Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  “The one with Matthew Broderick, the last scene, where Godzilla kept on coming, and coming?”

  “Yeah, but Angie’s more determined.”

  “And Godzilla’s easier to get along with.”

  “Hey, that’s my almost, soon-to-be-ex-wife you’re talking about!”

  “Speaking of which, when are you gonna call her?” Charlie dared ask.

  Burke slumped back in his chair. “Why did you have to remind me, when things were going so well.”

  Fortunately or unfortunately, he didn’t have to. His intercom buzzed and he heard Maryanne Thomas’s nervous voice say, “Bob? You’d better duck. Angie’s on her way back, and she doesn’t look very happy.”

  “Oh, shit,” the two men muttered in unison.

  The dreaded Angie did not wait to be let in or announced. The door flew open and slammed into the sidewall, and she stormed in and began reaming him out before it stopped swinging.

  “You moron! You are such an asshole!” she glared, directing her full ire at Bob.

  “You need to focus on one insult at a time, Angie; it’s more effective that way,” he managed to get in.

  “Don’t make jokes, Bobby,” she glared at him. “You lost the DOD contract? The goddamned DOD contract?”

  “That’s… That’s not fair, Angie,” Charlie tried to interject. “Bob didn’t…”

  “Shut up, Charlie!” Her hand cut through the air like a knife and silenced him. “No one was talking you,” she said as she turned her hate-filled eyes back on Bob. “Why don’t you get out of here and stop fighting me, while there’s still something here that someone would want to buy. You can take your pet toad with you and those gung-ho Army photos on the wall too.”

  “Hey! Putting those up was your idea not mine,” Bob countered with a half-smile. “If you don’t like the interior decorating, blame yourself, not me.”

  “Stop interrupting!” she snapped as she closed in, pointing at him with a sharp, angry finger. “And don’t worry, it’s all gonna get redone, real soon. My father may have thought you were the son he never had, but I hate to break the bad news -- I’m an only child!”

  “I am well aware of that Angie, dearest.”

  “Besides, you don’t know shit about high tech.”

  “Neither do you. I never wanted the company, and you know it. That was your father’s idea, because he figured it was the only way he could, ‘keep you in the style to which you became accustomed,’ as he put it. He knew you’d blow through the whole thing in five years, and there’d be nothing left — no money, no company, and no jobs — they’d all be gone.”

  Hands on hips, she glared down at him. “You’re missing the point. I’m his daughter. It was supposed to be mine, not yours, and it’s none of your goddamn business what I do with it.”

  “That’s not the way your father looked at it.”

  “No? Well, you should have stayed in the damned Army. Eating out of cans and blowing things up are about all you were ever good for.”

  “Oh? There was a time you thought the list was a little longer than that.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not nineteen anymore, this isn’t the backseat of your Chevrolet, and frankly, I’ve had better. See, I grew up, Bob, and so have my tastes. So I’m calling a Board Meeting. You have until close of business today to resign. If you don’t, I’ll take the company from you and you’ll end up with nothing!”

  “A Board Meeting, Angie? You’ve tried that before,” he shrugged. “It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.”

  “This time it will. When you lost that DOD contract, you’ve got everyone scared.”

  He ran his hands through his hair and took a deep breath. “What do you want, Angie?” he asked in disgust. “I need to be spending my time getting it back, and shaking the trees for some new work, not sword fighting with you. You know that, and so will the Board.”

  “I already have proxies on 47%.”

  “Got the union guys to drink your Kool-Aid?”

  “Maybe, and by the Board Meeting, I’ll have a lot more. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get the banks to call your notes.”

  Bob sat up, looked at her, and shook his head. “Why would you do that? Your father spent his life building this company. This isn’t an ego thing for me. All I want is to see the company back on track and profitable again.”

