Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  But Jarvis Lenard was a practical, reasoning man as well as a spiritual one. Already today the helicopters had made three passes of the wetlands and bordering jungle—just an hour ago one of them had flown above the wall of trees outside his shelter, blowing a tempest of foliage through its entrance—and their attempts to close in on him would not end when a heavy curtain of darkness fell over the island and they could put their nightseeker equipment into play. The sky would be patrolled day and night, as would the ground. And the village would be watched, and searched, and watched some more, and searched again with sinister, devious eyes.

  Jarvis was unsure how long it would be before he might get to a safe place, or even where such a place might be. In the meantime he would need to hide for what could be days, perhaps weeks, and could not be falling short of food. It would hardly be enough for him to scrounge lichen and berries and the pulp of cattails. However much it troubled him, he would have to resign himself to killing if he meant to keep his strength.

  He moved on the fowl with two hurried strides and, as he raised his stick with both hands, saw it snap its head up from the water to look around at him. Its display of aggressive defiance was instantaneous—a shrill cry, a puffing out of feathers, a spreading and flapping of wings. Jarvis took another step forward and brought the stick down on it with a hard swing, trying for the long neck or head. But the whistler partially eluded him with a shrieking, fluttering hop and was instead struck on its right flank at the base of the wing. It fell onto its opposite side and slushed about in the marsh, the one broken wing dangling with shoots of bone sticking up through the skin at its base, the other thrashing like a paddle in the water, flinging up clumps of mud.

  Jarvis Lenard clubbed the body again, felt the crack of ribs transmitted to his fingers through his stick, saw bright blood splash from underneath its plumage. The crippled bird dragged on its side with its good wing still paddling and scooping mud, and Jarvis stood over it with his stick up over his head for the deathblow. But then his teeth clenched at its dying cries and he knew he could not take a chance that it would not finish the job. The creature had suffered enough.

  He lowered the stick across his chest and, gripping it at either end, bent to press it down against the base if the whistler’s skull. Then he put one knee heavily on the stick to hold it firm, snatched the bird’s legs into his fists, and pulled back with a hard jerk to break the neck apart from the spine as he had seen Grandma Tressie do to the live chickens she would occasionally bring home from market.

  The bird quivered as if with a surge of voltage and kept beating its one unbroken wing into the muck for almost a full thirty seconds before its nervous system shut down and the twitches stopped.

  Jarvis took his knee off the stick and rose, lifting the warm carcass, standing there a little while as some of the blood and water dripped off. He felt tired, desperate, and sorrowful.

  “I beg your forgiveness, little mother, and am deeply obliged for yer sacrifice,” he said. His arm and voice shook. “Doan’t know if yah would care why I done as I ’ave—an’ need yet do—but there are those who must be held accountable fer what’s goin’ on t’ruout this island, and my intention’s ta stick around and see justice done fer a fact.”

  Jarvis waited another moment, silent and thoughtful, drops of blood and water spilling from the limp bird in his hand. Then he put it in his makeshift sack and turned toward the mangrove thicket where he had spotted its nest.

  Without their mother to feed and protect them, the hatchlings would face either starvation or eventual discovery by predators.

  He could do no less in his guilt and gratitude than give them the mercy of a faster end.

  SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

  It was half past noon when they met as planned at the Valley Fair Mall on the border of San Jose and Santa Clara.

  Megan Breen had exchanged a Louis Vuitton Suhali handbag that she’d purchased the week before, her eye having discriminated a flaw in the stitching of an inner zipper compartment once she got it home. At the price she paid for the bag, this seemed a shameless crime.

  Julia Gordian had come for an advertised sale at the aromatherapy and herbal cosmetics boutique. She liked using the tea tree antioxidant facial scrub, lavender and ylang oil body lotion, and rosewater skin restoration gel with “bio-intrinsic essences,” whatever that meant. All she really knew was that the products made her feel fresh and clean out of the shower and didn’t contain too many artificial ingredients, or so their labels said.

