Power Play

by Joseph Finder

"What?"

  "She likes to hump people's legs."

  "Isn't she a female?"

  "It's a dominance thing. Don't let her do it."

  "No one dominates me," she said.

  "It's the same way wolves establish the hierarchy in their pack."

  "Wolves? Are we still talking about Gerty the Emo Dog?"

  "Dogs and wolves are genetically the same species, you know."

  "What do you know about wolves, Landry?"

  More than you know. "Don't you watch the Dog Shrink on TV?"

  "Don't need to. I do my own field research. All men are dogs-even the ones who act like wolves."

  "Forget it," I said. "One more favor?"

  Her look was even more suspicious. She had this great cold stare that she must have perfected at the clubs when she wanted guys to stop hitting on her.

  "Bodine wants to know how the Eurospatiale crash happened."

  "The wing fell off or something."

  "A little piece of the wing, Zoл, called the inboard flap. The question is why. It's a brand-new plane."

  "You want me to find out?"

  "E-mail some of the journalists on the good aviation websites-ask them if they've heard anything. Rumors, whatever-stuff they might not have reported. And try to grab some photos."

  "Of the plane?"

  "If you can. Pictures of the inboard flap would be even better. Gotta be a couple somewhere-there were a bunch of photographers in the crowd taking pictures of the aerial demo. I'll bet you when that piece hit the tarmac, someone shot some close-ups. I'd love to get some high-res photos if you can find any."

  "Why does Bodine care?"

  "He says he wants Mike to have all the dirt on Eurospatiale he can get."

  "It's not enough that their freakin' plane crashed?"

  I shrugged.

  "When do you need it? By the time you get back from Canada?"

  "Actually, Bodine wants the info before we get there."

  "That doesn't give me much time, Landry. Mike needs me to do a spreadsheet for him, and theoretically I do work for him, you know. I could get to it in a couple of hours."

  "That should work if there's Internet access on the company plane."

  "There is. Wireless, too. Just make sure you do it before you get to the lodge."

  "Why?"

  "The place is off the grid. No cell phones, no BlackBerrys, no e-mail, nothing."

  "You're kidding."

  "Uh-uh. Mike was dreading it. You know how addicted he is to his e-mail."

  "I thought this was real high-end. You're making it sound like some kind of shack with no indoor plumbing."

  "It's totally high-end. But it's so remote they don't have landline phones. This year, Cheryl's not letting anyone use the Internet or the manager's satellite phone. She wants everyone to be off-line."

  "Sounds great to me. But those guys are all going to go apeshit."

  "And you're actually going to have to talk to them."

  "Not if I can help it."

  "You don't get it, do you? That's the whole point of these stupid offsites. Team-building exercises and morale-building and all that? A lot of outdoor sports? Even ropes courses, I hear."

  I groaned. "Not ropes courses."

  "Well, maybe fancier than that. I don't know. But it's all about breaking down barriers and getting people who don't like each other to become friends."

  Going kayaking together was supposed to make all those EVPs into friends? All those supercompetitive Type A personalities? They were far more likely to garrote each other.

  "Somehow I don't think it's going to make Bodine like Cheryl Tobin any better."

  Zoл gave me a long, cryptic look, then moved closer. "Listen, Jake. Not to be repeated, okay?"

  I looked up. "Okay."

  "So, there's this chick, Sophie, works at headquarters in Corporate Security?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I ran into her at the Darkroom on North Vine last night, and she told me she'd just finished doing this huge, totally top-secret job for the general counsel's office."

  She paused, as if she was unsure whether to keep going. I almost said, Couldn't be all that top-secret if you know. But instead, I nodded, said, "Okay."

  "Going into people's e-mail accounts and archiving their e-mail and sending it to some law firm in Washington, D.C."

  "For what?"

  "She didn't know. They just told her to do it. Kind of creeped her out. She knew it meant something serious was going on. Some kind of witch-hunt, maybe."

  "Everyone's e-mail?"

  She shook her head. "Just a few of the top officers." She waited a few seconds. "Including Hank Bodine."

  "Really?" That was interesting. "You think Cheryl Tobin ordered it?"

