by Tom Clancy
“So why the long face?” Scull said. “Gunville couldn’t have steered us toward better eats. Doesn’t have a bad set of pipes, either. Though, you want me to be truthful, I’d still prefer he wasn’t singing in French so I could understand the words.”
Nimec didn’t answer.
Scull shrugged, dunked his spoon into his bowl, slurped. Nimec looked at him across the table, trying to decide whether his effusive praise of the food and song offered at Scintillements was authentic, a vaudeville routine intended to needle him, or perhaps a typically obnoxious Scullian mixture of the two. Regardless, Scull had succeeded in wearing his patience down to the thinnest of tatters. Or contributed to it, at least.
He turned toward the middle of the room, which neither sparkled, glittered, nor squirmed with crayon-colored lasers but instead fit the travel brochure description to its very letter. A sedate, softly lit, classic dinner club atmosphere. Around the stage were about thirty tables filled with well-dressed men and women, an appreciable percentage of whom were expatriates from the United States and elsewhere. On stage, Pierre Gunville, crew master of the Africana, sat on a stool beside the baby grand, vocalizing a sentimental ballad he’d introduced as being about love gained, betrayed, and forsaken—speaking French and English for the benefit of his multinational audience. Gunville was clad in a black tux, wing-collared white shirt, and black cravat that had been gradually undone over the course of his performance to reveal a thick, braided gold chain around his neck. It was the most ostentatious thing about the place.
Nimec ate his food, listened, and waited. When he and Scull had arrived at their reserved table earlier, Gunville had come over from the stage—where he was doing a sound check or something—proclaimed his great delight at making their acquaintance, and guided them through the menu, recommending his favorite house specialties. He had then explained that singing at the club was both his joy and sideline, a bit of diversionary moonlighting to compensate for the ennui and accumulated pressures of his hard, extended stints at sea. It was his wish, he’d said, that they enjoy the first of his two half-hour sets during dinner. He would promptly rejoin them for a drink at intermission and be pleased, indeed eager, to discuss whatever matters were on their minds relating to his primary vocation.
By that, Nimec assumed he had meant his captaining of the Africana.
Now Gunville’s sad serenade seemed to be concluding. Or crescendoing. Or whatever the hell love’s-loss songs did when they finally wrapped up. The pianist, whom Gunville had introduced only as “Maestro,” struck a resonating minor chord on the keyboard, added a blue trickle of melody. Then Gunville dramatically rose off his stool, lifted the microphone close to his mouth with his right hand, clenched his left hand into a trembling impassioned fist at his side, and ended his number with a sustained, sonorous note and a dashing full bow. Nimec noticed his lingering eye contact with a woman seated alone at a little table for two near the stage, her hands raised higher than the rest as patters of laid-back but appreciative applause spread throughout the room. She was blond, shapely and had on a sleeveless dress with a plunging back line.
Slipping the mike onto its stand now, Gunville thanked the crowd for their kind and wonderful reception, “Merci, merci beaucoup mes amis!” Then he gave the blond another glance, momentarily touched a hand to his heart, and exchanged intimate smiles with her before stepping off the stage.
An ardent fan, Nimec thought.
He watched the balladeering skipper approach his table and take a chair.
“Gentlemen,” Gunville said, still slightly breathless from capping off his set. “I do hope your reviews will be lenient.”
Scull looked up from his soup.
“You can lay it on me anytime, mister,” he said.
Nimec wondered if murdering a colleague in public would disqualify him from his position at UpLink.
“It was nice listening,” he said, and paused. “As long as we’ve got you out of the spotlight, though, I wonder if we could get right to some things that apply to our immediate business.”
“Of course,” Gunville said. “And these would involve the cable inspection you plan to launch from the Africana when it returns from dry dock next week?”
“Some,” Nimec said. “If you don’t mind, I also want to ask you about the accident back in May. I’m sure it isn’t a subject you much like talking about—”
Gunville raised a hand.
