Power Play

by Joseph Finder

  This had to be the famous Hugo Lummis, our chief lobbyist. The man Cheryl Tobin was hanging out to dry, according to Kevin Bross.

  He went right up to Bodine and Bross. I hung back a bit. Lummis checked his watch, a huge, extravagant-looking silver thing not much smaller than a Frisbee. Then Bross checked his watch, too, a gold thing just as big. They seemed to be concerned about the time, which I didn't quite get. Who cared what time we got to the offsite?

  As I came over to Bodine's rat pack, Bross, who had a Klaxon voice you could pretty much hear anywhere, said, "IWC Destriero." Lummis rumbled something, and Bross went on, "Got it in Zurich in December. World's most complicated wristwatch. Seven hundred fifty mechanical parts, seventy-six rubies. Perpetual calendar with day, month, year, decade, and century."

  So they were comparing wristwatches. "In case you forget which century you're living in, that it?" Lummis shot back. "Twenty-first, last time I checked, unless that watch of yours knows different."

  "The moon phase display is the most precise ever made," Bross said. "Split-second chronograph. The tourbillon has an eight-beat-per-second escapement. Take a listen-the minute repeater chimes every quarter hour."

  "Excuse me," I said. I tried to catch Bodine's eye, but he didn't see.

  "That would drive me crazy," Bodine said.

  Lummis held up his own watch, and announced: "Jules Audemars Equation of Time skeleton. Grand Complication."

  "How the hell can you tell time on that thing?" Bodine said. "I just want to know what time we're going to leave already."

  "No one's going anywhere until Cheryl shows up," Lummis said. He looked at his wrist Frisbee. "I guess Cheryl's gotta make an entrance. Fashionably late. Being the CEO and all."

  "Nah," said Bross, "women are always running late. Like my wife-it's always hurry up and wait."

  Bodine was smiling faintly, neither joining in their mocking nor disapproving of it. "Well, the plane's not gonna leave till she gets here," he said.

  Hugo Lummis noticed me, and said, "Wheels up?"

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "We about ready to leave?"

  "I-I don't know."

  He squinted at me, then guffawed. "Sorry, young man, I thought you were a flight attendant." The men around him laughed, too. "It's the tie."

  I stuck out my hand. "Jake Landry," I said. "And I'm not a pilot, either."

  He shook my hand without introducing himself, looked down at my watch. "But you got yourself a nice pilot's watch there, I see. That an IWC, young fella?"

  "This?" I said. "It's a Timex, I think. No, Casio, actually. Twenty-five bucks."

  Lummis chortled heartily, turned back to the others. "And I was about to ask the young man to carry my bag onto the plane for me." Peering at me, he said, "You a new hire?"

  "I work for Mike Zorn."

  "Cheryl wanted an expert on the 880," Bodine explained.

  "Hell, I've got hemorrhoids older than him," Lummis said to the others, then added to me, mock-sternly: "Remember, young fella, what happens in Rivers Inlet stays in Rivers Inlet." Everyone laughed uproariously, as if this were some kind of inside joke.

  "Hank," I finally said to Bodine. "Singapore Airlines is in play."

  It took him a minute to realize I was talking to him, but then his eyes narrowed. "Excellent. Excellent. How do you know this?"

  "Guy at Aviation Daily."

  He nodded, rubbed his hands together briskly.

  By then they were all staring at me. Kevin Bross said, "They had eighteen 336s on order from Eurospatiale. That's five billion dollars up for grabs. I gotta call George."

  "He's in Tokyo, isn't he?" Bodine said. George Easter was the Senior Vice President for Asia-Pacific Sales.

  "Yeah," Bross said. "They're seventeen hours ahead of us." He stared at his watch. "What time is it, anyway?"

  Bodine laughed, then they all did. "Three thirty in the afternoon. Makes it, let's see, seven thirty in the morning in Tokyo." He turned to me, flashed his watch. "Good old-fashioned Rolex Submariner," he said with a wink. "Nothin' fancy."

  "Comes in handy when you're diving at four thousand feet, I bet."

