable, was certified waterproof to a hundred-foot depth and furthermore had come to Nimec free of charge, being one of his occasional deluxe perks as Roger Gordian’s security chief.
Yet for him the best of the gadget’s features was its Annie-Meter.
As he called it.
Nimec had set it shortly after leaving Houston for San Jose earlier that week. To be more precise, Nimec had set it fifteen minutes after Annie dropped him off at the airport, where she’d sent him on his way with a deep, sweet, shamelessly immodest kiss through her car’s open passenger door as he’d leaned in across the front seat from the curb . . . a kiss whose taste had lingered all the while it took Nimec to reluctantly pull himself and his carry-on b
ag from her car, turn through the terminal entrance, obtain his boarding pass from the clerk at the departure gate, and finally sit himself down in the passenger waiting area to fool with the watch’s push-button menu controls.
The Annie-Meter, so-called, looked to unknowing eyes like an electronic calendar. What you did with it exclusively, if your name happened to be Pete Nimec, was first scroll to the box around the date you left Annie, whenever you left Annie, and record the exact, official NIST time you made your generally romantic farewells. Then you went to the screen that allowed you to specify the expected duration of your time apart from her and entered that information, inserting a little check mark beside the ALARM option—which, thanks to shareware Annie’s son had downloaded from the Internet overriding the WristLink’s preprogrammed selection of beeps and musical tones, would sound a bleeping rendition of the Temptations’ “My Girl” on the day you were scheduled to see Annie again. Next up, assuming once more that you were Pete Nimec, was to open another dialogue box and checkmark the COUNTDOWN option enabling you to monitor, with a quick and convenient glance, the exact, official NIST number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds that were left until you got to hear that blessed melody. Finally you made absolutely sure both your farewell and return-to-Annie dates were highlighted in valentine red on the calendar, push-buttoned your way back to the device’s normal watch face, and that was that.
Nimec had last consulted the Annie-Meter riding the elevator down from his guest suite in UpLink’s reserved upper-story block, and noted he was twenty-three days, one hour, and an odd bundle of minutes from reuniting with his honey bun. Meaning that by the conclusion of the obligatory dinner reception, possibly sooner if it didn’t drag on too long, the number of days would be reduced to twenty-two and change. That was, he acknowledged, parsing things a tad. But as Tom Ricci had advised back when Nimec was entirely confident Ricci had his head on straight, you had to count your gains in small steps.
He entered the atrium now, joining the twenty-five or so attendees who’d gotten there ahead of him. All but one were men in suits, and half of those were UpLink corporate officials and high-level technical consultants focal to the fiber ring deal. The sole woman present was Tara Cullen, the project’s network operations manager . . . and a sleek, standout blond, as the thick cluster of smiling African delegates around her had clearly noticed. Nimec saw three or four members of his twelve-man security team interspersed throughout the crowd, lapel pins on their jackets—the triangular pins’ engraved and laminated design showing a broadsword surrounded by stylized satcom bandwidth lines.
Everyone from UpLink looked about as zonked as Nimec felt. He had wanted representatives from his Sword contingent at the gathering as a gesture of courtesy, but because they weren’t part of the business delegation had seen no reason to trot out the entire bunch. He’d thus asked for only a handful of volunteers, having allowed those who preferred to skip the festivities do so after their long, taxing haul from California. Starting tomorrow his group would have its work cut out conducting surveys of UpLink’s new onshore and offshore facilities and laying the groundwork for site policies, procedures, and equipment. Let them relax while they could.
Aside from a fleet of black-tuxed, white-gloved servers weaving about the room with trays of hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, the rest of the people Nimec scoped from the entryway belonged to the Gabonese welcoming committee: politicians and administrative appointees led by Etienne Begela, who Nimec’s well-studied contact brief tagged as bureaucratic head of the telecom regulatory agency in Port-Gentil.
Now Begela looked over at Nimec, excused himself from a group of UpLink executives he’d engaged, and approached with his arm outstretched.
Nimec went forward to meet him. The atrium was awash with sunlight even though it was almost seven in the evening. It gleamed off the silver trays and table settings and spilled through the glass-paneled ceiling onto exotic blossoming floor plants, which Nimec didn’t recognize in the least and which seemed almost too outlandishly tall and lush to be genuine.
“Monsieur Nimec, hello, it is a pleasure.” Begela pumped his hand, offered a huge white-toothed smile, and introduced himself in French-accented English. Nimec wondered briefly how the minister had identified him right off, then guessed one of the execs had pointed him out. Either that or Begela had been pretty good about reviewing his own background files. “I hope you are finding your accommodations satisfactory after such a lengthy trip, and would like you to know I’ve personally selected those hotel staffers who will be attending to your party throughout its stay.”
“I appreciate that,” Nimec said. “Everything’s great.”