  Now Megan sat keeping an eye on their shopping bags and other personal articles at the table they had pulled up to in the mall’s big, sunshiny food court after doing their errands. In front of her were two cranberry scones, a paper cup of dark Italian roast coffee, and a stack of napkins. The coffee was piping hot and tasted good and had been served with one of those cardboard sleeves that slid around the cup so you didn’t have to double it.

  She sipped and looked around for Julia, whom she’d last seen getting in line behind her for a garden salad. Then she located her in the crowd of shoppers, leading with a plastic tray as she pushed toward the table. On it was a flat mini-pizza box and some paper plates.

  “Sorry it took me a while.” Julia said, putting down the tray. “Hot stuff.”

  She sat opposite Megan. Her black hair cut short and deliberately mussed, she wore avocado-and-cream striped lowrise bellbottoms, a black midriff blouse, and white lace-up Keds sneakers. The blouse was loose and sleeveless with a flared lapel and some kind of complicated sash tied above her exposed navel. On the right lapel was a silver marcasite brooch shaped like a gecko. On her left shoulder was a small dark blue tattoo composed of a pair of stylized kanji ideographs: Ji, which means “oneself,” and Yuu, which roughly translates into the word “reason” or “meaning.”

  Together they form the traditional Japanese symbol for liberty and freedom.

  “Changed your mind about that salad, I see,” Megan said.

  Julia got comfortable at the table, flapped open her pizza box, and pointed inside. The pie was cut into four slices and topped with a huge pile of onions, peppers, mushrooms, and sausages.

  “Wrong,” she said. “I just decided it would look better on runny mozzarella, hot tomato sauce, and crust. A nice, thick carbohydrate-ridden crust.”

  Megan looked into the box.

  “No arugula?” she said, straight-faced.

  “Or sprouts.” Julia smiled. “Those little pieces of spiced ground pork stuffed into intestinal lining do more to zest it up.”

  Megan cocked an eyebrow with amusement. She had come from the office in a charcoal gray blazer with the Chanel logo on its penny-colored buttons, a matching skirt, an ice blue blouse, and gray mid-heel dress shoes.

  “I can’t believe you intend to consume that whole pie,” she said.

  Julia shrugged. She reached for a napkin, put it in her palm, took a wedge of pizza out of the box, put it on the napkin, and bent it slightly along the middle to form a sort of runoff channel for the excess grease. Careful not to lose any of the topping, she tipped the slice down to let the grease drip onto the foiled cardboard liner that had been underneath it. Then she pushed the pizza box toward Megan.

  “Mangiare bene,” she said. “Take one.”

  Megan shook her head.

  “I already bought these scones.”

  “Eat ’em afterward.” Julia pushed the box closer to her. “Go on, be a lioness.”

  Megan smiled.

  “No, thanks, really,” she said. “I have a conference at three o’clock and would rather not belch my way through it.”

  Julia gave another shrug. “Your loss,” she said, starting in on the pizza.

  Megan carefully broke a piece off her scone and looked over her business suit for stray crumbs. At the table to her right, a plump woman shopper and her tyke-ish, buddingly overweight daughter had reached the conclusion of their fast-food pit stop. As the little girl started gathering their crumpled wax
ed wrappers, empty paper cups, and used napkins into the tray between them, Mom admonished her to leave it, somebody who worked in the mall would clean up. Megan saw them stroll away out the corner of her eye, wondering if the kid also caught heat for scrubbing her teeth before bedtime.

  “Things moving along okay with your exhibition?” she said to Julia.

  “They’d better be.” Julia shrugged. “I’ve got a week to go before the opening, thirty pieces left to hang, and a thousand rapidly multiplying butterflies in my stomach.”

  Megan took a bite of the scone.

  “Still plan on sticking to watercolors?”

  “Mostly,” Julia said. “I’ve decided to take your advice and go with a limited mixed media presentation.”

  “So you included the batiks.”

  “That abstract series you like, yeah,” Julia said. “I brought a few to the gallery yesterday, and have the rest set to go for tonight, which should just leave me needing to drive over my oils.”

