“You’ll need to keep an eye on Ricci while I’m gone,” he said.
“Yes.”
“There’s a lot of anger and frustration between him and Rollie Thibodeau, and I can see a blowup in the making. It’s pretty clear from all the little things. Like how they say each other’s names. And the way they act whenever they’re together in the same room. You’re going to have to watch out for that, too.”
“Yes.”
They ate some more of their food. Outside, the Buddy Holly simulacrum had done a gradual fadeout and Elvis Presley, the genuine article, was singing about how he couldn’t help falling in love with someone.
Nimec looked at Megan.
“I’ve also got a personal favor to ask, if you don’t mind,” he said.
She nodded.
“It involves Annie.”
Megan waited.
“Before she came along, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to worry about anything or anyone besides UpLink,” Nimec said. “I’ve had to rethink that, though. Take a new look at my responsibilities. What they are, and what they should be. I figure Africa’s probably going to be business as usual. But you know how it is.”
Megan nodded again.
“Yes,” she said, “I do. You can’t afford to let things slide.”
Nimec paused, transferred his food container from his lap to the top of the dash, and moved forward a little in his seat.
“Jon’s got his mother to take care of him, and I know he’ll always be okay,” he said after a bit. “With Annie it’s different. She’s tough. Good at handling things, been relying on herself a long time. But I don’t want her to have to do that anymore. Don’t want to be thinking there’s a chance she’s ever going to be alone.”
Megan gave him a third nod.
“Annie’s my friend, Pete,” she said. “More, she’s one of ours now. Package deal. You know what comes with that.”
He looked at her, then grunted.
“She’ll be in town a couple of weeks from now, staying at my condo with the kids. Hers and mine. We were supposed to see a ball game… and if you have time—”
“At your service,” Megan said. “I’ll invite them over for dinner and ask if they want to stay overnight. Annie’s been scoffing at my claim to virtuosity in the kitchen, so it’ll give me a chance to show her up and feed the brood all at once.”
“Uh-oh,” Nimec said. “Double jeopardy.”
“Is this what you consider being grateful?”
“No,” he said. “Realistic.”
Megan stretched her lips into an exaggerated frown, reached for his food container, and set it back onto his lap.
“Eat a clam, buster,” she said.
Madrid. One o’clock in the afternoon. His model church on a table near the apartment window, Kuhl’s curtains were drawn, a pale light filtering through their sheer white fabric to throw a shadow of the church, still towerless, onto a wall and corner of the ceiling. Under a fluorescent swing-arm magnifier clamped to the table, the tower subassembly awaited his last touches of detail.
Across the room, Kuhl sat at a notebook computer joined to a cable Internet connection, his eyes fastened to its screen as he clicked onto a private conferencing site and typed in his security key. Headset on, he waited a moment and was forwarded to the next level of channel-specific authentication.
The prompt for his first spoken pass phrase appeared.
“On Maple White Island,” he said into his headset’s microphone.
Another moment passed. Kuhl sat in the cropped shadow of his church. His computer’s client software converted his analog voice signals into a binary stream that was encrypted and transmitted to the server.
He was prompted for his second pass phrase.
“Deep in the Brazilian jungle,” he said.
Kuhl waited. The prompt for his third and last pass phrase flashed onto the computer screen.
“Professor Summerlee found the Lost World,” he said.
Kuhl waited again. The three-step process ensured exceptionally accurate client verification, allowing the server’s voice biometric program engines to conduct a comparative analysis in much the same way that a fingerprint would be scanned for its unique characteristics — his words broken into phonemes and triphones, basic units of human speech that were analyzed for their dominant tonal formants and matched against a digitally stored speech sample in the database.
Kuhl’s identity confirmed, his computer showed the ENTRY ALLOWED notification. A brief animated icon flashed onto it: the Chimera of Greco-Roman legend standing in profile, its lion’s head twisting toward him, its jaws splitting open to breathe a great billow of fire that went curling and churning across the display until it became a coruscant sheet of orange. The orange quickly dispersed in brilliant slips and shreds and left only the monstrous head of the lion — now static except for a pair of sparkling ember-red eyes — facing Kuhl onscreen.
Then an electronically altered voice in his earpiece, its frequencies bent and phased to a low pitch:
“Siegfried, at long last,” Harlan DeVane said. “How splendid it is to hear from you.”
In the study adjoining his yacht’s master stateroom, DeVane sat very still as the wall-mounted plasma display went dark. Then he slid off his headset, lifted his wireless computer keyboard from his lap, and put it on the richly inlaid walnut table beside him.
A chill smile trickled across his face. The user icon Kuhl had chosen for himself was a nice bit of drollery that suited his temperament as well as DeVane’s animation did his own personality… or at least a part of it. The chimera was an amusing outlet, but Kuhl had no similar touch of flash, no taste for the razzmatazz. A barbarian warrior who stood out of his time, he could have been a Viking, a Saxon, a Mongol Khan.
DeVane reclined in his chair, his elbows propped on its armrests, fingers woven into a cradle under his chin. If Kuhl was surprised by his activation notice moments earlier, it had not showed. But the actual mission assignment — that had given him quite a shot of juice. Not even the digital processing that stripped all mood and emotion from the human voice had concealed Kuhl’s eager satisfaction over his instructions. The words DeVane used were deliberate echoes of comments he had made to the good economic minister Etienne Begela in his governmental office — why bother to fiddle with something that worked?
“Find what Roger Gordian most loves, and we will know his greatest weakness,” DeVane had said. “Strike at it, and we will have struck at his heart.”
“I will be moving on from here right away, then.”
“Yes.”
“To America.”
“That’s correct, Siegfried. America. Where Gordian’s heart is. And where opportunity is a wild running horse to be roped and ridden.”
Kuhl had asked only a few practical questions after that.
Though far away, DeVane had felt his arousal.
Slowly now, he let his eyes glide over the row of four African masks aligned on the wall above the plasma screen. There was a reptilian gold fetish mask that Ebrie chieftains had carried to laud the killing of their tribal enemies, a blockish, primitive Dogon hunter’s helmet worn for protection against the spirits of slaughtered prey, an Ashante ghost mask with curling horns and sharply filed teeth, and the Fang Ngi secret society mask of which Begela’s face had somehow reminded DeVane — or more accurately, Mr. Fáton — at their recent appointment in Port-Gentil.
Gerard Fáton. Jack Nemaine. Henry Skoll. The Facilitator. El Tío. All of them were masks of DeVane’s creation, available to him when necessary. Even his Harlan DeVane identity was a guise of sorts. Form-fitted, true. Designed and developed around basic elements of his personality. Yet no less a careful invention than the others, a role he had learned to play fully and well…