Please come to my suite on the penthouse floor as soon as is convenient. Present this to the security guard at the elevator.
Marissa Gilder
* * *
Meanwhile, in an apartment suite on Embarcadero that had been rented by visiting clients of the Zodiac Commercial Bank, Lee Mullen was taking a call from a henchman who had spotted Solomon Leppo coming out of the Oasis hotel earlier and followed him to an address in Gorky, where he was still ensconced.
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” Mullen instructed. “I’ll send more of the guys over. If he makes a move before they get there, call me.”
“Wait.” Henry Balmer, who happened to be with Mullen, raised a cautioning hand. “You’ve got Leppo now any time you want him. But Thane might not still be out there in the desert—especially after that fiasco yesterday. If he’s back here, Leppo could lead us to him.”
Mullen held his reaction to returning a sour look. “Nobody crosses me and walks,” he said, repeating what had become his regular theme lately. “Thane is your problem. Of course he’s still out in the desert. You weren’t there. Why else would they be hiding behind all that artillery that nearly blew us away?”
“You don’t know that,” Balmer retorted. “Thane is also the problem of the people who are paying you. A big problem. Your job is to cover all bases. I don’t think they’d like it if they found you’d let someone who crossed them walk.”
Mullen considered the point darkly, then turned back to the screen.
“Don’t pick him up yet,” he told the caller. “Just keep a tight tail on him for now. We need to see where he goes.”
“Gotcha,” the caller confirmed.
19
Marissa Gilder was curvy, bouncy, and petite, with round blue eyes that seemed practiced in widening to convey awe, wonder, or simply an intensity of fixation that constituted her means of ensuring the attention and special treatment that she was accustomed to. Except that, in this instance, perhaps, the awe that she was directing in Kieran’s direction was more solidly grounded and not just contrived as a manipulative device. Her hair was blond, shoulder-length, and bouncy like her person, with a reflective tint that gave it a mobile golden sheen. Her face lived up to the images that the media had made popular: saucily pretty with an upturned nose, pouty mouth, rounded cheeks tapering to a button chin, all no doubt coaxed to a high point of subtly enhanced sensuousness and allurement by the coordinated efforts of an expensively retained team of beauticians and stylists. She received Kieran in a loose, sleeveless cream dress with gold spangles, suitably adorned with an exposition of gold rings, bracelets, necklace, and a hair comb.
The suite itself was a riot of flowers, cards, gifts on display, and unopened packages, with trays of candies and tidbits, a selection of cold snacks, and a corner bar for visitors in the suite’s outer room. Hotel staff bustled in and out at intervals, bringing clothes to already bulging closets and removing others for packing in anticipation of departure that evening. Two Zorken security men in dark suits sat in the outer room, keeping a wary eye on Kieran through the open doorway. He had been checked for weapons on arrival, before being brought into Marissa’s presence. Even so, she sat at a greater distance back from him than would have been normal for the circumstances, in the center of a couch at the far end of a low table. So far, she had followed his words with the raptness of somebody who has wandered for a lifetime, finally finding her guru. She was stunned by his awareness of events that had transpired between herself and her father, faraway on Asgard, that very morning. The plague that Kieran had named, although unknown to any of the medical authorities that had been consulted, had been described identically by another savant out in the desert with the scientific group that the Zorken people had evicted. Kieran replied modestly that obviously the same truth would manifest itself to everyone in touch with ultimate reality.
By this time, Marissa had recovered from her initial display of wonder. How much of it was genuine, and how much a Socratic way of drawing people out, Kieran hadn’t yet decided. She watched him take a sip from the glass of vodka tonic he had accepted and met his eyes curiously. “I always thought people like you didn’t touch alcohol and such,” she commented.