“A difficult affair anyone would choose to leave in the past, but I can certainly understand your concerns,” he said. “Permit me a moment to order a drink, and I’ll try to answer as many questions as possible.”
Nimec gave a nod. Gunville motioned over a waiter, asked his two visitors whether they might care for anything. Nimec declined. Scull ordered a Courvasier. Gunville got himself a scotch on the rocks.
“What occurred was no less unexpected than tragic,” Gunville said after the drinks were served. “Cédric Dupain was the lead diver and one of our best. I believe he had more than two decades of experience between his military and civilian careers, and I’d worked with him in the waters of three continents. He was the first aboard my ship to be trained at piloting single-operator deepwater submersibles—”
“They’re what’s known as hardsuits in the trade, right?”
Gunville nodded.
“Remote vehicles are more often used these days. Machines do not share our susceptibility to the hazards of the deep, and there can be no comparison between losing a piece of hardware and losing a human life should some misfortune occur. But our perception, judgment, and manual dexterity remain irreplaceable qualities that robotic craft cannot share. And the hardsuit’s safety record is impressive in calm conditions. I’ve heard of only a single critical incident before the tragedy that took Cédric and his partner, Marius Bouchard.”
“Was Bouchard as good a diver?”
“He lacked the seasoning, but was a trustworthy professional. We send no one down to work at seven hundred meters without comprehensive training and stringent certification.”
“The day those men were lost,” Nimec said. “What went wrong?”
Gunville drank some scotch, lowered his glass to the table.
“A freak calamity,” he said. “They were troubleshooting for the source of a partial system failure and discovered a fault in the cable, a segment that runs along the bottom of an underwater ridge primarily composed of mud and sediment. We believe the damage had been done by sharks. Soon after they tracked it down, there was the apparent submarine equivalent of an earth slide.”
“Anything like that ever happen before? I mean, without your divers getting hurt?”
Gunville shook his head.
“It is what made the incident so shocking. Had it been a massive collapse, I might have perhaps reconciled myself to their deaths . . . gotten my mind around it as you Americans say . . . more easily. When you know someone is in a building that has collapsed, you immediately prepare for the worst. But imagine learning a person has been killed after being struck by a few crumbled bricks or something that has fallen from a construction scaffold. In this case two people. The slide was confined almost to the precise area where Cédric and Marius were working.”
“I wonder what touched it off,” Scull said. He raised his eyes from his soup bowl. “Reports I’ve seen all say the fan’s tectonics are real stable.”
Gunville looked at him.
“That is correct,” he said. “Our best guess is that it was progressive erosion. There are natural interactions that can change the features of the undersea landscape even in salutary conditions. Tidal flows, gravitational effects, storms, scavenging or colonizing creatures. This creates nonconformities. Areas of deterioration that may go undetected, particularly if they are small. Over a long period of time an overhanging portion of the shelf was undermined, fractured, and simply gave.”
Scull grunted. He ran his spoon around the inside of his bowl to clean off the last of the tiébou dienn and put it in h
is mouth.
“Did you have any seismographs taken afterward?” Nimec said. “Would’ve helped rule out any chance there was a minor quake.”
Gunville shook his head.
“Planétaire Systems saw no reason for it,” he said. “Frankly neither did I. The event was localized. Its causes were apparent from subsequent inspection by divers and ROVs. And we were confident of the seismological data already compiled.” He reached for his drink. “You must also understand my own immediate priority was recovering the bodies of my crewmen.”
“Sure,” Nimec said. “We’re not trying to second guess anybody.”
“Still makes sense to do a comparative geological work up,” Scull said. “With all the offshore rigs popping up in the Ogooué, you want to be sure the drilling hasn’t moved things around, loosened them like people sticking their toes into sand castles.”
Gunville looked at him.
“I agree with your suggestion. If Planétaire hadn’t pulled out of the region, it is likely a new survey would have been conducted by my employers at Nautel. Unfortunately, without their finances . . .”
