by Tom Clancy
This, then, was their third unplanned stop in the past two hours, and it had seemed to throw Yousaf — never a talkative companion — into an especially sullen and overanxious state. His hands locked around the wheel, he had watched in brittle silence as Khalid pushed out his door, then sat very still with the motor running, and the wipers making their ceaseless rhythmical swipes across the windshield.
He went to the back of the jeep, used a few good, hard kicks to break up the clotted snow around the mudflaps of both rear tires, and scooped whatever didn’t crumble out of the well with his gloved hands. Then he returned to the vehicle’s front end. A glance through the windshield revealed that Yousaf was still staring at him rigidly from the driver’s seat, as if he were somehow to blame for the storm and its resultant delays.
Khalid crouched to brush off the snow-covered right headlamp. To get out of the fiendish weather and know their objective was accomplished… these alone were adequate reasons for his eagerness to arrive at the town of Halmat in the valley. But the thought of separating himself from Yousaf and his foul moods gave him added incentive to push on.
Finished with one lamp now, Khalid set himself toward the passenger side of the jeep to clean the second, but had barely gotten as far as the middle of the fender when he was startled by the loud rev of the engine.
He turned his head toward the windshield, thinking Yousaf must have accidentally footed the gas pedal while still shifted into PARK… and then was horrified to see the jeep come bounding forward, bearing down on him with a sudden snarl of acceleration. Yousaf’s tightened features were visible through the windshield, his eyes locked on Khalid with a terrible, narrow intensity.
Khalid was too shocked to have a chance of getting out of the heavy vehicle’s way, too shocked to do anything but scream raggedly into the wind as it struck his body — and then even screaming was beyond him. He flew backward off his feet, taking a half spin before he landed roughly in the snow, his left arm and leg twisted at a grotesque angle. Blood squirted into his mouth from somewhere deep inside him, spilled over his chin, steamed from his torn flesh in the subzero Himalayan cold.
Gagging and choking, Khalid flopped over onto his right side, felt a sharp stab of pain in the center of his chest, and knew at once that several of his ribs had been shattered. Then he realized through his pain that the jeep’s lights had continued to shine on him, pinning him in their beams. The right headlamp dim with its film of snow. The one he’d cleared off harsh and blindingly bright. He somehow managed to prop himself up on his elbow, tried dragging himself through the snow out of its direct glare.
But again Khalid was given no time to move even an inch. His eyes wide, his mouth yawping with shock, he saw Yousaf stop the vehicle, shift into reverse, come to another momentary stop, and then charge rapidly toward him again.
The jeep rolled over Khalid at full speed, crushing him into the ground, its wheels dragging his limp, mangled body along for almost two minutes before finally leaving it behind in a heap of churned and bloodied snow.
Yousaf did not bother to look back. His face set with determination, he plunged on alone through the storm-tossed darkness, bearing his precious cargo to those who awaited it across the furthermost borders of night and nation.
* * *
Roger Gordian studied the pile of rocks in front of his wheelbarrow, saw one he liked for the course he’d been laying on his stone wall, picked it up with a grunt of mild exertion, and then placed it atop the last two rocks he’d stacked. Nice, he thought. A beaut, in fact. Shifting it around for the best fit, Gordian pressed down on it with his hand, noticed it wasn’t quite balanced, readjusted it, pressed down again, felt it wobble some more, made another unsuccessful readjustment, scratched his chin, and knelt to investigate.
Ahh, he thought with a nod. Elementary.
From his crouched position Gordian could see a gap between his latest addition to the wall and its two underlying stones. He poked his finger into it, discovered it went in all the way to the middle knuckle. What he would need to do here was fill that hole.
He got to his feet, studied the rock pile for something the right size, didn’t see any likely candidates, and hunted around in the grass for a minute. Then a little chunk of quartz caught his eye from a nearby patch of grass and he went on over for a closer look.
Above him at the crest of the hill that sloped down in landscaped terraces from the verandah of their Palo Alto home, Ashley stood watering her hillside plants with a garden hose, sweeping it from side to side, leaving transitory rainbows in the air as sunlight passed through the fine mist around its nozzle. A year earlier they’d spent thousands for an underground sprinkler system after Ash had decided that using the hose was ridiculously obsolete. For a while she’d given the newly installed system unqualified raves, preached the gospel of liberation from the endless dragging and snagging of hoses, and talked repeatedly about donating the evil rubber serpent — and its various carriers, extensions, and attachments — to a Goodwill shop she supported in town.
Then she’d had a spontaneous reversal of faith. Or at least it had seemed spontaneous to Gordian. Maybe she’d contemplated it long and hard in private. All he knew for certain was that Ashley had stalked in from the garden one day, complained the sprinklers weren’t reaching anything close to all her “spots,” and gotten the old hose out of the shed where it had languished for months — unused but surprisingly undonated. Sprinkler systems, she’d declared to him, were at best secondary aids to dedicated keepers of the green, and, at their worst, excuses for the lazy and slothful to shirk their gardening responsibilities.
