“Ca marche comme un papier de musique, ” he said. “All right, everythin’ goin’ smooth, jus’ got me a little frustrated.” He looked embarrassed. “My big mouth ain’ caused no trouble between us, eh?”
She regarded him steadily.
“No,” she said. “No trouble.”
“Then I think I’ll go below, pack away the damn rod, an’ enjoy the boss’s luxury accommodations.”
She nodded.
Thibodeau bent to pick up the angling rod and then strode off across the hundred-footer’s deck, passing Nimec without a hint of acknowledgment.
Nimec came to stand beside Megan.
“I’ve never seen him act like that before,” he said. “You?”
“No,” she said, watching Thibodeau climb down into the stairwell under the vessel’s flying bridge. “And we’ve been friends a lot of years.”
“You think it was his tug-of-war with the fish that got to him, or the one with Ricci at the meeting?”
“Maybe both. I’m not sure.” She sighed, her gaze drifting toward the vessel’s prow. “Speaking of our other global field supervisor, he appears to be in a mood of his own.”
Nimec turned to look. His serious face visible in profile, Tom Ricci stood gazing out over the water.
“I have to wonder if the cooperative arrangement we worked out for those two wasn’t good chemistry,” he said.
“Almost seven months down the road seems kind of late for us to second-guess our decision. We have to make it good.” She put a hand on each of his shoulders. “Your guy,” she said, “your ball.”
Nimec let her aim him toward Ricci and shove him off.
Tall, lean, and dark-haired, his angular features several sharp cuts of the chisel from handsome, Ricci kept staring across the water through his sunglasses as Nimec approached.
“The ragin’ Cajun get over losing the big one?” he said, moving not at all.
Pete stood next to him, his arms crossed over the rail.
“Didn’t think you were paying attention,” he said.
Ricci remained still.
“Old cop habits,” he said. “I pay attention to everything.”
They were quiet. Some yards aft, Megan had settled into a deck chair, reclining it to bathe in the afternoon sun, her long legs stretched out in front of her. Ricci tilted his head slightly in her direction without seeming to take his eyes off the water.
“Those Levi’s, for example,” he said. “They say snug jeans are out, baggies are in. Convinces me they haven’t seen snug on Megan Breen.”
Nimec smiled a little.
“Got you,” he said.
They stood viewing the calm blue iridescence of the bay in silence.
“There’s been a ban on landing giant bass since the eighties,” Ricci said after a couple of minutes. “Thibodeau would’ve had to let it swim, anyway.”
“The payoff’s in the catching, not the keeping.”
“Let me hear you argue that to the fishermen I knew up in Maine,” Ricci said. “Funny thing, you won’t find one of those guys who’ll ever describe the sea in terms of its beauty. For them it stands for waking up in the cold before sunrise and long hours hauling nets on damp, leaky tubs. But it’s the source of their livelihood, and there’s a different kind of appreciation for it.”
Nimec looked over at him. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
Ricci leaned forward over the rail.
“Me neither, exactly,” he said, shrugging. “I’m an East Coast boy, Pete. Grew up ten minutes from the Boston shipyards. I’ve always thought of the Atlantic as a workingman’s ocean. Might not be reasonable, but to me the Pacific coast is catamarans, blond surfer dudes, and blonder Baywatch girls.”
“Ah,” Nimec said. “And you think you might be constitutionally unsuited to temperate waters, that it?”
Ricci started to answer, hesitated, then slowly turned to face him.
“I wasn’t looking to get into it with Thibodeau at the meeting,” he said at last.
“Nobody said you were.”
Ricci shook his head.
“That’s not the point,” he said. “What anyone did or didn’t say isn’t important to me. I don’t need that kind of bullshit.”
Nimec’s expression was reflective.
“Agreed,” he said. “The question is how you choose to handle it.”
Ricci stood in the breeze, his shirtsleeves flapping around his sinewy arms.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everybody who was at the meeting… except for me… has been with Gordian for years. You’ve all got similar ideas about what Sword ought to be. You’re all used to sticking to certain operational guidelines. You developed them.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve already decided you don’t fit,” Nimec said. “Or can’t — or won’t.”
Ricci looked at him.
“I’m trying to be realistic,” he said. “Come on, Pete. Tell me you don’t have your doubts after what happened today.”
Nimec thought about it. Sword was the intelligence and security arm of his employer’s globe-spanning corporation, its title derived from a reference to the ancient legend of the Gordian knot, which had defied every attempt at unraveling its complicated twists and turns until Alexander the Great cast subtlety aside and split it apart with a definitive stroke of his blade. This illustrated Roger Gordian’s own no-nonsense attitude toward the modern day problems that might jeopardize his interests, utilizing country-specific political and economic profiles to help anticipate the vast majority of them before they became full-blown crises, and tackling the unpredictable emergencies that cropped up to endanger UpLink personnel with the most highly trained and well-equipped counterthreat force he could assemble.
Every twelve months before the happy distractions of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays kicked into high gear, Gordian gathered Sword’s leadership aboard his yacht for a sort of informal year-end review and freewheeling blue-sky session, an open forum at which they could examine the organization’s recent accomplishments and shortcomings, evaluate its current state of preparedness, and hopefully reach a consensus of opinion about its future direction.
This year’s roundtable, however, had produced less in the way of common understanding than acrimonious confrontation, at least between two of its key participants.
The session had convened before lunch amid the plush carpeting and rich mahogany furnishings of the Pomona ’s spacious main salon. Besides Nimec, Megan, Ricci, Thibodeau, and Gordian himself, it had been attended by Vince Scull, UpLink’s chief risk-assessment analyst, freshly returned from a long stint in the South Pacific, where he’d been scouting out locales for new satellite ground facilities and had very noticeably added inches to his belly roll, as well as a tiny but expert helical tattoo to the back of his right hand that, he explained, had been applied by a Malaitan tribeswoman as a lasting souvenir of their acquaintance.
Scull had kicked things off with an endorsement of French Polynesia as a potentially excellent site for a monitoring and relay station, scarcely needing to refer to his copious notes while offering detailed facts and figures about the country’s natural and industrial resources, trade statistics, governmental structure, etc. After taking several questions about his recommendation, he had moved on to a broader overview of UpLink’s international standing.
Given his deserved reputation for crankiness, Scull’s sanguine tone was remarkable.
“All in all, we can knock wood,” he’d said in summation, rapping his fist twice against the tabletop. “It’s been peace and quiet since that nasty affair last spring. There hasn’t been a single territorial or ethnic flare-up anywhere we’ve committed our resources that couldn’t be defused before it got out of hand, thanks as much to our company’s pull as diplomatic massages. And lots of places that were giving me worries about their internal stability have managed to avoid the coups, genocidal bloodbaths, even your garden variety power plays that usually bite us in the ass.” He had smoothed an errant strand of hair over his increasingly bald pate. “Take Russia as a for instance. With our old drook President Starinov resigning and the nationalist opposition coming on strong again, I figured we might be looking at payback for helping him hang onto his Kremlin office suite awhile back. But what we’re worth in jobs and cash inflow seems to have gotten us past any vendettas.”