Unacceptable Risk sw-2 Read online

  Baptiste went and purchased a card with one hundred minutes of long-distance talk time. He then walked his route through the Belleville church and nodded at the priest as he walked down the side of the main sanctuary. Once out of the church, and certain he wasn't being followed, he went down a back alley and took a different route than usual to the small cafe where he had previously used the phone. Unusually concerned, he passed this phone, went down the street a block and into a video place, where he browsed around before asking his daughter's friend, who worked there, if he might use the phone. As he hoped, he was shown to the back office, where he closed the door. He punched in the number on the card and then the pin number and then the overseas code for the United States followed by the number. He assumed he was calling a recently rented cell phone.

  "This is Jean-Baptiste Sourriaux," he said when a man answered.

  "I am 'Traveler' and I will relay your conversation with Mr. Gaudet." The man had no discernible accent and he spoke quickly, as if from a script.

  "He doesn't want voiceprints, I take it."

  "That is right."

  "I want a meeting."

  "We anticipated that. However, it will occur on our terms."

  "What are those terms?"

  "It will take place in an airplane. You will bring your U.S. double agent. The one working with Sam. We will tell you where to go and you will board a jet and we will leave you off at a place of our choosing. Details through Benoit."

  "That will be acceptable if I can be sure of my safe re turn."

  "That will not be possible. You will have to trust in our greed and determine that we will be richer by bringing you back safely. After all, a French security officer is of no use to us."

  Chapter 12

  The Great Spirit gives the flowering plants to teach the lesser spirits the festival of new beginnings.

  — Tilok proverb

  The prospects of female companionship in the Arab state of Quatram were abysmal, so Gaudet imported women. He paid them fairly and found replacements readily for those he hurt more than they wanted to be hurt. Killing the biggest complainers was a program that ensured good referrals and easy replacements. None was as good as Benoit Moreau had been, and that wouldn't change. But Gaudet still sought tall and supple women who reminded him of Benoit.

  New York City was another matter entirely. But he could not afford to distract himself even for a few minutes now, which was a pity because there were plenty of women.

  Trotsky wore some stubble, which was unusual, and kept quiet, which was normal, waiting for Gaudet to speak.

  Gaudet sipped an unsweetened double espresso.

  "When all this is over, I'll need a new place. Somewhere they will never expect me-a civilized part of the world. I've had my fill of Quatram."

  "Maybe a nice neighborhood in Middle America."

  "I'm not into potlucks."

  The phone rang and Trotsky took it.

  "They want to know if they can buy more art in Spain. They are obviously tired of the smuggling business."

  "The store makes money?"

  "Seems to."

  "Let them, but control it. And put that business on the 'keep' list."

  Two or three more calls came in during the next twenty minutes.

  "You are growing a small empire," Trotsky said.

  "I started with nothing but my bare fists, working for shit." Gaudet took his feet off the hotel coffee table. "Let's call them."

  In seconds Trotsky had the Quatram office on the line.

  "Get me 'Big Mohammed,' " Gaudet said, referring to the chief of the computer men. Big Mohammed was a short, balding man named Wilbur Hogan. With a noticeable paunch, Hogan was the type who liked big silver belt buckles on his blue jeans. He was divorced and couldn't find a girlfriend in Texas, so Gaudet had hired him one. Although the first and second girls didn't take, the third seemed to be sticking around and Big Mohammed seemed content living in Quatram, for the moment.

  Gaudet sipped his espresso while the chief went to find Big Mohammed. It took five minutes.

  "Our clients are pushing the timetable."

  "Everything seems to be pushing the timetable," Big Mohammed drawled in his dreadful Texas accent.

  "Do you have the time from release to complete invasion?"

  "About two hours-maybe one. Fifty million Windows- based computers and a few million VN-based computers."

  "How about the FAA?"

  "We will get on the network, but not through the Internet. You know the old slogan: 'Crispy on the outside, but a gooey, soft center on the inside.' Cordyceps will overload the system and bring it to a halt."

  "You don't know how long?"

  "If it hits the hardware like I think it will, we're talking weeks, maybe months. Weeks for sure."

  "Electrical utilities?"

  "Some. Rolling blackouts all over the place."

  "I'm counting on the phones. Especially long-distance infrastructure."

  "Again I'll predict a significant impact. It will not all be down. But Americans will be writing plenty of letters. A crimp in the e-mail."

  "Railroads?"

  "Down by thirty-five percent. Just a guess."

  "Pipelines?"

  "Don't know. Not sure how tech-dependent they are. But don't worry. The stock markets are gonna crash, no doubt about it."

  "Have we any chance of getting command and control?"

  "Nothing's changed there. They'll still have full military capability, except to the extent that domestic chaos cripples it."

  Gaudet hung up without another word and turned to Trotsky. "Make sure our investors aren't the only ones with put options. I want plenty, and well disguised."

  "I've been buying for weeks." Trotsky seemed offended.

  Gaudet didn't respond to that comment. He checked his watch. "How long?"

  "They're strolling. How long we don't know."

  "I want to watch the bastard die."

  "I think that is a bad idea."

  "I don't give a shit."