  “It’s supposed to be my company, Bobby. Mine! He was my father, not yours, and I don’t have a big emotional attachment to the place like you do. In fact, I don’t have an emotional attachment to much of anything anymore, except money. An appraiser friend of mine told me, ‘It don’t matter what you think, or what you want; a business is worth what it’ll fetch in dollars — not a penny more and not a penny less.’ ”

  “An appraiser? What happened to the tennis pro at the club and the bartender at the Hilton?” he asked sarcastically. “But it’s nice to see you’re getting your business advice from someone with a little substance for a change.”

  “Very funny. I need money, Bobby, and I don’t give a damn how I get it. However, if you and your numbers genius here can figure out a way to buy me out…”

  “Buy you out? Sure, we can talk about that after we get things back on course.”

  “No. Too bad, so sad, but I’m not waiting. If you can’t come up with the money right now, I’m taking over and I’ll sell the damned thing.”

  Angie was her father’s biggest frustration. With her high-spending lifestyle, he knew she would do exactly what she said she would do — cash the company out as soon as he was gone. He was not about to let her do that and tried his best to get her to care, but it was hopeless and they fought about it constantly. When Angie dragged Bob home the first time and introduced him to her father, he thought she was putting him on. Every other boy she brought home was a moron whom Ed immediately hated. But a career Army officer, West Point, ten years older than she was, sensible, polite, and someone he could actually carry on an adult conversation with? It had to be a put-on. She must have rented him from central casting, Ed thought, and that was before he learned about Bob’s skills and combat record. He knew he dared not gush, much less act like he approved. That would kill the romance for sure. Once it became clear that Bob was real, and that he and Angie were serious and actually planning to get married, Ed approached him about leaving the Army and joining the company.

  “I don’t know a damned thing about business, Ed, much less telecommunications,” Bob told him, but it didn’t matter.

  “Hell, Bob, I can buy all the techies, lawyers, and MBAs I want. I have an office full of those. What I can’t buy is a leader, someone who can step in and run this place. The company is its people. You know how to read ’em, motivate ’em, hire ’em, and fire ’em, and that’s something that can’t be learned from a class or out of a book. One of my old friends, Larry Benson, once told me there were only two places that teach leadership like that — the Boy Scouts and the Army. As far as I know, you and I are the only two alumni of both of those that I see around here, and I ain’t lookin’ for an Eagle Scout.”

  The title Ed gave him was Vice President, but Bob’s first assignment was on a truck as an installer trainee, then bench repairman, and finally as a salesman, calling on customers and prospects, learning the business lines from the bottom up. After two years, he was well on his way toward understanding field and headquarters operations when the old man died. That forced a serious shortening of the management-training ladder and Bob found himself in charge.

  Ed hoped that Bob might be able to tame Angie and control her, or at least slow her down, once they got married. Unfortunately, that was as hopeless as it ever was. The way she spent money, keeping it all in the family was probably the only way any man would be able to afford her. “Hell,” he said, “it’s all gonna be hers in the end anyway. Maybe she’ll figure that out before she drives you nuts, too.” Nice in theory, but she never did.

  The headstrong young tigress did, however, make one hel
l of a lover on the weekends while Bob was still in uniform, but their marriage quickly proved to be an emotional disaster. For the first two years, Bob worked his way up through sales, marketing, operations, and management, while the old man got sicker and sicker. He saw their marital train wreck coming too, and realized that if he did not take steps to protect the family business and its people, a vengeful Angie would soon destroy everything in her path. Ed and his attorneys spent a long weekend out of town, supposedly duck hunting up in Wisconsin. When they came back, he finalized the outline of a clever stock distribution plan that would solve the control and liquidation problem, or so he thought.

  For most of the past decade, Toler TeleCom did plain vanilla, commercial communications and security systems work. It was steady, predictable, and profitable, but Ed longed to take a shot at the big time — the prestigious and lucrative defense contracting market. Angie was on the Board of Directors too, holding her late mother’s shares and seat; and she fought with her father constantly about the direction they should take. To her, the company was little more than a cash cow to support her increasingly expensive tastes, and she never wanted him to venture beyond their comfortable, mainstream, Midwest base.