“UpLink will get one ordered,” Nimec said.
“Excellent.” Gunville sat quietly a moment, then glanced over at the stage. “I hope you will forgive me, but I must prepare for my next set.” He offered the men a courteous smile. “I’m certain we’ll be talking again over the next several days.”
Nimec nodded.
“You bet,” he said. “We’re very grateful for your time.”
Handshakes around the table, and then Gunville was off across the room.
Nimec saw him move toward the blond at the foot of the stage, dawdle there to speak to her.
“Hot stuff,” Scull said, following his gaze. “If I could sing like him, I’d be picking up broads left and right, too.”
“Don’t remember you having trouble on that score when you were married.”
“Which time?”
“I could probably take my pick.”
Scull shrugged.
“That was all before I lost my boyish good looks,” he said.
They were silent a bit.
“Okay,” Nimec said, and pointed his chin in the direction Gunville had gone. “Give me your impressions.”
Scull pointed to Gunville’s half-full scotch glass. “Didn’t finish his drink.”
“I noticed.”
“Sort of left me feeling he gave us the bum’s rush.”
“Yeah.”
“Meanwhile, he’s over there talking to the blond, plenty of time for her.”
“Yeah.”
Their eyes met.
“Can’t figure what it might be, but I think our fucking crooner Romeo’s got something to hide,” Scull said.
Nimec nodded.
“You and me both,” he said.
Port-Gentil. Headquarters Police Gabonaise. Forty-seven minutes past midnight. His shift long concluded, leaving him drained from overwork and nerves, the normally starch crispness of his officer’s uniform gone as limp as he felt, Commander Bertrand Kilana slouched before a computer screen behind his locked office door.
The air in the room was stale with sweat, ground out cigarette butts, and paper cups of cold, half-drunk coffee. One of the cups on his desk had begun leaking from its bottom, but Kilana had not noticed the spreading brown ring of wetness around it. Nor would he until tomorrow morning, when he returned to the office after too few hours’ sleep. By then the coffee would have partly soaked through a stack of his important case documents and the pages of a favorite investigative reference book, then dribbled down to the floor to leave a dark, permanent stain on his rug. Kilana would find the paper cup empty and curse himself for having neglected to dump it.
On Kilana’s monitor now, a live-streaming Internet surveillance video from the Rio de Gabao Hotel showed two of the Americans under observation exit an elevator that had risen to its luxury suite level and return to their separate rooms.
The commander identified them, tentatively, from his matched listing of UpLink personnel and their suite numbers. This information was stored in his computer’s encrypted database, but for the sake of convenience he’d kept a hardcopy on hand beside his keyboard. According to this printout, the men were Peter Nimec—suite 9—and Vincent Scull—suite 12.
He did not know, or wish to know, where they had been tonight—only that they had left shortly before ten, and stayed out for some three odd hours. He did not know their positions with UpLink, though that information could be easily obtained from departmental sources. He did not even know with absolute certainty why he had been instructed to maintain a constant watch over them.
Kilana kept his eyes on his role in the plot and let its other players worry about theirs. It was what he’d been told to do. It was also what was very much safest for him.
Kilana palmed his mouse, moved the cursor to the toolbar of his Internet Service Provider’s browser and clicked FILE ➞ ARCHIVE ➞ SAVE. When the dialogue box opened to request a file name, Kilana typed in the word hibou, followed by the number twelve.
Hibou is the French word for “owl.”
Now Kilana clicked again, and the hidden camera’s real-time images of the men were stored as a high-resolution, compressed audio/video DivX file on his database. He then took a rewritable DVD from the rack on his desk, slipped it into the computer’s burner drive, and returned to the toolbar.
