The Survivors

by Robert Palmer

  “Hold on,” I said. “Before you start calling me names, you should know I’ve been working on Braeder most of the day.”

  “You still could have called. I left three messages—”

  “I know. Listen, here’s what’s going on.” I gave him the short version: my early-morning conversation with Jamie Weston, meeting with Charlene and Cass Russo, what Tim Regis had to say. When I mentioned meeting with Howard Markaris, Scottie got angry again. “I could have been there too! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I hesitated a moment too long.

  “You didn’t want me there. You thought I’d go nutso on the guy.”

  “Something like that.” Sometimes you just have to be honest. “Either way, it worked out OK. When I mentioned Peter Sorensen’s name, Markaris almost blew a fuse. He definitely didn’t want me to talk to him. So I called Sorensen. He agreed to see us tonight.”

  “Us?” Scottie said, trying to sound casual.

  “I didn’t mention you, but sure. That is, if you promise to leave your nutso at home.”

  He snorted a laugh. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Where can I pick you up?”

  “I’d rather have my own wheels. I’ll meet you there.”

  “If you say so.” I gave him the address. “Let’s make it an hour from now. Sorensen said he was just starting dinner.”

  The address turned out to be on a residential street not far from Georgetown University. Scottie got there before me and was sitting on the curb, studying his tablet computer. His bicycle lay beside him in the grass.

  I had to park halfway down the block. As I walked back, he called, “It smells like a brewery around here.”

  Some of the row houses were well maintained but others were a mess—chipped paint, gutters hanging, screen doors missing. The yards there were trampled patches of weeds littered with beer cans.

  “Georgetown students rent a lot of these places. There’s a party every night—twice on Saturday.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Because Tori told me was the truthful answer. Still, I couldn’t help tweaking him. “You need to live a little, Scottie.”

  “Right,” he huffed. He stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. His skin seemed paler than usual, and he was fidgeting like a seven-year-old in need of a trip to the bathroom.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Sure, why not?”

  I kept staring at him and he said, “I had a rotten day at work, and I was worried about what you were up to.”

  “OK, one step at a time. Let’s see what Sorensen has to tell us.”

  “It’s that place over there,” he said, nodding across the street.

  It was a row house like all the others, in worse shape than some, but a lot better than the student rentals. There was a small plaque on the door that said Defense Contracting Institute, Inc. Washington is home to thousands of centers and foundations and associations. Some play in the policy big leagues, like Brookings and Heritage and Cato, with armies of analysts and fund-raisers. Some are lonely outposts with only one or two staffers, often washed-up government execs trying to keep their hands in the game. Others are harder to classify—and sometimes just plain wacko.

  “I was doing some checking on Sorensen,” Scottie said.

  “What did you find out?”

  He shrugged and shoved the tablet in his backpack. “Some stuff. Let’s go see the guy.”

  He was so jittery, I wanted to sit down and have a talk with him, but Sorensen might have spotted us and be wondering what we were doing out there. I didn’t want to spook him. So inside we would go.

  Scottie locked his bike to the porch while I knocked on the door. It opened, revealing a lanky man with a shock of gray-blond hair and a matching mustache. He tilted his head back and looked down his long nose at me. “You’re Henderson?”

  “Yes. This is my associate, Scott Glass.”

  Scottie seemed surprised that I’d mentioned him. He awkwardly stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Sure,” Sorensen said, ignoring the handshake. “Nice to meet you, too.” He waved us inside. “Something to drink? I think there’s water in the fridge.”

  “Nothing for me,” Scottie said, so gruffly that I frowned at him.

  “Sure, whatever you’ve got,” I said.

  He led us to a room off the central hall, what had been the living room when this was used as a home. There were two chairs in front of a battered metal desk. On the desk were three oldish laptop computers. Every other surface in the room was covered with stacks of papers and files. The place hadn’t been dusted in about a decade.

  Sorensen continued to the back of the house and soon returned with a bottle of water for me. He shambled to his seat behind the desk. I couldn’t see the computer screens, but the machines were on. His eyes flicked across them. “Braeder, huh? How could finding out about those guys help a patient of yours?”

  “He had a traumatic event when he was young,” I said, giving Scottie a quick glance. “It involved a woman who worked for Braeder. She had some problems there of her own, and we’re trying to sort that out.”

  He seemed to buy that explanation. “What do you want to know?”

  Scottie cut in before I could speak. “Tell us about this place. What do you do here?”

  “Military technology. We keep up on what’s new, publish a weekly newsletter, monitor contracting activity, report on waste. Sometimes we give strategic planning advice to the Department of Defense. There’s too much secrecy in the business. It leads to all kinds of inefficiency.”

  He’d obviously delivered that spiel before. As he spoke, he stared at the computers. Something flashed up on one and he began typing. Then he took up with a second machine, tapping with each hand. I smiled, reminded of a keyboardist in some old rock band.

  “How many people work here?” Scottie said.

  “I’ve got two full-time administrators and four interns. There are about twenty others who freelance doing investigations, writing reports for the newsletter.”

  “Do you live here?” Scottie said.

