Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s totally loose. Believe me, the guys would love to have a drink with you.”

  “I don’t drink anymore, man. Sorry.”

  “Well, whatever. Diet Coke. Come on.”

  He shrugged again. “Sure you guys aren’t going to mind?”

  7

  I felt like I’d brought Julia Roberts to audition for the high-school play. All of a sudden I was Mister Popular, basking in the reflected glory. We all gathered around a long table at the Outback Steakhouse, a five-minute drive away, everyone jazzed from our comeback-from-oblivion victory. Some ordered beers, and Trevor asked for a single-malt Scotch called Talisker, but the waitress didn’t know what he was talking about, so he settled for a Dewar’s. Kurt gave me a look that seemed to communicate secret amusement at what a dick Trevor was. Or maybe I was imagining it. Kurt didn’t know that Gordy drank single-malts too, that Trevor was just sucking up to the boss even though the boss wasn’t there.

  Kurt ordered ice water. I hesitated, then did the same. Someone ordered a couple Bloomin’ Onions and some Kookaburra Wings. Festino went to the john and came back wiping his hands on his shirt. “God, I hate those scary cloth roller towels,” he said with a shudder. “That endless, germ-infested loop of fecal bacteria. Like we’re supposed to believe the towel only goes around once.”

  Brett Gleason hoisted his mug of Foster’s and proposed a toast to “the MVP,” saying, “You don’t have to buy another drink in this town again.”

  Taminek said, “Where’d you come from?”

  “Michigan,” Kurt said, with a sly grin.

  “I mean, like—you play in college or something?”

  “Never went to college,” Kurt said. “Joined the army instead, and they don’t play much softball. Not in Iraq, anyway.”

  “You were in Iraq?” said one of our top dogs, Doug Forsythe, a tall, slender guy with a thatch of brown hair and a cowlick.

  “Yeah,” Kurt said, nodding. “And Afghanistan. All the hot tourist spots. In Special Forces.”

  “Like, killing people?” asked Gleason.

  “Only bad guys,” Kurt said.

  “You ever kill anyone?” asked Forsythe.

  “Just a couple of guys who asked too many questions,” said Kurt. Everyone laughed but Forsythe, and then he joined in, too.

  “Cool,” said Festino, yanking at the tendrils of a fried onion and dipping the straws into the peppery pink sauce before gobbling them down.

  “Not exactly,” said Kurt. He looked down at his glass of water and fell silent.

  Trevor had his BlackBerry out and was thumbing the wheel, checking for messages as he sipped his Dewar’s. Then he looked up and said, “So how do you guys know each other?”

  I flinched. The cell phone, the Acura wiping out in a ditch—the true story could inflict lasting damage to my reputation.

  Kurt said, “Mutual interest in cars.”

  I liked this guy more and more.

  “Cars?” said Trevor, but then Cal Taylor looked up from his Jack Daniel’s—a freshly poured tumbler from the bar—and said, “In ’Nam, we called you guys Snake Eaters.”

  “The closest you got to ’Nam was Fort Dix, New Jersey,” said Gleason.

  “Screw you,” growled Taylor, finishing off his Jack Daniel’s. “I developed boils.”

  “Is that the same as Navy SEALs?” asked Forsythe. He was greeted by a chorus of derision, and Cal Taylor began singing, in a slurred and warbling tenor, the “Ballad of the Green Beret.” He stood up, held out his glass of J.D., and sang, “One hundred men we’ll test today…But only one wins the Green Beret.”

  “‘Only three,’” corrected Gleason.

  “Sit down, Cal,” said Trevor. “I think it’s time to go home.”

  “I haven’t finished my supper,” Cal growled.

  “Come on, old man,” Forsythe said, and he and the rest of the guys trundled Cal out to the parking lot, Cal squawking in protest the whole time. They called him a cab and promised that someone would get his car back to his house in Winchester.

  Kurt turned to me while they were gone, and said, “Why are you guys the Band of Brothers? Some of you guys vets?”

  “Vets?” I said. “Us? Are you kidding? No, it’s just a nickname. Not a very imaginative one, either. I don’t even remember who thought of it.”