  Bodine didn't seem to hear me. He said to Bross, "Tell George to touch skin with Japan Air and All Nippon, too, while he's at it. This is our big chance. A no-brainer. Get to 'em with a bid before the other guys move in."

  Bross nodded, then whipped out a handheld from its holster, a quick-draw BlackBerry cowboy. He punched in numbers as he turned away.

  I was about to tell Bodine about the suspected cause of the crash, but then I decided to read Zoл's e-mail first so at least I knew what I was talking about.

  "Let's get this show on the road," Bodine muttered, while Kevin Bross talked on his cell loud enough for everyone to hear. "There's billions to be made in the next couple of weeks, and she's got us playing games in the woods."

  "Speak of the she-devil," Lummis said, and we all turned to the door.

  Cheryl Tobin, wearing the same lavender suit I'd seen her in earlier, entered the lounge. She bestowed a beatific smile on the assembled.

  Right behind her came another woman, who I assumed was her administrative assistant or something. An elegant, auburn-haired beauty in a navy polo shirt and khaki slacks, holding a clipboard and moving with a dancer's grace.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that I knew her. I drew a sharp breath.

  My stomach flipped upside down and turned inside out.

  Ali Hillman.

  9

  Her apartment, in an old Art Deco building in Westwood, was like Ali: the unexpected corners, the skewed lines, stylish and a little mysterious and glamorous and sort of exotic.

  "The rumor is that this apartment used to belong to Howard Hughes," she said as she led me inside the first time. We'd been spending nights at my apartment, so coming here felt like a new stage, like I'd passed some sort of test.

  "He used it as a love nest for his girlfriends. That's what the landlord says."

  "Either that, or he needed another place to store his mason jars." It was on the second floor, and you could hear traffic noise from the street, trucks roaring by, car horns.

  "But I need to move. Too noisy. I can't sleep at night."

  "Move in with me."

  "El Segundo? It's a commute."

  "I'm worth it."

  "We'll see."

  She put her mouth on mine, ending the conversation.

  "Mmm," she said after a couple of minutes. "Yeah, I'm thinking you just might make the cut."

  She didn't see me. She was immersed in conversation with Cheryl Tobin as the two of them swept into the room, parting a Red Sea of middle-aged men. An electric force field seemed to surround them, crackling and radiating through the room. Like it or not, this was the boss.

  And-what?-her assistant? Was Ali working for the CEO now? If so, when had this happened?

  I felt the electrical charge, too, but of a different sort. It was the voltage generated by all sorts of little switches going off in my brain, circuits closing, thoughts colliding. I hadn't seen her in months, had assumed she was still in HR. But I'd lost track of what she was doing, exactly. Another guy might have kept tabs on her on the company intranet, asked after her. Googled her. She was the kind of woman who could turn men into stalkers.

  I wish I could say I'd moved on, had the coldhearted ability to shift over to the next woman without looking back. The truth is, I knew that if I allowed myself to mope or obsess, I'd never get over her. I wasn't sure I ever would anyway. So as much as I thought about her after the breakup, I didn't let myself wallow in the sweet misery of tracking her from afar.

  And now Ali was working with, or for, Cheryl-you could tell from the body language-and she was probably going on the offsite, too.

  For a moment it felt as if I were inside a freeze-frame: I couldn't hear or see anyone around me except for Ali. The loud chatter and laughter dissolved into meaningless babble.

  Ali.

  I knew now
who'd put me on the guest list for the offsite. One mystery solved. But it only created a new one.

  Why?

  Yet before I could go up to her, she was gone. She said something to Cheryl and, holding a cell phone to her ear, disappeared down a side corridor.

  Gradually, I returned to the room, became more aware, more present. I heard Bodine mutter to Bross, "Notice she said no staff, no assistants, no admins. Yet she brought one of hers."

  Ali wouldn't be Cheryl Tobin's administrative assistant, of course; she was a rising executive in HR. But was it possible that she'd become an assistant to the CEO of some kind?

  Cheryl worked the room like a master politician. She circulated among the twelve or so guys, smiling and touching them on the shoulders in a way that was warm but not too intimate.