  It was obvious that he did, and that made it a rude question. I squeezed Scottie’s arm. “Let me take over for a minute.”

  Sorensen was looking at us, forgetting about his computers. “No, it’s all right. I do live here. I get more work done that way.”

  Scottie had leaned forward and seemed to be trying to stare him down. I didn’t understand what was going on with him.

  “Let’s get back to Braeder,” I said.

  “Yes, let’s,” Scottie said. “Even living here, this must be an expensive operation to run. Where do you get your funding from?”

  “Ah,” Sorensen said. He slouched back in his chair, sticking his long legs out to the side. “We get our money from a variety of private sources, some in the defense industry, some outside.”

  “Braeder?” Scottie said.

  Sorensen looked at me, giving a faint smile. “Apparently your associate has done some research that he hasn’t shared with you. Bravo, by the way, on what you’ve found out. Information on nonprofit funding isn’t easy to track down. Yes, Braeder is one of our major contributors.”

  He closed up the laptops, eliminating the distractions.

  “You said you got my name from Eric Russo’s wife. That’s fascinating, really. The last time I saw Charlene was over twenty years ago. She threatened to kill me.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  For half a minute Sorensen seemed lost to the world, then he stood up. “I’ve spent enough time in this room today. Let’s go upstairs.”

  I expected him to take us to his living quarters on the second floor, but he went up another set of stairs to the roof. He had a deck built there, with garden planters and expensive all-weather furniture. It was dusk, and the views were amazing—the lighted spires of Georgetown University, the Washington Monument and Capitol dome, National Cathedral.

  “Have a seat,”
he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  After he disappeared down the stairs, Scottie leaned over to me. “He’s not telling us everything. He used to work for Braeder.”

  “I know. Charlene Russo told me.”

  “Not just any employee. He was division head—”

  Sorensen had reappeared. He was carrying three highball glasses and a bottle of Black Label scotch. “Neat?” he said.

  He didn’t have ice, so I nodded.

  He poured three stiff fingers in each glass and sat down. “I love it up here. It’s the only place I can seem to think anymore. You get old, your mind gets too cluttered up with things.”

  He took a sip of his drink and looked up. “Venus over there.” He pointed at a bright spot near the horizon. “In five minutes, it’ll be dark enough for Vega to show.” He smiled slightly. “More clutter in my mind.”

  Or just showing us you’re the smartest guy around, I thought. I could go with that. “You must have done something pretty special to get Charlene Russo to threaten to kill you,” I said.

  “Not really.” He nudged our glasses and nodded for us to drink up. “Unless you think tilting at windmills is special.”

  Scottie took a drink, so fast I heard the glug from across the table. “Just tell us what happened,” he said flatly.

  Sorensen looked hurt. He was obviously a bright man; he wanted some respect. I said, “We’d really like to hear the story.”

  He evened up the scotch in the glasses before he went on. “All right, but it goes way back, to when I was in school.”

  He told us his family had owned a military contracting outfit—not huge, but a solid business. He’d gone to Harvard, then MIT for a doctoral degree in engineering. He never was into the business end of things. He loved being in the lab, working out technical puzzles. By the time he was thirty, he had nine patents to his credit. He could have just continued on that path, “working seven days a week knocking things together,” as he put it.

  Sorensen stretched out and rested his glass on his narrow belly. “Everything was great until the day I met Ned Bowles.”

  “When was that?” I said.

  “That was in February, twenty-five years ago.”

  Scottie and I looked at each other.

  Sorensen continued, “Ned’s company and ours were competitors, so I had no idea what he wanted when he called and asked to have lunch. We met; he was charming. He came right to the point, too. He wanted to hire me—away from my own family. It sounded preposterous at first, but then he started talking about this new design facility he was going to build, and the other people he was going to hire. He offered me a salary three times what I was making and offered to make me division head of research for all of Braeder.” He gave Scottie a nod. “I heard you talking when I came back with the bottle. Bravo again on your research.”

  Scottie shrugged slightly and took another swallow of scotch.

  Sorensen said, “I went back to the office and told my father. I thought he’d treat it as a joke. Instead he blew up, told me I was an idiot for even talking to Bowles.” His voice dropped a beat. “There are some things I can’t abide, even now.”

  Slowly he spun his glass on the table. “I thought about it for a few weeks and got some calls from people at Braeder trying to convince me to make the jump. It’s nice to be wanted. I decided to take it.”

  “And that’s where Eric Russo came in,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then smiled. “Not right away, but yes—the lawyer to handle the paperwork. Somebody had to put together an employment agreement. I didn’t want to hire an attorney, and Eric said he’d take care of it, make sure the contract was fair to everybody. I didn’t even read the damned thing, just signed on the dotted line.”

  “Stupid,” Scottie mumbled.

  Sorensen’s eyes flashed. “Yes, but we all do foolish things when we’re young.”

  “The contract didn’t give you what Bowles promised?” I said.

  “No—I got the salary, the benefits, the title of division head. But as they say, the devil is in the details. That contract turned me into a serf. Everything I created was Braeder’s property. And if I left the company, I couldn’t work anywhere in technical design or research for seven years. That’s a lifetime in the area I worked in.”