  “All you guys in sales?”

  “Yep.”

  “You good?”

  “Who, me?”

  “You.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “I think you’re probably better than okay,” Kurt said.

  I shrugged modestly, the way he seemed to shrug without saying anything. I do tend to unconsciously imitate whoever I’m around.

  Then I heard Trevor say, “Steadman’s fine. He’s just not much of a closer anymore.” He sat back down at the table. “Right, Steadman? How’s that Lockwood deal going? Are we in the third year yet? This may be the longest negotiation since the Paris Peace Talks.”

  “It’s looking good,” I lied. “How’s it going with the Pavilion Group?”

  The Pavilion Group owned a chain of movie theaters that wanted to put LCDs in their lobbies to run trailers and ads for concessions.

  Trevor smiled with satisfaction. “Textbook,” he said. “I did an ROI test for them that showed a seventeen percent increase in sales of Lemon Slushies.”

  I nodded and tried not to roll my eyes. Lemon Slushies.

  “Tomorrow I’ve got a meeting with the CEO, but it’s just a meet-and-greet formality. He wants to shake my hand before he inks the deal. But it’s in the bag.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  Trevor turned to Kurt. “So, Kurt, you guys skydive and all that?”

  “Skydive?” Kurt repeated with what sounded like a little twist of sarcasm. “I guess you could call it that. We did jumps, sure.”

  “How awesome is that?” said Trevor. “I’ve gone skydiving a bunch of times. Me and some guys from my frat did a skydiving trip to Brittany the summer after we graduated, and it was such a rush.”

  “A rush.” Kurt said the word like it tasted bad.

  “Nothing like it, huh?” said Trevor. “What a kick.”

  Kurt leaned back in his chair, turned to face Trevor. “When you’re dropped off from a C-141 Starlifter at thirty-five thousand feet to do a jump deep inside enemy territory, doing a clandestine entry seventy-five kilometers east-northeast of Mosul, it’s not exactly a rush. You’re carrying a hundred seventy-five pounds of commo gear and weapons and ammo, and you’ve got an oxygen mask blinding you and your stomach’s in your throat and you’re falling a hundred fifty miles an hour.” He took a sip of water. “It’s so cold at that altitude your goggles can freeze and shatter. Your eyeballs can freeze shut. You can get hypoxia and lose consciousness in a few seconds. Sudden deceleration trauma. Death on impact. If you don’t hold your arms and legs just right when you’re free-falling, you might go into a tumble or a spin, and go splat. Maybe your chute malfunctions. Even really experienced soldiers break their necks and die. And that’s if you don’t find yourself under attack from SAMs and antiaircraft artillery. You’re scared shitless, and anyone who says they’re not is lying.”

  Trevor blushed, looked as if he’d just been slapped. Festino gave me a sidelong look of immense pleasure.

  “Anyway,” Kurt said, draining his water, “I’m sure Brittany was loads of fun.”

  Kurt was a huge hit.

  Forsythe said, “Hey, can you come back next week?”

  “I don’t know,” Kurt said.

  “We too Little League for you, that it?” said Taminek.

  “Nah, not at all,” Kurt said. “It’s just that I work nights a lot.”

  “Doing what?” Forsythe asked.

  I braced myself—the tow truck, the Acura in the ditch…But he said, “I drive for a buddy of mine who owns an auto body shop.”

  “We got to get this guy a job at Entronics,” Taminek said.<
br />
  Kurt chuckled, and said, “Yeah, right.”

  The rest of the guys eventually went home, leaving just me and Kurt.

  “So,” he said. “Band of Brothers.”

  I nodded.

  “Good buddies?”

  I shrugged. “Some of them.”

  “Pretty competitive bunch, looks like.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Can be,” I said. “At work, anyway.”

  “That pretty-boy who sat across from me—what’s his name, Trevor?—seems like a real dickhead.”

  “I guess.”

  “Saw him driving over here in his Porsche. So, was your boss here tonight too?”

  “No. Most of the guys here tonight are just individual contributors.”

  “Individual contributors?”

