Power Play

by Joseph Finder

  I paused just long enough for him to think I was mulling all this over. "No offense," I said, "but I'm not a Hindu."

  I waited for Travis to pass by again.

  A thought had occurred to me, and I shifted around to Danziger.

  "If we have kidnap-and-ransom insurance," I said, "doesn't that mean we have some firm on retainer that specializes in rescuing hostages?"

  Danziger smiled: rueful, not condescending. "That's only in the movies. In the real world, very few risk-management firms actually do retrievals. They do hostage negotiation with the kidnappers and make the payment arrangements. But this isn't a ransom situation. Russell's too smart for that. He knows what he's doing." Danziger paused. "He does seem to know an awful lot about how this all works."

  "So do you."

  "It's part of my job. At Hammond, the controller is also what they call the 'risk manager.' That means I work with Ron Slattery and Geoff Latimer to arrange for all the special risk insurance coverage. Told you I'd put you to sleep if I told you too much about what I do." He seemed distracted, looked at Grogan. "How does he know so much about K &R, do you think?"

  "I've been wondering the same thing," Grogan said. "You remember when Latimer told us about this security firm in California he thought we might want to have on retainer? Some law school classmate of his founded it or ran it, maybe?"

  "Right!" Danziger said. "They did recovery and retrieval, not just hostage negotiation. A lot of child abduction cases, I remember-divorces and such. One of their employees got arrested in South America on a child recovery case he was working, charged with kidnapping under the international treaty agreements. Did a couple years in prison in the U.S. That pretty much cooled me on them."

  The two men exchanged glances.

  I said, "You think that's Russell? That guy?"

  Danziger shrugged. "How else could Russell know so much?"

  "What do I know so much about?"

  A voice with the grit of fine sandpaper.

  Russell.

  I looked away, stared at the log walls. I didn't want to catch his eye. Didn't want him to notice that I'd moved.

  My heart hammered.

  "I know a lot of stuff," he said. "Like the fact that you were sitting over there before."

  I looked at Russell, shrugged nonchalantly.

  "I think you and I need to have a talk, Jake," he said. "Right now. Where's the cook?"

  A small woman with a big mop of unruly curly hair, who'd been dozing against the stone side of the fireplace, looked around and said, "I'm the chef."

  "Man, I never trust a skinny cook," he said. "How's your coffee?"

  "My coffee? We have Sumatra and Kona-"

  "How about java? You got java? I'd love a big pot of coffee. Nice and strong."

  She looked at the manager, frightened. He nodded.

  "He's not the boss anymore, babe," said Russell. "I am. Now, my friend Verne is going to take you into the kitchen while you make us some coffee."

  "How do you like it?" she said. "Cream? Sugar? Splenda?"

  "Now you've got the right attitude. I like it black. Those artificial sweeteners will kill you."

  44

  After I'd been at Glenview a few months, Mom was allowed to visit.

  She looked like she'd aged twenty years. I told her she looked good. She said she couldn't believe how I'd changed in a few short months. I'd gotten so muscular. I'd become a man. It looked like I was even shaving, was that possible?

  Most of her visit we sat in the molded orange plastic chairs in the visitor's lounge and watched the TV mounted high on the wall. She cried a lot. I was quiet.

  "Mom," I said as she was leaving. "I don't want you to come here again."

  She looked crestfallen. "Why not?"

  "I don't want you to see me in here. Like this. And I don't want to remember why I'm here. I'll be out in a year or so. Then I'll be home."

  She said she understood, though I'll never know if she really did. A month later, she was dead from a stroke.

  45

  The screened porch was cool and breezy. It had a distinctive, pleasant smell-of mildewed furnishings, of the tangy sea air, of the oil soap used to wash the floor. It was obviously not a place that saw much use.

  "Come into my office," Russell said. He'd taken off his tactical vest and had put on a soiled white pit cap that said DAYTONA 500 CHAMPION 2004 on the front and had a big number 8 on the side.