  "Remote revenge is underrated." Trotsky smiled again. Twice in a day. "Think of it as a private jubilation of the imagination."

  Grady called Sam, determined that she would go alone with Michael to get the journals and equally determined that she would put up a fight as necessary. There was no way Sam would agree and the odds of convincing him had to be near zero. In order to make the call, she walked down the street because she wasn't going to argue with Sam in front of Michael. They weren't far from the middle of Manhattan and there were plenty of people on the street. She supposed the thing that bothered her the most was that if he said no, she wouldn't go. The cabbie didn't seem to mind stopping as long as he had his meter running.

  "Sam, we have to talk about something."

  "I can always tell when you're loaded for bear." Grady tapped her foot for a moment and didn't say anything. It pissed her off that he had already put her in a neat, little box. It was the rebellious-brat-employee box.

  "I want to go very low profile with Michael and pick up his journals. It's either that or he goes alone."

  "You think it's a good idea?"

  "It's better that I go than nobody goes. He needs a guide in this country. Surely, you've noticed that."

  "If you want to, go ahead. Tell Yodo what you want."

  "I want to pick them up halfway between Manhattan and Ithaca. Somewhere remote. And then I want Michael to lock the journals away in a vault when we get back."

  "Good plan. Jill can arrange for the vault."

  "Anything else?" she asked, unable to believe his re sponse.

  "Make a copy of the 1998 journal and courier it to the office. Jill can provide the courier. Also make copies of all the journals and have them locked somewhere else, where only Michael can get them. Jill could probably help you with that as well."

  "Sam, are you feeling okay?"

  "You're grown-up now. And that means I have to be will ing to let you die."

  Grady froze
up when he said that. "You never said anything like that before."

  "I respect you and, I think, to a certain degree you can act like a real contract agent. I'm not always going to be there to yank your butt from the jaws of defeat."

  "This is one hell of a cold fatherly talk." Then she laughed because she didn't know what else to do.

  " 'Treat every failure as a new beginning.' My mother said that. I believe in you."

  Grady walked back down the sidewalk, feeling frightened… and proud.

  "If we hurry, we can be back in time for lunch tomorrow," she said to Michael.

  "I already called Rebecca and told her the meeting would have to be put off-maybe for a few days. She was very disappointed, but I have to make it up to her by taking her hik ing in the California mountains. That woman is a negotiator."

  Yodo came walking toward them. Obviously, he had already talked to Sam.

  "Good luck." He held out his hand and Grady shook it.

  "What'll you be, a pallbearer?" Grady smiled.

  Sam and Anna walked along the edge of Central Park toward the Plaza Hotel. Tonight he had a blond handlebar mustache and blond hair with eyebrows to match and wore a beret. Anna wore a Snoopy hat complete with earflaps. Looking at her, a person would never think celebrity. The driver of a horse-drawn carriage shivered in the autumn cold and snubbed his cigarette under a Red Wing boot. Sam could tell that Anna wanted to take a ride through the city. The horse pawed the pavement, maybe bored, maybe pissed off. Since the horse's ears were forward, Sam banked on bored and ready to go.

  "Take us on a thirty-minute round," Sam said.

  In the carriage was a heavy blanket. Sam pulled it over them. He wanted to think, and it didn't surprise him that Anna knew his mood. Under the blanket she put her hand on his arm and looked off at the people and shops as they rode down Fifth Avenue. Sam knew he was at a crossroads in his life. There were decisions made at forty-two that could not be made at sixty-two. There were choices a man could re gret, some irreversible, and he didn't want to make one of those.

  He thought about his grandfather and a talk they once had. Sam had been trying to decide about a young woman in his neighborhood who wanted to go away to college, but she had become so infatuated with Sam that she was losing her will to leave home. Sam wanted her to stay because he wanted to hang out with her, but at the same time he be lieved that for her own sake she should leave and go to school and get a career. It was a struggle.

  "I want to tell you a story," he said to Anna. "A story my grandfather told to me."

  "Shoot."

  "It may be a little corny." Sam grinned.

  "Corny is good when you're pregnant. You have to make your thinking more basic."

  "Back before my grandfather's time, the Tiloks had a very old chief. One tooth left in his head just before he died. Black Hawk. Called himself Jones to the whites. Grandfather had a painting of him and talked about how he kept the tribe from violence."

  "I suppose the tooth part is apropos of nothing but a lack of dentistry," Anna joked.

  Sam loved her sense of humor.

  "So, Black Hawk was confronted with a choice of two men to be his successor. One was Charles Curtis, the other Andrew Wiley. Wiley had many enemies. He was arrogant and contentious, but also strong and impressive, and men followed him. Nobody could beat him in wrestling. Curtis was a good planner; he could read and write and he helped the widows. And he understood growing crops. He never talked of gaming revenge on the whites-unlike Wiley, who doted on the fantasy.

  "Black Hawk needed to choose one of the two men. If he chose Wiley, the young men would be happy, at least most of them. There were a few young men, those more educated in the white man's ways, who wanted Curtis and would have nothing of Wiley. These men tended to live off the reserva tion. In his heart Black Hawk knew that for the future, living with the white man and abiding by his laws, Curtis was the best choice for the people. But on his deathbed the chief wanted also to please the young men.

