by Tom Clancy
“We’re doing our best, Mr. Gordian,” Cody said.
His voice dropped into that hermetic tunnel of silence again.
Gordian cradled the receiver and sat looking out his window in sober contemplation. Rainwater splashed against the glass, washing down its surface in long rippling streams. From his angle, he could see nothing of the street below, no pedestrians scurrying through puddles for someplace dry, no cars crawling along with their windshield wipers on. Mount Hamilton too seemed beyond the reach of his vision, rendered a gray, featureless blur by the heavy curtains of moisture blowing across the sky.
It was, he thought, as if the world was made of rain.
Only rain.
* * *
As Gordian had been assured, Cody’s next call was to Pete Nimec. He was not in his office, and the recorded greeting on his voice mail said he would be away overnight and checking his incoming messages regularly. His cell phone number was given for emergencies.
Cody quickly terminated the connection and dialed it.
* * *
“So you want me to be your, what, eyes and ears around the world,” Ricci said. He crouched and put a log into the woodstove opposite the comfortable leather sofa where his visitors were seated. “That about it, Pete?”
“Not quite, if I may interject a point or two,” Megan said, glancing at Nimec.
He gave her a shrug. They were in Ricci’s spacious living room, a mid-1980’s rear addition to a Colonial home built a century earlier, with natural wood plank walls and glass sliding doors that gave onto the water-front deck where they’d been talking until a few minutes ago.
“The person we select will be responsible for implementing and coordinating security functions at UpLink’s various international and domestic sites,” she said. “He or she will be second in authority only to Pete. But I want to stress that we’re primarily here so you and I can get acquainted, and to gauge your interest in us.”
“And yours in me,” Ricci said, facing her.
They exchanged looks.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a unique and demanding job. We naturally want to see if you’ve got what it takes to meet its challenges.”
Ricci considered that a second, then nodded.
“Fair enough,” he said. “You still assembling your candidate list?”
“The only other person whose qualifications we’re presently weighing is a current member of our Brazilian team named Roland Thibodeau. And to be frank, his interest in the position hasn’t yet been determined. I plan on speaking to Rollie sometime within the next couple of days.”
Ricci turned to Nimec. “How come you wouldn’t tell me anything about the reason for this visit over the phone?” he said.
“If I’d tried, I would have heard a click in the receiver before the words were finished leaving my mouth. Figured it would be best to come and talk. See how you felt about it face-to-face.”
Ricci silently took three sheets of newspaper from a shallow wine crate beside him, crumpled them, and pushed them underneath the grille of the stove. Then he struck a match and held it to the newspapers to start them burning. Flames crackled up and licked at the bottom of the log.
When the log had caught, he carefully shut the glasspaneled door of the stove and looked at Megan again.
“I figure you’ve heard the long sad story of how I lost my badge,” he said.
“Pete gave me his take on it,” she said. “I’d already gotten another from the papers.”
“You can see why I like using them as tinder then,” he said.
She smiled a little.
“The thought had occurred to me,” she said. “In light of today’s events, it also strikes me that you have a knack for making enemies in the wrong places.”
Ricci hesitated for the barest moment. “You read the version where they say I’m an uncontrollable maverick, or the one where I’m called an outright disgrace to the Boston police department?”
“Both, actually, but I tend to ignore the descriptive nouns and home in on the bare facts,” she said. “A kid falls to his death from an Ivy League campus rooftop. The group of frat boys who were up there with him claim it’s a terrible hazing accident. Too many beers, reckless behavior. As the city’s chief homicide detective, you head what everyone expects to be a perfunctory investigation, until the coroner’s report reveals there was no alcohol in the deceased’s bloodstream. You start digging around, find out the boys who were on that roof are heavily into dealing drugs and other unsavory after-school projects, then find out there’s been some bad blood between the group leader and the kid who was killed. The alpha gets charged with first-degree murder; his friends deal down in exchange for their cooperation as state’s witnesses. There’s a trial and he’s found guilty, which should mean a mandatory twenty-five-to-life sentence. But the jury’s verdict is overturned by the judge and he walks on a technicality. Something about an error in how certain evidence was processed by the medical examiner’s office.” She paused. “How am I doing so far?”
