Power Play

by Joseph Finder

  Bodine gave me a look of pure, unadulterated loathing.

  22

  A long table had been set up in a bay of the great room that overlooked the ocean. Night had fallen, and the windowpanes had become polished obsidian, reflecting the amber glow of the room. You couldn't see the ocean, but you could hear the waves of Rivers Inlet lapping gently against the shore.

  Cheryl Tobin was seated at the head of the table. I was at her immediate left. On my other side was Upton Barlow, then Hugo Lummis, whose potbelly was so big he had to push his chair way back from the table to make room for it.

  Lummis was telling some long-winded anecdote to Barlow. Meanwhile, Cheryl was talking with her CFO, Ron Slattery. His bald head shone: oddly vulnerable, a baby's. He was saying, "I thought your speech was absolutely masterful."

  The table was covered with a stiff white linen cloth and set with expensive-looking gold-rimmed china and gleaming silverware. An armada of cut-glass wine and water glasses. Next to each place setting was a narrow printed menu listing six courses. A white linen napkin, folded into a fan, on each plate. A little card with each person's name written in calligraphy.

  There was nothing spontaneous about Cheryl's decision to seat me next to her. If she wanted me to spy for her, I really didn't get it.

  I buttered a hot, crusty dinner roll that was studded with olives, and wolfed it down.

  Hank Bodine was down near my end of the table, but in no-man's-land, if you believed in close readings of dinner-table placement. Ali was on the other side, between Kevin Bross and Clive Rylance. Both Alpha Males seemed to be putting the moves on her, double-teaming her. She smiled politely. I caught her eye, and she gave me a look that conveyed a lot: amusement, embarrassment, maybe even a secret enjoyment.

  A couple of Mexican waiters ladled lobster bisque into every-one's bowls. Another waiter poured a French white wine. I took a sip. It tasted fine to me. Not that I had any idea.

  Barlow took a sip, grunted in satisfaction, and pursed his moist red lips. He said out of the side of his mouth, "I don't have my reading glasses-this a Meursault or a Sancerre?"

  I shrugged. "White wine, I think."

  "Guess you're more the jug-wine-with-a-screwtop type."

  "Me? Not at all. I like the gallon boxes, actually." Might as well give him what he wanted to hear.

  He laughed politely, turned away.

  Ron Slattery was keeping up his line of sock-puppet patter. "Well, you've got the entire division running scared, and that's a good thing." His mouth was a thin slash, barely any lips. The small fringe around his shiny dome was shaved close. His heavy black-framed eyeglasses might have looked funky, ironic, on someone like Zoл, but on him they were just nerdy.

  "Not too scared, I hope," Cheryl said. "Too much fear is counterproductive."

  "Don't forget, a jet won't fly unless its fuel is under pressure and at high temperature," he replied.

  "Ah, but without a cooling system, you get parts failure, right?"

  "Good point," he chortled.

  Then she turned to me, raised her voice. "Speaking of which, why'd it crash?"

  How had she put it before? I know all about it, believe me. She knew the reason; she had to. But she wanted me to tell her in public, in front of everyone else.

  "An inboard flap ripped off the wing at cruise speed and hit the fuselage."

  "Explain, please." She really didn't need to speak so loudly. Her eyes glittered.

  "A three-hundred-pound projectile flying at three hundred miles an hour is going to do some serious damage."

  "Obviously." Exasperated. "But why'd it rip off?"

  "Chicken rivets."

  "Chicken rivets," she repeated. "I don't follow." People around us were listening now.

  Maybe she didn't know as much about the crash as she'd claimed. But whether she did or not, she wanted me to explain, which was tricky: even though she'd been the EVP for Commercial Airplanes at Boeing before she came to Hammond, I had no idea how much she actually knew about building airplanes. Lots of executives rely on their experts to tell them what to think. I didn't want to talk over her head, but I also didn't want to condescend.

  "Well, so Eurospatiale's new plane is mostly made out of plastic, right?"

  She gave me a look. "If you want to call carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer 'plastic' instead of composite."

  You got me there, I thought. So she did know a thing or two. "Most of the senior guys still don't trust the stuff."