  "Wouldn't surprise me."

  I thought for a few seconds. I'd heard that one of the reasons the board of directors had brought in an outsider to run Hammond was to clean house. There were all sorts of rumors of corruption, of bribes and slush funds, but to be honest, our business is sort of known for that. "No wonder Bodine wanted to know if I was a buddy of Cheryl Tobin's."

  "If I were you, I'd be careful," Zoл said.

  "Careful? What, I might get rope burn?"

  Zoл grimaced. She seemed a little pissed off that I seemed to be dismissing her hot gossip with a stupid quip. But I figured that whatever was going on between Hank Bodine and the CEO had nothing to do with me.

  "No," she said. "Four days of all that face time with the corporate bigwigs, I'm afraid you might speak your mind and lose your job. Those guys aren't going to take crap from you."

  "No?"

  "No. You may know dogs, Landry, but you don't know the first thing about wolves. It's a dominance thing."

  6

  As I cruised down the 405 Freeway to Van Nuys, making unusually good time, a police cruiser came out of nowhere: blue strobe lights whirling, siren whooping. My stomach clenched. Damn it, was I speeding? Sure; who wasn't?

  But then the cop raced on past me, chasing down some other poor sucker, leaving me with only an afterimage burned on my retina and a memory of a time I rarely thought about anymore.

  The bailiff took me into the courtroom in handcuffs.

  I wore a white button-down dress shirt, which was too big on me-sixteen years old, lanky, not yet broad-shouldered-and the label made my neck itch. The bailiff, a squat, potbellied man who reminded me of a frog, took me over to the long wooden table next to the public defender who'd been assigned to me. He waited until I sat down before he removed the cuffs, then took a seat behind me.

  The courtroom was stuffy and overheated, smelled of mildew and perspiration and cleaning fluid. I glanced at the attorney, a well-meaning but scattered woman with a tangle of frizzy brown hair. She gave me a quick, sympathetic look that told me she wasn't hopeful. I noticed the file on the table in front of her wasn't my case: She'd already moved on to the next one.

  My heart was pounding. The judge was a fearsome black woman who wore tortoiseshell reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She was whispering to the clerk. I stared at the plastic woodgrain nameplate in front of her: THE HONORABLE FLORENCE ALTON-WILLIAMS engraved in white block letters.

  One of the fluorescent lights was buzzing, flickering. The huge radiators were making knocking sounds. Voices echoed from the hall outside the courtroom.

  Finally, the judge turned toward me, peered over the tops of her half glasses. She cleared her throat. "Mr. Landry," she said. "There's an old Cherokee legend about a young man who keeps getting into trouble because of his aggressive tendencies." She spoke in a stern contralto. "The young man goes to see his grandfather, and says, 'Sometimes I feel such anger that I can't help it-I can't stop myself.' And his grandfather, who's a tribal elder and a wise man, says, 'I understand. I used to be the same way. You see, inside of you are two wolves. One is good and kind and peaceful, and the other is evil and mean and angry. The mean wolf is always fighting the good wolf.' The boy thought about it for a momen
t, then said, 'But Grandfather, which wolf will win?' And the old man said, 'The one you feed.'"

  She picked up a manila folder, flipped it open. Cleared her throat. A minute went by. My mouth had gone dry, and I was finding it hard to swallow.

  "Mr. Landry, I have found you guilty of criminally negligent homicide." She stared at me over her glasses. The public defender next to me inhaled slowly. "You should thank your lucky stars that you weren't tried as an adult. I'm remanding you to a limited-secure residential facility-that is, juvenile detention-for eighteen months. And I can only hope that by the time you've completed your sentence, you'll have learned which wolf to feed."

  The radiators knocked and the fluorescent light buzzed and somewhere out in the hall a woman's laugh echoed.

  7

  Hammond Aerospace had four corporate jets, all of which were kept at the company's own hangar at Van Nuys airport, in the San Fernando Valley, about twenty-five miles northwest of downtown L.A. "Van Noise," as the locals grumpily called it, was farther from Hammond world headquarters than LAX, but since it didn't service commercial flights, it was quicker and easier to get in and out.