Several mouse clicks later, he had merged the night’s dozen hibou surveillance files from the hallway outside the Rio de Gabao’s luxury suites into a single large file on the disk. Also on the disk were separate files from inside the suites themselves, designated faucon—“falcon” in French. These included an exceedingly interesting video of Tara Cullen—suite 5—as she showered and prepared for bed, which Kilana had given a number of successive replays, watching it for his personal enjoyment while a freshly lighted cigarette burned down to a charred, unsmoked stub in his ashtray.
With the files copied, Kilana removed the disk from the drive tray, put it into a jewel case, and turned off his computer. Then he rose, made a perfunctory attempt at smoothing down his rumpled, sagging uniform, abandoned all hope of it, and left the office, snapping out the lights as he went through the door.
In the parking lot, a courier waited in the shadows near Kilana’s automobile. The police commander knew this man’s face but not his identity. More willing ignorance; it was well within Kilana’s power to learn everything about him, from his grandmother’s maiden name to his favorite pissing hole.
Passing the jewel case to the courier without a word, Commander Kilana watched him leave the parking area on foot and then disappear into the night.
After a few moments, he got into his car and drove home, ousting from his mind an intrusive guess about the DVD’s eventual destination.
Yes, the less he knew the better.
Except, perhaps, when it came to the beautiful occupant of luxury suite 5 at the Rio de Gabao Hotel.
SIX
CALIFORNIA / GABON, AFRICA
IT WAS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCISCAN PADRES at the San Carlos Barromeo Mission, outside what would become the city of Carmel, that gave the vast, cragged stretch of the central California coastline its original name: El País Grande del Sur, or the Big Country to the South. As U.S. western expansion brought the wagon wheels of American settlers rolling into this territory, its Hispanic friars, their numbers and influence already on the wane, must have been chagrined to hear the place name anglicized, abbreviated, and vulgarized to Big Sur. But then, it may be surmised that waves of gold-rushing Forty-Niners, and the subsequent annexation of California by the Colossus of the North, would have soon made any consternation over such a thing seem trifling to the manifestly destined extreme.
The rental cabin Kuhl’s sleeper agents had acquired for him in Big Sur perched on the edge of a precipitous gorge three thousand feet above sea level, its western windows offering a wide view of the Pacific Ocean beyond the canyon, it
s isolation guarded by a thirty-foot-tall iron entry gate a full mile down the ridge’s eastward slope. Built in 1940 as a secret getaway by one of the state’s early millionaire lumber barons—and currently assigned by family heirs to the management of a real-estate company specializing in wilderness properties—the furnished cabin was a large two-story structure of stone and Douglas fir logs with open interior spaces, a central spiral staircase, French doors, and upper and lower balconies that extended past the sheer western cliff to overhang the long, empty plunge of the canyon. Access from the limestone gateposts was confined to an unmarked strip of winding dirt road circumscribed by thirty private acres of oak and redwood forest, vertical shale outcrops, rolling fields, and scattered swift-moving streams that ceaselessly chattered, splashed, and tumbled down deep, steep cuts in the wooded mountain slopes.
Behind a high west window on the second floor, Kuhl sat in a supple leather chair watching the commercial van’s arrival through his binoculars. It pushed uphill between the trees at an engine-grinding crawl, its wheels occasionally sinking into loose, crumbly ditches in the access road. The road’s narrowness would not have allowed even two small vehicles to pass in opposite directions, and it had recently become rutted and washed out after a spate of heavy late summer rainfall. The Realtor’s offer to fill and regrade its surface had been declined by Kuhl’s representatives. Their employer sought a period of complete escape from distraction, they emphasized. The noisy repair work would have impinged on the first week of his stay at the very minimum, and he was adamant about requiring uninterrupted solitude.
A ten-thousand-dollar deposit left on his lease had ensured that complete deference was given to his wishes.
Now the van came jolting and bumping over the final few yards of the path. Kuhl wondered whether its rough trip up had agitated the occupants he assumed were riding in its cargo section. This was no bit of idle musing. He must have absolute confidence in their reliability. If they showed any sign of unrest he would notice it, apologize for the driver’s trouble, and send him back on his way.