Ricci’s eyes held to her firmly.
“You don’t mind, I’ll wait for the next part before rating you,” he said.
Megan nodded. The log in the woodstove popped and spat sap, flames flaring brightly around it.
“Next you do a spate of media interviews repudiating the judge, arguing that the error shouldn’t have been enough to get the case into Appellate Court, let alone warrant nullification from the bench,” she said. “Even more seriously, you allege that the judge was bought and paid for by the killer’s father. They go on television with their counterclaims, say you have some kind of personal ax to grind. A number of details from your departmental records are leaked to the press, including information that you’d received counseling for problem drinking and depression while on the force. There are stories that you have a bad attitude. When it’s all over, the kid is still free and you’ve turned in your badge. The general impression is that you were given the choice of either resigning or being discharged without pension.”
She sat quietly again, watching him.
“That’s not bad, far as it goes,” Ricci said. “But there’s also what you left out.”
“I didn’t want to sit here giving a recitation,” she said. “It might be better to hear the rest from you. If you care to tell it.”
Ricci nodded. “Sure,” he said. “In the interest of good public relations.”
She waited without comment.
“The murdering little prince’s father was a Beacon Hill millionaire,” he said. “I learned during the trial that the judge belonged to the same A-list country club as Dad, which in my opinion ought to have been enough to have him removed from the case. Prosecution could’ve taken it up in district court, but didn’t, and since it’s their call I couldn’t let myself worry about it. After the trial’s over, though, I hear from a couple of staffers at the club that there were three separate meetings between Dad, the judge, and the oak wainscoting while the jury was in deliberation. One of them’s the manager, a solid guy who’s been working there forty years and has no reason to be spinning tall tales. Came forward out of feeling guilty, like the other two.” He shrugged. “They denied it later on, when I went public.”
“Somebody cured their guilt,” Megan said. “Money and power being the prescribed remedy. If I’m to believe your version.”
Dead silence. Ricci looked hard at her, the fire tossing shadows across his angular features.
“What is it exactly that bothers you about me?” he said at last.
His blue eyes level and probing.
She opened her mouth as if to reply, closed it, and merely stared back at him without saying anything.
“I believe it,” Nimec said, breaking into the silence. “His account, that is.”
Ricci turned to Nimec, leaving Megan surprised by her own relief at being out from under his steady gaze.
“I don’t need an advocate,” Ricci said.
“Your credibility shou
ldn’t be at issue here.”
Ricci’s features beamed with sudden intensity. “I told you I don’t need to be defended. Not by you or anybody else.”
Megan raised her hand in a curtailing gesture.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m not trying to be antagonistic, and apologize if that’s how I came across. It’s been a wearing day.”
Ricci looked at her in silence, those penetrating eyes back on her face.
“I think we should take a step back,” she said. “Concentrate on your feelings about the job with UpLink.”
Ricci looked at her a while longer. At last he exhaled audibly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “To be straight, I’m not sure it’s something I’d want any part of, or even that I’ve got the background for. This is big stuff. Seems to me you ought to be looking at heavy artillery, not a Police Special.”
Nimec leaned forward, his hands clasped on his lap.
“Except that the background you’re so quick to dismiss includes four years with SEAL Team Six, an elite within an elite created for antiterrorist operations,” he said. “And that’s just for openers.”
“Pete—”
Nimec cut him short. “After leaving the military in ’94 you joined the Boston police, earned your first-class detective shield in record time. Worked deep cover with the Organized Crime Task Force, an assignment for which you were particularly well-suited because of your experiences with ST 6, where one of your special areas of expertise was infiltration techniques. Upon conclusion of a major racketeering investigation you requested a transfer to the Homicide Division and stuck with it until the bad affair we’ve been talking about.”
