The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [82]
“But it does have that beautiful park,” Myra pointed out, gazing at the lake, the giant apartments that lined the far side of the park, and the distant roofs of the Central Park Zoo.
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Ranjit told her, and indeed he had little to complain about. Though Dr. Dhatusena Bandara’s office in the UN building was just across town, the doctor himself was somewhere else, on some errand that no one chose to discuss. His office had, though, provided them with a young lady who had taken them to the top of the Empire State Building and introduced them to the Lucullan joys of oyster stew in the old Grand Central railroad station, and who stood ready to get tickets for them for any show on Broadway. Which wasn’t a great thrill to Ranjit, whose entire lifetime experience of performances had been on a flat screen, but greatly pleased Myra. Which itself much pleased Ranjit, not to mention that he had discovered the American Museum of Natural History, only a few blocks away—wonderful in its own right as an exemplar of that new delight in Ranjit’s life, its museumness, but thrilling in the great planetarium that filled its northern space. “Planetarium” was hardly the right word, in fact; the structure on Central Park West was so much more than that. “I wish Joris could be with us!” Ranjit said, more than once, as he strolled its thrilling exhibits.
And then, following a long enough interval that Ranjit had stopped thinking he might actually show up, appeared the one person, totally unexpected, who could make a pleasant visit unforgettable. When Ranjit opened the door of their suite to a knock, supposing there would be no more than a chambermaid with an armload of fresh towels on the other side of it, there in fact, grinning, stood Gamini Bandara, with a spray of fresh roses in one hand for Myra and in the other a bottle of good old Sri Lanka arrack for the two of them. It was the first time they had been together since the wedding, and the questions came thick and fast. How had they liked England? What did they think of America? What was it like back in Lanka these days? It wasn’t until the men had poured their third round of arrack that Myra noticed that all the conversation went in the same direction, questions coming from Gamini, answers from her husband and herself. “So,” she said at last, “tell us, then, Gamini, what are you doing in New York?”
He grinned and spread his hands. “One damn meeting after another. It’s what I do.”
“But I thought you were based in California,” Ranjit put in.
“I am, right. But there’s all sorts of international stuff going on, and this is where the UN is, isn’t it?” Then he swallowed his third shot and looked serious. “Actually, the reason I’m here, Ranjit, is that I want to ask you to do me a favor.”
Ranjit said promptly, “Name it.”
“Don’t say yes so fast,” Gamini chided. “It means making a commitment for some time. But it’s not a bad commitment, either. So let me get right down to it. When you’re in Washington, you will be contacted by a man named Orion Bledsoe. He’s a cloak-and-dagger guy, and he’s high up in the part of the government most people never hear about. For that matter, he has quite a record of his own. He’s a veteran of the first Gulf War, and of the troubles in what used to be Yugoslavia, and then of the second, and much worse, war in the Gulf, the one in Iraq. That’s where he got, in that order, the wound that cost him his right arm, the Purple Heart, the Navy Cross, and, finally, the job he’s got now.”
“Which is what?” Ranjit asked, as Gamini seemed to pause for