The Cardinal Divide Read Online Free Page B

he tipped his fourth beer, spilling a trickle of it down the front of his shirt. “What the!...” he growled, turning on the man next to him.
    He was greeted by the grinning face of Dusty Stevens. “Easy, champ.”
    â€œDidn’t see you come in,” grumbled Cole, using a handful of paper napkins to mop the beer from his shirt.
    â€œYou were in your own little world, as usual,” said Dusty, peering over his glasses at Cole. Martin Middlemarch stood behind his friend, looking thoughtful. “Little jumpy tonight, Blackwater?”
    Cole grimaced and nodded and dumped the sodden napkins on the bar while Martin and Dusty ordered beers. “Let me get you a refill, Cole,” said Dusty, taking Cole’s glass from his hand. Stevens was in his mid-forties, but looked much older. He was a short, round man with closely cropped hair that had silvered long ago. He wore a green golf shirt under a shiny leather jacket. He sported tiny rectangular glasses and had a habit of looking over them when he spoke to people, as though the spectacles were meant only for reading.
    â€œRough week, Cole?” Martin asked.
    Cole recounted the story of Mary’s last day on the job.
    â€œYou’ll be answering your own phone then for a while,” said Dusty Stevens sympathetically.
    â€œFor a while. Until things pick up,” sighed Blackwater, sipping his pint.
    â€œWhat do the prospects look like for that happening?” Middle-march was younger than Stevens by a decade, taller by half a foot, and lighter by fifty pounds. He spoke in a mild, measured tone despite the din of the bar. He had the build of the long-distance runner that he was, and wore his sandy hair neatly parted to one side. He took a satisfying sip of his glass of beer. No pint glasses for Martin Middlemarch: he was here mostly for the company.
    Cole just shook his head. Martin looked at Dusty. “You could always take a J-O-B ,” he said, sipping from his glass.
    Cole looked around the room and then at the two men who were standing beside him. He simply shrugged. The three men had known each other for a decade or more, but had become friends only since Cole Blackwater moved to Vancouver three years earlier. When Cole had been working for the Canadian Conservation Association, Dusty and Martin had worked in the Vancouver office of Greenpeace. Dusty’s specialty was the media. He had been employed as a communications officer in the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s, and took the post with Greenpeace after Glen Clark became premier.
    Martin Middlemarch was a campaigner, who had come to Greenpeace by way of the social justice movement. They had recruited Cole and the CCA to help them stop a US nuclear submarine from docking at the Canadian Forces Base at Esquimalt, just outside of Victoria. For Cole and the CCA it was tit-for-tat: Greenpeace would help them with the federal Endangered Species Act.
    Cole had used his contacts with sympathetic Members of Parliament to create a lengthy and acrimonious debate in the House of Commons over Canada’s tacit support of nuclear weapons on the high seas while Greenpeace activists in rubber Zodiac boats got between the submarine and the port. After that, whenever Cole visited Vancouver for work he had been a welcome guest at the Greenpeace office, and the three men drank beer and swapped stories in the pubs and bars along Commercial Drive.
    But around the time that Cole was being ushered out of Ottawa,both Dusty and Martin had been lured away from Greenpeace to work for industry-supported consulting firms. Dusty and Martin couldn’t say no to the opportunity to work inside the corporations, media, and government relations firms they’d been fighting. The pay was too good and the jobs secure, and they were able to justify their moves by saying that they could now change the system from within. Cole Blackwater didn’t buy it.
    â€œWorse things in the world,