  “Those I-495 Beltway bandits are going to eat you alive, Dad,” she warned. “It’s all politics back there, and you know it. You’re gonna lose your butt!”

  “Well, it’s my butt to lose, isn’t it?”

  “For the moment,” she glared at him.

  “Angie, a business grows, or it dies; but it can never stand still. Besides, I built this company for all the good people who work here, not only for you.”

  “Well, it’s gonna be mine, whether you like it or not, isn’t it?”

  “That all depends on whether or not you finally grow up.”

  The week Ed got his test results and knew he was headed for the hospital, probably for that last time, he named Bob Burke President and CEO, promoting him over four other Vice Presidents, including Angie. They were already separated by then, and Ed’s new stock distribution and succession plan gave Bob controlling interest in 27% of the company’s stock, via a loan that he would be required to pay back if he ever tried to sell the shares. The same was true for the other recipients. He pegged the security for the loans to the value of the stock at the time of distribution, effectively tying everyone’s hands. Ed put another 26% of the stock into a trust for the other salaried employees, based on their positions and seniority. Their existing 401K and its Board would manage that trust. Similarly, the company’s blue-collar craft union pension plan got another 24%. That left Angie with 23% of the outstanding shares, including her mother’s, which she already owned.

  Ed’s stock distribution plan was diabolical. Angie’s 23% effectively froze her out of control of the company. Both the union and the white-collar trusts could only be voted as blocks. Even if Angie got the blue-collar union with its 24% to join with her, or the salaried white-collar employees with their 26%, she would still fall short unless she could attract the support of both the management trust and the unions. As Ed well knew, the likelihood of that happening was slim to none. On the other hand, with twenty-seven percent, Bob retained control of the company so long as he continued to hold the support of either the union or the other managers. In addition, his grant of shares prohibited each of those groups from selling more than 20% of their holdings in any one year, and the company retained the right of first refusal to buy them. So Ed could rest easy knowing that his darling daughter could continue to live her ridiculously stylish lifestyle on the company’s dividends and earnings, but that was all she would get. She could yell, scream, and file lawsuits to her little heart’s content, but she was powerless to cause the company any serious damage, sell it, or break it up.

  That was, until the DOD contract blew up in Bob Burke’s face.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Angie finally left. So did Charlie. Bob shook his head and reached for the bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallan single-malt scotch in his bottom desk drawer, and poured himself three fingers in a heavy cut-glass tumbler, neat. Drinking scotch in the middle of the afternoon wasn’t something he did regularly, but Ed had left it as a “special” present. “A tot of this golden nectar can even make a rotten day feel a little bit better,” he wrote on the card. The Macallan did help during some bad times, as Burke well remembered, so why not now? He spun his desk chair toward the window, propped his stocking feet on the credenza, and leaned back with the tumbler sitting on his chest.

  Normally, this was a great way to end a day — looking out the window into a glorious afternoon sky through the amber glow of a fine glass of scotch. Not today, though. Ever since he boarded the airplane in Washington, D. C., to return home, he felt as if he were on a downward spiral, helplessly spinning downward faster and faster. Most of that was a result of the loss of the DOD contract and the convulsions that would cause within the company, but Angie’s visit, her threats, and O’Malley’s visit all contributed. Charlie was right, however. The business deserved every bit of his attention. He owed it to the people who worked here, but he couldn’t give it. Not today. The images of Eleanor Purdue being strangled on the Consolidated Health Care building roof and the look on that bastard Greenway’s face kept popping up inside his head, and they wouldn’t go away. Neither would Peter O’Malley’s offer. While he was in the Army, Bob Burke never liked politicians, not that he gave them much thought. They expected career soldiers to avoid politics and politicians whatever their ilk, and Bob Burke never wasted time on things he could not do anything about anyway. Since he became a civilian and tried to manage a business, his opinion of them steadily worsened. O’Malley was one more classic example of the breed — a self-centered egomaniac one should never trust, and whose concern stretched no further than his own reelection. Those were givens. The question was, how could Burke use him?

