Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

“Okay, good. But tell me something, Ethan. I’m still not clear on why the Aztecs were so into human sacrifice.”

  “That’s kind of complicated.”

  “I bet you can explain it to me.”

  “Well, it was sort of to keep the whole universe moving. They believed that there was this kind of spirit in the human bloodstream, but mostly in the heart? And you had to keep giving it to the gods or the universe would just stop.”

  “I see. That makes sense.”

  “So when things were going really bad they just did more human sacrifice.”

  “That happens where I work, too.”

  He cocked his head. “Oh yeah?”

  “Sort of.”

  “The Aztecs cooked and skinned and ate humans, too.”

  “That we don’t do.”

  “You want to see a picture of the Chair of Spikes?”

  “Definitely,” I said, “but we should probably go downstairs and have dinner, don’t you think?”

  He stuck out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. “We don’t have to, you know. We can just tell them to bring it up to us. That’s what I do a lot.”

  “Come on,” I said, getting to my feet and lifting him up. “We’ll both go. Keep each other company.”

  “I’ll stay up here,” Ethan said.

  The adults had switched to red wine, a Bordeaux that Craig had brought. I’m sure it was extremely expensive, though it tasted like dirty sneakers. I could smell steaks in the broiler. Susie was talking about a famous TV star who was in rehab, but Craig interrupted her to say to me, “Couldn’t take any more torture, huh?”

  “He’s great,” I said. “He told me that when things got really bad the Aztecs sacrificed more humans.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “He’ll talk your ear off. Hope he hasn’t discouraged you guys from having kids of your own. They don’t all turn out like Ethan.”

  “He’s a good kid,” I said.

  “And we love him to pieces,” Craig said in a rote voice, like a disclaimer in a drug ad. “So, I want to hear about your work life. I’m serious.”

  “Oh, it’s boring,” I said. “No celebs.”

  “I want to hear about it,” Craig said. “I’m serious. I need to know what regular people’s work life is like, especially if I’m going to write about it. I consider it research.”

  I looked at him and mentally went through about a dozen really nasty and sarcastic replies, but luckily my cell phone went off. I forgot I’d still had it clipped onto my belt.

  “There you go,” Craig said. “That’s got to be the office, right?” He looked from his wife to Kate. “His boss or something. Something has to be done right now. God, I love the way they crack the whip in the corporate world.”

  I got up and went into the living room and answered the cell. “Hey,” a voice said. I immediately recognized Kurt.

  “How’s it going?” I said, happy to be yanked away from Craig’s klieg lights.

  “I catch you during dinner?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Thanks for talking to the Corporate Security guy. I downloaded the job application and filled out the form and e-mailed it back, and I got a call from the guy. He wants me to come in for an interview tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You’re good to go,” I said. “He must be seriously interested in you.”

  “Or desperate, I figure. Hey, so maybe I can grab you for a few minutes in the morning, talk on the phone. Get your take on Entronics and what the security problems are, all that. I like to be prepared.”

  “How’s right now?” I said.

  12

  We met at a place in Harvard Square called Charlie’s Kitchen, where they have this excellent double-cheeseburger special. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner: Craig had pretty much killed my appetite, plus Kate had overcooked the steaks. Too many martinis. She didn’t look too happy at first about my abandoning her little dinner party, but I told her a work crisis had arisen, and that seemed to satisfy her. In fact, she seemed a little relieved, because she could see where the dinner was going, and it wasn’t pretty.

  I didn’t recognize him at first, because his goatee and mullet were gone. He’d gotten a haircut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, but not military short. It was parted on the side, looked stylish. He was a good-looking guy, I realized, and now he looked like a successful business executive, only he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

  Kurt just ordered his regular, a glass of ice water. He said that when he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, fresh, clean cold water was a luxury. You drank the water there, he said, you’d get the shits for days. Now he drank it whenever he could.

  He said he’d already eaten supper. When my plate arrived—a big old double cheeseburger and a mountain of fries with a plastic tankard of watery beer—Kurt took one look and scowled. “You shouldn’t eat that shit,” he said.

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you might want to think about losing a little weight. You’ll feel better.”

  Him, too? “I feel fine.”

  “You don’t work out, do you?”

  “Who has time?”

  “You make time.”

  “I make time to sleep late,” I said.

  “We got to get you to the gym, do some cardio and some free weights. Don’t you belong to a gym?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I pay like a hundred bucks a month for a membership at CorpFit, so I figure I don’t actually have to go there.”

  “CorpFit? That’s one of those pussy smoothie-bar Evian-water places, right?”

  “Since I’ve never gone, I really wouldn’t know.”

  “Nah. I got to take you to a real gym. Where I go.”

  “Sure,” I said, hoping he’d forget we ever talked about working out, but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who forgot anything. I took a look at my mug of beer and called the waiter over and ordered a Diet Coke.

  “You still driving that rental?” Kurt said.

  “Yeah.”

  “When are you getting your car back?”

  “I think they said middle of next week.”

