“Yeah,” he said. “Familiar.”
“It’s solid advice,” Nimec said. “I can’t think of a better way of saying you ought to give things a chance to work out.”
Ricci grunted and studied the water again.
“Assuming for a minute that I would,” he said. “If Thibodeau shoves, from now on, I’m shoving back harder. That bother you?”
Nimec shrugged.
“Whether or not it does, I’d be willing to carry it,” he said.
Ricci gave no comment, just leaned forward with his elbows on the rail.
“The bay’s pretty this late in the afternoon,” he said after a long while.
“Yeah,” Nimec said. “It’s how the sun hits the swells when it dips toward the horizon.”
“Just sort of glances off their tops, makes it look like they’re sprinkled with a few zillion gold flakes.”
“Yeah.”
Ricci looked over at him.
“I’ll stick around, Pete,” he said. “For now.”
Nimec nodded, and this time it was his turn to smile a little.
“That’s about all I can ask,” he said.
A distancing from consequence salves the betrayer’s guilt. Do not look toward crime and politics for examples; that facile sense of remove is bait for the waiting trap, and we’ve all heard the excuses in our ordinary lives. The woman next door that leaves the cat behind on moving day — van’s here, have to go, who’d have thought the dumb thing would wander off for so long after she let it out? The family man enjoying a peccadillo with his secretary after office hours — his wife’s happily provided for, bought her an expensive gold bracelet last week, and he’s sure his kids prefer their computer games to hanging around with dull old Pop.
Remove any act from a broader context, and one can become convinced it means nothing. You see how easily this happens? Just close the eyes to cause, look away from effect, and walk on down the road.
Alone in Roger Gordian’s office at UpLink in San Jose, Don Palardy told himself it was only a few hairs he was taking.
Only a few hairs, what was the terrible crime?
White cotton gloves on his hands, he stood behind Gordian’s open desk drawer and used a tweezer to pull a strand from the comb in one of its neat compartments. He carefully dropped it into his Zippit evidence collection bag and then plucked two more from the teeth of the comb, dropping them into the plastic bag as well.
As head of the sweep team that performed weekly electronic countersurveillance checks in the building’s executive offices and conference rooms, Palardy had no concerns about being discovered in an awkward or compromising position.
He knew that Gordian was at the yearly blue-water conference and would not be walking in on him today. He knew that he wasn’t being observed through hidden spy cameras first and foremost because it would have been he, Palardy, or one of his subordinates who performed their installation, had Gordian ever requested it— and he had not. Moreover, Palardy had carried into the room with him the broad-spectrum bug detector known in his section as the Big Sniffer — a twenty-thousand-dollar device that looked like a somewhat larger-than-standard briefcase when closed, and that was now opened and unfolded on the floor to reveal a microcomputer-controlled system of radio, audio, infrared, and acoustic correlation scanners, the output of which was displayed on LED bar graphs or optional hard-copy printouts. Among the Big Sniffer’s package of advanced tools was a Very Low Frequency receiver sensitive to the 15.75 kilohertz frequency emitted by the horizontal oscillators of video cameras. And the VLF detector was neither beeping nor flickering, which indicated none had been located.
Alone and trusted here in the office — safe from “surreptitious intercept,” as it was known in the trade — Pa — lardy slid the evidence bag between his thumb and forefinger to seal it, dropped the bag into a patch pocket of his coveralls, and pushed the kneehole drawer shut.
The deed done, he plugged the cable of his boom detector into its socket in the rear of the Big Sniffer and went about his routine sweep with due diligence. Taking care to avoid the antique Swiss bracket clock he so admired, moving the mop-shaped antenna across the walls of the office, Palardy probed for the harmonic signals of tape recorders, microphones, and other passive and active bugs. Had he found anything amiss, he would have been quick to disable it and report his findings to his higher-ups in Sword security.
Don Palardy considered himself a decent and caring man, though not without human frailty. Had he found an expensive piece of jewelry on the carpet here, a missing cuff link or tie clip studded with diamonds, he would have returned it to his employer, regardless of how much taking it with him would have helped with his debts.
All he had taken were a couple, three hairs.
Since Brazil, he’d gotten very good at rationalizing away his transgressions.
FOUR
The tunnel was about ten feet deep and ran for two miles toward the United States under the sage-brush desert midway between Tijuana and Mexicali. Its southern opening was accessible through a trapdoor in the rear of a barnyard storage shed. Its northern opening was a small cleft in the hillside at the bottom of an arroyo within eyeshot of the California border. The old tales said it had been dug by Jesuit priests wishing to secrete away a portion of their abundant wealth — al — leged to have been gathered through outlawed trade with pirates and Manila galleons — when the jealous Spanish crown ordered its confiscation in 1767. Over 230 years later, it remained a busy conduit for smuggling operations, although the clandestine traffic was now in narcotics and illegal immigrants bound for America. “The occasion makes the thief,” went the Mexican saying.
Tonight, some thirty yards from the tunnel’s northern entrance, two stripped-down, lightweight all-terrain vehicles and a dusty old Chevrolet pickup sat hidden from Border Patrol agents by a carefully arranged screen of manzanita and chamiso. The truck’s windshield had been blown out, and broken glass was sprayed all over the hood and interior. Both men inside were dead, slumped backward in their seats, the woven upholstery soaked with blood and chewed to ragged scraps by the fusillade of bullets that had passed through and around their flesh. Their pants were drawn down over their ankles, their severed genitals stuffed into their gaping mouths. Each of the lifeless ATV drivers had been shot, mutilated, and left sitting in an identical fashion.
Above the blind of shrubbery that surrounded the vehicles, a dozen men were positioned on sandstone ledges along the east and west walls of the gulch, the four-by-fours in which they had arrived from Tijuana parked at a distance. They carried Mendoza bullpup submachine guns with tritium dot sights and lamp attachments. On the outcropping nearest the tunnel mouth was a wiry, dark-skinned young man with a neat little chin beard and coal-colored hair swept straight back from his forehead. He stood flattened against the slope in a toss of shadows cast by the dim light of a quarter moon. Beside him on the rock shelf was a can-shaped metal object with a thin telescoping antenna on top. His weapon against the leg of his blue jeans, he studied the tunnel mouth from his elevated vantage, not suspecting that he, too, was being observed.
Higher up the arroyo’s western slope, Lathrop crouched behind a wide slab of rimrock, his mouth slightly open, his upper lip curled back, almost seeming to sniff the air as he watched the men below with intense fixation. It was an attitude queerly resembling the flehmen reaction in cats — the detection of airborne trace molecules with the Jacobson’s organ, a tiny, exceedingly acute sensory receptor in the roof of the mouth that, like the tailbone, remains vestigial in humans, and whose function is something between smell and taste, endowing the feline with what is often taken for a sixth sense.