Power Play

by Joseph Finder

  "Mafia informer," she said, nodding sagely.

  "Drug cartel," I said.

  She ran her fingers along the bridge of my nose, down my lips, tracing a straight line to my chin. "The plastic surgeon did a nice job."

  "Good enough for government work."

  "Of course, for all I know, you really are in the Witness Protection Program." Her eyes told me she was no longer joking. "Given how little you talk about yourself. I feel like I don't know any more about you than what's on the surface."

  "Maybe that's all there is." I started feeling uncomfortable. "Isn't it almost time for my dog show?"

  "That's on Sunday nights, Landry."

  I snapped my fingers. "Rats."

  "You know what you remind me of? Remember when we went to Norman Lang Motors to buy your Jeep, and we saw that huge black SUV with those opaque tinted windows? Totally blacked out?"

  "The Pimpmobile. Yeah, it was a Denali. What about it-I'm a pimp? I'm gangsta?"

  "You see a car like that in traffic, and you turn to look at who's inside, but you can't see in. So you stare, longer than you usually might. For all you know, they're staring back at you. But you have no idea who's in there. That's you."

  "Ali, I think you've been spending too much time watching Pimp My Ride," I said, suppressing a surge of annoyance. "I'd say I'm more like the sign they had on the Jeep's windshield. Remember what it said?"

  She shook her head.

  "It said AS IS. Okay? That's me. What you see is what you get. Don't go looking for hidden secrets. There aren't any."

  "I think there's a lot more to you than you want me to see."

  "Sorry," I said. "Deep down, I'm shallow." I clicked on the TV. "Today's Monday, right?"

  You married, Jake?" Latimer said.

  "Nope."

  "Planning on it?"

  "No danger of it happening anytime soon."

  "Hope you don't mind me saying, but you should. You need a stable home life if you want to make it in business, I've always thought. Wife and kids-it anchors you. It's a safe place. A refuge when work gets stressful."

  "I just drink," I said.

  He looked at me keenly for a second.

  "I'm kidding," I said. "You got kids?"

  He nodded, smiled. "A daughter. Twelve."

  "Nice age," I said, just because that seemed like the thing to say.

  His smile turned rueful. "It's a terrible age, actually. In the course of a month I went from a guy who couldn't do anything wrong to a guy who can't do anything right. A loser. Uncool."

  "Can't wait to have kids, myself," I said with a straight face.

  We changed into dinner clothes. Latimer's boxer shorts were white with green Christmas trees and red candy canes on them. "Christmas gift from my daughter," he said sheepishly. He was scrawny, with a smooth, pale, hairless belly and spindly legs. His skin was milky white, like he'd never been in the sun.

  He put on gray dress slacks, a white button-down shirt, a black belt with a shiny silver buckle. When he'd finished changing, he took out a BlackBerry from his briefcase. A few seconds later, he said, "Oh, right. I keep forgetting. No signal here. I'm addicted. You know what they call these things, right? Crackberries?"

  I'd only heard that about a hundred thousand times. "That's good," I said, and smiled.

  "Don't know if you're a gadget guy like me, but here's my latest toy," he said proudly, pulling out an iPod. "Ever see one of these?"

  Not one that old, actually. "Sure."

  "My daughter got it for me. I've even learned how to download music. You like show tunes?"

  I shrugged. "Sure." I hate show tunes.

  "Feel free to borrow it whenever. I've got Music Man and Carousel and Guys and Dolls and Kismet. And Finian's Rainbow-you ever see Finian's Rainbow?"

  "I don't think I have, no."

  "The best ever. Even better than Man of La Mancha. We love musicals at home. Well, mostly it's my wife and I, nowadays. Carolyn only listens to bands with obscene names like The Strokes, I think they're called."

  "Maybe I'll take a listen sometime."

  "You know, I've always thought that so much of what goes on in the business world is like a musical. A stage play. A pageant."

  "Never thought of it that way."

  "Much of it's about perceptions. About how we perceive things, more than what's really going on. So Hank and Hugo and Kevin and all those guys look at you and think you're a kid, you're too young to know anything. Whereas in truth, you could be every bit as smart or qualified as any of them."

