by Tom Clancy
The knife slashed up from beneath the dark shelf of a branch, plunged hilt-deep into the softness of her throat, then slashed crosswise once and again. Arterial and venous blood gushed over the animal’s white down and stained the snow under her front hooves mingled shades of red. She collapsed heavily, the brightness of life frozen in eyes already dead.
Kuhl knelt to pull his knife from the wound, traces of vapor steaming from its wet blade.
For the first time in weeks, he felt released.
Gordian awoke, gasping for air.
Feverish and disoriented, unable at first to remember where he was, he felt certain a hand was clapped over his nose and mouth. Then he got his bearings. He was in his hospital room. His bed light off in the dimness of early morning. A thin crack of illumination spilling under his door from the outer corridor.
Air.
He needed air.
Gordian struggled to pull down a breath, his body arched off his mattress from the effort. But his lungs didn’t respond. They felt heavy and clogged. A muffled gurgling noise escaped him. Air. He fumbled under his chin for the oxygen mask. Couldn’t find it. He reached down to his chest and still couldn’t locate it. Groped about on his right side, where he sometimes clipped it to the safety rail. Not there.
The oxygen mask. He needed the mask. Where was it?
His mouth opened wide, he swung his arm up over his head, found the feed hose running from the wall, and with a surge of relief slid his fingers down along its length. Feeling for the mask at the end of it—
His newborn relief suddenly plummeted away into confusion.
The mask ...
He was already wearing it.
He cupped his hand over its curved plastic surface, pressed it against his face, drew hard. Air hissed through the tube. He could hear it over the strangled shreds of sound coming out of him. Hear it flowing into his mask ... but that was where it seemed to stop. His throat, his chest, were blocked.
Desperate, choking, feeling as if his chest were about to explode, he clawed for the emergency button at his side to summon a nurse, hoping to God one was very nearby.
EIGHTEEN
CALIFORNIA
NOVEMBER 16, 2001
THE CONDOMINIUM SUBLEASED BY DONALD PALARDY belonged to a large block of units UpLink International had acquired to house its midlevel employees in one of the newer planned developments in Sunnydale—a suburban community with the conceit of a major city, about fifteen miles south of San Jose.
By the time he got into his car to drive down Wednesday morning, Ricci had started wondering if Megan and Scull could have been right about him making too much of Palardy’s absence. Maybe Palardy had put on a well-rehearsed sick voice when he’d phoned Hernandez to say he wouldn’t be at work the previous Monday. Maybe he’d met a hot number in a bar and spontaneously decided to take her on a cruise to nowhere. Maybe he would be in bed with his phone unplugged, munching on potato chips and watching game shows or reruns of sixties sitcoms on cable television. In hindsight, Ricci’s all-fall-down comment about Palardy and Gordian seemed a bit silly, even to him. And his finger-snapping had made it sound sillier. Of course, everyone had agreed that something wasn’t kosher about Palardy’s continued dereliction after three days, and felt it was at least worth checking out.
His thoughts had gone on in that mode until he finally located Palardy’s condo after several wrong turns leading onto streets named for different native flowers that all sounded alike to him, past rows of two-family stucco buildings that all looked alike.
Then Ricci stopped questioning himself and started noticing things. It was a mental shift to a scrupulous objectivity that grounded every good cop the moment he arrived at the scene of an investigation. And Ricci doubted even the Boston Police Department officials who’d once thrown him into the political winds would have disputed that he’d been among their best.
As he rolled his Jetta into the driveway, his first observation was that Palardy’s van was in his carport. His second was that Palardy hadn’t brought in his newspapers for a few days—there were three lying on his walk in their plastic delivery bags. That could mean he was home and too sick to bother picking them up or that he’d gone off somewhere without his vehicle, although he might own more than a single set of wheels.
He strode to the door, rang the bell, and waited. No one answered. He fingered the buzzer again, keeping it depressed a little longer. Still nobody. Then he knocked without getting a response. After a few minutes, he leaned over to peek through the glass panels on either side of the door, but they were covered with louvered screens. The shade was likewise fully drawn over the front window.
Ricci buzzed again, let another minute pass. He heard a sound from inside, listened, realized it was the racket of a cuckoo clock. Palardy didn’t come to the door.
Ricci tried the doorknob. Locked. He bent to examine it out of old habit. A typical key-in cylinder lock. He could retract the bolt with a credit card in ten seconds flat. In fact, the door had been opened that way before, judging by the scratches on the rim and doorframe. That prompted another observation. The scratches looked as if they might be fresh.
He considered this a moment. The marks might not have the slightest significance. Ricci would have been hard pressed to count how often he had accidentally gotten locked out of his own home and used a charge card to work his way inside. It was easy once you got the knack. Anybody could do it. Every cop he’d known. And Palardy, being a trained countersnoop, it seemed reasonable to assume he wouldn’t need to hire a locksmith if he forgot his house keys somewhere. Not with a Minnie Mouse job like this. On the other hand, Palardy had unexplainedly dropped from sight, and Ricci’s probing mind couldn’t rule out the chance that someone else might have gained entry.