  As he downed the last of the scotch, he heard a hurried knock on his door and Charlie burst in holding his laptop in front of him with one hand, while still beating on the keys with the other. “Bob,” he said without waiting for an invitation, “I did some digging into Summit Symbiotics…”

  “You too? I tried for a while, but all I got was garbage, PR crap, and a migraine.”

  “It took some serious database mining to get past all that. No offense, but techie stuff like that’s well below your pay grade. Besides, you’re too old to even try.”

  “What do you mean too old?” Bob asked as he spun around and sat up.

  “Seriously? The next time you have a system or data base issue and I’m not around, go to the mall and find a twelve-year-old with an iPad, or a sixteen-year-old freshman at MIT. You’re a dinosaur when it comes to this stuff, and it absolutely isn’t worth your time.” Finally, Charlie took his eyes off the screen, looked down at Bob’s desk, and saw the bottle. “Macallan? Twenty-five-year-old? You’re way too cheap to buy good swill like that. Where’d you get it?”

  “Ed Toler left it for me... for medicinal purposes, of course."

  "And you've been holding out?"

  "There’s another tumbler on the bookcase and plenty of shots left in the bottle. Pull up a chair and tell me what you found.”

  Charlie didn’t need to be asked twice. He filled his glass and took a chair on the other side of Bob’s desk. “I went back through Symbiotic’s proposal, and pawed through their corporate papers. Their office address is a PO Box in D. C. and they incorporated in Delaware. It’s cheap, very pro-business, and the state makes it hard to access the documents and then drill down through the layers to get at the real ownership.”

  “Nothing unusual there.”

  “True, but what is unusual, is that Symbiotic only incorporated thirty days ago. All of the reports and papers — all of them — their Annual Report, the PR material in the proposal, even the Articles of Incorporation and the official filings are very light on names and photographs of officers, staff, places, preceding corporations, and anything that they have actually d
one, including contracts, projects, previous customers, and all the rest.”

  “Thirty days?” Bob asked. “I remember the crap we went through, all the hoops DOD made us jump through to even be allowed to submit. How the hell did they give a start-up outfit like that such an important contract?”

  “How? Well, if they really are legit, maybe they’re an off-book spinoff from some major corporation that did a lot of DOD work. As far as I can tell, though, Symbiotic has no corporate linkage to anybody. Okay, then I wondered if maybe DOD knew the people? I mean, they could be some good tech people who quit somewhere else, DOD knows them, and they’re doing it at a loss to get a foot in the door. Who knows? I suppose it happens.”

  “It happens? No, Charlie, shit happens! That was our contract. Who are they?”

  “Precisely! You and I are in the business and we know most of the techies in our little niche. It’s a small fraternity, especially if they are doing military telecom work, right? Well, I looked through every piece of paper I could find, and dug out the names of every one of their officers and key technical people. Guess what? They’re all lawyers! Every goddamned one of them. I looked some of them up in Martindale-Hubbell, the national directory of lawyers and law firms, but I didn’t need to. Most of the ones in the Symbiotic papers have their law firm affiliations written below their names. Obviously, someone plugged them in to fill the required slots, but there isn’t a telecom exec or manager in the whole bunch.”

  “Lawyers?”

  “Yep, lawyers, and it gets worse. You remember the firm Angie used when she tried to contest the old man’s will — Gordon and Kramer downtown. Well, guess who Summit’s registered agents are? Gordon and Kramer. Summit Symbiotics is a Delaware corporation, which is a subsidiary of Summit Industries, also a Delaware corporation, which is in turn owned by — you got it — Summit International, a Delaware holding company, with murky layer after murky layer. However, for a Federal bid and contract, they must be registered. After digging, and digging, and digging some more, I finally found a list of their ownership and Board of Directors. Naturally, it consists of eight of the top partners of Gordon and Kramer.”