As his fingers clicked over the keys, a tool bar appeared across the top of the screen and the video image shrank into a window, with graphical level meters and editing controls appearing to its right.
“Now, let’s try it again, giving it a little mid-range gain, eliminating some audio dither.”
Grolin hit Rewind, Pause, then Play.
“Why are you here?” Roma said from the speakers. Paused.
Grolin quickly tweaked a dial, and then another, his eyes narrow behind the intentionally nerdish horn-rimmed glasses.
Roma said, “You know… zarry… wnnt have your parrrrrsrdy until tomorrow—”
Grolin stopped the progress of the virtual image, ran it backward to the point just before Roma’s voice dropped off in volume, started it going forward again.
His fingers clattered over the buttons of his console. Graph lines and status bars rose and fell in the edit window.
“Why are you here?” Roma husked. “You know zakrry won’t have your papers rdy until tomorrow. And 1 don’t suppose you’ve just come to syngnnnight.”
“You hear that?” Barnhart jerked his head around toward Nimec, wincing in pain from the abrupt movement. “He’s talking about providing her with papers. Presumably travel documents.”
“I’ll bet,” Nimec said. “That son of a bitch facilitated the attack from beginning to end.”
“Speaking of which,” Grolin said, “one more run-through, and I’ll have every last word on this tape popping out at us like braille.”
Noriko’s fingertips rapped an impatient quintuplet against the back of Barnhart’s chair.
“Come on,” she said. Thinking: Aggravating twerp.
Grolin rewound, paused, played, tinkered with his MIDI controls.
“Why are you here?” Nick Roma said to the woman unbuttoning in front of him. “You know Zachary won’t have your papers ready until tomorrow. And I don’t suppose you’ve just come to say good night.”
“By Jove, and fucking-A, I think we’ve got it,” Grolin said. “Who’s Zachary, by the way?”
Nimic was looking at Barnhart. “You think that’s a first or last name?”
Barnhart shook his head. “Could be either, but I’ll ask around. My guess is he’d be one of Roma’s forgers. Or somebody who works for one of his forgers. Roma’s steadiest, ugliest source of income is the flesh trade. Smuggling desperately poor women from Russia to America as prostitutes… essentially sex slaves… with fraudulent visas and identification. That’s also how the organizatsiya imports its soldiers and hit men.”
“The bunch that did the job in Times Square would have wanted out of the country pronto,” Noriko said. “We find this Zachary, seems logical he’d be able to lead us to them.”
“Or steer us in their direction, anyway,” Barnhart said. “And that’s providing we can get him… or her, now that I think about it… to talk.”
“Leave the second part to me,” Nimec said, his eyes still on Barnhart. “How soon can you dig up the information we need?”
“Won’t take long, assuming we’re right about this person’s specialty and connection to Roma. I know G-men, detectives on the NYPD, even people in the Attorney General’s Office, who keep tabs on every player of importance in Roma’s outfit. And who’ll talk to me no questions asked.”
“Make sure that’s the way it is,” Nimec said. “I’ve been pulling strings for two days to see that the record of your ER treatment gets erased before it’s released to the police. I don’t want anybody tumbling to our investigation.”
Barnhart nodded, started to push himself up off the chair, but then sank back into it, obviously hurting.
“If one of you’d give me a hand, I’ll head upstairs to my office and start making some calls,” he said.
“And miss the climax to the flick?” Grolin said. “I plan on repeating it in its prurient entirety.”
Noriko looked at him with sharp irritation.
“Jeff, trust me,” she said. “You’ll have a much better time watching it alone.”
Roger Gordian sat alone, with his cell phone in his hand. With all the chaos at work, with all the emergencies he had to react to, plan for, juggle, and worry about, his home situation was threatening to overwhelm him.
He loved his wife.
His wife had left him.
It had been nearly three weeks, and she hadn’t come home, and she hadn’t called.
Sometimes he felt like marriage was a game in which women made the rules and the poor slobs who married them had to figure those rules out blindfolded.
He still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong.
The things he felt for the woman he married had never faltered from the moment he saw her. They’d changed, but only to become richer and deeper.
The better he came to know her, the more he loved her.
And the more he realized he would never solve the mystery of her.
In all the years since they’d been together, he’d never once felt more than a fleeting tug of attraction to the beautiful women who moved through the corridors of power. Like any man, he’d see a pretty woman and his basic reaction was immediate. But acting on those feelings was out of the question. No matter how beautiful they were, they weren’t Ashley.
She was as beautiful to him for who she was as for what she looked like.
He’d had more than enough sex, especially during his fighter jock days, to learn the difference between that momentary tug of attraction and the real thing.
Love. Commitment. Marriage.
He’d been scared to death of all of them, terrified he’d miss out on the fabulous smorgasbord of women in the world, until the day he met Ashley.
He learned the difference the first time they touched.
What he couldn’t understand was that she didn’t believe that he loved her still. Even more than he had when they first married. Why didn’t she understand that?
That wasn’t fair. Deep down, he knew what the problem was.
Time.
He’d had it to spend with her back when they were first starting out. The business was smaller then, the problems manageable.
Nowadays, it felt like the fate of the free world was impacted every time he made a decision. It was kind of hard to justify chucking it all and going home at the end of a business day when kids in Russia wouldn’t eat if he left things undone.
But had he ever taken the time to explain that to her?
It was time that he did.
He picked up his cell phone and dialed Ashley’s sister in San Francisco.
Even before her sister Ann handed her the telephone, Ashley Gordian knew by the look on her face that it was Roger. Nobody but her husband could bring that tight look of disapproval to her sister’s face with a simple greeting.
It had been like that ever since the beginning. Back then, Roger had been young, driven, and — by Ann’s standards — poor as a church mouse. Not nearly good enough for her baby sister. She’d been opposed to the marriage before she’d even met the man. All the respect, the acclaim, the financial success Roger had accumulated had never changed Ann’s mind. In her posh world, it was all too new to count.
But Ashley had taken one look at the burning intensity in Roger’s eyes and known she’d found her soulmate. And she’d been right. She’d married the man, not the pedigree, and she’d never regretted it. She loved Roger. In every way that a woman could love a man. And for the past twenty years she’d built her life around him. It wasn’t a sacrifice, despite what her sister said. He was such a good man, so caring about the world, and so fiercely determined to make it a better place. But that world had been stealing him from her, bit by bit, moment by moment.