And the hotel was very nice—elegant, in fact, Nimec mused. Though even a jungle hut and straw cot would have been agreeable to him after his latest marathon global traverse. This one ranked way ahead of SanJo- Malaysia on the all-time fatigue scale, and seemed a close runner up to SanJo-Antarctica. How many hours had it spanned? A glance at his superwatch would of course tell him to the exact, official NIST atomic minute, but Nimec had the sense that knowing the answer to that question would make him feel even more wiped out than he currently did. There had been the United Airlines charter out of San Jose airport—well, playing the name game again, Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, as the city council had rechristened it a couple of years back in honor of the former mayor—at six thirty in the morning the previous day. That had taken his group to their connection at O’Hare in Chicago, where they had boarded a UA international flight to Paris de Gaulle after a five-hour layover. Arriving in the glorious City of Light around seven the next morning after a full day of travel, they’d barely had a chance to toss back some Mc-Donald’s coffee and hit the terminal restrooms—which had been the high point of that little interlude, and no more glorious than visits to salles de bains the world over—before hustling aboard an Air France A340 for another seven hours in the wild blue yonder, and finally touching down at Leon M’ba Airport in Libreville at around five in the evening. From the nation’s capital they’d flopped onto a waiting Air Gabon Fokker 28 that had shuttled them to Port-Gentil, where they’d hustled into their rooms, and, each in his or her own dog-tired way, prepared for the banquet.
“When you’ve rested up, we shall have to familiarize you with our city,” Etienne Begela was saying now. “You’ll find it delightfully captivating, I’m sure. I’ll show you our government offices tomorrow, and can recommend places to shop, dine, even enjoy some sightseeing if the desire strikes. And I have people ready to assist your group in whatever other ways may be needed.”
Nimec gave the minister a nod.
“I look forward to all that once I’ve recharged,” he said. “We’ll try not to be too much of a nuisance.”
A pair of waiters glided over and surrounded Nimec with their carefully balanced trays of appetizers. One held a selection of pâtés, thin-sliced sausages, truffles, and chilled poached salmon. The other had something hot, what looked like escargot stuffed into sauteed mushrooms. Nimec found himself disappointed. The offerings looked tasty enough. And he’d done his homework about the long French tradition here. Gabon had been visited by trading ships from Marseilles and Nice since before Columbus, was settled by colonial forces right around the middle of the nineteenth century. Still, you could sample French food anywhere. It was the universal posh cuisine, and this affair definitely had a high poshness quotient. Nimec wasn’t big on it, however, and guessed he’d hoped for more regional fare. If you were going to fly a couple of zillion miles to Africa, you wanted to chow down on African.
Nimec sampled the pâté and thought it was blandly decent. But he resolved that he’d have to take Begela up on his offer of guiding him toward some interesting spots to eat.
He noticed Tara Cullen passing by with one of the other Gabonese delegates and waved to catch her attention, figuring it was an ideal chance to provide an intro . . . as well as an opportune moment to ease himself out of the conversation and
into a chair for a while. And maybe see if any of the penguins were serving coffee. He really did feel headachey and bedraggled.
“Tara,” he said, “I’d like you to meet—”
“Ms. Cullen and I have already made one another’s acquaintance.” Begela flashed his big, overpowering smile at Nimec, then beamed it onto Tara and snagged her elbow. “Indeed, though, I feel professionally obliged, and personally delighted, to take this opportunity to expand upon it.” He nodded at the tall, dark-skinned man who’d been walking along with her. “Macie Nze, this is Mr. Pete Nimec, Mr. Nimec, Macie Nze . . . my friend and fellow in the Ministry of Telecommunications. He can tell you of our recent trip to the capital in support of UpLink’s agenda.” The smile became even more commanding. “And we ourselves must talk later, Macie, no?” he said without elaboration.
Nze gave him a nod and agreed that they should. Nimec thought he looked sort of flustered—or surprised, anyway—wondered about it a second, and then ventured that he probably just didn’t appreciate having his blond companion rustled off by a colleague.
As Begela steered Tara toward the bar, Nimec also decided to forget about his quiet cup of coffee.
“So,” he said, and extended his hand toward Nze for a fresh round of vigorous shaking. “Tell me about that trip of yours . . .”
Nze did, to neither man’s particular enjoyment.
The old Detecto stand-up scale had originally belonged to a Lousiana country doctor, who had it delivered to Roland Thibodeau’s appearance-conscious godmother as a lagniappe, a little something extra offered for good measure, when she had bought some nice, new-looking furniture at his moving sale . . . or so Thibodeau recalled her telling him. He had vague memories of his dear Nanaine Adele Rigaud getting many small, pretty gifts from the doctor before he and his wife left the bayou, pulling stakes for New Orleans all of a sudden. These gifts, too, may have been lagniappes. But Thibodeau had been very young back then, and unclear about the ways of adults.
Cutting Edge (2002) Page 9