  The moon, fat and bright, cast a silvery light through the screens. The sky glittered with a thousand stars.

  He pointed to a comfortable-looking upholstered chair. A glider, I found, when I sat in it. He sat in the one next to it. We could have been two old friends passing the time in relaxed conversation, drinking beers and reminiscing.

  Except for his pewter gray eyes, flat and cold: something terribly detached about them, something removed and unnerving. The eyes of a sociopath, maybe; someone who didn't feel what others felt. I'd seen eyes like his before, at Glenview. He was a man who was capable of doing anything because he was restrained by nothing.

  I felt a cold hard lump form in my stomach.

  "You want to tell me what you were doing out there?" he said.

  "Trying to help."

  "Help who?"

  "I was passing along word from the CEO."

  "Word?"

  "To cooperate. Telling the guys not to cause trouble. To just do whatever you say so we can all get out of here alive."

  "She told you to walk over there to tell them that?"

  "She prefers e-mail, but it doesn't seem to be working so well."

  He was silent. I could hear the waves lapping gently against the shore, the rhythmic chirping of crickets.

  "Why'd she ask you?"

  "No one else was crazy enough."

  "Well, you got balls, I'll give you that. I think you're the only one out of all of them who's got any balls."

  "More balls than brains, I guess."

  "So if I ask Danziger and Grogan what you were talking about, they're going to tell me the same thing."

  The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled. "You're good with names, huh?"

  "I just like to come prepared."

  I nodded. "Impressive. How long have you been planning this?"

  I registered a shift in his body language, a sudden drop in the temperature. I'd miscalculated.

  "Am I going to have trouble with you?" he said.

  "I just want to go home."

  "Then don't be a hero."

  "For these guys?" I said. "I don't even like them."

  He laughed, stretched his legs out, yawned.

  I pointed to his cap, and said, "I saw that race."

  He looked at me blankly.

  "That's Junior, right?"

  "Huh?" It took him a few seconds to remember he was wearing a NASCAR cap.

  "Dale Earnhardt Jr.," I said.

  He nodded, turned away, looked straight ahead.

  "Junior crossed the finish line a fraction of a second ahead of Tony Stewart," I said. "Yeah, I remember that one. Seven or eight cars just wiped out. Michael Waltrip's car must have flipped over three times."

  He gave me a quick sidelong glance. "I was there, man."

  "You're kidding me."

  "Also saw his daddy get killed there three years before."

  I shook my head. "Crazy sport. I think a lot of people tune in just for the crashes. Like maybe they'll get lucky and see someone die."

  He gave me a longer look this time, didn't seem to know what to make of me. One of the snotty rich executives who followed NASCAR? It didn't compute. I guess I was doing a decent job pretending to care.

  "Nothing like the old days," he said. "NASCAR used to be like bumper cars. Drivers used to race hard. A demolition derby. The old bump-and-run."

  "Reminds me of that line from a movie," I said. "Rubbin's racin'."

  "Days of Thunder, man!" He was suddenly enthusiastic, his smile like a child's. "My favorite movie of all time.
How's it go again? 'He didn't slam you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you-he rubbed you. And rubbin', son, is racin'.' That's it, man."

  "That's it," I said, nodding sagely. Bond with the guy. Connect. "Sometimes a driver's just gotta shove another car out of position. Spin the other guy out. Wreck his car. Trade a little paint. But that's all changed now."

  "Exactly. Now you race too hard, they sock you with a penalty. Everyone's got to stay in line."

  "NASCAR got sissified."

  "They turned it into a corporation, see."

  "Damn straight."

  He gave me another quizzical look. "How come you're so much younger than the rest of the guys?"

  "I just look younger. I eat right. Saw-tooth palmetto."

  A smile spread slowly across his face. "Saw palmetto. You some-one's assistant or something?"

  "Nah, I'm just a ringer. A substitute."

  "That why you're not on the original guest list?"