He thought about using the card trick to admit himself right now but then dismissed the notion. That very sort of tactic had once helped his detractors pin the rogue-detective label on him. And he was just getting comfortable at UpLink.
He stood there at the door, attempting to remember the street where he passed the management office. Fuchsia, was it? Or Manzanita? Unable to decide, he returned to his car and drove around a while, looking for the place.
A quarter hour and multiple wrong turns later, he found it on Lupine. The building manager was a man named Perez whose reservations about admitting a stranger to Palardy’s apartment unit began to dissipate the instant Ricci flashed his UpLink Security ID card. And no wonder, since the company owned half the complex.
“We’re pretty concerned,” Ricci said. He kept his card displayed. “Nobody’s heard from him in days.”
Perez seemed fascinated with the Sword insignia.
“I do this, got to stick around while you’re inside,” he said with a heavy Mexican accent.
“Okay by me.”
Perez nodded. “Lemme grab the key ring, I meet you over there.”
Ricci offered to give him a lift instead, dreading another wrong turn. With Perez beside him to furnish directions, it took under five minutes to get back to the condo.
In the walkway Perez fumbled with his keys for a second, found the right one, and pushed open the door.
They found the living room unoccupied. Utterly still except for the ticking of the cuckoo clock.
“Palardy?” Ricci stood in the entry. “You here?”
Silence. Stillness.
Ricci stepped past the building manager to another door, slightly ajar. He glanced over his shoulder. “This the bedroom?”
Perez nodded.
Ricci rapped the wood. Again no answer. He grabbed the doorknob and entered.
In the doorway behind him, Perez inhaled sharply at the sight of the body.
Ricci’s memory of the photo he’d pulled from the security files confirmed it was Palardy. He was lying in bed on his back, his eyes wide open. A blanket covered him to the chest. His face was gray, with dark purple blemishes on the cheeks and forehead. His mouth was twisted into what appeared to b
e a grimace of pain. The hand sticking out from under the blanket was hooked into a claw, the visible portion of his bare arm also lesioned.
“You should stay back,” Ricci said to the building manager.
He didn’t need encouragement.
“Sí, ” he said shakily. “I got to call the cops—”
“Have a cellular on you?”
Perez nodded.
“Good.” Ricci inclined his head toward the telephone on the bedside stand. “I don’t think you want that one anywhere near your mouth.”
Perez nodded again and crossed himself, staring inside from the entrance.
Ricci produced a business card and pen from inside his sport jacket, wrote hastily on the back of the card, and handed it to him. “Do me a favor; contact the guy whose name and number I jotted down. That’s Pete Nimec, at UpLink. Let him know what we found here. If you don’t mind, I think it might be better if he’s the one who gets in touch with the police.”
Perez nodded a third time and took the portable phone out of his pocket.
Ricci turned back into the room, reached into his own pocket for the scrub mask and latex gloves he’d brought with him, and put them on. Then he went over to the bed for a closer look at the dead man.
The skin at the back of his neck pebbled.
Palardy’s stomach had tossed up whatever was inside it. His gaping, cyanotic lips were crusted with vomit. His face, too. It had overflowed onto his pillows, sheet, and blanket, leaving them splashed with yellowish stains.
Ricci examined the nightstand. Besides the phone, it held a small reading lamp and a half-filled glass of something that might have been apple juice or a soft drink. The glass was on a coaster between the bed and phone. Ricci frowned, thinking. Or rather, letting a thought that had already occurred deep in his mind rise to a conscious level. Had he felt an attack or seizure coming on, Palardy surely would have attempted to call for help. Very likely overturned the glass when he was groping for the phone. Dropped the receiver, if he’d managed to get his hand around it. But they were neatly in place. And the way Palardy’s blanket was pulled up to his chest, he almost could have been tucked in. Passed away without stirring from his sleep.
But his contorted features and hand signified that his death had been neither peaceful nor painless.
Ricci’s frown grew. So far, the picture wasn’t coming together for him.
He looked around the room. The two windows to the left of the bed were closed. On the right wall was what looked like a vintage baseball-dugout clock, the Brooklyn Dodgers logo on it. Quite a collector’s item. The rest of the sparse furnishings were contrastingly unremarkable. A television on the small dresser opposite the foot of the bed. A desk with one of those inexpensive fabric office chairs pushed underneath it. Next to the desk, a computer printer on a wheeled stand. All he could see on the desktop was a small stack of billing statements clipped to their payment envelopes, a few pens and pencils in a souvenir coffee cup, and a box of facial tissues. Its surface was otherwise bare.
Ricci stepped over to the desk and rolled back the chair, then crouched to look into the kneehole.
The two bidirectional data cables on the floor weren’t attached to anything at his end. One had a parallel port connector, the other a phone-style plug-in jack. Ricci’s eyes traced the first cable to the back of the printer. The other cable went to a LAN modem on the carpet about four feet away. The network modem’s power light was glowing green to indicate it was turned on. From there another cable ran along the edge of the carpet toward the bed and then behind the headboard to a small metal plate below the windowsill. Yet another led from the same plate to the television set.
Palardy had a high-speed cable Internet connection. Made sense. It was probably on the corporate tab.
