Hughes nodded, gave her another smile, and left.
A moment later Julia turned from the door and got back to work.
In the Outback, the man who’d introduced himself as Barry Hughes passed the Howell residence, reached the bottom of the lane, turned left, and then drove west over the blacktop toward the coast.
His own particular morning’s work was over, and it could not have gone any better.
“So what do you think?” DeMarco said.
“From what you tell me,” Nimec said, swatting away a mosquito, “we’ve got some worries.”
“Yeah.”
“Serious worries.”
“Yeah.”
“Which you obviously know, or we wouldn’t be here,” Nimec said.
DeMarco nodded but said nothing.
They were standing together on an aged steel foot-bridge over a drainage channel in the city’s Romb’Intchozo precinct, their elbows propped on its pedestrian guard rail. In the rainy season, the channel would be gurgling with overflow from the flooded Ogooué River delta. But this was a different season, and the water below them was low and still and muddy. Insects swarmed around thick clottings of food wrappers and other paper litter that floated on or just below the surface.
Nimec wished he hadn’t worn short sleeves. Or that he’d splashed on some pest repellent.
“Hell of it is, I can’t think of anything but the obvious,” he said after a long silence. “We need to find out who’s put a watch on us. How wide it is. And we need to find out the reasons why. What they’d have to gain.”
DeMarco nodded again. He felt a tiny stinging bite on his bare left forearm, slapped his right hand down on it, examined his palm, and saw the mosquito’s wings, legs, and carapace mashed together in a smear of blood. He scraped it onto the guard rail with a sense of vengeful reward.
“Damned bugs,” he said.
“No pun intended, I hope.”
DeMarco puzzled a moment over the vinegary humor in Nimec’s tone, then got it.
“No,” he said with a thin smile. “None.”
They stood looking out past at the stagnant, refuse clogged, insect-teeming murk under the bridge.
After a while Nimec decided on the first step in what he supposed might be labeled a plan.
Or something close to one.
The Ogooué Fan. Eighty leagues below sea level. Fifteen feet long, its leech-white outer hull devoid of markings, the deep submersible had passed beneath the sand ridge’s crumbled terrace to assume a stable automatic hover close to the ocean bottom.
In the steel-walled forward pressure cabin, two men in overalls that matched the color of the craft’s fiberglass exterior occupied its command station behind a hemispheric acrylic viewport — the large half bubble allowed for wide field, low refractory visibility, giving a near illusion that there was nothing to separate them from their aqueous surroundings. One of them sat in the pilot’s chair, ready to take manual joy-stick control of the craft and push its ducted, silent-running, eight-horsepower electric thrusters to a speed of better than ten knots in the event that sudden detection or imminent threat drove them to launch an escape. Behind the backup controls to his right, the copilot monitored his frontal and overhead status boards and handled their periodic radio communications with the surface team.
The four crewmen in the aft pressure chamber also wore pale overalls. Two had manipulated the clawed robotic arm that had plucked the segment of fiber cable from its bed of sand and sediments. Their companions behind a separate instrument console had followed the marine cable’s exposure with the deployment of a tubular protrusion from the submersible’s underbelly midway between bow and stern, running it to the rubbled sea floor, mating it to what almost appeared to be an ordinary splice enclosure in the line. But the bidirectional data port in the enclosure’s upper surface would be certain to draw attention from a knowledgeable eye such as Cédric Dupain had possessed… and indeed did when he’d spotted its watertight cover some months earlier, making the discovery that would seal his and Marius Bouchard’s fate.
Had Dupain lived long enough to further scrutinize it, his inquisitiveness would have surely led him to find the data port and the special multifiber coupler fitted within the splice enclosure: a microchip-activated beam-splitting pod that, when switched on, would tap into the lightwave signals passing through the cable and divert a fraction of them into the optical fibers of the extended feeder tube. Because the pod had been built into the system near a splice housing known to Planétaire’s, and now UpLink International’s, system managers, the temporary signal degradation would be considered unremarkable. The heat-fusing of fiber ends at splice points will always result in some attenuation of signal strength, intrinsic losses that are ignored within certain established levels, and there would be many of these points along the route of a typical long-distance network’s architecture.
At each parasitic siphoning off of the cable, its flood of raw high-speed data was transmitted from the submersible’s array of receiving/buffering computer terminals to Cray superprocessors aboard the Chimera using a direct, narrow-targeted underwater-to-surface Intranet link maintained via an extremely high frequency (or EHF) acoustic telemetry modem and on-hull antenna about the size and shape of a carrot. Were they to hear a mission-abort command from the pilot’s chair, the men at the aft consoles would be responsible for disengaging the feeder tube and, if time and opportunity allowed, retrenching the cable to hide any visible sign of their tap.
Although these emergency measures were practiced in drills, the reality was that their implementation never had been required. A cautious and prudent man in any circumstance, Harlan DeVane was at his best functioning in the depths.
As DeVane himself often mused.
Port-Gentil. Late Sunday afternoon. Pete Nimec and Vince Scull strode through the main lobby of the Rio de Gabao to the street, past the accommodating concierge, the smiling doorman, the ready taxi drivers parked near the entrance.
On the pavement they turned right and started walking unhurriedly toward the big outdoor market at the north side of the city, a couple of commercial travelers enjoying a welcome weekend respite from their high-powered business affairs.
Soon afterward, Sword ops Charlie Hollinger and Frank Rhodes left the hotel together and strode south toward the casino district. They were talking about things like their luck at the slots and exchanging tips for cashing in big at baccarat and roulette.
A half hour passed before Steve DeMarco and three more members of the Sword advance team — Andy Wade, Joel Ackerman, and Brian Conners — hit the street. The group stood chatting in front of the hotel, casually discussing their separate plans for the rest of the afternoon. DeMarco and Wade said they wanted to see some historic sights. Ackerman mentioned a free Makossa concert in the city park he was anxious to catch, and Conners, who played guitar as a hobby, indicated he’d like to tag along with him. DeMarco suggested that all of them ought to try hooking up with Nimec and Scull at the bazaar a bit later on, maybe going out for dinner afterward. Conners said he wasn’t sure, but would probably decide to pass on that, expressing his interest in some local sights he wanted to visit on his own after the concert. And besides, he’d already promised Hollinger and Rhodes he would join them in blowing his week’s pay at the tables.