  "The 'senior guys' at Hammond?"

  "Everywhere."

  She knew what I meant, I was pretty sure-the senior execs at all the airplane manufacturers were inevitably older, and what they knew was metal, not composites.

  "So?"

  "So all the flaps on the wings are made of composite, too," I said. "But the hinges are aluminum. On the wing side, they're bolted to the aluminum rib lattice, but on the flaps, they're cut in."

  "The hinges are glued on?"

  "No, they're co-cured-basically glued and baked together. A sort of metal sandwich on composite bread, I guess you could say. And obviously Eurospatiale's designers didn't quite trust the adhesive bond, so they also put rivets into the hinges, right through the composite skin."

  "The 'chicken rivets,'" she repeated, unnecessarily loud, I thought. "Called that why?"

  I glanced up and saw that more and more people around the table were watching us. I tried not to smile. "Because you only do it if you're 'chicken'-scared the bond won't hold. Like wearing belts and suspenders."

  "But why are 'chicken rivets' a problem?"

  "When you put rivets through composites, you introduce micro-cracks. Means you run the risk of introducing moisture. Which is clearly what happened in Paris."

  Barlow signaled one of the waiters over and told him he wanted to try whatever red wine they were pouring.

  "How can you be so sure?" she said.

  "The photographs. You can see cracks at the stress concentration points. You can also see the brooming, the-"

  "Where the composites absorbed water," she said impatiently. "But the plane was new."

  "It made maybe twenty test flights before the show. Flew out of warm, rainy London up to subzero temps at forty thousand feet. So the damage spread fast. Weakened the joints. Then the flap tore off its hinge and hit the fuselage."

  "You're sure."

  "I saw the pictures. Nothing else it can be." Ali looked at me, a glint of amusement in her eyes. Kevin Bross put his hand over hers, making some point, and she delicately slid hers away.

  The younger of the two Mexican waiters poured red wine into Barlow's glass. It was deep red, almost blood-red, and even at a distance it gave off the smell of a horse barn. I guessed that meant it was good.

  Then the waiter's hand slipped. The neck of the bottle struck the glass and tipped it over. Wine splashed on the tablecloth, speckling Barlow's starched white shirt.

  "Hey, what the hell?" Barlow cried.

  "I sorry," the waiter said, taking Barlow's napkin and daubing at his shirt. "I very sorry."

  "For Christ's sake, you clumsy ox!"

  The waiter kept blotting his shirt.

  "Will you get the hell out of here?" Barlow snapped at the kid. "Get your goddamn hands off my stomach."

  The waiter looked like he wanted to flee. "Upton," I said, "it's not his fault. I must have knocked into it with my elbow."

  The waiter glanced quickly at me, not understanding. He couldn't have been twenty, had an olive complexion and close-cropped black hair.

  The manager came out of the kitchen with a small stack of cloth napkins. "We're so sorry," he said, handing a few to Barlow and laying the others neatly over the stained tablecloth. "Pablo," he said, "please get Mr. Barlow a towel and that spray bottle of water."

  "I don't need a towel," Barlow said. "I need a new shirt."

  "Yes, of course, sir," the manager said.

  As Pablo the waiter left, I said to the manager, "It wasn't Pablo's fault. I hit hi
s glass with my elbow."

  "I see," the manager said, and kept blotting.

  Cheryl watched with shrewd eyes. After a minute, she said: "Well, at least Hammond would never do something so stupid as to use chicken rivets, of course."

  I glanced at her quickly, then caught the sharp edge of Hank Bodine's menacing stare. "Well, actually, we did," I said.

  "We did…what?"

  "Put chicken rivets on all the wing control surfaces. Other places, too."

  "Wait a second," she said. She sat forward, intent. If this was performance art, she was Meryl Streep. "Are you telling me our SkyCruiser team didn't know this might cause a serious problem?"

  The frightened waiter returned with a stack of neatly folded white towels and handed them to Barlow. "I said I don't need any damned towels."

  "Excuse me," I said to Cheryl. Then I touched the waiter's arm. "Mira, este tipo es un idiota," I said softly. "Es solo un pendejo engreнdo. No voy a dejar que te meta en problemas." The guy's a jerk, I told him. A pompous asshole. I'd make sure he didn't get blamed for it.

