House Arrest

by Mike Lawson

  Sebastian was completely different. Not only was he not the least bit sociable—Evelyn could have accepted that; some people just aren’t outgoing or gregarious—but Sebastian truly didn’t seem to give a damn about the people who worked for him. As far as he was concerned, the thirty thousand he employed worldwide were nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet. If it was more profitable to move a thousand jobs to India, he never appeared to give any thought whatsoever to what would happen to the thousand people who lost their jobs in America. All he seemed to care about was next quarter’s dividend.

  But Evelyn knew, even if no one else who worked for him did, that he hadn’t always been this way. As a boy he’d seemed normal enough, although he’d been what the kids these days would call a nerd. When he was young and his father would bring him to work, he drove the engineers crazy with all his questions. Yeah, he’d been a bit goofy as a kid, but he’d been a nice kid.

  His personality changed drastically by the time he became an adult, and Evelyn knew the reason, because she’d been sleeping with George at the time. Jean Mitchell, his high school sweetheart—who later married Lyle Canton—broke up with him in college, and Sebastian had a nervous breakdown. George said that if Sebastian’s mother hadn’t intervened, he was convinced that his son would have committed suicide. And Evelyn could understand, even if George couldn’t, how the awkward young teenager she’d known might go off the deep end after losing the love of his life. What she couldn’t understand, however, was the person he turned into.

  When he came to work for George after graduating from MIT, the sweet kid she’d known had morphed into this intense, brooding creature, lurking in his father’s shadow, watching silently as he learned the business. Then, when he took over the company after his father became ill and had to retire—and when George was no longer there to restrain him—Sebastian immediately stripped away any part of the company he considered inefficient and went after the competition as if he were a combatant engaged in some sort of financial blood sport. Somehow losing Jean to Canton had hardened him in ways Evelyn couldn’t understand. Any compassion he’d once felt for others had vanished.

  Sebastian had also taken an interest in other competitive activities after he took over the company. He hired a personal coach and began to play tennis, becoming good enough to play with the best amateurs in the region. Evelyn had watched him in a match once, and he was absolutely savage when he played. He drove a race car for a brief period, winning several races, destroying several cars, and firing members of his pit crew for any error that added seconds to the clock. He took karate and earned a black belt or something. But the thing was, he didn’t seem to take any real pleasure from these activities, as he pursued them in the same grim, winning-is-everything fashion in which he conducted his business.

  Seven months ago, however, his personality had abruptly changed, if only for a short time. For a brief, three-month period, he was the happiest Evelyn could ever remember seeing him. He became, if not exactly sociable, at least more friendly and approachable. One day he even brought her flowers; it was her birthday, but she was so shocked she was rendered speechless. At the time this transformation in him took place, she had no idea what could have caused it—then she found out, at the same time as the rest of the world, when it was reported after Jean Canton’s fatal car accident that Sebastian had been having an affair with her.

  Evelyn couldn’t believe how hard Jean’s death had hit him. First, he missed two weeks of work, never once checking in to see how things were going, which for him was unheard of. And after he returned to work … It was as if he’d lost all interest in the only thing he’d ever really cared about, his company. He’d spend hours alone in his office, refusing to see people who needed to see him. He wouldn’t take phone calls from people he always took calls from and never returned their calls. He began to miss meetings he normally would have attended. He would show up for work some days unshaven, his clothes looking as if he’d slept in them. Evelyn had seen people devastated by the death of a loved one, but she’d never seen anyone affected as badly as poor Sebastian. It was as if he were disappearing inside himself.

  Oh, well, what could she do?

  She had just flipped open the novel she planned to spend the next eight hours reading when Bill Brayden entered the office. “I need to see him,” Brayden said.

  She didn’t much like Brayden. He was polite enough and was never rude to her, but there was something sinister about him. He reminded her of those SS officers you see in World War II movies, the ones always hunting down the beautiful heroines who were members of the French resistance.

  Evelyn glanced at the phone on her desk and said, “He’s not on the phone and doesn’t have anything scheduled until nine. Just go on in. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see you.” That was a joke, but Brayden obviously didn’t get it.

  Headquarters for Spear Industries was a twenty-one-story glass tower in Reston, Virginia. From Sebastian Spear’s penthouse office, you could see the cars going by on the Dulles Airport access road and the lush fairways of the Reston National Golf Course—although Spear rarely took in the view. He might as well have worked in a cave, as his attention was usually totally focused on the Bloomberg terminal or the two computer monitors on his desk.

  On one side of Spear’s office was an old-fashioned draftsman’s table—it had belonged to his father—and rolled out on the table were schematics for some future project. In front of his glass-topped desk were two uncomfortable stainless-steel and leather chairs, but as meetings with Spear rarely lasted long, the chairs’ inhumane design didn’t much matter.

  When Bill Brayden walked into the room, he was surprised to see his boss standing and looking out a south-facing floor-to-ceiling window. Sebastian Spear was a tall, slender man with narrow shoulders that tended to make his head seem larger than it actually was. His face was pale, as for the last four months he’d spent very little time outdoors. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses—the same style he’d worn since high school. When he was younger the glasses had made him look like a nerdy Bill Gates wannabe. Now they seemed perfectly suited to him, somehow even fashionable.

