“I’ll be gladder if we could stick to the point.” Scull rolled his eyes. “Scintillements, you know what it means? Sparkles. Probably has those laser lights flying around over the walls and ceiling, make you feel like some nut-case with a big crayon covering them with colored squiggles—”
“I’m not sure that’s how it’ll be. I picked up a tourist brochure in my room, and there was an ad—”
“Come on. Since when are you so gullible? Must be the settled life affecting you.”
Nimec looked confused. “Settled life?”
“I just asked you not to stray off the topic. You want my advice on this love thing you got going in Texas, we can do it later,” Scull said. “The club, Petey. Focus on the club. Think about its name a minute, then tell me you expect good eats. They can be pretentious as they want dressing it up in French, I still say it belongs on the marquee of some poky Brooklyn disco like the one that used to be run by the Russian mob punk you took down… what the hell was it called, by the way?”
“The Platinum Club.”
“Yeah, that’s it…”
“Vince,” he said. “French is the official language here.”
“So?”
“So maybe it’s you who should use your head.” He shrugged again. “Nobody’s dressing anything up. Nothing fancy or pretentious about it to their ears.”
“Still worse,” Scull said. “If the owners of the joint know the customers know what the name means, how good can it be? And speaking of bullshit handles, what’s with this Captain Guns-at-the-hips? If you think you’re gonna find that one on his birth certificate, guess again.” Scull made a rumbling sound. “Reminds me of a guy I met at a party once, introduced himself as John Wildlife. No shit. Right away, I peg him as some dilettante rich kid whose moneybags parents stuffed a fortune into his mountaineering knapsack, or maybe into his kayak when he was about to paddle off down the Snake River. Had to be a fortune. Startup capital to help him found one of those tree-hugger nonprofits in D.C… Georgetown, no less. Guy’s got a whole floor of offices on Sixteenth Street for this foundation — you know what rents are like over there. And the reason? Just so he can take a vacation from his recreational activities every now and then, pull himself out of the white-water rapids long enough to dry off his ass. John Wildlife, will somebody please fucking spare me—”
Their elevator stopped at the lobby with a soft ding. As its doors swished open, Nimec saw the concierge flash a hospitable smile from his desk and expelled a sigh of relief. Scull had ceased his tirade.
“Come on, Vince.” He exited the car. “Let’s find ourselves a taxi.”
Scull followed a step behind him, frowned.
“I’ll be happy if we get a driver who doesn’t take us for a couple of greenhorn suckers,” he said.
The concierge took pains to be helpful as the two Americans came across the lobby from the elevator. Did they need their currency exchanged? he enquired in studied English. Would they like particular directions somewhere? Were there any special room-service orders they might wish to place with the staff in advance of their return?
The first man to pass his desk — Monsieur Nimec, executive suite 9—declined with a polite thank-you. The new arrival — Monsieur Scull, who had insisted on an immediate room change from suite 8 to suite 12 on check-in, stating the former was incommodious and noisy — merely shook his head in the negative and followed the other toward the entrance.
The concierge did not let the second guest’s scowl leach any of the obliging geniality from his expression. He was skilled at his job and knew how to keep his poise.
The concierge’s eyes tracked them as they strode to the hotel entrance and a doorman in a braided, epauletted uniform held open its large glass doors. Then he reached for his telephone, tapped in a number, left a brief message with the person who answered, and hung up.
With their backs to him, the smile he offered the men had fled his face.
Out front, the doorman hastened from beneath the hotel’s regal red-and-gold awning, hailed one of several waiting curbside taxis, and opened its rear door for the UpLink representatives. Then he asked their destination — again in their own tongue — was given it by the tall, narrow-jawed man who had led the way through the entrance, and helpfully communicated where they were going to the driver in his native French.
The taller of the men tipped him and climbed into the taxi. His stocky companion packed himself into the backseat next, slamming the door shut before the doorman could close it for him, albeit in what would have been a much gentler manner.
With his gratuity tucked into the pocket of his colorful uniform jacket, the doorman watched the taxi pull away down the boulevard. A moment afterward, the second in the queue of parked taxis slid up to the hotel entrance.
This time the doorman opened its front passenger door and leaned all the way inside.
“Scintillements,” he instructed the driver.
“Ce voir Gunville?”
“Ce n’est non l’affair.”
They made brief eye contact. Then a silent nod of acknowledgment from the driver, and he faced forward, his hands on the wheel. Who the Americans were meeting was truly none of their affair; it would be best for them to know only what was necessary.
The doorman straightened, pushing the door shut.
A second later, the taxi swung from the curb and slotted into the light traffic a short distance behind the vehicle carrying Nimec and Scull.
The ocean waters of Gabon are blessed with mild currents, and so the Chimera floated gently tonight above the Ogooué Fan, a wide belt of alluvial sediment sloping toward the oil-gorged offshore basins beyond land’s end. Here, four months ago, Cédric Dupain and Marius Bouchard had come to sudden death at three hundred fathoms, but the explosions and pressure that left their bodies in shredded ruin caused no visible disturbance to the surface tranquillity.
Life’s worst acts of violence may be hidden, silent, and deep. Known as the spawning ground of abominations, it is a place where perpetrator and victim meet and witnesses attest to nothing, where crimes committed beget atrocious intimacies, where guilt makes its slippery escape through wormholes bedded in shame.
In his yacht’s stateroom bed, Harlan DeVane lay facing its raised porthole and wished hard for sleep to take him. Though shut tight, his eyes were grazed by the navigational lights of the buoys and platforms outside to the west, and the running lights of the great sluggish fuel tankers at near-rest between them. Some nights their flickering glow would lull DeVane into temporary oblivion, but now, on this night, they only prodded him back from its edge.
The porthole’s thin translucent curtains swirled in drifts of warm sea air. Naked atop his sheets, DeVane felt the satin breeze slide over his legs and chest, felt the soft, rhythmic rocking of his yacht trying to ease him into darkness. But his body remained stiff, unrelaxed. He had tried to keep his thoughts on business, settle himself by planning for imminent discussions with his clients. There had been little to consider, however. His offering of the current information crop would be a take it or leave it proposition. He had lost much of his fortune and face after the Sleeper virus debacle and been put in a ticklish position with the disappointed buyers of its genetic activators. And yet he had misled none of them. The failure had not resulted from a default in supplying the product, nor a deficiency in its performance, nor any misrepresentation of its ravaging potential. In his line of work, there could be no guarantees against countermeasures taken by the enemy. UpLink International had been the stumbling block, and he fully meant to remove that impediment. He would not repair the damaged trust of his clients by becoming a markdown distributor, a light-palmed haggler like the market venders in Port-Gentil.