  Not that I'd ever flown on the corporate jet before-whenever I traveled for work, I flew commercial. The company planes were only for the elite.

  I parked my Jeep in front of the low-slung terminal building, grabbed my suitcase from the back, and looked around. The jet was parked on the tarmac, very close by. This was the biggest and fanciest plane in our corporate fleet, a brand-new Hammond Business Jet with the space-age Hammond logo painted on the tail. It glinted in the sun as if it had just been washed. It was a thing of beauty.

  No one had told me where I was supposed to go when I got there-whether I should go directly to the plane or not. I knew you could drive right up to the aircraft and board. But I could see, through the plate-glass windows of our "executive terminal," a cluster of guys who looked like Hammond execs, so I rolled my suitcase up to the building and walked in.

  The passenger lounge was designed to resemble a 1930s airport, with marble-tiled floors and low-slung leather couches. It reminded me of one of those fancy airport "clubs" just for the first-class passengers, the kind of place you sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of as you trundle by, before the door slams shut to the likes of you. Out there in the overcrowded airport, you're dodging speeding electric passenger carts that beep at you hostilely, and being jostled on the moving walkway by overweight women clutching Cinnabons, while inside the hushed silence of the Ambassador's Club or the Emperor's Club, rich, well-dressed passengers are clinking flutes of champagne and scarfing down beluga on toast points.

  I looked around. There were ten or so men here. Not a woman among them. There were no women at the top of Hammond Aerospace. Except for the new boss, of course.

  They all resembled one another, too. Their ages ranged from early forties to maybe sixty, but they all looked vigorously middle-aged, virile, and prosperous. They all had a certain gladiatorial swagger. They could have been relatives at some jocky family reunion.

  Also, unlike me, none of them was wearing a tie. Or even a blazer. They were all dressed casually in sportswear or outdoor gear-cargo shorts and pants, golf shirts, Patagonia shells, North Face performance tees. Brand names all over the place.

  I sure hadn't gotten the memo.

  A couple of them were wandering around, talking to themselves, wearing Bluetooth earpieces that looked like silver Tootsie Rolls with flashing blue lights on them. Hank Bodine was standing near the entrance. He was wearing a navy short-sleeved knit shirt and talking to someone I didn't recognize.

  Since he was the only one here I knew, I figured I should go up to him and say hi. I didn't want to break in on anyone's conversation, but I also didn't want to stand around like a mannequin. I may not be the most outgoing guy you'll ever meet, but I'm not socially stunted, either. Still, I couldn't help feeling like the new kid in grade school, peering around the cafeteria at lunch, holding my tray, looking for a familiar face so I could sit down. The same way I'd felt when I'd arrived at Glenview, when I was sixteen.

  So I left my suitcase near the door and tentatively approached him. "Hey, Hank," I said.

  Before Hank had a chance to reply, a tall, wiry guy came up and clapped him on the shoulder. This was Kevin Bross, the EVP of Sales in the Commercial Airplanes Division. He had a long, narrow face and a nose that looked like it had been broken a few times. Probably playing football: Bross was another Big Ten football jock-he'd played at Michigan State.

  "There he is," Bross said to Hank Bodine.

  Bross didn't even seem to notice me standing there. "You read that bullshit e-mail Cheryl sent around this morning?" he said in a low voice. He wore a black Under Armour T-shirt, tight against his broad, flat torso like a superhero's costume. "All that crap about 'guiding principles' and 'a culture of accountability'?" He stared at Bodine, appalled. I couldn't believe he was dissing the CEO so brazenly, and within earshot of the others.

  Hank Bodine smiled, shook his head, unreadable.

  Bross went on, "Like she's our den mother or something?"

  Bodine just winked, and said, "Guess we didn't have any guiding principles before. You know Jake Landry?"

  "How's it going?" Bross said without interest. He gave me a quick, perfunctory glance before turning back to Bodine. "Where's Hugo?"

  "He should be here any second," Bodine said. "Flying in from D.C."

  "So Cheryl didn't fire him yet, huh?"

  "Cheryl's not going to fire Hugo," Bodine said quietly. "Though by the time she gets done with him, he'll probably wish he got fired."