  Spear didn’t turn to look at Brayden, even though he must have heard him open and close the office door. Brayden waited a moment for Spear to face him, and when he didn’t, he said, “I believe everything regarding Canton will soon be resolved.”

  What he meant was that DeMarco would soon cease to pose any risk whatsoever.

  Brayden waited, staring at Spear’s back, for Spear to say something—like Thank you, Bill or You did a great job, Bill—but he didn’t. He just stood there, apparently mesmerized by whatever he was looking at on the other side of the glass. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Brayden said, “I’ll, uh, keep you apprised of any developments.” When Spear still didn’t respond, Brayden shook his head and left.

  Fucking Spear. What a whack job.

  Sebastian had expected to feel different. He’d expected to feel something … more.

  When Canton was killed, he’d been in China, at a symposium, listening to a so-called expert talk about the current state of China’s power grid and the need for expansion. He didn’t even know why he’d attended the symposium in the first place, because once he arrived he realized he had no interest in anything anyone had to say. He’d been bored and began scrolling through his iPad, and that’s when he saw the headline that Lyle Canton had been shot inside the Capitol.

  He’d left the auditorium, walked outside, staring down at the headline, waiting for it to hit him: a spike of elation, a surge of vindictive joy, a sense of triumph because the only man he’d ever hated was gone. But nothing happened. He didn’t feel anything. The empty, hollowness in his chest that had been there since Jean’s death remained. She was gone—and nothing would ever fill the void.

  After Jean had dumped him in college for Canton, he’d spiraled downward into a deep depression, shattered by grief and loss and betrayal. Had it not been for his mo
ther, he was certain he would have killed himself. She brought in the psychiatrist from Cambridge, and he’d helped somewhat—or at least the drugs had helped—but it was mostly his mother, who spent hours comforting him, sometimes just sitting next to him, holding his hand. She’d understood, even if no one else had, that Jean hadn’t been a passing teenage infatuation. Sebastian had been in love with Jean longer than many people stayed married, and when she left him for Canton, it was no different from a man losing his spouse. Only his mother understood this.

  It was his father, however, who changed him into the man he became. His father couldn’t see the point of wallowing in grief over a single woman, not when you’re only twenty years old. His father’s attitude had been that there were a million women out there, and Sebastian just needed to get back on his horse and start riding again. His father was wrong about that. The world may have been filled with women, but there had been only one for him. When it came to Jean, the expression soul mate wasn’t a cliché.

  But there was one thing his father had been right about. His father pointed out, in his typical macho, callous fashion, that the reason Sebastian had lost Jean was that he hadn’t been willing to fight for her. He’d let Lyle Canton steal her, as if she’d been a car and Sebastian had carelessly left the keys in the ignition. His father had said that real men don’t let other men steal things from them.

  It was from that point forward that Sebastian had decided he would never lose again, or if he did, it wouldn’t be because he backed away from a fight. People thought his business tactics had to do with making money but they really didn’t. He had all the money he would ever need. What drove him was that he’d vowed that he would never be beaten again because of being weak or disengaged or unwilling to do whatever it took to keep what was his.

  He couldn’t believe it the night Jean walked up to him at the Smithsonian event. He hadn’t seen her in over twenty years—he’d deliberately avoided looking for photos of her online and refused to read anything written about her by the press—but there she was, in the flesh, and he’d been amazed at how little she’d changed since college. He was so stunned to see her that he wasn’t able to speak. Nor was he able to move. He knew he should turn and walk away to show his contempt for her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was fixed to the spot as if the past and her beauty had nailed his feet to the floor. Then she said, “I’m sorry for what I did to you, Sebastian. I’ve been sorry for twenty years. Can we talk? Please?”

  And talk they did, although she did most of the talking: about the regrets she had for marrying Canton, about the way he treated her, about how she knew her life would have been completely different if she’d stayed with Sebastian. When she took his hand and said she wanted him to get them a room—as if one night could make up for all those lost years—he did so without hesitation.

  After his affair with Jean began, Sebastian could feel the change in himself. It was as if his heart had been a dormant seed and her renewed love for him had caused it to sprout and grow. For the three short months they were together, he’d felt like a kid again, happy in a way he couldn’t remember being happy since high school. He would find himself smiling for no apparent reason. He took delight in simple, beautiful things, like children laughing and the way the world smelled new again after it rained. But after her death—after Canton killed her—his heart shriveled and died, and he knew there would be no second resurrection.