  “Those two great big canvases.”

  “Right.”

  “Think they’ll fit into the Celica?”

  Julia shook her head.

  “Not unless I plan on strapping them to the roof.” She paused and briefly lowered her glance. “It almost makes me wish I hadn’t gotten rid of the old SUV . . . but, hey, you’re followed, kidnapped, and almost murdered by professional assassins, you wonder if maybe you ought to appease the gods and trade in the vehicle you were driving that day.”

  Megan had seen Julia’s eyes flick downward as she spoke. It was the same, or nearly the same, whenever she mentioned what happened to her. She would leave it out there, the remembered terror thinly wound in defensive humor, making it difficult to know how to pick up on it, or whether that was even something she wanted.

  Julia would talk about it one of these days, Megan thought. Eventually she would need to talk about it in an open way. But the timing was hers to decide.

  Megan ate another piece of her scone. A couple of high-school-age boys with McDonald’s bags sat down at the table vacated by the round and purposefully untidy mother and daughter. They swept the rubbish and dirty tray that had been left behind to one side of the table, took a bunch of hamburgers from their bags, and plowed into them with enthusiasm.

  “I’d be glad to help with the paintings,” Megan said. “Far as your transportation problem, though, my car’s smaller than yours.”

  Julia made a swishing don’t-worry-about-it gesture.

  “Dad’s got me covered,” she said. “He’s coming over tomorrow in the Land Rover.”

  Megan scrunched her forehead. “Roger?” she said.

  “He would be my one-and-only father, right.” Julia gave her a puzzled look. “Why the funny face?”

  “I didn’t know I made one.”

  “That’s because you couldn’t see it from here,” Julia said, and tapped her side of the tabletop.

  Megan lifted her coffee to her mouth, sipped. “Guess I was wondering about your handsome curator friend,” she said.

  Julia frowned slightly.

  “Richard is an assistant curator,” she said. “One among several at the museum.”

  “Uh-oh. This already sounds ominous.”

  Julia sighed.

  “We’re over,” she said.

  “Over?”

  “And done,” Julia said. “I broke things off last weekend.”

  “Wasn’t that your first date with him?”

  “Second, if you feel the need to count,” Julia said, chewing her pizza. “Take it from a divorced woman, Meg. It’s better to recognize a dead-end street before turning into it, because those U-turns can be absolute murder.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You really want to hear about it?”

  “I would.”

  Julia looked at her, expelled another sigh.

  “Last Saturday night, Richard asks me out to dinner, my choice of restaurants,” she said. “I suggest Emilio’s, you know it?”

  “Sure,” Megan said. “That Italian place in Santa Clara with the courtyard in back. Very romantic.”

  “Which is the reason I picked it . . . that and the cuisine,” Julia said. “Easy question, okay? What’s Italian cooking supposed to be except this”—she gave the pizza in her hand a demonstrative little shake—“or some kind of pasta dish? Fettuccine, ravioli, lasagna. Maybe veal scallopini. A basket of homemade bread or rolls on the side, a cannoli for desert, nothing too creative. Am I reaching some unreasonable level of expectation yet?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Bam!” Julia said, doing a fair impression of Emeril Lagasse. “In Richard’s world, asking a date to choose a restaurant doesn’t necessarily mean she’s also entitled to choose her own dish. Most especially not if it contains repulsive, unfashionable carbs.”

  “Uh-oh.” Megan had to grin. “He’s one of those?”

  “Hold the bun,” Julia said with a nod. “You know how I am, Meg. The reigning Miss Individuality. If he says so right off, no sweat, I find another restaurant. I’ve got nothing against him believing a certain diet works, but don’t foist it on me with a lecture about unburned calories.”

  Megan was shaking her head. “Did he happen to notice you’re in pretty fantastic shape?” she said.

  “Not the way he might’ve if he hadn’t blown his chances that night, let me tell you.” Julia frowned. “I walked out on him, Meg. Left him right there at the table and hailed a cab home.”

  Megan’s eyes widened with surprise and amusement. “No.”

  “Yes,” Julia said. “He kept insisting I eat the lobster or grilled fish. And he talked over me—overruled me—when I tried making my preference of Ziti al pomodoro clear to the waiter.” A frown. “That was the last unbearable, embarrassing straw. I’ve only answered his phone calls once since, and that was to tell him to forget my number.”

  Megan threw her head back and laughed. “God,” she said. “And I thought my history with men was a road littered with wreckage.”

  Julia looked at her.

  “Goes to show there’s always a person waiting to outdo you,” she said, laughing a little, too.

  They ate quietly. Megan worked away at her scone as Julia got through eating her slice and then reached into the pizza box for another.

  “Enough about my life,” Julia said after a bit. “What’s with yours these days?”

  Megan shrugged, sipped.

  “Work,” she said.

  “No play?”

  “No time.” Megan sighed. “It’s taken everything out of me just trying to settle into the new position. And lately our projects with Sedco have developed some speed bumps. The Caribbean fiber deal sticks out . . . Do you know about it?”

  “Some,” Julia said. “I heard my father mention it once or twice when Dan Parker was still on their board. He’s like a member of our family. Almost a god-uncle to me.”

  Megan nodded her awareness. “There’s a guy that replaced him on the board of directors, A. R. Baxter—that’s Andrew Reed, great-great-grandson of the famous privateer—FYI. He’s constantly wanting to reevaluate and clarify points of contractual agreement. He’s a stubborn pain, and it makes for long, hard days of meeting with our own lawyers and executives.”

  “Is Baxter the reason for your conference this afternoon?”

  Megan shook her head.

  “That’s a different can of worms,” she said. “I felt we needed another huddle to work out a plan for making nice with the Pentagon.”

  Julia looked at her. “Because of what Tom Ricci did in New York,” she said.

  Megan nodded, sipped away at her coffee. Again, the subject of the abduction hung unaddressed between them. Ricci had assembled the Sword task force that had tracked Julia to the cabin in Big Sur. He had pressed the search and gotten her out himself and left the man who’d led the hostage-takers dead. But Ricci alone knew exactly how that man died. Ricci alone was in the room with him, behind a locked door, in the minutes before he
died. And what Megan wanted to say now, and didn’t, was that whatever occurred behind that door had seemed in some indeterminate way to spiral out into what took place those many months later in New York City.

  “Tom’s name is bound to come up, sure,” she said instead, trying with her even tone to reduce his importance as an issue, make it sound as if he wasn’t at the very center of things. “We’ll have to decide what to do about him when Pete gets back from the islands.”

  “Has anybody been in touch with him since he was suspended? Anybody from UpLink, that is.”

  Megan regarded Julia for a few seconds, struck by the too-light, almost singsong quality of her voice right then, thinking maybe more than one of them here wanted to downplay the matter.

  “Pete’s tried calling him,” she said. “Not with any success, though. At least these past few weeks.”

  “He doesn’t answer his phone?”

  “Doesn’t answer, doesn’t return messages, won’t give us a clue what’s going on with him.”

  Julia tilted her head curiously.

  “That seems kind of odd,” she said.

  “Come on.” Megan couldn’t hide her skepticism. “Tom Ricci being incommunicative?”

  Julia was looking at her.

  “I mean Pete not going to see him where he lives,” she said. “I’d always heard they were tight.”

  The expression on Megan’s face went from skeptical to just plain blank. She was unsure why that hadn’t entered into her thought processes. But it hadn’t. She didn’t know what to say, and found herself glad to see Julia reaching for slice number three, apparently satisfied to let the whole thing ride. Besides, a quick glance at her watch told her it was almost time to get going.

  She drank some more coffee, ate some more scone, examined herself for crumbs again, discovered a few tiny specks on her skirt, and was brushing them off when she noticed that one of the burger-munching teenagers at the nearby table had turned to watch her, his attention glued to her hand as it moved over the lap of her skirt.