  He had an open, trusting face, and he looked at me, surprised. Maybe even relieved.

  "Gracias, seсor. Muchas gracias."

  "No te preocupes."

  "You speak fluently," Cheryl said.

  "Just high school Spanish," I said. I didn't think she needed to know that my "teachers" were a couple of cholos, or at least Latino gangstas-in-training, at a juvenile detention facility.

  "But you've got the idiom down well," she said. "I spent a few years in Latin America for Boeing." She lowered her voice. "That was sweet, what you just did."

  I shrugged. "Never liked bullies," I said quietly.

  She raised her voice again. "You're not seriously telling me that we made the same stupid mistake, are you?"

  "It's not a matter of being stupid," I said. "It was a judgment call. Remember a couple of years back when Lockheed built the X-33 launch vehicle for NASA?"

  She shook her head.

  "They made the liquid fuel tanks out of composite instead of aluminum. To save some weight. And during the tests, the fuel tanks ripped apart at the seams. A very public disaster. So our people looked at that, and said, man, throw in some rivets just in case the adhesive fails like it did with Lockheed."

  "'Our people.' Meaning who? Whose…'judgment call' was it? Some low-level stress analyst?"

  "I'm sure the decision must have been made at a higher level than that."

  "How high a level? Was it Mike Zorn?"

  "No," I said quickly.

  "Surely you know who made the decision to put in the…chicken rivets?"

  "I don't really recall."

  "But the name of the engineer who signed off on it is a matter of record, isn't it?" she said. "I'll bet you've got the spreadsheet on your computer. With the CAD number, listing the employee number of the stress analyst who stamped and signed off on the chicken rivets." She smiled thinly. "Am I right?"

  Man. She knew a hell of a lot more than she was letting on. The guy who signed off on all the wing drawings was a stress analyst who'd been with Hammond for more than fifteen years, a very smart engineer named Joe Hartlaub. I remembered how he argued, long and hard, against putting rivets through the composite skin. Remembered the e-mails between him and Mike Zorn. Zorn took Joe's side-then Bodine jumped in and overruled them.

  Bodine, who'd been building metal airplanes for decades, considered composites "voodoo." And he had the power to overrule both Zorn and the stress analyst. Bodine was the boss. He always won.

  "I'm sure one of our stress analysts stamped the drawings, but it couldn't have been his decision," I said. "It would have had to be made at a higher level."

  "By whom?"

  "I don't know."

  "Surely you do."

  "I don't want to speculate," I said.

  "Meaning that you know and won't tell me?"

  "No. Meaning I'm not sure."

  "Probably an old-line metal guy, as you put it. Right? A senior executive?"

  I shrugged again.

  "Because now it's clear, based on what happened in Paris, that the wings are going to have to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. A design change, partial-scale integrated testing, tooling and fabrication and touch-and-gos. Which will delay the launch of the SkyCruiser by six months, even a year."

  "That would be a disaster. A delay like that, we could lose billions of dollars."

  "And if we sell planes that we know to be defective, we're criminally negligent. So we don't have a choice, do we? Which is why I want to know who made that idiotic decision that's going to cost us so dearly."

  My theory was right. She was determined to use the Eurospatiale crash to undermine Hank Bodine, then get rid of him. And I'd just gotten trapped in the maws of that battle.

  I just nodded.

  "Well, I intend to find out who it was," she said. "And when I do, I will cut him out like a cancer."

  23

  The waiters cleared away the bowls and the gold-rimmed service plates and began setting out a battalion of fresh silverware and steak knives with curved black handles and sharp carbon-steel blades.

  Then the food came. And came. And came.

  Raw oysters served with a pungent ponzu sauce. Tiny braised wild partridges seasoned with juniper berries on a bed of cabbage laced with tiny cubes of foie gras. Sautйed rapini and black-walnut-filled Seckel pear and cipollini coulis. Saffron-buckwheat crepes with a ragout of lobster and chanterelle mushrooms. Saddle of venison stuffed with quince. Ya de ya de ya.