  “That’s too long. Let me give them a call.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “You have your Entronics ID with you?”

  I took it out and put it on the table. He examined it closely. “Man, do you know how easy it is to counterfeit one of these babies?”

  “Never thought about it.”

  “I wonder if your security chief ever thought about it.”

  “You don’t want to piss him off,” I said, tucking into the burger. “You have a résumé?”

  “I can throw one together.”

  “In the right format and everything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what. E-mail me what you’ve got, and I’ll go over it, make sure it’s in good shape.”

  “Hey, that would be awesome.”

  “No problem. Now, if I had to predict, I’d say that Scanlon is a tough interview. Though he’ll probably ask you the standards, like, ‘What’s your greatest weakness?’ And, ‘Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to solve a problem.’ Like that. How you work on a team.”

  “Sounds like I can handle that,” he said.

  “Make sure you get there on time. Early, in fact.”

  “I’m a military guy, remember? We’re all about punctuality.”

  “You’re not going to dress like that for the interview, are you?”

  “Any idea how many uniform inspections I had to endure?” he said. “Don’t worry about me. There’s no corporation in the world more uptight than the U.S. military. But I want to know some details about your access control system.”

  “All I know is, you wave this card at one of the boxes and you go in.”

  He asked me a bunch more questions, and I told him what little I knew. “Your wife doesn’t mind you staying out late?” he asked.

  “I wear
the pants in the household,” I told him with a straight face. “Fact is, I think she was glad to get rid of me.”

  “You still duking it out with that guy Trevor for the promotion?”

  “Yeah.” I told him about my “interview” with Gordy. “He’s not going to give it to me, though. I can tell. He’s just yanking my chain.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He says I don’t have the killer instinct. And Trevor’s a superstar. His numbers are always good, but they’re especially good this year. He’s just a top goddamned salesman. There’s also Brett Gleason. He’s kind of a lunk, but he has that animal aggressiveness that Gordy likes. Gordy says it’s going to be one of us three, but I’d put money on Trevor. He’s got a big demonstration before the big swinging dicks at Fidelity Investments on Monday, and if our monitors win the shoot-out—which they will—then he lands Fidelity. Which is huge. Means he wins. And I’m screwed.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything about how things work in business, but believe me, I’ve been in my share of situations that looked hopeless. And the one thing I do know for sure is that war’s unpredictable. It’s volatile. Complex. Generates confusion. That’s why they talk about the ‘fog of war.’ You often can’t believe what you see, and you can never be certain about your enemy’s plans and capabilities.”

  “What does that have to do with getting a promotion?”

  “I’m saying the only way to guarantee a loss is if you don’t fight. You’ve got to go into every battle knowing you can win.” He took a long swig of ice water. “Make sense?”

  13

  In the morning I slipped out of bed quietly at six, before the alarm went off. After years of getting up at six, my body was programmed. I could hear Kate’s labored breathing, from too much booze last night. I went downstairs to make coffee, bracing myself to encounter Craig, me precaffeine and thus vulnerable, in case he was an early riser. Then I remembered that six in the morning was three in the morning California time, and he was likely to still be asleep, especially after a late night.

  The kitchen and dining room were littered with the detritus of the dinner, dishes and serving platters and silverware heaped everywhere. Kate and Susie had grown up with housekeepers picking up after them, and Susie still had someone who cooked meals and cleaned up afterward. Kate…well, Kate sometimes lived as if she did. Not as if I had the right to complain about it, since I don’t have that excuse. I just hate doing dishes and am a slob by nature. A different excuse.

  Wineglasses and martini glasses and Grammy Spencer’s cordial glasses cluttered the kitchen counters, and I couldn’t find the coffeemaker. Finally, I located it and put some coffee up to brew, accidentally spilling some of the ground coffee onto the green Corian countertop. Concrete, over my dead body.

  I heard a clinking sound, and I turned around. There at the kitchen table, concealed behind a tall stack of pots and pans, was little Ethan. He looked small and frail and like the eight-year-old he was, not the scarily precocious kid he normally seemed to be. He was eating Froot Loops from a giant soup tureen he must have found in the china cabinet. The spoon he was using was a sterling silver soup ladle.

  “Morning, Ethan,” I said, quietly so as not to wake the slumbering party animals upstairs.

  Ethan didn’t reply.

  “Hey there, buddy,” I said, a bit louder.

  “Sorry, Uncle Jason,” Ethan replied. “I’m not really a morning person.”

  “Yeah, well, me neither.” I went up to him, about to muss his hair, but stopped myself when I remembered how much he disliked people mussing his hair. Come to think of it, I never liked that much either. Still don’t. I gave him a pat on the back and cleared myself a place, pushing aside a stack of Grammy Spencer’s blue Spode china plates, slick with congealed grease from the overcooked steaks. “You mind if I share some of those Froot Loops?”

  Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s yours anyway.”

