He paused a moment. “Are you still following, Eduardo?”
Eduardo nodded agitatedly again.
DeVane’s eyes bored into him with such awful, palpable force he thought his knees would finally give out.
“Open your mouth and answer me,” he said. His expression was brittle. “Find that much strength.”
Sick, dizzy, Eduardo again struggled to speak. He knew that he was standing at the brink of Hell, and if his silence were perceived as defiance, he was finished.
“Yes,” he said in a faint, cracked voice. “I–I understand.”
DeVane sat back in his chair and put his fingers together in a steeple again, resuming the relaxed, self-assured posture in which Eduardo had first seen him.
“Good,” he said. “Then you should finally understand something else. I am here, now, as a gesture of respect for Vicente, for whom I know your punishment will be difficult. Were it not for him, it would have been unworthy of my attendance. I would have ordered it done from the comfort of my home, and devoted no more thought to it than I do to blinking my eyes.”
With that, he looked at Kuhl, who had turned partially in his direction. There was an unspoken interaction between them — a brief meeting of their gazes, barely perceptible nods.
Then Kuhl reached back around his right hip and pulled something from his wide leather belt. Squinting in the semidarkness, Eduardo could see that it was some sort of wooden club or nightstick.
He looked beseechingly at DeVane, but he was staring at his own hands as if contemplating some unrelated matter. Beside him, Vicente sat with his head still lowered.
Kuhl stepped toward him, his hand gripping the stick.
“Please,” Eduardo said. He cowered backward, came up against Ramon’s solid body and the unyielding gun-metal pressed to his neck. “Please.”
Kuhl was on him an instant later. Even as Eduardo raised his hands in defense, Kuhl struck a sharp, precise blow to his right arm with the end of the stick. His wrist bone broke free of the long bones of his forearm with a clean and audible snap. Kuhl swiftly brought the stick to the right and down again between Eduardo’s neck and collarbone, then swung it across his middle. Eduardo simultaneously crumpled to his knees and vomited on himself.
Kuhl hit him three more times with the stick, smashing his nose with one blow, then striking him twice in the head. Eduardo collapsed further, curling his knees up into his chest. Blood gushed from his pulverized nose onto the rough concrete floor.
His eyes rolled blearily upward. He could see Kuhl standing above him, holding the stick in a vertical position, pulling at its upper end. And then the stick’s handle detached and the long length of a knife blade slid from inside its bottom segment.
Kuhl stood there without expression, the knife in his right hand and the remaining portion of the stick in his left, looking as if he were about to plunge the blade into Eduardo’s body. But instead he turned and passed it to someone who had come up beside him.
Eduardo shifted his head as far as he could, saw the man standing next to Kuhl, through a haze of pain, and released a low, tormented groan.
Vicente stared down at his nephew a moment, his eyes solemn, the lines around his mouth deepening. Then he knelt over him with the knife and sliced its edge across his throat to deliver the coup de grace.
Eduardo jerked, made a gurgling noise, and expired.
Rising, the old man gave the weapon back to Kuhl, turned toward DeVane, and bowed his head a little.
“I am sorry for your loss, dear friend,” DeVane said gently.
Vicente nodded again but remained where he stood.
DeVane rose from his chair as Kuhl approached him, the knife dripping in his hand.
“Have Vicente driven out of here so the others can scrape that garbage off the floor,” he said. “The Albanians have come through for us, and you and I have matters of vital importance to discuss.”
ELEVEN
“Any word on Thibodeau?” Gordian asked.
“He’s still in ICU, but his condition’s been upgraded from critical to serious,” Nimec said. “The doctors are encouraged. They say he’s alert. Also told me he’s already getting on their nerves.”
“How so?”
“Asking a lot of questions.”
“Good sign.”
“And demanding they find him a Stetson.”
“Even better.”
“Exactly my thought.”
“Either of you care to explain?” Megan said. “About the Stetson, I mean.”
Gordian looked at her. “Thibodeau was Air Cav in Vietnam. It was their tradition to wear Stetsons as part of their military wardrobe when they received awards and decorations. Still is, I think.”
“Ah,” Megan said. “So he’s presumably of a mind that there’s something to celebrate.”
Gordian nodded.
They were in a sub-basement meeting room at UpLink’s corporate HQ that looked much like any other in the building — beige carpet, oval conference table, recessed fluorescents — but differed from them in many important respects. The most apparent to the handful of top-tier executives permitted access were the electronic security panels outside the door incorporating voice-activated key-code software and retina-fingerprint scans, and the total absence of windows once they got inside.
The most substantive differences involved the interstitial matrix of comint technology that had been subtly worked into the room’s design and construction. Layers of two-foot-thick concrete and acoustical paneling soundproofed its walls to human ears. Steel reinforcements, white-noise generators, and other counter-surveillance systems had been imbedded within them to block the tapping of conversations and electronic communications. Adding to security were twice-weekly sweeps for bugs, and spectrum and X-ray scans of all electronic equipment coming into or out of the room. While continual advancements in eavesdropping technology made it unrealistic to guarantee that any space on earth was strongboxed against droops—a word meaning “dirty rotten snoops” coined by UpLink’s risk-assessment man, Vince Scull — its occupants could feel a comfortable degree of assurance in the inviolability of their discussions.
These occupants presently being limited to Gordian, Nimec, and Megan Breen, who had convened in this high-tech sanctum sanctorum to see what they could make of Brazil.
“Thibodeau’s doctors mention the sort of questions he’s been asking?” Gordian said now.
“No, but Cody did. He’s the guy Rollie insisted on talking to,” Nimec said. “It’s pretty much as you’d expect. Who, what, why. And how the invaders knew as much about our perimeter security and grounds plan as they did.”
“The answer to the last part seems painfully obvious.”
“A mole,” Megan said.
“Or moles,” Nimec added.
“Anybody look good for it?” Gordian asked.
“Not yet, and I expect it’ll take a while before we find solid pointers,” Nimec said. “There’s no evidence our internal defenses were compromised in the sense of systems shutdowns or restricted databases being hacked. The reconnaissance that was gathered wouldn’t have required a high level of clearance, just a familiarity with the complex and the time and incentive to do a thorough job of mapping it out. My guess is there are over a thousand administrative, R&D, production, building construction, medical, maintenance, and even kitchen staffers who could’ve provided the information.”