Ricci rose and turned toward the entrance. Perez was already putting away his phone.
“I talk to your friend,” the building manager told him. “Says he gonna call police right away. Says you should stay and meet them.”
Ricci nodded.
“I want to look around some more, anyway,” he said through his mask. “You still feel like keeping an eye on me, that’s fine. But I figure you might rather wait outside.”
Perez glanced over at the corpse, then back at Ricci.
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe outside.”
Ricci nodded again.
“One question,” he said. “Do you know if Palardy owned a computer? Ever notice a machine on his desk when you were doing repairs, or anything like that?”
Perez shrugged.
“Can’t remember. I come inside here maybe two, three times before today, that’s it,” he said. “Why you ask?”
Ricci grunted and shook his head.
“Just curious,” he said.
Ashley Gordian was alone with her husband. Such a basic thing. So fundamental. A woman and the man she loved, the man with whom she’d shared a thousand intimacies, together. But she’d had to battle a small army of doctors, plow through their unanimous objections, to make it happen. She understood their reasons, of course. Their fiduciary responsibilities, their obligation to prevent the transference of his infection, their genuine concern for her welfare. And she’d agreed to abide by their restrictions when they finally relented and allowed her into the room into which Roger had been moved, a room in isolation from the rest of the hospital ... what she’d overheard one of them refer to as a “warm zone.” She had put on protective attire. Let herself be wrapped from head to toe. A cap, mask, and gloves. A smock over her outer clothes. Booties over her shoes. There could be no part of her that was left exposed. No direct contact with him for the fifteen minutes they’d reluctantly given her. Her flesh could not touch his flesh.
Married three decades, and their flesh could not touch.
She looked down at his unconscious form, a large, fit man rendered so fragile in so incredibly short a time, tubes running into his nose from a mechanical ventilator, the pressurized air flowing into his lungs to keep them open, to force oxygen into them, prevent them from drowning in this body’s own fluids as he lay there, unable to breathe for himself.
She looked down at him now, looked down at him and wanted more than anything to remove the gloves from her hands, tear them off and soothe his brow, and knew she couldn‘t, couldn’t peel away the layers of plastic and rubber and synthetic fabric separating them.
But their hearts ...
She inhaled through her mask and stepped closer to the bed.
Their hearts, she thought, would not be unjoined.
“Gord,” she said. “It’s me ... Ashley ...”
She heard the tremor in her voice and paused to control it. Come on, you can do better. Be strong. For him.
“I know I look like a wrapped piece of fish, but trust me, I dressed up for you,” she said. “I’m wearing that blouse you always compliment, the blue silk one, underneath this miserable smock.”
His eyes remained closed. He did not move. The ventilator pumped breath into him.
“Hannah’s flying in from Connecticut today. I think she’s tired of Julia being the daughter who gets all your attention. Brian, he’s going to stay home from work to take care of the kids while she’s here. You should have trusted me all those years ago when I said he’d make good husband material....”
She brushed her gloved fingertips lightly over his cheek, a sterile contact that was the closest she could come to feeling him.
The ventilator pumped.
“The doctors, they’re really hustling to make you well, and trying to be nice to me in their doctorly way,” she said. “This morning I was introduced to a specialist ... Eric Oh. He’s looking into your case, running tests, and thinks he might have an idea what’s wrong with you. He was asking me whether you might have come into contact with rodents lately, of all things. And you know, there I am, worried sick about you, listening to his questions, wanting to do anything I can to help, and all of a sudden I get this crazy urge to lay into him for
insinuating we don’t keep a clean house.”
Another pause.
“Well, I managed to calm myself without saying anything I’d live to regret, and decided it’s possible some field mice could have nested in our basement... or even been in Julia’s yard when you were working on the dog corral. So now they’re sending teams out to look around both our properties for droppings, I think they said.” She shrugged. “Mouse shit, honey, in my kitchen. Can you believe it? Maybe I should have cracked that doctor one, huh?”
He did not move.
Not a flicker under his eyelids.
She listened to the ventilator pump.
“Oh, some good news,” she said. Strong, strong. “Everybody’s starting to talk Super Bowl for the Packers. I’ve been hearing it all week on the news. They’re playing at home Sunday, I think it’s that team from Florida you always gripe about. The weather’s been so cold in Wisconsin, they already have snow on the ground, and I know you say that gives your boys the advantage over the competition, that they can take a little nip in the air....”
She felt a sob well suddenly into her throat and clenched her teeth against it. Pushing it back down inside her. Banishing it.
“Anyway, back at the ranch, Megan and Pete and the crew are doing some sleuthing of their own. Trying to see if they can find somebody who might have passed you the bug. You know how they are, wanting to make everything right. I swear, they’d go to war with the universe for you. And I know Pete would turn red in the face if he ever heard me say this... Vince, too, ... oh God, especially Vince ... but I think they love you almost as much as I do. Really love you, Gord.”
She became aware of movement behind her, turned to look over her shoulder.
A nurse. Signaling her from just inside the door.
Ashley nodded, held up a finger.
The nurse returned the nod and withdrew.
Ashley leaned forward over the bed.