She took hold of his hand, still watching him intently.
“You hear anything new from Dr. Lieberman?” he asked.
“Not since early this morning,” she said. “He was supposed to look over your information and meet us here, but got called off on an emergency.”
Gordian nodded, felt the tender swellings under his jaw. It reminded him of when he’d had the mumps as a kid.
“Dad…”
He looked at Julia, noticed that her eyes had suddenly moistened.
“Honey?” he said. “Something the matter?”
She was shaking her head, but at some unspoken thought rather than in answer to his question.
“What you heard me saying when you woke up… I’m sorry. About how I’ve been treating you. About the way I acted the other day when you were over at the house.” She squeezed his fingers more tightly, swiped away a tear with her free hand. “I’ve been such a self-absorbed jerk since the divorce…. God, Daddy… I don’t know why I keep taking things out on you….”
“Might be because we’re two of a kind,” he said. “Good at not being good with our emotions.”
Julia tightened her grip on his hand, her eyes glistening.
“It’s like I keep my feelings inside until they fill me up, you know?”
“I know.”
“Like they’re all mixed together, and I don’t have a clue how to deal with them, and instead try to push them somewhere deeper inside. Convince myself they’ll go away. And then the pressure only gets worse—”
“I know,” he said. He smiled at her. “Doesn’t make it easy on the people we love. Just ask your mother.”
They were quiet for a moment, hands joined at Gordian’s side.
“You’ll sort things out,” he said finally. His throat was on fire, the temporary relief from the water he’d sipped long gone. “It takes time. You’ve been through changes, difficult ones—”
He was interrupted by a soft knock on the open door.
They both turned their heads toward Dr. Lieberman just outside in the corridor.
“Julia, Gord,” he said. His face was drawn. “I hope you’ll excuse my lateness; it’s been one of those days.”
“Tell me about it,” Gordian said in a ragged voice. “Hello, Elliot.”
Lieberman’s eyes made a quick tour of the room as he entered. “I was hoping to find Ashley—”
“I’m right behind you.”
He glanced over his shoulder, saw her standing in the hall with a folded blanket draped over her arm, and stepped aside to let her move past him.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad the three of you are here.”
They looked at him. It went through all their minds at once that neither Lieberman’s tone nor his expression remotely approached gladness, his chosen figure of speech aside.
He reached back and closed the door, then stood silently for what seemed a very long time.
“We have to talk about my findings,” he said. “Talk very seriously.”
“Here’s what little I know,” Megan said. “The boss’s condition hasn’t improved since this morning, and the tests aren’t showing what’s wrong with him. His doctor, I think his name is Lieberman, has put in a call to an epidemiologist at the Department of Health in Sacramento.”
She was looking at Pete Nimec and Vince Scull, the three of them seated in Nimec’s office at UpLink headquarters, their meeting hastily convened minutes after Ashley Gordian phoned to update her from the hospital.
Nimec’s eyes held steady on her face. “That’s it?”
She nodded.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Scull said. “A case gets kicked up to state level, it means there’s either gotta be a rash of ones like it or a suspicion that whatever’s hit Gord is contagious… and a threat to the public welfare.”
Megan shook her head.
“That’s what I assumed, too,” she said. “But Ashley explained the contact’s strictly unofficial. Lieberman has a personal relationship with the government man, and he’s reaching out.”
They were silent for a while.
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Nimec said. “And don’t tell me to wait and pray for the best.”
Megan regarded him gravely.
“Pete,” she said, “sometimes you can’t charge to the rescue.”
He expelled a breath.
“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.”
More silence.
Scull frowned, rubbing a hand back and forth over his smooth, hairless expanse of scalp. Then he looked at Megan.
“I’m thinking maybe we ought to investigate,” he said.
“Investigate what?” she said.
“Same things as the white coats,” he said. “You look at a whole bunch of dots and try to draw in the lines that connect them. I mean, if you get right down to it, this wouldn’t be any different than what’s SOP at my job.”
“I don’t follow.”
Scull rubbed his head again.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m in another country conducting a risk analysis from a corporate perspective, I first pretend I’m from Mars, throw every preconception I have from my mind. Make like a sponge and soak up everything I can. You with me so far?”
She nodded.
“Now I’ve been there long enough to get a sense of what the place is about, and I notice a potential problem. Some political, economic, or social instabilities that could threaten our company interests,” he went on. “I examine the cause or causes, trace their origins. It can be complicated. There are always buried issues and agendas. But I focus on the ones that are exposed. Follow their threads. Most often, they’ll lead to others that aren’t so visible. And then I follow them. And when I know everything I can within whatever time frame’s imposed on me, I spin the threads into a regional profile and scenario plans. Then make my recommendations on what our investment strategy should be.”
“Okay, I’ve still got you,” Megan said. “Now help my chronically prosaic mind with the rest.”
Scull thought for a moment.
“Say you’re a medical sherlock. There’s a disease you don’t recognize, you want to trace its origin, same’s I’d do with some radical political movement in Frickfrackistan,” he said. “So you start looking at how the person you’re treating might’ve acquired it. Where’s he been lately? Who were his contacts? You maybe hit on another case that can be linked to him, you can pretty much surmise the sickness is communicable. The next step is to figure out its vectors. How it’s spreading. Whether it jumps from rodents to people. Or rodents to insects to people like bubonic plague. Or gets passed directly from person to person. Name your route. The main thing is that once the information’s in your pocket, you’re on the way to finding your germ. And then you can maybe come to terms with it. Figure out how to deal with the thing.” He looked from Megan to Pete. “You see where I’m coming from?”
The other two were nodding, Megan with her eyebrows raised.
They sat in pensive silence again.
Then, from Nimec: “Where do we start?”
Scull turned sideways in his chair and rapped his fist on the wall.
“Right here, Petey. UpLink HQ,” he said. “Where the hell else but the boss’s home away from home?”
Palardy was dreaming he was in the hospital. Or at least he thought it was a dream. It was hard to tell sometimes what was real and what wasn’t. Like the day he’d gone into Gordian’s office with the syringe. That had seemed as if it was a dream, too. He remembered how he’d seemed to be floating in space as he walked through the door, his sense of unreality. Of being inside and outside himself at once. And that was how he felt now. So maybe it was all in his mind. Not just the bad things that had happened to him lately, the things he’d done, but everything since Brazil. The gambling, his selling those blueprints to the space station facility to make his vig, his wife leaving him… and then back to the U.S.A. and more bets, more shylocks, more betrayals demanded of him and carried out. All a dream, every minute of it. Every hour, day, week, and month, right up to and including his coming down with the sickness. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life was…