  Following her death he again spiraled out of control, just as he had when she broke up with him in college: drinking until he passed out, unable to sleep, fantasizing for hours about the way things could have been, sometimes crying so hard he couldn’t breathe. He broke every mirror in his house one morning, because every time he saw himself he experienced a nauseating, overwhelming sense of self-loathing for his failure to save her from Canton. Then he’d made a complete ass of himself by showing up drunk at her funeral and threatening to kill Canton, after which he was tossed into a cell like some pathetic maniac, which he truly had been that day. He hadn’t gone to the cemetery to confront Canton; he’d gone to say good-bye to Jean. He’d planned to wait until Canton had left the cemetery and then go stand by her grave and say how sorry he was for having failed her. But when he saw that son of a bitch pretending to weep for her—

  After he was questioned by the Capitol Police and then released without being charged, he’d returned home and searched his house until he found his grandfather’s gun, a .38 revolver that neither he nor his father had ever fired. He started to walk out the door, the gun in his hand, intending to hunt Canton down and kill him. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. The logical, barely functioning side of his brain knew his chances of succeeding were practically nil and that he’d most likely be killed himself. Which led to: Why not kill myself? He knew he’d never be content again or experience love or true happiness again. But then he thought, No! If he killed himself, Canton would win, and he couldn’t allow Canton to win.

  He could just see Canton marrying some other woman like Jean, some woman he could trot out like a puppet onto the political stage. And who knew where Canton might end up? Becoming president of the United States was not outside the realm of possibility; he certainly might become the next Speaker of the House, which would make him second in line for the presidency.

  At that moment—the moment when he thought of the possibility of Canton becoming president—it was as if someone had doused him with a bucket of ice water. He showered and shaved for the first time in days, took a pill, and slept for twelve hours. When he woke up, he dressed in one of his conservative suits and went to his office, trying to act as if the past two weeks had never happened. The first thing he did when he reached his office, however, was summon Bill Brayden, and the only thing he said to Brayden was, “I want Lyle Canton gone.”

  And that’s all he’d said.

  Brayden had worked for him for a long time. He didn’t need to be told anything more.

  But now Sebastian realized that killing Canton hadn’t given him the sense of satisfaction that he’d expected and once again felt the despair wash over him. Nothing had changed. Nothing would fill the void.

  What really was the point of going on?

  14

  After Bill Brayden retired from the air force, he was hired as the deputy to Spear Industries’ head of security, a man named McDonald, a former D.C. Metro detective. In less than a year, Brayden was managing Spear’s security operations—in other words, he was doing McDonald’s job. He hired and fired security personnel, updated equipment as needed, and developed and executed plans for protecting Spear Industries’ assets. The only thing he didn’t do was run a small group called Special Security Operations. When he asked McDonald what SSO did, he was told, “Don’t worry about it.”

  Now “Special Security Operations” might sound like an outfit composed of elite soldiers, like Delta Force guys. It wasn’t. SSO consisted of a couple of tight-lipped lawyers and two cynical ex-cops, one from Chicago and one from Philly.

  One day McDonald called Brayden into his office. McDonald had been absent from work quite a bit before that meeting, and Brayden knew that he had had his prostate removed and there’d been some complications. McDonald, a notoriously unsentimental man, told Brayden, without any preamble: “I’m dying. Fucking cancer. I’m going to stick around here for about a month to teach you the ropes, then I’m gone.”

  After he got over the shock of McDonald’s pronouncement, he wondered what McDonald meant by “teaching him the ropes,” because as near as Brayden could tell he was already running Spear Industries’ security division—except for the guys in Special Ops. And that’s when he learned what Special Ops did.

  McDonald explained that in some countries corruption was so rampant that the only way Spear Industries prevailed was by figuring out whom to bribe and then bribing them. And in these countries, you didn’t even have to be very subtle about it. You’d drop by the office of the government minister whose palm had to be greased and
basically say, “So how much do we have to pay you to get the contract?” In other places, including the United States, a more oblique approach was required. Contributions were made to political campaigns; a local official would be the beneficiary of a first-class European vacation; a visiting congressman would have a sexual experience borrowed from Fifty Shades of Grey.

  Special Operations also did what McDonald called “opposition research”—which meant learning everything it could about rival corporations so it could exploit any weaknesses. When government contracts were involved—federal, state, or municipal—Special Ops would do what it could to find out what other companies were bidding so Spear could come in just under their bids, or it would bribe the guy in charge of reviewing the bids.

  McDonald said, “We don’t do anything our competition isn’t also doing. We’re just better at it.” When Brayden asked, “Isn’t some of this stuff illegal?” McDonald said, “Yeah, and if you got a problem with that, you should quit.”

  Brayden didn’t quit.

  McDonald explained to him that the trickiest part of his job often wasn’t the opposition. The trickiest part was Sebastian Spear. “I started under Spear’s old man,” McDonald said, “and George knew exactly what I was doing, and sometimes he’d be directly involved in the planning. Well, Sebastian doesn’t work that way. He’s way too cagey. He makes sure that he’s at least a step or two removed from anything me and my guys are doing, so if someone lands in the shit it won’t be him. Every once in a while, I might have to brief him on something to make sure he knows what I’m doing, and he won’t say a word. It’s like he’s making sure he’s never on record for approving anything. And when he wants you to do something, he’ll be so fucking cryptic it might take you a day or two to figure out what the hell he wants.