Ricci knelt there by the stove, looking across the room at him.
“Running down my stats doesn’t change how I feel,” he said. “There are ten years between me and the service. That’s a long time.”
Nimec shook his head.
“I don’t get you, Tom,” he said. “Nobody’s twisting arms, but this isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It deserves fair consideration. By all of us. We should at least agree to—”
He abruptly broke off. Set to its vibration mode, the palm phone in his shirt pocket had silently indicated he was receiving a call.
“One second,” he said, holding up his pointer finger.
He took out the phone, flipped open the mouthpiece, and answered.
His features showed surprise, then sharp attention, then a mixture of both.
It was Cody from Mato Grasso.
Speaking in the same tone of controlled urgency he had used with Roger Gordian, Cody ran down the situation in Brazil for the second time in less than ten minutes, his voice routed via that nation’s conventional landlines to an UpLink satellite gateway in northern Argentina, transmitted to a low-earth-orbit communications satellite, electronically amplified, retransmitted to a tracking antenna operated by a local cellular service in coastal Maine, and sent on to Nimec’s handset all virtually instantaneously.
Nimec asked something in a hushed voice, listened, whispered into the phone again, and ended the call.
“Pete, what is it?” Megan said, reading the deep concern on his face.
He kept the phone open in his hand.
“Trouble,” he said. “A level-one in Brazil.”
She looked at him knowingly. His use of the code meant a crisis of the gravest nature had occurred, and that he did not want to go into details about it in Ricci’s presence.
“Roger been informed?” she asked.
He nodded.
“We’d better check in with him,” he said. “Got a feeling he’s going to want us back in San Jose right away.” The doctors knew they had their job cut out the moment he was brought into the emergency room.
It would have been clear even to an untrained observer that he was in terrible shape; clear from his near-comatose state; clear from all the blood that had soaked from the gaping hole in his belly through his clothing, the thin blankets covering him, and the uniforms of the technicians who had delivered him on the stretcher; clear from the blue cast of his skin and the weak, irregular rhythm of his breath.
To the expert eye, these physiological signs pointed toward specific life-threatening complications that would have to be assessed and treated without losing an instant. The severe hemorrhaging alone would have led them to evaluate him for shock, but his lividity left scant doubt of its onset, and the blood pressure cuffs placed on his arm as his stretcher was rolled in had given systolic and diastolic readings of zero over less than zero, indicating a near-cessation of his circulatory processes. His thready breathing also suggested that a tension pneumothorax — in laymen’s terms, an air pocket between the lungs and their surrounding tissues developing as a result of shock — was putting pressure on the lungs and causing them to fully or partially collapse.
The condition would lead to respiratory failure and certain death unless relieved by external means.
Managing a medical crisis requires a constantly unfolding and frequently accelerating series of prioritizations. In this case the priority was to stabilize his vital functions even before the injuries to his internal organs could be determined by Xrays and exploratory abdominal surgery. Only then would it be known with certainty how many times he’d been shot, or what path the bullet, bullets, or bullet fragments had taken.
With the clock ticking, the surgeon in charge at once began giving directions to his assistants in a rapid and assertive manner.
“I want MASTs…”
This being an acronym for medical shock trousers, which could be slipped onto the patient and inflated with air to force blood up from his lower extremities to his heart and brain.
“… seven units of packed RBCs…”
Shorthand for red blood cells, the hemoglobin-rich component of blood that provides life-giving oxygen to body tissues. In a typical situation requiring transfusion, the patients’s serum is cross-matched for compatibility with a sample of the blood product to be administered, but because he was an employee of UpLink, this man’s type was already on file on the doctors’ computer database, eliminating that step and conserving precious minutes.