Gordian hadn’t personally noticed a significant difference between Ash’s pre-sprinkler and post-sprinkler hillside plants. They had always looked beautiful and well-tended to him. But then, he accepted that she had superior garden aesthetics. Just as it went without question in their household — well, mostly — that he was the better builder.
Gordian plucked the stone he’d spotted from its grassy nest and inspected it in his palm. It was about four inches wide and somewhat wedge-shaped… just what the wall-doctor ordered.
Now he brought his new find back to the wall, worked it partway into the gap with his fingertips, took a hammer from his tool belt, and carefully chinked the stone into place. Then he gave the large rock he’d been trying to stabilize another test.
It sat steadily on the two supporting rocks beneath it.
Okay, he thought. Very nifty.
Gordian stood admiring the wall for a bit. There was still a lot of work ahead of him before it was finished. Two weeks’ worth, maybe three. But he thought he’d gotten the hang of how to make the stones hold together, and always took satisfaction from figuring out how things worked. Simple things, complicated things, they were all enjoyable to him.
But tell me… are they comparable? an inner voice asked. Not equally, mind you. I’ve cut you some slack there and didn’t use that particular word. What I want is your overall feeling of how one stacks up against the other — excuse the pun.
Gordian frowned at the nagging voice in his head. It didn’t speak up too often, but when it did, it was with the leery, contentious tone of an attorney cross-examining a reluctant witness on the stand, always using the old courtroom tactic of never asking a question whose answer you didn’t already know. It would not, however, be necessary to put Gordian under solemn oath to gain an admission that his backyard stonewalling didn’t approach — never mind equal, counselor — the challenge of turning the failed electronics firm he’d bought at a bargain-basement price into a technological giant, or designing the GAPSFREE avionic suite that had revolutionized the U.S. military’s recon and target acquisition capabilities to earn him his wealth and reputation. Nor did it quite impart the satisfaction he’d gotten from taking great strides toward the creation of a truly global telecommunications web. But Gordian had given ten years of his life to service in the Air Force, better than double that many to UpLink. The next chunk of it b
elonged to the wife and family that had sacrificed so much to his dream of a world made freer by the open spread of information… and he meant to share it with them with the same passion he’d devoted to his professional and public occupations. While it seemed he’d taken sail on his sixtieth birthday only yesterday, the line of that rear horizon was further away in fact than in his mind. Why keep looking back through a telescope to measure himself against his own past achievements? Gordian didn’t know. Still, he sometimes had trouble steering away from making comparisons. And maybe, counselor, just maybe, the greatest challenge every man faced as he grew old was trying to recognize how pointless it was to compete with the younger man he’d been.
Gordian couldn’t have begun to guess why this train of thought abruptly made him remember that he owed Lenny Reisenberg a phone call, but something in it did, and he paused as he was about to lift another rock from the pile to dial Lenny’s office on his cellular.
“Boss!” Lenny said when the receptionist transferred the call. “I was hoping you’d buzz me. Wasn’t sure if I should give things a little while longer—”
“I figured, Len,” Gordian said. “And I apologize for not getting back to you sooner.”
“Busy soaking up the joys of retirement?”
“So to speak,” Gordian said. “I have to admit, though, there are moments when I feel out of my element. Like I’m playing hooky from school, I suppose.”
“ ‘Cutting class,’ Boss,” Lenny said. “Or ‘skipping school.’You say ‘playing hooky’ to my kids, they won’t have any idea what you mean.” He paused. “Hell, I don’t know where the term comes from.”
“I think the reference is to fishing,” Gordian said. “You’d hide a string and a hook in your book bag and then sneak on over to the lake to see what you could catch.”
Lenny ahhed.
“Wouldn’t have guessed,” he said. “The only lake we had in Brooklyn was this cesspool in Prospect Park. And the only thing I ever caught there was a foot fungus that lasted for a year.”
Gordian smiled.
“Lenny, I have some news for you,” he said. “I’ve gotten our security people to move on the Sullivan matter. They’re either already in high gear, or will be very soon.”
Lenny was silent a moment
“Boss, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” he said.
“Forget it, Lenny.”
“Really—”
Gordian glanced up the hillside at Ashley, who saw him looking and waved. He raised his hand over his head, waved back.
“Len, please, it isn’t that big a deal,” he said. “Not when I consider all the favors you’ve done for me over the years.”
“If you insist, Boss,” Lenny said. “I still don’t know what to say.”
“Then save your words for that woman who asked for our help, Mary Sullivan,” Gordian said. “Make sure she knows we’ll do our best to find out what’s happened to her husband.”
Lenny was silent another moment before he answered.
“I will, Boss,” he said. “And I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed it doesn’t turn out to be anything too bad.”
* * *
Detective First Class Ismael Ruiz, Tenth Precinct, had decided to postpone asking DeSanto the last little question on his mind right now until after he’d reviewed what the guy already told him, making sure he’d gotten everything down right.
Ruiz sat at his desk in the squad room, glancing over his notepad, tapping it with the sharp end of his pencil.
