A sob took hold of her, then another, and she began weeping openly. Lenny studied the paper clip in his hand, waiting as she gradually regained her composure.
“Mrs. Sullivan…”
“You can call me Mary.”
He looked at her. Saw that faint, sorrowful smile on lips wet with her spilled tears.
“Mary,” he said. “Your husband and I… we’ve been doing business a while now. Far’s our relationship goes, I feel I know him pretty well.” Lenny paused, slid the paper clip under one finger, over another. “I’ve asked myself if there’s anything he might’ve told me the other day, anything I noticed that seemed different than usual. The truth is, there wasn’t—”
“Please help me find out what’s happened to him,” she said all at once.
Her red-rimmed eyes meeting his own, clinging to his own.
Lenny remained quiet for a moment. His face showed surprise and confusion, and on the outside that was a somewhat authentic reaction. The problem being that it was another matter below the surface. In many respects, he didn’t consider himself quick on the uptake. Show him a thousand times where to lay down silverware in a standard table setting, or what food went in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer, he wouldn’t remember. Explain whether you were supposed to turn a screw clockwise or counterclockwise to loosen it, it would never sink into his brain. Figuring out how ordinary things worked defied him. But ordinary people were another story. He got their signals without too much difficulty. It would only take a single gesture to give him a full read on someone’s personality, a few words to deliver the message he or she was trying to put across to him.
Right now he knew just where Mary Sullivan was going, and suddenly felt too quick for his own good.
“I don’t understand,” he lied. “That is, how could I…”
She shook her head.
“I wasn’t talking about you alone, Lenny,” she said. “But the company you work for… UpLink International. It could help.”
Lenny stared at her. His sympathy notwithstanding, he really and truly didn’t like the turn their conversation had taken.
“Mrs. Sullivan… Mary… we’re a telecom,” he said. “We develop communications networks.”
“And other things, too. For the military, yes?”
“Well, sure. There are the defense contracts. I suppose it’s common knowledge Roger Gordian built our company on them. But that doesn’t give us any strings with—”
“I try to follow the news, keep up with the main stories,” she said. “None of us in this city will ever forget what happened a few years ago, that terrible time we went through. So many thousands of people killed by those maniacs for no reason. And I remember a report on TV, the program might have been 48 Hours…”
In fact it was 60 Minutes, Lenny thought without bothering to correct her.
“On that show they talked about the security team UpLink’s pulled together to keep its employees safe around the world,” she pressed on. “How it’s supposed to be the best. And the part that stuck with me, sticks to this day, is when the police commissioner was asked about Mr. Gordian helping our government find the terrorists who attacked us.”
Lenny didn’t need to be reminded, having played a relatively minor, tell-me-no-secrets-and-I’ll-ask-you-no-questions role in UpLink’s investigation and eventual pursuit of the conspirators in four separate countries. The boss had wanted it kept under wraps for a slew of reasons, as had the Feds, and the PC had obliged them all to the extent that he could. But then, maybe six months after the tragedy, a former aide at One Police Plaza gave a videotaped interview — his face an unrecognizable smudge on the screen, his voice electronically wound and stretched to a distorted pitch — in which he’d bared much of a classified department file on UpLink’s participation. That had put the commissioner in the hot seat. Rather than offer lame denials, he’d acknowledged the “debt of gratitude,” or some such, that New Yorkers and the nation in general owed Gordian and company for their patriotic actions. While his answers didn’t completely douse the fire under him, they kept the back of his pants from catching until the press scrambled off after the next headline.
Lenny sat gathering his thoughts. He knew he was about to take his cue from the commish and felt kind of lousy.
“Mary,” he said. “When our city got hit, all kinds of volunteers committed to picking us up. I know my boss pitched in, but couldn’t say how. The situation back then was so far from normal…”
Her eyes flashed, the green irises suddenly bright.
“I’m not trying to compare. Not in the way it might have sounded,” she said. “Pat’s only one man. His disappearing into thin air isn’t a crisis except for his family. But are you telling me it’s normal? Or not different enough…”
Lenny shook his head.
“You’re going through hell,” he said. “I realize that. But I’m a shipping officer. I work with freight forwards, import regulations, customs documents… I really don’t know what I’d do—”
“Anything you can,” Mary Sullivan said. Sounding composed, even resolute now. “It isn’t easy for me to come here and ask a favor of you, a person I’ve never met before. And I wouldn’t if I had somewhere else to turn.” She paused. “I once read, or heard somebody say, the missing are presumed guilty… that when they first drop out of sight, the police treat it like they’ve run off on their own, and wait too long before they start looking for them. You can see what they’re thinking on their faces, tell by their voices. Why waste manpower on an angry wife, or a husband who loses it when the charge cards get run up too high?”
Or who decides he feels like a week of fun and games at the Mustang Ranch, Lenny thought.
He hesitated, returned to playing with his paper clip. He felt a load of compassion for the woman sitting across from him. He liked her husband, thought he was a nice guy, and sincerely hoped he came back to her okay. But it was not his responsibility. She was asking him to become involved in something that was none of his affair. Moreover, she was asking him to ask UpLink’s security division to get involved. They would want no part of a missing persons investigation unrelated to their duties on behalf of company interests… as he was sure to be reminded if he brought the matter to their attention. And knowing the person he’d have to approach, it would be a snub bordering on ridicule. He had no juice with her. Or close to none. And less than he’d had before at the main office in San Jose, what with all the changes going on there lately. Far too much was being expected of him, and he would have to lay that out to Mary Sullivan as delicately as possible.
He looked down at the clip in his hands. Looked up at her.
And before he could say anything heard a pair of voices in his head, his own and another’s, a startlingly clear auditory transmission bursting across a quarter century of time: