Nimec looked confused.
“He doesn’t trust us?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then complicated how?”
“I’d rather not explain it right now.”
She saw his frown of confusion deepen.
“Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”
Nimec looked at her a moment.
Bob again, he thought.
Then he gave a little shrug and shifted direction, dropping his right mitt to take an uppercut. Megan swung and made only glancing contact.
“You pulled that one. Again.”
She brought her arm up smoothly, throwing her shoulder into the blow, and felt the satisfying impact of her fist thumping the leather dead on.
“Okay, that was perfect. Relax a minute,” he said, coming to a flat-footed halt. “Now listen, this is important.” He patted the middle of his rib cage with his mitt. “A guy comes at you, here’s where you hit him. Do it hard and clean, and it’ll collapse his diaphragm, doesn’t matter how big he is. And he won’t have expected it from a woman. People who don’t know how to fight will generally make the same mistakes. They either aim for the nose or chin, which aren’t easy to tag, or the gut, where there’s more muscle, fat, whatever sort of insulation, than anywhere else.” He lifted the other mitt to the side of his neck, just below the ear. “If you don’t have an opening for the upper body, and you think you have the reach, you’ll want to pop him right here. At the pressure point. Got it?”
“The chest or the neck,” Megan said, the words spaced between long gulps of breath. She brushed a trickle of sweat from her eye with her glove. “You’ve told me that at least a dozen times.”
“Reinforcement’s never hurt anyone I’ve trained.” He wiggled the mitt in front of his ribs. “Quick, let me have some—”
“Pete—”
“And we’ll be through for today.”
She let him have some.
Ten minutes later, they were outside the ropes, towels draped over their shoulders, their T-shirts splotched with perspiration and clinging to their bodies. Nimec went over to his supply locker, put away his target mitts, then helped Megan to unlace her gloves.
“There’s another item of business we need to discuss,” he said, hanging the gloves on a peg inside the locker.
“Concerning?
“Ricci’s brain flash about establishing RDTs,” he said. “I’ve been mulling it over and feel it ought to be done.”
Megan stood undoing her hand wraps, her open gym bag on a bench against the wall behind her.
“I agree,” she said. “Provisionally.”
“Your provisions being…?”
“It would have to be on an experimental basis and subject to constant review. And I’d want everybody on board. Meaning Gord and Rollie.” She looked at him. “You seem surprised, Pete.”
Nimec shrugged.
“You didn’t seem too enthused about the suggestion when it was offered,” he said. “I figured I’d run into more resistance.”
Megan considered how to respond. She finished removing the linen wraps, wound them up neatly, then turned to the bench and dropped them into her bag.
“Ricci’s aptitude isn’t anything that I question,” she said finally, looking back at Nimec. “I just don’t enjoy his contentious solo flier routine. And sometimes I need to be where he isn’t to get past it.”
Nimec shrugged a little, his hand on the locker’s open door.
“Sounds like some kind of solution, anyway.”
“You could call it that,” she said. “I think of it as keeping my sights on the bigger picture.”
He gave her a questioning glance.
“Whoever attacked us in Brazil last spring killed a lot of our people and would have caused even more destruction… would have been able to blackmail every country on earth… if we hadn’t gotten in the way of their plans,” she said. “Put me in our enemy’s shoes, I’d be carrying one serious grudge. And the thought of not being ready if and when it’s acted upon worries the hell out of me, Pete.”
He kept looking at her for several long seconds and then swung the locker door inward. It shut with a dull, metallic clang.
“Makes two of us,” he said.
Some months earlier in Madrid, in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado, he had gone to view Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, and even now was unsure how long he had stood before it. It was as if time had stilled around him. As if his innermost visions had been projected onto the wall of the gallery.
He had not known where to rest his eye. On the molten orange landscape with its pools of fire, its spewing clouds of black, volcanic smoke? Or the medieval village besieged by an exterminating army of skeletons, banners of war hoisted above their skull heads, the hollow sockets of their eyes showing only a pitiless adherence to their single objective? Here they hacked at the living with broadswords. Here they impaled them on the points of spears. There a cadaverous looter knelt over his prostrate victim, holding knife to throat to deliver the finishing stroke. In the right foreground, a peasant woman who had fallen atop a pile of twisted corpses raised her arms in a futile plea for mercy as a bone soldier stood with one conquering foot planted on her body, his battle-ax swinging inexorably downward. Where to rest the eye? On which scene of fabulous annihilation? The death barge advancing over a mire of crushed bodies and blood, its skeletal crew wrapped in the white cerements of the grave? The townsman hanging, limp, from the single forking limb of a shattered tree? The emaciated dog, all skin and protruding ribs, sniffing hungrily at the child in its fallen mother’s embrace? Or the revelers in peacock finery scattering from their dinner table in helpless panic as a swarm of cadaverous marauders closed ranks around them?
Where, indeed, to rest the eye?
The painting had been remarkable. Absorbed in its sweeping infernal beauty, Siegfried Kuhl might have believed its creator had reached a hand across the centuries and tapped deep into his mind for inspiration. His umbilical connection to it had been overwhelming. It had at once seemed to draw its energy from him and infuse him with its own.
Until that unforgettable experience, Kuhl had never been moved by a work of art. He had gone to the museum out of curiosity and nothing more, compelled by Harlan DeVane’s remark that he might find it of interest. Six months ago, it had been. After the debacle in Kazakhstan, where only a chance diversion had allowed him to break away from the Sword operative with whom he’d grappled in the launch center’s cargo-processing facility.
The man’s features were framed in his mind in photographic detail. Whenever he pictured the sharply angular jut of his cheekbones, the set of his mouth, he would feel the restless desire for vengeance slide coldly through his intestines. As he felt it now, six months later and a continent away, sitting at a window table in a brasserie called La Pistou, opposite the Champs de Bataille Pare, in Quebec City. Watching the entrance to the park, waiting for his lovely courier to arrive.
Kuhl’s failure at the Cosmodrome had been a severe blow. Driven underground, wishing to get far ahead of his pursuers, he had altered his appearance, obtaining colored contact lenses, darkening his hair, filling out his lips with collagen injections, even growing a short beard. Then, in his global migrations, he had found himself in Spain for a time, and he realized it was no accident that brought him there.
DeVane had understood how it would be for him to see Brueghel’s masterpiece, reflecting, as it did, the grim sensibility of an age when the Black Death had raged across continents, an indiscriminate scourge exempting no man or authority, no civilized institution, from being laid to waste. An age when none knew whether to blame Heaven or Hell for their miseries.