“Okay,” he said. “If I understand it, you’ve been Patrick Sullivan’s beard while he’s been conducting an extramarital relationship—”
“Hold on,” DeSanto said from the chair opposite the detective. “You didn’t hear me use that word.”
Ruiz looked at him as if to ask what word.
“Beard,” DeSanto said. “I never mentioned I was his beard.”
Ruiz frowned, thinking it was going to be one of those afternoons. A thin, dark-skinned thirty-five-year-old whose height was generously recorded at 5’ 7” on his driver’s license, he was often mistaken for someone in his early twenties when people met him for the first time, including the scumbag hoods he busted, the cranky New Yorkers he was sworn to protect from them, and even other cops of junior rank. While his wife insisted he ought to be happy about his youthful appearance, pointing out there were people who would pay anything to shave a decade of wear and tear off their looks — and did in droves every single day with skin peelings, botox injections, and plastic surgery — it wasn’t something he especially liked, since, his high rank aside, it sometimes stood as an obstacle to him getting his props on the job without having to make a muscle.
“Sorry,” Ruiz said now. Whatever DeSanto’s beef with his common slang, it wouldn’t be courteous or productive to offend him. “Beard, it’s a figure of speech. For somebody who lays cover for somebody else that’s having an affair—”
“A homosexual affair,” DeSanto said. “Which Pat and I absolutely aren’t. Homosexual, you understand.”
“I do, yes.”
“Because when you use the word you did… well I guess it comes from when gay men used to wear beards so people would think they were macho, though nowadays that doesn’t tell you anything.” He paused. “There’s a veep at the bank where I work — got a bush like an ape on his face — who just told me he’s marrying his boyfriend. Which, you know, doesn’t bother me. These times we live in, I think about what can happen to people, I say let them be happy any way they can, long as they don’t hurt anybody.”
Ruiz offered no comment. He’d actually believed the term beard had originated with lesbians who dated or married men to hide their true sexual preferences. But he didn’t want to get off on some bullshit tangent about his choice of words. Not when there were two fresh missing persons cases Anthony DeSanto had likely tied together with the information he’d volunteered here.
“To verify, the bank where you work… this is the Dunne S and L near Union Square?” he said, steering things back on course.
“Yes. A couple blocks from my apartment.”
“And you’re a loan officer there?”
“A commercial loan manager,” DeSanto said, and straightened his shoulders. He was a blunt-featured, seriously overweight man who was nonetheless very well-groomed, his thick brown hair worn in a neat layer cut, his navy-blue business suit tailored flatteringly to cover up the full extent of his bulk.
Ruiz waited a second before saying anything else. DeSanto’s body language told him he’d better get the professional handle right next time. Whatever the hell distinction there was between loan officer and manager, it seemed important to the guy, who was apparently a stickler for proper terminologies.
“Talking about Patrick Sullivan and Corinna Banks,” he said. “Your knowledge is that they’ve been carrying on an affair for some time…. That accurate?”
“Yeah,” DeSanto said. He shrugged. “It didn’t start out serious. Pat loves his wife, I can tell you. But he’s in sales, travels around to different cities, even different countries sometimes.”
“This is with Armbright Industries.”
DeSanto nodded.
“Selling fancy techware.”
DeSanto nodded again.
“The traveling bit can be hard… a man spends weeks away from home in strange places, it’s natural to get lonely,” he said. “Pat will be out of town somewhere, hit a bar, buy some woman a few drinks, share a good time with her, end of story.”
Ruiz remained silent, thinking he could be apart from his wife for a thousand days and nights — no, make that a thousand times ten—and never consider sharing that kind of good time with another woman.
“And that’s how he met Ms. Banks?” he asked after a moment, studying his notes and realizing he hadn’t yet gotten that information from DeSanto. “While he was on the road?”
“No.” DeSanto hesitated, smoothed his suit jacket. “The truth is somebody I was dating intr
oduced them.”
“A girlfriend.”
“My ex-girlfriend,” DeSanto said. “Joyce happened to know Corinna, worked with her at a cosmetic counter in Bloomie’s.”
“That would be Bloomingdale’s here in the city.”
“Right.”
“On East Fifty-ninth Street.”
“Right.”
“So Pat’s fooling around isn’t only restricted to his long and lonely business trips.”
DeSanto gave him a look.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “Patty loves his wife and family, does his best for them.”
Ruiz let that stand, instantly regretting his sarcasm. You were on the force long enough, you had to fight succumbing to a confrontational us-and-them mentality. This wasn’t a grilling, after all. DeSanto had come forward on his own.
“Your ex have a second name?” he said.
“Breyers.”
“That’s B-R-E-Y-E-R-S?”
“Like the ice cream, right.”
“Somewhere she can be contacted if necessary?”
“Don’t ask me where she is now, it was a bad split,” he said. “Far as I know she moved down south to Atlanta a couple years ago.”
Ruiz grunted, jotting the name in his pad.
“Back to Patrick and Corinna again,” he said. “You told me it didn’t start out serious between them.”
“Right.”
“That they were, in your opinion, having a casual fling.”
“At first, anyway,” DeSanto said. “Though Corinna got to be special to him.”