  "Yeah, maybe. So what happens tonight?"

  "The opening-night banquet. Cheryl gives a talk. The facilitator gives a rundown on the team-building exercises tomorrow. I talk at dinner tomorrow night. Lot of blabbing."

  "What's your talk about?"

  "Ethics and business."

  "In general, or at Hammond?"

  He compressed his lips, zipped up his suitcase, and placed it neatly at the back of the clothes closet. "Hammond. There's a win-at-any-cost culture in this company. An ethical rottenness, sort of a hangover from Jim Rawlings's hard-charging style. Cheryl's doing what she can to clean it up, but…" He shook his head, never finished his sentence.

  Latimer was a real type: the clothes, the hair, the packing, everything conservative and by the book. A real rules-loving guy. I guess every company needs people like that.

  But I was a little surprised to hear him criticize our old CEO. Rawlings had, after all, named Latimer general counsel. They were said to have been close.

  "What's she doing to clean it up?" I said.

  He hesitated, but only for a second or two. "Making it clear she won't tolerate any malfeasance."

  "What sort of 'malfeasance' are you talking about?"

  "Anything," he said, not very helpfully.

  I didn't press it. "You think Rawlings encouraged that sort of stuff?"

  "I do. Or he'd look the other way. There was always this feeling that, you know, there's Boeing and there's Lockheed; and then there's us. The predator and the prey. We were the little guy. We had to do whatever it took to survive. Even if we had to play dirty."

  He was silent. He seemed to be staring out at the ocean.

  "The big guys play dirty sometimes, too," I said.

  "Lockheed cleaned up their act quite some time ago," Latimer said. "I know those guys. Boeing-well, who knows? But even if Boeing plays dirty, that doesn't justify our doing it. This is something Cheryl's really concerned about. She wants me to rattle some cages."

  "That's not going to make you very popular around here."

  He sighed. "A little late for that. I'm probably going to ruin some people's dinners tomorrow night. No one wants to hear doom-and-gloom stuff. But you've got to get their attention somehow. Like I always say, pigs get slaughtered."

  He went quiet again. Then he said, "Look at this," and beckoned me to the window.

  I crossed the room to the window. Off to the left, the sun was low on the horizon, a fat orange globe. The ocean shimmered. At first I didn't know what he was calling my attention to-the sunset, maybe? That seemed somehow, I don't know, sentimental for a guy like that. Then I noticed a dark shape moving in the sky. An immense bald eagle was dropping slowly toward the water. Its wingspan must have been six feet.

  "Wow," I said.

  "Watch."

  With a sudden, swift movement, the eagle swooped down and snatched something up in its powerful talons: a glinting silver fish. Predator and prey, I almost said aloud, but that was just too self-evident to say without sounding like a moron.

  We watched in silent admiration for a few seconds. "Boy," I finally said, "talk about symbolism."

  Latimer turned to look at me, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

  So maybe he wasn't all that insightful after all. "Then again, it's just a fish," I said.

  17

  Geoff Latimer announced that he was going downstairs and invited me to join him, but I told him, vaguely, that I had a couple
of things to finish up. When he'd left the room, I pulled out my laptop to take another look at those photos of the crash that I'd downloaded on the flight over.

  Theoretically, I guess, I was doing it because Hank Bodine had asked me to. But by then I'd become curious myself. A brand-new plane crashes-at an air show, of all places-you can't help wondering why.

  And then there was Cheryl's remark, which was pretty much what Zoл had said: What difference did it make, really, what the reason for the crash was? We didn't need to know why it had gone down in order to sell more of our planes. It was, as Bodine liked to say, a no-brainer. Every airline in the world that had ordered the E-336 had to be a little freaked out by the crash.

  So why did Hank Bodine want to know? I had a feeling, based on Cheryl's expression and the way she'd looked at Ali, that there had to be something else going on.

  And, of course, I was determined to get to the bottom of that crash. If for no other reason than to figure out what was really going on.

  And here was the weird thing: According to one of the reports Zoл had sent me, the E-336 had made maybe twenty test flights before the Paris Air Show. That's the high-altitude equivalent of a new car. When you take delivery of a new car, it's always going to have a few miles on the odometer, from the test drive at the factory to the predelivery inspection at the dealership. Twenty test flights-that was nothing. That was brand-spanking-new.