  “What area was that?” I said.

  “Optical design. I was working on high-magnification systems for planes and satellites. Ned gave me everything I wanted, the best help and equipment. I burned through every idea I had in two years. We filed a new patent application almost every month. Then as soon as I started to slow down, Ned kicked me to the curb. I was still division head of research. They couldn’t take that away. But they shifted all their attention from optics to avionics, something I knew nothing about. I had an office, a great salary—just no work to do.”

  He’d finished his drink and so had Scottie. Sorensen added more to their glasses.

  “I had other job offers, including with the Hubble Space Telescope Program. Right up my alley. So I went to Ned and told him I was leaving. No, he said. Actually, he said, ‘Hell no.’ He intended to hold me to my contract—no research work outside Braeder for seven years.”

  “That’s when you went back to Eric Russo,” I said.

  “He worked for Braeder, but I thought he worked for me, too. I figured he’d come up with some compromise. We met at his office on K Street. Things got pretty heated, and I told him if he didn’t get me out of that damned contract I was going to sue him. Bury him. If I couldn’t win in court, I could ruin him in the newspapers.”

  He lifted his glass to take a sip.

  “Charlene was his administrative assistant then. She heard what I said to him and cornered me in the hall.” He smiled grimly. “Remember that saying they had a few years back—Mama Grizzlies? Charlene was the original. She backed me right against the wall and said if I went after Eric, it would be the last thing I ever did.”

  “You let her tell you what to do?” Scottie said.

  “Of course not. I got a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against Ned and Eric and Braeder.” He waved his thin hand around. “What you see here is the settlement. I’m banished from research, but I get to have this place, with a steady stream of cash from Braeder. I can be a thorn in their side, but nothing serious. I’m too small potatoes for that.”

  He brooded for a few seconds, then got himself together. “Ned Bowles and his crew are careful. They’re polite. You met Howard Markaris; you saw it. But they don’t let anyone get in their way. And they don’t let anybody out from under an obligation.”

  “Was your family’s company Clovis-Knight Optics?” I said.

  “Yes, it was. How did you know?”

  “I talked to a former employee of Braeder’s named Lois McGuin. She mentioned Clovis-Knight. Lois became quite wealthy when Braeder went public.”

  “So did a lot of the original Braeder employees,” Sorensen said. “I didn’t land there in time.” He laughed, as if he was putting all the bitterness behind him. “So tell me about this patient of yours—how can I help you there?”

  Scottie had his backpack, and he reached inside and laid my mother’s unemployment filing on the table. Sorensen clicked a switch on the corner of the deck, turning on a ring of lights behind the planters.

  Sorensen took his time reading it. “Denise Oakes,” he said. “That name is familiar, but according to this she left Braeder several months before I got there. I never would have met her.”

  “She was fired for taking design plans out of the office,” I said. “Lois McGuin implied she might have been trying to sell them to Clovis-Knight.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Sorensen said. “Until I started working for Braeder, they didn’t have a single idea worth taking.” He shrugged, realizing how that sounded. “Braeder’s strength was in manufacturing. They had a great production line, everything made to perfect specs. But their weakness was moving the science forward. In defense work, you have to
push the materials, get the most out of every component.”

  He noticed my glazed expression.

  “The technical part doesn’t matter. Braeder was never a leader when it comes to developing new ideas. They buy their technology. No, that’s putting too happy a face on it. They buy people, like they bought me. They use them up and throw them away like tissues.”

  I tapped the paper. “Could that have happened to Denise Oakes?”

  “Like I said, the name seems familiar, but I don’t remember—”

  Scottie broke in. “She killed herself, after she shot her husband and kids.”

  “Ah . . . yes,” Sorensen said, with a grimace of distaste. “I do remember that. I didn’t connect it with the name. There were lots of whispers about Mrs. Oakes, long after I got to Braeder.”

  I looked down at the table. “What did those whispers say?”

  “That she was crazy and had been for a long time.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to let my anger show. Scottie didn’t have that kind of control. He drained his glass and thumped it down. Silently, I cursed him for drinking so much.

  “If there wasn’t anything at Braeder worth stealing, why was she fired?” Scottie said.

  “I don’t know,” Sorensen said. “If she was unstable, maybe that’s why.”

  “Maybe?” Scottie said sarcastically. “That’s the best you can do?”

  I cut in on him. “These whispers you heard—can you remember who talked about her?”

  Sorensen frowned and rubbed his jaw. “It was so long ago. People just talked—before meetings, in the staff lounge. I never paid much attention. She was only a technical writer, not one of the upper-level people.”

  “Not important,” Scottie said. “So she didn’t really matter.”

  “That’s enough, Scottie,” I said.

  “No, he acts like—”

  “That’s enough.” And it was time for us to get out of there before he really made a mess of things. Sorensen had a lot of information that could be helpful. I wanted a chance to make a second run at him on my own.

  “Mr. Sorensen, thanks for meeting with us.” I handed him a business card. “If you remember anything specific about Denise Oakes, I’d appreciate a call.”