  Kate must have bought them for Ethan when she went shopping yesterday. Her husband gets burlap flakes and twigs. I made a note to register a complaint later. I got a regular cereal bowl from the kitchen cabinet and poured out a generous heap of the carnival-colored little Os and doused it with some of the contraband whole milk from Ethan’s carton. I hoped there’d be some left after our guests were gone.

  I went out to the porch to get the morning papers. We got two—the Boston Globe for Kate, and the Boston Herald for me, the one my dad always read. When I returned to the kitchen, Ethan said: “Mommy said you went out last night to avoid Daddy.”

  I laughed hollowly. “I had to go out on business.”

  He nodded as if he saw right through me. He jammed an immense spoonful of cereal into his little mouth. The ladle barely fit. “Daddy can be annoying,” he said. “If I could drive, I wouldn’t be home very much either.”

  Ricky Festino intercepted me as I was about to enter my office. “They’re here,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The body disposal team. The cleaners. Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction.”

  “Ricky, it’s too early, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I switched on my office lights.

  Festino grabbed my shoulder. “The merger integration team, asshole. The chain-saw consultants. They’ve been here since before I got in. Six guys, four of them from McKinsey, and two guys from Tokyo. They’ve got clipboards and calculators and handhelds and goddamned digital cameras. They just came from Royal Meister headquarters in Texas, and let me tell you, they left a trail of bodies in Dallas. I heard about it from a buddy there, called me last night, warned me.”

  “Slow down,” I said. “They’re probably just here to figure out how to make the two organizations mesh.”

  “Boy, are you living in fantasyland.” I noticed he was sweating already. His blue button-down shirt was soaked through under his arms. “They’re looking for redundancies, dude. Identifying non-value-adding activities. That means me. Even my wife says I don’t add value.”

  “Ricky.”

  “They say who stays and who goes. This is like corporate Survivor, only the losers don’t get to go on Jay Leno.” He took the little bottle of hand cleaner out of his pocket and began juggling it nervously.

  “How long are they here for?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe a week. My buddy in Dallas told me that they spent a lot of time pulling up everyone’s performance reviews. The top twenty percent got invited to keep their jobs. Everyone else is deadwood to be lopped off.”

  I closed my office door. “I’ll do what I can to protect you,” I said.

  “If you’re here,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t I be here?” I said.

  “Because Gordy hates you?”

  “Gordy hates everyone.”

  “Except his butt boy, Trevor. If I still have a job and that douche bag becomes my boss, I swear I’m going to go Columbine. Come in here with an Uzi and do my own ‘performance review.’”

  “I think you’ve had too much caffeine,” I said.

  The day was long and exhausting. Rumors of impending disaster had begun to run through the halls.

  At the end of the day, as I rode the elevator down to the lobby, the other passengers and I watched the flat-screen monitor mounted on the elevator wall. It showed sports news (the Red Sox were a half game ahead of the Yankees in the American League East standings), news headlines (another suicide bombing in Iraq), and selected stock quotes (Entronics was down a buck). The word of the day was “sapient.” Today’s “celebrity” birthdays were Cher and Honoré de Balzac. A lot of the guys find the elevator TV thing really annoying, but I don’t mind it. It takes my mind off the fact that I’m in a sealed steel coffin dangling from cables that might snap at any moment.

  When the elevator doors opened at the lobby, I was surprised to see Kurt standing there, talking to the Corporate Security Director, Dennis Scanlon. Kurt was wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt, and striped silver
rep tie, and he looked like a vice president. Clipped to his left lapel was a blue temporary Entronics badge. The Corporate Security area was off the lobby of the building—I guess because that’s where the Command Center and all the other security facilities were.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “Why are you still here? I thought your interview was this morning.”

  “It was.” He smiled.

  “Meet our new Corporate Security officer,” said Scanlon. He was a small, froglike man with no neck and a squat body.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s great. Smart hire.”

  “We’re all excited to have him join us,” Scanlon said. “Kurt’s already made some very shrewd suggestions for security improvements—he really knows the technology.”

  Kurt shrugged modestly.

  Scanlon excused himself, and Kurt and I stood there for a few seconds. “So that was fast work,” I said.

  “I start Monday. There’s an orientation and a boatload of paperwork to fill out, all that crap. But hey, it’s a real job.”

  “That’s really great,” I said.

  “Listen, man, thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “I mean it. I owe you one. You don’t know me very well, but one thing you’ll learn is, I never forget a favor.”

  I joined Kate in bed after checking my e-mail one last time for the night. She was wearing her usual bedtime attire—extra-large sweat-pants and extra-large T-shirt—and watching TV. During a commercial break, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance last night to ask you about your interview with Gordy.”

  “That’s all right. It went okay. As okay as an interview with Gordy could go. He basically taunted and threatened me and tried to pump me up and deflate me all at the same time.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What a jerk. You think you’re going to get the job?”

  “Who knows. Probably not. I told you, Trevor’s more the Gordy type—aggressive and ruthless. Gordy sees me as a wimp. A nice guy, but a wimp.”

  A really annoying commercial came on, and she pressed the mute button. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. At least you tried.”