  So there had to be something wrong with the plane, and I knew that the Eurospatiale consortium sure as hell wasn't going to admit it. They'd blame the weather or pilot error or bad karma or whatever they could get away with claiming.

  All I could tell from examining the photographs was that the hinges had ripped out of the composite skin of the flap. But why? The hinges were cut into the flap and glued on with a powerful epoxy adhesive. They sure as hell weren't supposed to rip out. After twenty years, maybe. Not after twenty short hops between Paris and London.

  For a couple of minutes I stared at the damaged flap, until something itched at the back of my mind. A pattern was starting to emerge. A possible explanation.

  I zoomed in as close as I could before the photograph disintegrated into pixels. Yes. At that resolution I could see quite clearly the cracks at the stress concentration points. And the telltale swelling in the composite skin. "Brooming," it was called. It happened when moisture somehow got into the graphite epoxy, which had a nasty habit of absorbing water-sucked it up like a sponge. And that could happen for a number of reasons, none of them good.

  Such as a design flaw in the plane itself. Which was the case here, I was convinced.

  I knew now why the plane had gone down, and I was certain Hank Bodine wouldn't want to hear the explanation. He'd regret ever asking me to look into it.

  Unless…

  Unless, say, he already knew the cause and wanted me to find it out for myself. But that was too complex, too convoluted, and I couldn't see any possible logic in that. I wondered whether Cheryl knew more about the crash than she'd let on. Was it possible, I wondered, that she already knew what I'd just found out?

  With a sinking feeling, I realized, too, that as much as I wanted to steer clear of the power struggle between Cheryl Tobin and Hank Bodine, I was already deeply embroiled in it.

  I went downstairs to find Bodine and tell him what I'd learned.

  18

  As I came down the stairs I heard loud voices and raucous laughter emanating from the bar. Hugo Lummis was clutching a tumbler of something brown and seemed to have a real buzz on. He was talking to a guy I recognized as Upton Barlow, the chief of Hammond's Defense Division. Barlow was tall, with sloped shoulders, looked like an athlete. Deep lines were etched around his mouth, a stack of parallel lines carved into his forehead. He had receding gray hair, little black eyes like raisins, a pursed mouth.

  The two of them seemed to be trading travel horror stories. They were both members of the million-mile frequent flyer club, and it sounded like they didn't much like Europeans.

  "Ever notice the crappy plastic toilet seats?" Lummis was saying. "Even in the good hotels? And the weird way they flush, like with metal plates on the wall or whatever?"

  "No, it's the showers that are the worst," Barlow put in. "They're made for midgets."

  I looked around the huge main room, saw Geoff Latimer sitting by himself in a big overstuffed chair, reading the Wall Street Journal. I didn't see Hank Bodine, though, or Clive Rylance.

  "Good luck finding an ice machine in your hotel," Lummis said. "Ask for Coke and you get it as warm as a bucket of spit. Must be some European Union law against ice."

  "You can't even watch the news in your hotel room," Barlow said. "You put on CNN, and it's all different. You get, like, a forty-five-minute report on Nairobi or Somaliland or something."

  I had a feeling the Europeans didn't like them much, either.

  "Why don't you join us, fella?" Lummis said to me.

  I hesitated for an instant. Having a drink with these old goats was just about the last thing I wanted to do. If Hank Bodine was going to have a talk with Clive Rylance, I should probably find some way to eavesdrop. If they weren't down here, maybe I could find Ali and pretend to introduce myself so I could spend some more time with her.

  But then I reminded myself that if I was really going to help Ali uncover evidence about a bribe paid to the Pentagon, the two guys at the bar were exactly who I should be hanging out with. If a bribe had really been made to someone in the Pentagon, it would be surprising if these two didn't know about it. Both of them schemed night and day to sell planes to the Air Force and were willing to do anything to make the sale. If there was a conspiracy, they'd have to be two of the key players.

  Upton Barlow picked up on my silence, and said, "Aw, he doesn't want to sit with us old farts."

