“You want bop, there’s Ornithology.”
“I’ll do it with Dizzy if you’ll give me Anthropology.”
For a second Lenny was rocked by those words from the distant past, warped back to the fluke encounter that had reversed the steady downward slide of his life. It hadn’t seemed that way to him then, but he’d been at the edge. The very brink of a dark someplace he would surely have fallen into if one man hadn’t held out a line for him to grab.
Damn it, he thought. Damn that stinking memory. Why did it have to come to him now?
Lenny sat in silence a brief while longer, feeling as if he needed to catch his breath. Then he dropped the paper clip into the tray where it belonged.
“No promises, Mary,” he said. “But I’ll see if I can’t get you some answers.”
“Forget it,” Noriko Cousins said without looking up from behind her computer screen.
Lenny didn’t say anything. That had been just the response he’d expected.
“No way,” Noriko added.
Lenny was silent. She seemed inclined to give her rejection further embellishment, and he figured he’d wait for it before mounting his comeback.
“There’s isn’t a chance I’m about to get us embroiled in a situation that has absolutely zero bearing on our corporate interests,” Noriko said. “If this woman who came to see you needs somebody to sniff out her wayward spouse, she can check the Yellow Pages for bedroom-peeping gumshoes.”
Lenny stood facing her desk with his hands in the pockets of his tweed overcoat, uncertain whether the chill he felt was a result of her brusque reception, the low temperature in the room, or his long walk down to Hudson Street from his midtown office. Hudson was a bitter, blustering channel of wind in January. This building, a converted nineteenth-century meat-packing factory, remained full of cold, slippery drafts that would seep through its redbrick facing despite myriad layers of interior renovation. And Noriko tended to keep the thermostat way down for inexplicable reasons of her own. So maybe it was the physical environment making him want to shake off icicles. But Lenny hadn’t found it quite so inhospitable when Tony Barnhart had been running things here at the local headquarters of Sword — the official tag for UpLink’s intelligence, security, and crisis-control arm, and a clever allusion to the old legend of Alexander of Macedonia undoing the supposedly undoable Gordian knot with a swift, sure stroke of his blade. Roger Gordian, Gordian knot, decisive and pragmatic solutions to tough problems, whack!
Lenny took a deep breath. He had liked Barnhart exponentially more than Noriko Cousins, who’d succeeded him as section chief after wounds he suffered in a gunfight with some lowlife Russian hoods had sent him into early retirement. But the plain truth was that Lenny never felt quite at ease around any Sword personnel. It was their collective attitude, mostly. He could tolerate some remoteness given the perilous nature of their work, safeguarding the lives of UpLink employees in hot spots around the world… and probably an untold number of people who knew nothing about UpLink. Given, also, that they were culled from law-enforcement, covert intelligence, and military special operations groups and thus conditioned to secrecy through years of training and experience. Lenny got that without a problem, yo comprendo todo y más señoritas y señores. And yet Noriko was a case apart from the rest. In his opinion she had raised close-mouthed, standoffish impenetrability to a new level.
“Look, I didn’t say I’m in love with the idea of getting mixed up in this whole thing,” he said.
“Good, great.”
“For that matter, I wouldn’t dream of having us stick our noses in a situation with no connection to UpLink.”
Her brown Eurasian eyes remaining on the screen, Noriko swished a hand toward the door in an absent gesture of dismissal.
“It’s wonderful we agree—”
“Except in this case it happens there is one,” Lenny said.
She finally glanced up at him. Tall, slender, athletic, her shoulder-length black hair gelled and tousled around symmetrically fine features, she wore a body-hugging black sweater, black leather miniskirt, black tights, and high-shaft black leather boots for a total effect Lenny had to admit was a draw to the eyes. Still, the good looks didn’t nearly compensate for her brass.
“I hope you aren’t going to tell me it’s because we buy components from this Patrick Mulligan—”
“Sullivan,” Lenny said.
“Right, excuse me,” Noriko said. “But if that’s your rationale, you might as well make UpLink responsible for the friendly men and women who sell us light bulbs, keep us in bathroom supplies, and stock our hallway vending machines with bags of potato chips and chocolate kisses.”
Lenny shook his head.
“Pat’s a salesman for the Kiran Group. And we’re probably his biggest account, since we lay out maybe five million bucks a year to Kiran for—”
“Synthetic ruby, I know…”
“Laboratory-cultivated sapphire,” Lenny said. “Sapphires and rubies are the same mineral. Corundum. The difference is their crystallization pattern. And their properties. It’s why we use one and not the other in our laser equipment.”
Noriko looked at him.
“I stand corrected again,” she said. “I also still don’t see any logical reason why that makes Mull… ah, Sullivan, our concern.”
Lenny guessed he didn’t either. But it was his pledge to Sullivan’s wife that he’d make a go of things, not logic, that had propelled him down here to SoHo on his lunch break.
“I’m busy, Lenny,” Noriko said now. “What’s your point? The condensed version, please.”
Lenny shrugged his shoulders.
“Just that we’re talking about somebody with ties to our core operations, not the Hershey’s chocolate guy,” he improvised. “It isn’t my job to fill in the blanks.”
“And how does it follow that it’s mine?”
Lenny shrugged a second time, stuck for a persuasive reply. Trying to get past the interference she threw up was like having to dance between raindrops.
Noriko kept looking at him, her expression openly scornful.
“Six months ago the Kiran Group was bought by Armbright Industries, a multinational corporation that happens to be our chief competitor in a dozen areas of tech development,” she said. “Armbright has its own internal security to look after its employees.”
“Their security isn’t Sword by a longshot.”
“Not my problem,” Noriko said. “Let them allocate a heftier slice of their budget to the division. They’ve mimicked us in every other way.”
Lenny felt swamped with futility. He hated talking to her. Hated it.
“You’re really catching me on a hectic afternoon,” she said. “Is there anything else you want me to consider before we wrap up?”
This time Lenny guessed he might have had an answer, but it stalled short of his lips. What was he supposed to tell her? That he’d related to Mary Sullivan’s background without ever asking a word about it, her sorrowful but determined green eyes stirring memories that hadn’t occurred to him in years?
“No, nothing else,” he said at last. “I’m done.”
“Okay,” Noriko said with flat disinterest. “Be well, Lenny.”
“Yup. I’ll see myself out.”
Noriko Cousins returned her eyes to the computer screen, both hands on the keyboard even before he left her office.
No sooner had the door closed behind Lenny than her clacking stopped.