  “Sales reps. I’m a DM, a district sales manager, and so is Trevor, only we have different territories.”

  “But he’s competing against you.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s complicated. We’re both up for the same promotion.” I explained to him about the recent turmoil at Entronics and the AM job that had just opened up and the trouble I was having with the Lockwood Hotels deal. He listened without saying anything.

  When I was done, he said, “Not easy to have unit cohesion when you’re all battling each other.”

  “Unit cohesion?”

  “See, in Special Forces, we’d work in twelve-man teams. Operational detachments, they call ’em. A-Teams. Everyone’s got his job—mine was eighteen charlie, engineer sergeant. The demolitions expert. And we all had to work together, respect each other, or we’d never be battle-ready.”

  “Battle-ready, huh?” I smiled, thinking of the corporation as a battlefield.

  “You know the real reason soldiers are willing to die in war? You think it’s about patriotism? Family? Country? No way, bro. It’s all about your team. No one wants to be the first to run. So we all stand together.”

  “I guess we’re more like scorpions in a bottle.”

  He nodded. “Look. So we were on this armed reconnaissance mission outside Musa Qalay, in Afghanistan, right? Going after one of the anticoalition militias. A split team, so I was in charge. We had a couple of GMVs. Nontactical vehicles, I’m talking.”

  “GMV?” Military guys speak a foreign language. You need a simultaneous translator to talk to them sometimes.

  “Modified Humvee. Ground Mobility Vehicle.”

  “Okay.”

  “Suddenly my GMV’s struck head-on by machine gun fire and RPGs.” He made a slight grimace. “Rocket-propelled grenades, okay? Shoulder-launched antitank weapon. It was an ambush. My vehicle was hit. We were trapped in a kill box. So I ordered the driver—my good buddy, Jimmy Donadio—to floor it. Not away from the ambush, but right toward the machine-gun emplacement. Told the guy on top to start firing off the .50 cal, just unload it on them. You could see the bad guys slumped over the machine gun. Then my GMV got hit with another RPG. Disabled it. The vehicle was in flames, okay? We were screwed. So I jumped out with my M16 and just started firing away at them until I was out of ammo. Killed them all. Must have been six of them.”

  I just stared at Kurt, rapt. The scariest thing I ever faced in my line of work was a performance review.

  “So let me ask you something,” Kurt said. “Would you do that for Trevor?”

  “Fire at him with a machine gun?” I said. “I fantasize about that sometimes.”

  “You get my point, though?”

  I wasn’t sure I did. I poked at the Bloomin’ Onion but didn’t eat any. I already felt queasy from all the grease.

  He looked like he was getting ready to leave. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go for it.”

  “So when we were in country, our most important weapon by far was always our intel. The intelligence we had on the enemy, right? Strength of their units, location of their encampments, all that. So what kind of intel do you guys collect on your potential customers?”

  This guy was smart. Really smart. “They’re not the enemy,” I said, amused.

  “Okay.” A bashful smile. “But you know what I mean.”

  “I guess. We gather the basic stuff…” I paused for a few seconds. “To be honest, not much. We sort of fly by the seat of the pants, I sometimes think.”

  He nodded. “Wouldn’t it help if you drilled down? Like the way you’re getting dicked around by Lockwood Hotels—like, what’s really going on there?”

  “Would it help? Sure. But we don’t have any way of knowing. That’s the thing. It’s not pretty, but that’s how it is.”

  Kurt kept nodding, staring straight ahead. “I know a guy used to work in security for the Lockwood chain. He might still be there.”

  “A security guard?”

  Kurt smiled. “Pretty high up in corporate security, at their headquarters—New York or New Jersey, whatever.”

  “White Plains, New York.”

  “Lot of Special Forces guys go into corporate security. So why don’t you give me some names, some background. Tell me who you’re working with. I’ll see if I can find anything out for you. A little intel, right?”