  "Black Hawk devised a test question to determine the best man for the job: 'Suppose the white man's government came to the village and wanted to buy a piece of the reservation for very little money. Suppose the money was so little and the land was so great that the tribe might not survive, so that the white man was stealing our future. Suppose there were two ideas. One idea was for the chief to starve himself and to tell the white man's newspaper of the injustice. The other was for the strongest braves to take a hostage, a power ful white man in the government who was known to be traveling in the area. What would you do?'

  "Wiley was quick to answer: 'The men would sneak out at night and at daybreak, in the gray of the morning, they would take the government man and blindfold him so that he could not recognize them; then they would hide him in the mountains, where no one could find him. They would offer next to negotiate for their land and say nothing of the gov ernment man or his whereabouts. If they could not change the mind of the white men in the negotiation, they would at least kill their hostage and they would take more government men in the night and kill them as well, and they would have some retribution for their loss.'

  "This answer pleased the young men.

  "Curtis gave his answer 'I would go out alone in the night. I would sneak up to the government man's house. If possible, even on the threshold or even inside. At first light I would show myself. I would ask to speak with the govern ment man in front of the man who writes newspapers. I would tell him that I had come to prevent violence and to stop an injustice. I would tell him that I would take no food until the matter was resolved so that the Tiloks could survive.'

  "Wiley scoffed, or so the story goes. He says: 'But they would ignore you and laugh or even put you in chains and then the people would be without a leader.'

  "Curtis argued: 'That is where you are wrong. If they put me in chains or even killed me, the people would have a greater leader. Because a leader is a man who shows the way. You cannot kill the white men and go unpunished and it is foolish to try.'

  "Wiley figured he had him. Turning to the crowd, he said: 'So you would give up without a fight.'

  "And this was Curtis's answer: 'But that is only me,' he said. 'If they killed me, or put me in chains or merely ig nored me and ignored my plea, the village could make a new plan. Perhaps another man could come and another. I would trade my life for a chance to buy peace for the people and I would teach others to do the same.'

  "Wiley's view of the world was essentially that the chief must survive because he viewed the tribe as an extension of himself and saw himself as at the center of value. Curtis, on the other hand, saw himself as only one man and saw that there might be good in giving himself for something greater than himself. He saw value in other places. 'Every person has a Wiley and a Curtis inside them,' Grandfather said. 'They are always with us.' Regarding that girlfriend of mine, Grandfather said that my Wiley and my Curtis were in a struggle for my soul.

  "I think that's what is happening now. There is something epic about a child-a small person with his whole life in front of him. A mind that a man could nurture and teach. But with the child would come diapers, whining, parent-teacher conferences." He decided he'd said enough and kissed her on the lips.

  "What did you do?"

  "Told the girl to go to college. She met a man and fell in love. I know I never would have married her."

  "There are all those future potential girlfriends of Sam," Anna began, "or Robert, or whoever. Beautiful women. Beaches full of them, malls full of them, on the sidewalk, in the restaurants, tending their gardens, going about life, every one of them an extraordinary adventure and you would be forfeiting all of that. I know, Sam. I know how it is."

  "But there is that child. A child that is ours together. And there is you."

  He kissed her again, and this time she kissed back. People were watching, so they cooled it and went back to playing under the blanket.

  He looked in her eyes and saw a calm certainty. Oddly, he was both
pleased and distressed that she looked so wise. Still, he thought he should make things plain and give his lit tle talk.

  "I've decided."

  "Yes?"

  "I want to marry you." He paused. "So, I'm asking if you will be my wife."

  "I love you." She began kissing him anew despite the onlookers. "You will marry me in public?"

  "In Times Square, if you want."

  "I accept. Not the Times Square part. The rest."

  "I think we should become a family. I'll drop the anonymous routine."

  "Can we do the honeymoon before the marriage?"

  "It's a little backward, but sure. Did I surprise you?"

  "I'm thrilled. And happy. Happier than I have ever been," Anna confessed.

  "When did you know?"

  "When you told me, of course."

  "Come on. I could see it in your eyes."

  "Well…"

  "Come on…"

  "I was pretty sure when I saw the pink spot on the little tester strip that says 'Sam has one in the oven.'”

  Sam nodded.

  "You remember when we met?" she asked.

  "How could I forget?"

  "When I saw that sailboat and a guy in the raffia hat, I knew even then that you were coming for me to haul my ass out of the Devil's Gate. And when I jumped overboard, I knew you would follow. And when I told you that I had to have your help with my brother, I was pretty sure that you would do it. And the first time we made love…"

  "You're an incurable romantic."

  "Okay, so when do you think I knew?"

  "Some things dawn on us a little bit at a time."

  When she cried, he told himself that it was going to be like this with all the pregnancy hormones and the lactation and the ligaments turning rubbery and all the other transfor mations that went along with this business of making a baby. Since there were pills for erections and pills for anxiety and pills for depression and pills for sleeping, Sam wondered if there might be a pregnancy pill. Better yet, a relationship pill for nervous Indians.