  Most of the men responded the way you'd expect. They gave her smiles that were too wide and too bright. They shifted their stances so they could watch her out of the corners of their eyes while she talked to others. They tried to suck up without being too transparent about it.

  Not all of the guys, though. Hank Bodine's little clique seemed to be making a point of ignoring her. Kevin Bross said something under his breath to Bodine, who nodded, his eyes alert but unrevealing. Then Bross turned and headed toward Cheryl. Not right toward her, but meandering in her general direction. As he got close, she must have said something-I couldn't hear-because he turned and smiled right at her.

  "I admired your e-mail this morning," he said, his voice louder than he no doubt intended.

  Bodine and Lummis were watching the exchange from across the room.

  I could see Cheryl's pleased smile. She said something else.

  "No, I was really impressed," Bross said. "People need to be reminded about the culture of accountability. We all do."

  Cheryl smiled and touched his shoulder. Bross nodded, gave a sort of contorted, embarrassed smile. His face was flushed. Then he turned and looked at Bodine and gave him a wink.

  Not until we all began boarding the plane did Ali see me.

  She was at the top of the metal stairs leading into the jet, just behind Cheryl Tobin, as I started to climb the steps. She turned around, looked down as if she'd forgotten something, and her eyes raked mine.

  Then, abruptly, she looked away.

  "Ali?" I said.

  But she pretended not to hear me and entered the cabin without turning back.

  10

  By the time I boarded, Ali was nowhere to be found, and I was left feeling as if I'd been kicked in the solar plexus. Or someplace a little lower.

  She'd seen me: No question about that. And whether she'd put me on the guest list or not, she had to know I'd be here.

  Why, then, the cold shoulder?

  I've always thought that living with a woman is like visiting a foreign country where no one speaks English and the signs are all in some strange alphabet that almost looks like English, but not quite. If you want to buy coffee or order dinner or get a seat on a bus, you have to learn a few basic phrases of the local dialect.

  So in the year and a half that Ali and I went out, I learned to read the nuances in her voice. I became reasonably fluent. I stopped needing to consult the Berlitz book. And I still hadn't lost the ability to speak Ali.

  But her reaction was baffling.

  I assumed she'd gone off to work with Cheryl in the CEO's private lounge. It took all the restraint I could summon to keep from walking down there and asking her what was going on.

  Instead, I took a seat in the main salon. Most of the seats were taken by the time I got there, but I found a chair off by itself, next to where Hank Bodine was holding court with Hugo Lummis, Kevin Bross, and someone else. I was close enough to hear them talking, but I'd sort of lost interest in hearing them compare watches, as fun as that was, so I tuned out.

  Anyway, my mind had been derailed. As much as I tried not to, I couldn't stop thinking about Ali. And it wasn't just her strange behavior. It was simply seeing her after so long. I was like a parched man lost in the desert for weeks who'd just been given a thimbleful of water. My thirst hadn't been slaked; it had been whetted.

  I thought about Ali, presumably sitting with Cheryl Tobin in the executive lounge, which included a private office, bedroom suite, exercise studio, personal kitchen, even a shower. Even among the superprivileged who got to fly on private corporate jets, there was first class. I loved that. You finally claw your way to the top only to discover there's still one more rung above you, a rarefied VIP echelon you'd never even heard of.

  The rest of us weren't exactly in steerage, though. The main salon looked like an English gentleman's club, not that I'd ever actually seen such a thing. It certainly didn't look like any airplane I'd ever been in before. The cabin walls were paneled in Brazilian mahogany. The floors were covered with antique-looking Oriental rugs. Huge, cushy, black leather club chairs were arranged in little "conversation groups" around marble-topped tables. There was a burlwood standalone bar.

  Two beautiful blondes were circulating with trays of little Pellegrino bottles, taking drink orders. I wanted a real drink, but I was at work, after all, so I decided I'd better just get a Pepsi.

  My chair swiveled and tilted. All around me was wide-open space. There was no seat six inches in front of mine that would tip back into my knees. Very nice. I could get used to this.