  Of course, I didn't know what half the stuff was, so I studied the menu like a lost tourist clutching a street map. I was full before the main course, and I didn't even know what the main course was.

  At the foot of the table, Bo Lampack, the guy who looked like Mr. Clean, stood up and cleared his throat. The hubbub didn't subside until he clinked on his water glass for a good fifteen seconds.

  "I don't know, think there's enough food here tonight?" he boomed. "Might have to go out to McDonald's for a Quarter-Pounder later on, huh?"

  The laughter was boisterous.

  "Oh, yeah, right. No restaurants around here for a hundred miles. So I guess you better eat up, folks. Hey, I'm Bo Lampack, from Corporate Teambuilders. Your team-building coordinator. As most of you remember, since I worked with most of you adventurers before." He paused. "Then again, alcohol does kill brain cells."

  More raucous laughter.

  He looked sternly around the table. "And after that banquet on the last night…" He paused again, and let the guffaws crescendo. "…I'm surprised you gentlemen have any brain cells left."

  He surfed the waves of laughter like a pro. "Looks like we got some ladies with us this year, huh? Two beautiful ladies. You ladies think you can keep up with all these tough guys?"

  I stole a glance at Cheryl. An enigmatic smile was frozen on her face like a mannequin's. Ali smiled bashfully, nodded.

  "Actually," Bo said, "maybe the real question is, can you tough guys keep up with the ladies? See, in case you guys are thinking you're old hands and you got a head start on the ladies-sorry. Doesn't work that way. Because I always like to shake things up. Get you out of your comfort zone. So we're going to be doing some new things this year. Some fishing-only not the kind you're used to. Some kayaking. A great new GPS scavenger hunt. Even extreme tree climbing-and lemme tell you, it ain't like when you were a kid."

  Kevin Bross grinned.

  "Right, Kev? You've done recreational tree climbing, haven't you? Rope-secured, with harnesses and carabiners and all?"

  "Got certified in Atlanta," Bross said.

  "Why does that not surprise me?" said Lampack. "How about you, uh, Upton? It's wild, isn't it?"

  Upton Barlow shook his head. "Haven't tried it yet, but I'm looking forward to it," he said. Obviously he wasn't happy that Bross knew a sport he didn't. "We doing the fire walk again this year?"

  "Uh, we've stopped doing the fire walk," Lampack sa
id. "Insurance problems."

  Some nervous titters.

  "Guy from Honeywell got hurt pretty bad, few months back."

  "I guess he wasn't a positive thinker," Bross said. "It's all about mental concentration, you know."

  "Tell that to the guy from Honeywell with third-degree burns on the soles of his feet," said Lampack. "Had to have skin grafts. See, this isn't all fun and games, kids. Now, this year's program is called Power Play, but it's not going to be like any play you've ever done before. You're all going to have to sign liability waivers as usual. There are dangers. We don't want any of you executives falling off tightropes in the ropes course and bashing your heads and delaying the launch of your new plane or anything."

  There was a weird, hostile edge to Lampack, I was beginning to see. Like he secretly resented the corporate executives he worked with and took a kind of sadistic pleasure in taunting them.

  "I won't lie to you," he said. "There's gonna be scary moments. But it's moments like that that tell you who you really are. When you're thirty feet off the ground you learn what you're really made of, okay? You learn to confront your fears. Because this is about personal growth and self-discovery. It's about breaking down inhibitions. Knocking down those office walls so we can build team spirit."

  He reached down and picked up a large reel of rope. He pulled out a length: half-inch white rope, blue threads woven through it. "You know what this is? This is not just your lifeline. This is trust." He nodded solemnly, looked around. "When you're walking across a cable thirty feet off the ground and some-one's belaying you, you've got to trust him-or her-not to drop you, huh?"

  He set the spool down. "You'll be challenged mentally and physically. And you're all going to fail at some point-our courses are designed to make you fail. Not our rope, though. Hopefully." He chuckled. "These tests are some of the most brutal trials you'll ever go through." He paused. "Except maybe one of Hank Bodine's PowerPoint presentations, huh?"

  Bodine clicked a smile on and off. No one laughed.