  They didn't explain, of course, but I knew they were talking about Hugo Lummis, the Senior VP of Hammond's Washington, D.C., Operations. In plain English, he was our chief lobbyist. Hugo was a Southern good ol' boy, a real Capitol Hill creature. Before Hammond hired him, he'd been a deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and before that he'd been chief of staff for some important Republican congressman. He was on back-slapping terms with just about everyone in Congress who counted.

  There were rumors around the company that he'd done something funky, possibly illegal, to land Hammond a big Air Force contract a few months ago. But just rumors-there'd been no charges, nothing concrete. Now I wondered whether that was why the girl from Corporate Security to whom Zoл had talked had been ordered to search through Bodine's e-mails.

  "She's just gonna let him twist slowly in the wind, huh?" Bross said.

  Bodine leaned close to Bross and spoke in a low voice. "What I hear, she's hired one of those big Washington law firms to do an internal corporate investigation."

  Bross stared. "You're shittin' me."

  Bodine just looked back.

  "You got to stop this," Bross said.

  "Too late. It's already wheels up."

  "Hank, you're the only one who can persuade this chick you don't shit where you eat."

  I was sort of embarrassed to be standing there listening to their conversation. But I guessed that, to these guys, I was just some functionary so far down the totem pole I might as well have been below ground. Since Bodine had reassured himself that I wasn't part of Cheryl's faction, I clearly wasn't a threat. He hadn't even bothered to explain to Kevin Bross who I was or why I was here.

  "Well, my daddy taught me never to talk that way to a lady," Bodine said. He smiled and winked again. "Anyway, what I have in mind doesn't involve persuasion."

  My cell phone rang. I took it out of my pocket and excused myself, though the two men barely realized I was leaving.

  "Hey," Zoл said. "You having fun yet? Let me guess. You're kissing butt all over the place, sucking up a storm, and you're already the new golden boy."

  "Something like that." I stepped outside the terminal building and stood in the sun, admiring the gleaming Hammond plane.

  "Are you talking to anyone, or are you standing by yourself, too proud to hang with your superiors?"

  "You got something for m
e, Zoл?"

  "I just talked to a reporter from Aviation Daily about that plane crash. He said it was a composites problem that caused the whatchamacallit to break off."

  "The inboard flap. What kind of composites problem, did he say? A joint?" I felt the sunshine warm my face.

  "Do I look like an engineer to you? I can't even figure out my TiVo. Anyway, I took notes and put it in an e-mail to you. I also attached some close-up shots of that piece of the wing."

  "Great, Zo. I'll download them after we board. Thanks."

  "De nada. Oh, and, Jake?"

  "Yeah?"

  "The Aviation Daily guy also told me that Singapore Airlines just canceled their deal with Eurospatiale. Like, they totally freaked out over the crash."

  "Really?" That was a major contract. Almost as big as the Air India deal. "Is that public information?"

  "Not yet. The reporter just got the news himself, and he's about to put it on their website. So no one else knows yet. You're, like, fifteen minutes ahead of the curve."

  "Hank Bodine's gonna squeal like a pig in shit."

  "Hey, Jake, you know-you might want to tell him yourself. Break the good news."

  "Maybe."

  "You're hesitating. You don't want to look like you're sucking up. Yeah, well, you might want to start making friends with all the big dogs. Especially since you're about to spend a long weekend with them. You're probably going to be doing 'trust falls,' you know."

  "In that case, I'm likely to get a concussion."

  "I hear you."

  "Okay, I'll break the news to Bodine. And thanks again. I owe you one."

  "One?" Zoл said. "One squared, more like."

  "That's still one, Zoл."

  "Whatever."

  I clicked off and headed back inside.

  8

  A big, rotund bald man with large jug-handle ears pushed through the glass doors of the terminal right in front of me. Someone called out to him, and he replied in a booming voice with a Southern accent, erupting in a big, rolling laugh. He started hailing people as if this was a frat party, and he was the rush chairman. His double chin jiggled. He wore a silvery gray golf shirt stretched tight over an ample potbelly.