  Granted, the furnishings were a little much-all that dark wood and antique rugs and black leather-but the plane was pretty great. The Hammond Business Jet was far and away the best on the market. It left the Gulfstream G450 and the Boeing Business Jet and the Airbus Corporate Jetliner in the dust. The Hammond had the widest body and the largest cabin of any private corporate jet on the market. Even configured as luxuriously as it was, it easily held twenty-five people.

  The pitch we used to convince companies to spend fifty million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation. Oh, no. It was a productivity tool. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time. And a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal a deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart.

  Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity, I've found.

  In addition to the CEO's executive suite and the main salon, this plane also had a conference room (with videoconferencing capabilities), a small office suite, and three lavatories with showers. People sometimes called it the "flying penthouse" or the "flying boudoir." Or the "mile-high palace." The dйcor, someone once told me, was the legacy of our previous CEO, James Rawlings. The story was that he and his wife had flown on some other company's jet as the guests of the CEO and were both blown away by the way the cabin was outfitted, which made Hammond's jets look shabby by comparison. Mrs. Rawlings hounded her husband until he gave in and let her hire her favorite interior designer to overhaul one of the Hammond jets, the same designer who'd also done their house and their yacht.

  While I waited for the waitresses, or the flight attendants, or whatever they were called, to take my drink order, I took out my laptop and powered it on. I had work to do-I had to download the files Zoл had sent so I could try to get Bodine the answers he wanted-but I was finding it hard to concentrate.

  My computer located the wireless Internet signal, and I logged on to my e-mail. Opened Zoл's e-mail and read it over twice. Then I opened the zipped folder containing the Aviation Daily photos, eight high-resolution close-ups of the Eurospatiale crash, including the part that had ripped off, the inboard flap. They were big files and took a while to download.

  Meanwhile, I could hear Hugo Lummis saying to the others, in his booming voice and mellow Southern accent: "You gonna tell me that's a level playing field? Uh-uh, no sir. So I'm having dinner at Cafй Milano with the Secretary of the Air Force just last week, and he keeps talking about 'the Great White Arab Tribe' and I finally say to him, 'What in God's name are you talking about?' And he says, 'Oh, that's just our nickname for Boeing.' So h
ow does Cheryl think we're supposed to compete with that kinda favoritism if we don't grease the skids a little?"

  I looked at him, without meaning to, and Kevin Bross noticed my glance. He made some kind of a quick, subtle hand gesture, and then Lummis's voice suddenly died down.

  After a while, I started smelling cigar smoke, and I looked over and saw Bodine and Lummis smoking a couple of big ugly stogies. Thick white tendrils of smoke wreathed their heads. I guessed this wasn't a no-smoking flight.

  When one of the beautiful blond flight attendants finally came over to me, I decided to order a Scotch. Seeing Ali had set me back, I realized; I really did need a drink. So I asked for a single-malt Scotch, and she wanted to know what kind. Apparently I could get whatever brand I wanted. I said Macallan. She asked me how old. I asked what my choices were.

  "Would you like the eighteen?" she said.

  I told her I would.

  Just then, someone made an announcement over the speakers that we'd be taking off momentarily and asked us to fasten our seat belts. It was a polite, almost apologetic request, not the sort of imperious demand they make when you fly commercial. No one ordered me to turn off all electronic equipment. No one said anything about stowing our bags in any overhead compartments. Not that there were any overhead compartments to jam our stuff into.

  The flight attendant apologized profusely that I'd have to wait for my drink until after takeoff. She asked me to fasten my seat belt, then excused herself so she could do the same.

  I could feel the idling engines roar to life-two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 turbofan engines, with a three-shaft layout-and we began the takeoff roll. Seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust lifted us off the ground; but for all that power, you could barely hear any noise. One of the reasons it was so quiet is that the big fan in the engine moves a lot of air around the turbine, and that acts like a muffler. Plus, the engine nacelle inlet is lined with a one-piece acoustic barrel to absorb sound.

  Airplane geek: who, me?