"Wait," she said. "I'm not trying to be antagonistic, and apologize if that's how I came across. It's been a wearing day."

Ricci looked at her in silence, those penetrating eyes back on her face.

"I think we should take a step back," she said. "Concentrate on your feelings about the job with UpLink."

Ricci looked at her a while longer. At last he exhaled audibly.

"I don't know," he said. "To be straight, I'm not sure it's something I'd want any part of, or even that I've got the background for. This is big stuff. Seems to me you ought to be looking at heavy artillery, not a Police Special."

Nimec leaned forward, his hands clasped on his lap.

"Except that the background you're so quick to dismiss includes four years with SEAL Team Six, an elite within an elite created for antiterrorist operations," he said. "And that's just for openers."

"Pete--"

Nimec cut him short. "After leaving the military in '94 you joined the Boston police, earned your first-class detective shield in record time. Worked deep cover with the Organized Crime Task Force, an assignment for which you were particularly well-suited because of your experiences with ST 6, where one of your special areas of expertise was infiltration techniques. Upon conclusion of a major racketeering investigation you requested a transfer to the Homicide Division and stuck with it until the bad affair we've been talking about."

Ricci knelt there by the stove, looking across the room at him.

"Running down my stats doesn't change how I feel," he said. "There are ten years between me and the service. That's a long time."

Nimec shook his head.

"I don't get you, Tom," he said. "Nobody's twisting arms, but this isn't a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It deserves fair consideration. By all of us. We should at least agree to--"

He abruptly broke off. Set to its vibration mode, the palm phone in his shirt pocket had silently indicated he was receiving a call.

"One second," he said, holding up his pointer finger.

He took out the phone, flipped open the mouthpiece, and answered.

His features showed surprise, then sharp attention, then a mixture of both.

It was Cody from Mato Grasso.

Speaking in the same tone of controlled urgency he had used with Roger Gordian, Cody ran down the situation in Brazil for the second time in less than ten minutes, his voice routed via that nation's conventional landlines to an UpLink satellite gateway in northern Argentina, transmitted to a low-earth-orbit communications satellite, electronically amplified, retransmitted to a tracking antenna operated by a local cellular service in coastal Maine, and sent on to Nimec's handset all virtually instantaneously.

Nimec asked something in a hushed voice, listened, whispered into the phone again, and ended the call.

"Pete, what is it?" Megan said, reading the deep concern on his face.

He kept the phone open in his hand.

"Trouble," he said. "A level-one in Brazil."