  "Sure, that would be great," I said, walking down the bar and sitting in the stool next to Upton Barlow. I introduced myself.

  "I'm sure I've gotten e-mails from you," Barlow said, shaking my hand. "Mike Zorn's assistant, right?"

  "That's right." I was surprised he remembered who I was.

  "But Mike's not going to be here, is he?"

  I started to answer, but Barlow turned away to greet someone else who'd just come down the stairs. It was Clive Rylance, an intense-looking, dark-haired, handsome man who looked as if he'd been carved out of a block of granite. He had an oblong head and a square jaw. He had a heavy beard that he probably had to shave twice a day. He should have been cast in the James Bond movies instead of the guy they have now.

  "Well, if it isn't Clive Rylance, international man of mystery," Barlow said.

  Rylance put one hand on Hugo's shoulder and, with the other, reached over and shook Barlow's. Actually, they seemed to be trying to crush each other's hands. "Gentlemen," he said.

  "Speak for yourself," said Lummis. "You know everyone here, right? Don't know if you've met…Golly, what's your name again?"

  "Jake Landry," I said, shaking with Rylance.

  "Clive," Rylance said. "So are you a new member of the executive team?"

  "Just filling in for Mike Zorn," I said.

  "Good," he said. He looked around at the others and laughed. "Phew. I was starting to feel real old there for a second."

  "You just fly in from Paris?" said Barlow.

  "Yesterday," Rylance said. "I had a dinner in New York last night."

  "Oh yeah? Where'd you eat?" Lummis said. I had a feeling Hugo Lummis dined out a lot, judging from his girth.

  "Per Se."

  "You actually got a table?" Barlow said.

  Rylance shrugged. "Come on, man."

  "Yeah, what am I saying? If anyone can wangle a reservation, it's you," Barlow said. "So you have that risotto with the truffles from Provence?"

  "The Kobe beef with the marrow," Rylance said. "Fantastic."

  "I don't know why everyone says it's not as good as French Laundry," Hugo Lummis said. "I think it's even better. But I think we're leaving our friend J
ake out of the conversation, aren't we?"

  "Not at all," I said. "Never heard of French Laundry, but I'd put it up against Roscoe's House of Chicken 'N Waffles any day."

  "Chicken and waffles?" Rylance said, disgusted.

  Lummis wheeled his stool around to look at me, and said, "Say, I love that place."

  "Admit it," I said, "given a choice between some microscopic piece of beef at that Laundry place and Herb's special at Roscoe's, you wouldn't hesitate, would you?"

  "Roscoe's, for sure," Lummis agreed. "Ever had their candied yams?"

  But Rylance wasn't interested. "Anyone seen Hank around?" he said.

  "Last I heard, he was hot on Cheryl's trail," Barlow said. "Had something he wanted to raise with her."

  "Raise all the way up her ass, I suspect," said Lummis. "So, Jake, you ready to be inspired and motivated by our fearless leader?" He fanned his hands in the air like a preacher rousing his flock. "The symbol of our company is the lion," he said in a falsetto, not a bad imitation of Cheryl Tobin. "And I'm here to make that lion roar."

  I laughed politely, and both Rylance and Barlow guffawed loudly, then Barlow leaned in close to the guys and muttered out of the side of his mouth, "It is a goddamned gynocracy around here these days."

  The bartender took my order-another Macallan single-malt, only he didn't ask me how old-and Rylance pulled up a stool on Lummis's other side. Then Kevin Bross passed by, wearing black workout shorts and a black sleeveless shirt that showed off his sculpted physique. He was drenched with sweat. The watchband of his heart-rate monitor was beeping rapidly. Bross had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and looked like he spent a lot more hours in the gym than at the office. As he walked behind me, he bumped up against my only good shirt with his slick arm, dampening my shoulder.

  "Good workout, Coach?" Clive Rylance said. "Hey, did someone strap a time bomb on you or something?"

  "Huh?" Bross said.

  "Sounds like you're about to explode."

  "Oh, that," Bross said, and he reached under his shirt and tugged at a chest strap. It came off with a Velcro crunch. "Heart-rate monitor. What about you, big guy? Brits don't exercise?"