  Kurt Semko had already surprised me a couple of times, so maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched, I figured, that this tow truck driver who’d been kicked out of the Special Forces might be able to get the lowdown on Brian Borque, the Vice President for Property Management at Lockwood Hotels. It made sense that there’d be a network of ex–Special Forces officers who now worked in the private sector. Why the hell not? I gave him a bit of background and scribbled Brian Borque’s name on a napkin. Kurt had an e-mail address, too—I guess everyone does these days—and I wrote it down.

  “All right, man,” Kurt said, getting up and putting a big hand on my shoulder. “No worries. I’ll give you a call if I find anything out.”

  It was pretty late by the time I got home, driving the Geo Metro that Enterprise Rent-A-Car had brought over that morning. Kate was asleep.

  I sat down at the computer in the little home office we shared to check my office e-mail, as I always did before I went to bed. Internet Explorer was open, which meant that Kate had been using the computer, and out of pointless curiosity I clicked on “Go” to see where she’d been browsing. I wondered whether Kate ever looked at porn, though that seemed awfully unlikely.

  No. The last place she’d been was a website called Realtor.com, where she’d been looking at houses in Cambridge. Not cheap ones, either. Million-dollar, two-million-dollar houses in the Brattle Street area.

  Real estate porn.

  She was looking at houses we could never afford, not on my income. I felt bad, for her and for me.

  When I signed on to my office e-mail, I found the workup I’d done on Lockwood, and forwarded it to Kurt. Then I scrolled quickly through the junk—health-plan notices, job listings, endless personnel notices—and found an e-mail from Gordy that he’d sent after hours.

  He wanted me to “drop by” his office at 8:00 tomorrow morning.

  8

  The alarm went off at 5:00 A.M., two hours earlier than usual. Kate groaned and rolled over, put a pillow over her head. I got up as quietly as I could, went downstairs, and made the coffee, and while it was brewing I took a quick shower. I wanted to get into the office a good hour before my interview with Gordy so I could go over my accounts and get all the numbers in order.

  When I got out of the shower, I saw the light in the bedroom was on. Kate was downstairs at the kitchen table in her pink bathrobe, drinking coffee.

  “You’re up early,” she said.

  I gave her a kiss. “You too. Sorry if I woke you.”

  “You were out late.”

  “The softball game, remember?”

  “You went out for drinks afterward?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Drown your sorrows?”

  “We won, believe it or not.”

  “Hey, that’s a first.”

  “Yeah, well, that guy Kurt pla
yed for us. He blew everyone away.”

  “Kurt?”

  “The tow truck driver.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember, I told you about this guy who gave me a ride home after the Acura wiped out?” It wiped out by itself. I had nothing to do with it, see.

  “Navy SEALs.”

  “Special Forces, but yeah. That guy. He’s, like, the real thing. He’s everything Gordy and all these other phony tough guys pretend to be. Sitting in their Aeron chairs and talking about ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘killing the competition.’ Only he’s for real. He’s actually killed people.”

  I realized I was telling her everything except the one thing I was most anxious about: my interview with Gordy in a couple of hours. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her. She’d probably just make me more nervous.

  “Don’t forget, Craig and Susie are going to be here in time for supper tonight.”

  “It’s tonight?”

  “I’ve only told you a thousand times.”

  I let out a half groan, half sigh. “How long are they staying?”

  “Just two nights.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what? Why just two nights?”

  “Why are they coming to Boston? I thought L.A. was God’s country. That’s what Craig’s always saying.”

  “He was just elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, and his first meeting is tomorrow.”

  “How could he be on the Harvard Board of Overseers? He’s a Hollywood guy now. He probably doesn’t even own a tie anymore.”

  “He’s not only a prominent alum but also a major contributor. People care about things like that.”

  When Susie met Craig, he was just a poor starving writer. He’d had a couple of stories published in magazines with names like TriQuarterly and Ploughshares, and he taught expository writing at Harvard. He was kind of snooty, and Susie probably liked that, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to live in genteel poverty, and I think he figured out pretty quickly that he was never going to make it in the literature business. So they moved out to L.A., where Craig’s Harvard roommate introduced him around, and he started writing sitcoms. Eventually he got a gig writing for Everybody Loves Raymond and began making serious money. Then, somehow, he created this hit show and overnight became unbelievably rich.