  So he does have a guest list. From Hammond? It could just as well be someone who works at the resort. Someone who doesn't have the most up-to-date information.

  No, it had to be a source inside Hammond: How else could he know so much about Ron Slattery's personal life?

  He has an inside source: but who?

  "I was a last-minute replacement."

  "For Michael Zorn?"

  Interesting, I thought. He's keeping track. "Right."

  "What happened to Zorn?"

  So his information was at least a day or two old. Also interesting: He knew a lot about money laundering and offshore banks, about kidnap-and-ransom insurance, yet he didn't know everything about Hammond's finances. Not, at least, what he needed to know.

  "Mike had to go to India for some client meetings," I said.

  "So how'd they choose you?"

  "I have no idea."

  He nodded slowly. "I think you're full of shit."

  "Funny, that's what my last quarterly performance review said."

  He smiled, turned his penetrating gaze away.

  "But if I had to guess, it's because I know a lot about our newest airplane."

  "The H-880. You an engineer?"

  "No, but I think I met one once."

  He chuckled.

  "I'm the assistant to the guy who's in charge of building the SkyCruiser. I'm like a glorified traffic cop. Actually, forget the 'glorified' part."

  "Any of that traffic include money stuff? What do you know about the payments system-how money's moved in and out of the company?"

  "I know that my paycheck gets deposited into my bank account every two weeks. That's about it, though. As much as I need to know. I'm the low man on the totem pole here."

  He thought for a while. "That doesn't mean what you think."

  "What doesn't?"

  "'Low man on the totem pole.' The lower part of a totem pole is actually the most important part, see, because it's what most people look at. So it's usually done by the chief carver. He has his apprentices do the top part."

  "Thanks," I said. "Now I feel better about it."

  "Of course, the other guys don't know about totem poles. So they treat you like shit."

  "Not really."

  "I see things."

  "I guess I don't. Though they do like to rub it in about how much money they have. Fancy restaurants and golf-club memberships and all that."

  "That's 'cause they're not men. They're soft."

  "Or maybe it's just that they know I just don't come from their world."

  "Well, it's pretty obvious you're nothing like them. They're all a bunch of pussies and sissies and cowards."

  He was playing me, too, but why?

  "Not really. Some of them are serious jocks. Pretty competitive-Alpha Male types. And they all make a lot more money than me."

  He hunched forward in his chair, pointing a stern finger. He spoke precisely, as if reciting something he'd memorized. "Someone once said that the great tragedy of this century is that a man can live his entire life without ever knowing for sure if he's a coward or not."

  "Huh. Never thought about that."

  He glanced at me quickly, decided I wasn't being sarcastic.

  "You know what's wrong with the world today, bro? The computers. They're ruining the human race."

  "Computers?"

  "You ever see elks mate?" Russell said.

  "Never had the pleasure."

  "Every fall the female elk releases this musk in her urine, see. Tells the bull elks she's ready to mate. The bull elks can smell the musk, and they start fighting each other over the female. Charge at each other, butting heads, locking antlers, making this unbelievable racket, this loud bugling, until one of them gives up, and the winner gets the girl."

  "I've seen bar fights like that."

  "That's how the females can tell which bulls are the fittest. They mate with the winners. Otherwise, the weak genes get passed on, and the elks are gonna die out. This is how it works in nature."

  "Or the corporate world."

  "No. That's where you're wrong." The stern lecturer's finger again. "My point. Doesn't work like that with humans anymore. Used to be, a human who was too slow would get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Natural selection, right?"

  "Didn't the saber-toothed tiger go extinct?"

  A darting look of irritation. "These days, everything's upside down. Women don't mate with the better hunter anymore. They marry the rich guys."

  "Maybe the rich guys are the better hunters now."

  He scowled, but I had a sense that he didn't mind the fencing. Maybe even liked it. "It's like Darwin's law got repealed. Call it the rule of the weak."

  "Okay."

