His appearance caught Marissa by surprise. For whatever reason — his posture, or the way he was dressed, or maybe because of that oversized two-tone beer cooler — she had assumed he would be a youngish man, but the face under the bill of his cap was far from youthful. In fact it was incredibly ancient. Lined and wrinkled, its cheeks sagging in loose folds of flesh, the slits of its eyes peering at her from above a vulturous nose and scowling lips, it was also infinitely unpleasant…
Then Marissa noticed what he was holding in his right hand. What he’d drawn out of the cooler, keeping it briefly hidden from sight by his body as he turned. And all at once her surprised reaction jolted up to one of surpassing shock and fear.
Not at any point in the waking nightmare to come would Marissa be certain whether she realized the man was wearing a mask before she actually saw his weapon, what might have been an Uzi, or something like one. But she knew what was happening the instant she did see it, knew it was her fault, all hers… and knew that none of the protective structures she’d built to contain her orderly little world had kept the truth from breaking through at last.
The man raised his gun in front of him, and then the rear doors of the station wagon were flying open, and more men were exiting both sides, three of them spilling from the doors, sprinting across the sand toward her and Felipe with miniature submachine guns also in their hands and obvious disguises pulled over their heads — a bearded pirate, a devil’s head, a grinning skull.
Tears began to flood Marissa’s eyes, further distorting the grotesque Halloween shop faces, but she held them back, checking them almost on reflex, refusing to succumb to panic. This was a public beach, hadn’t that been what she’d insisted? A public beach, where any break in the quiet would stand out. Her voice would carry, and someone might be close enough to hear her scream. Driving, walking, on a bicycle. Close enough to hear.
Make some noise, she demanded of herself. Come on, make some noise, scream your head off—
But it was too late, the men from the wagon were on her in a flash, surrounding her, a hand clapping over her mouth to stifle her rising cry for help. “Entra aqui! A prisa!” the one with the old man mask shouted to the others in Spanish, telling them to hurry up. And an instant later she was grabbed by the arms and shoulders and hustled toward the car with the metal bore of a gun sticking into her back. Alongside her, and then slightly ahead of her, Felipe was also jostled forward at gunpoint, stumbling a little as they pushed him toward one of the wagon’s open back doors.
He turned his head toward her, eyes wide, and started to call out her name, but was punched hard across the face by the man in the pirate mask before it could fully escape his lips.
They shoved Felipe into the rear of the station wagon as his legs crumpled underneath him, and moments later jammed Marissa through the same door, a gunman climbing into the backseat on either side of them, the others rushing around into the front.
This is my fault, she thought again mutely. It’s true, it’s my fault, I should have known.
And then the wagon’s motor came to life, and Marissa was jerked back in her seat as it kicked into reverse, cut a sharp turn away from the beach, and went speeding off in a cloud of spun-up sand.
“Trinidad,” Megan Breen said to Nimec.
“What?”
“And Tobago,” Megan said. “With Annie.”
“Huh?”
“Annie, your lovely and beloved wife.” She regarded him across her desk with mild amusement. “The place I mentioned… on Tobago, not Trinidad… is called Rayos del Sol. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
Nimec sat with a blank expression on his face.
“Testing one-two-three, Pete,” Megan said, and pointed to her ear. “Can you read me, or is it cochlear implant time?”
Nimec frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about your hearing. I’ve noticed it seems to conk out whenever I ask you to do something that conflicts with plans you’ve already locked in on.”
His frown deepened.
“I sat here listening to your Caribbean project update for half an hour,” he said. “You want me to run every detail back to you, I’ll be glad to oblige.”
“Which I guess would make your deafness selective.”
Nimec crossed his hands in a time-out gesture.
“We going to talk straight?” he said.
“I’d be peachy with that.”
“I’m not getting shipped out to Trinidad. Not with Ricci on our front burner.”
“Then we’ll shift burners.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“To him or us?” Megan said.
Nimec shrugged.
“Both, I suppose,” he said. “Our lead field op being on indefinite suspension is the kind of thing that leaves everybody betwixt and between. UpLink’s stuck without a replacement, Ricci can’t move on with his life.”
She looked at him, her large, intelligent green eyes holding steady on his face. Nimec braced for a difficult contest. He’d been in this spot with Meg before, or in similar spots, and didn’t see any easy give in her right now.
“I’m prepared to occupy a solitary corner of limbo for a while,” she said. “In a sense, we’ve been in it for over a month. Tom Ricci’s got us in a bind with all three branches of government and every major law-enforcement agency you can name. Even our best friends at the Pentagon have started to distance themselves, which puts our pending defense contracts at risk. And you know the table’s set for us to become the target of a public furor the moment any information about his one-man road show on the East Coast is declassified.”
“Figure the people whose lives he saved from those terrorists might be a few million exceptions to popular opinion.”
“And if it had gone the other way, I don’t know that even God in all his mercy could forgive us,” Megan said. “Ricci’s secretive actions could as easily have made those people casualties, Pete. But that’s over and done. He took us out of the decision-making loop by going it alone. Now it’s his turn to wait outside it while we deal with the consequences.” Megan paused. “You need some physical and mental distance from San Jose. A chance to order your thoughts before making a comfortable decision on whether he stays or goes.”
Nimec held his silence. Behind Megan, her office window gave a curiously smog-bleared view of Mount Hamilton away to the north. He remembered its rugged flank as everlastingly vivid and imposing from Roger Gordian’s office, which was just catercorner up the hall. But then, Meg’s window was just that, a window. Gord’s occupied an entire side of the room from floor to ceiling… really, it might be considered a glass wall. With that much light pouring through, Nimec supposed you would see well into the distance regardless of hazy environmental conditions. Anyway, it was impossible to make comparisons. And unfair. Gord was more or less retired. Megan had gotten a deserved promotion in rank to CEO and was more or less in charge of UpLink International’s corporate affairs. The outlook from her office was the one Nimec had here before his eyes these days, and it remained consistent with the view he’d always appreciated next door. How could Meg be blamed if it wasn’t as impressively crystal clear?
The simple fact was that, little by little, things had changed. And he’d have to accept it.
“Bottom line,” he said after a moment, “you’re telling me I need a vacation.”
Megan shook her head.
“Wrong,” she said. “Though I was afraid you’d see things that way.”