“… a big line…”
A wide intravenous catheter used to get the RBCs into his system by quick, massive transfusion.
“… and a needle aspirator in him stat!”
The needle aspirator being a large syringe used to drain the air out of the pneumothorax, inflate the lungs, and restore normal breathing; stat, medical jargon for I need it done five seconds ago, a word derived and abbreviated from the original Latin statim, meaning immediately.
While the image of medical professionals working in conditions of ordered, clockwork sterility is a common one, nothing will dispel it faster than a glimpse inside a trauma room, where the battle to save lives is a close, tense, chaotic, messy, sweaty affair. Jabbing a 14-gauge big-bore needle into the chest of a powerfully built two-hundred-pound man, clenching the attached syringe in your fist and unsuccessfully attempting to insert it between hard slabs of pectoral muscle once, twice, and again before finally making a clean entry, then drawing out the plunger and getting a rush of warm, moist air in your face as the pocket that had formed around the lungs decompressed, was nobody’s idea of a picnic — as the young doctor who had been hastily summoned on duty tonight, and who was now toiling away over Rollie Thibodeau here in the ISS facility’s critical-care unit, trying to prevent him from dying before he made it onto an operating table, would have attested if he’d had the time. But he was too busy following the instructions called out by the chief physician, himself standing over the patient, working to get the big line and saline IVs connected to him in a hurry.
With the syringe in place and the air suctioned from the pneumothorax, it was essential to prevent its recurrence and keep the patient breathing. This meant going ahead with a full closed-tube thorascostomy.
The first step was to create an airtight seal around the tube. Barely registering
the frantic activity around him, the young doctor lifted a scalpel from an instrument tray and sliced into the flesh between the ribs, making a horizontal incision. Then he took a Kelly clamp off the tray and pushed it into the incision, holding it by the shaft, expanding it to spread the soft tissue and create a tunnel for his finger. Blood splashed up around the clamp as he removed it from the opening and pressed his gloved finger between the lips of the cut, going in as deep as his knuckle, carefully feeling for the lung and diaphragm. After assuring himself that he had penetrated through to the intrapleural area — the space between the lungs and ribs where the air pocket had formed — he asked a scrub nurse for the chest tube and carefully guided it into the opening.
He paused, studied the patient, and exhaled a sigh of relief. The patient’s breathing was stronger and more regular, his skin color vastly improved. A water collection system at the opposite end of the chest tube would keep the air draining from the patient’s chest while insuring that no air was drawn back into it. To complete the procedure, the young doctor would suture the skin around the tube to preserve the seal.
A very long night still lay ahead, but Thibodeau would have something like a fighting chance as the doctors hustled him into the OR, opened him up, and got a look at the extent of the damage that had been done inside him.
SIX
CHAPARE REGION WESTERN BOLIVIA APRIL 18, 2001
A look of quiet gratification on his face, Harlan DeVane watched the line of three flatbed trucks roll along the hardpack at the eastern border of his ranch as they approached the airstrip and the waiting Beech Bonanza in a cloud of dust. Now, before midday, the sun was a firebrand hanging above the battered old camiones and the wide, flat pasture closer by, where he could see his cattle, prime heifers imported from Argentina, grazing indolently in the heat. There was no wind, and the ash and smoke from the forest fires seemed an inert smear above the horizon. Once the afternoon breezes stirred, however, it would rise and spread into a blanketing gray haze, dimming the sun so that one could look directly up into it with the unprotected eye. It was a price of development that DeVane found regrettable, but he was a man who dealt with realities as they presented themselves. The loggers bulldozed new roads, and the opportunistic peasant farmers and ranchers who came here to settle followed along those roads, and because the soil was quickly depleted in the Amazon basin — good for no more than three years’ growing of crops — they would clear previously untouched tracts of forest as their fields dried up and grew fallow. The cycle was implacable yet unavoidable. Nothing in life came free of charge, and most often you paid as you went.