  "You think women can tell which men are the fittest anymore? They can't. You see a guy who's really cut and buff and wearing a muscle shirt to show it off, and you can figure he spends all his time in the gym, but you know something? Odds are he's a faggot."

  "Or a WrestleMania champ."

  Another flash of annoyance; I'd gone too far. "I mean, look at these guys." He waved at the wall, at the hostages on the other side. "This country was made by guys like Kit Carson, fighting the Indians with knives and six-shooters. Brave men. But that's all gone now. Now, some pencil-neck geek sitting at a computer can launch a thousand missiles and kill a million people. The world's run by a bunch of fat-ass wimps who only know how to double-click their way to power. Think they should get a Purple Heart for a paper cut."

  "I like that."

  "Their idea of power is PowerPoint. They got headsets on their heads and their fingers on keyboards and they think they're macho men when they're just half wimp and half machine. Nothing more than sports-drink-gulping, instant-message-sending, mouse-clicking, iPod-listening, web-surfing pussies, and God didn't mean for the likes of them to run this planet on the backs of real men."

  A knock at the door, and Verne came in with a mug, which he handed to Russell.

  "Finally. Thank you, Verne," Russell said.

  "Now they're all bitching and moaning about how they can't sleep on the floor," Verne said, shrugging and twitching.

  "Tell 'em this ain't the Mandarin Oriental. Who's complaining-the boss lady?"

  "Yeah, her. And some of the guys, too."

  "Pussies. All right, look. No reason to keep 'em there, with the hard floor. I want 'em going to sleep. There's a room with a big rug, off the main room. The one with all the stuffed deer heads on the wall. The game room."

  "I know it."

  "Move 'em all in there. Tell 'em to stretch out and go to sleep. Easier to keep watch."

  "Okay."

  "Close and lock the windows."

  "Gotcha," Verne said, and he left.

  He folded his legs, leaned back in his chair. "Aren't you the one who told Verne you were going to gouge out his good eye if he touched your girlfriend?"

  "She's not my girlfriend."

  He surprised me with a half smile. "You do have balls."

  "I just didn't like the way he wa
s talking to her."

  "So how come you know about the Glock 18?"

  "I did a year in the National Guard after high school." When no college would accept me.

  "You a gun nut?"

  "No. But my dad sort of was, so some of it rubbed off."

  Dad kept trophy hand grenades around the house, a veritable arsenal of unregistered weapons: "Gun nut" didn't really begin to describe him.

  "You a good shot?"

  "Not bad."

  "I'm guessing you're probably a pretty decent shot. The good ones never brag about it. So you got a choice here. You're either gonna be my friend and my helper, or I'm going to have to kill you."

  "Let me think about that one."

  "Guy like you could go either way." He shook his head. "I still get a vibe off you like you might try to be a hero."

  "You don't know me."

  "Thing is, I don't hear the fear in your voice. Like maybe there's something missing in you. Or something different."

  "That right?"

  "Haven't figured it out yet."

  "Let me know when you do."

  "I'm thinking you might try something reckless. Don't."

  "I won't."

  "What I got going here is too important to get screwed up by a kid with more testosterone than brains. So don't think you're fooling me. Don't think I'm not onto you. Someone's gonna have to be the first to get shot tonight, just to teach everyone a lesson. Make sure everyone gets it. And I think it might just be you."

  46

  If he meant to scare me, it worked. I refused to let him see it, though. I paused for a second or two, then affected a lighthearted tone.

  "Your call," I said, "but I'm not sure you want to do that."

  "Why not?"

  "You think I'm the last guy you can trust? Consider maybe I'm the only one you can trust."

  He sat back, folded his arms, narrowed his eyes. "How's that?"

  "You said it yourself, Russell. Of all the guys here, I'm the peon. I don't get a bonus. I don't get stock options. I really don't care how much money you take from the company. A million, a billion, it's all the same to me. Doesn't affect me in the slightest. I don't care how much money Hammond makes or loses. I didn't even want to come here in the first place. Most of them didn't want me here."