Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  “It’s too much,” she was saying. “It’s eating him up. It’s all he wants to talk about, Gordy and the Band of Brothers.”

  Kurt mumbled something, and Kate said, “But Gordy’s just going to stand in his way, don’t you think? If he’s going to climb any higher in that company, it’s not going to be with Gordy’s help.”

  “My ears are burning,” I said.

  That jolted the two of them. “Jason!” Kate said.

  “Sorry to interrupt your conversation.”

  Kurt turned around in his chair. Grammy Spencer’s chintz-covered easy chair. Much more comfortable than her Victorian sofa.

  “Notice anything?” Kate said.

  “Besides the fact that my wife and my friend seem to be conducting an affair?”

  “The walls, silly.”

  I looked at the living room walls, and all I saw were the framed paintings Kate had collected over the years from artists the Meyer Foundation funded.

  “You got a new painting?” They all looked pretty much the same to me.

  “You don’t notice they’re all hanging straight, finally?”

  “Oh, right. Yes, very straight.”

  “Kurt,” she announced.

  Kurt shook his head modestly. “I always like to use two hangers on each frame—that brass kind with the three brads.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “And I used a level. Hard to get ’em straight without a level.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” I said.

  “And Kurt fixed that dripping faucet in the bathroom that’s always driving us crazy,” Kate said.

  “It never bothered me,” I said. Kurt did this and Kurt did that. I wanted to barf.

  “Just needed a new washer and O-ring,” Kurt said. “A little plumber’s grease and an adjustable wrench.”

  “Very kind of you, Kurt,” I said. “You just happen to carry plumber’s grease and adjustable wrenches and O-rings around with you in your briefcase?”

  “Jason,” Kate said.

  “I keep a bunch of tools in a storage unit back of my buddy’s auto body shop,” Kurt said. “Just stopped over there on the way over. No big deal.”

  “You had to see a vendor in Cambridge again?”

  He nodded. “Figured I’d just stop by and say hi, and Kate put me to work.”

  I shot Kate a dirty look. “Are we still going to the movies tonight, Kate?” I said.

  Kurt got the message and said good-bye. Then Kate began the incredibly long and involved process of getting ready to go out—there’s always a “quick shower,” and about forty-five minutes of blow-drying her hair, and then the makeup, which she applies as if she’s about to walk down the red carpet to the Kodak Theatre to get an Oscar. Then the inevitable, frantic race to get to the movie on time. Of course, the more I hounded her to hurry up, the slower she went.

  So I sat in the bedroom, impatiently watching her do her makeup. “Hey, Kate,” I said.

  “Mm?” She was lining her lips with that pencil-looking thing.

  “I don’t want you to exploit Kurt anymore.”

  “Exploit him? What are you talking about?” She stopped in mid-stroke, turned around.

  “You’re treating him like your servant. Every time he comes over here, you put him to work fixing something.”

  “Oh, come on, Jason, he volunteers. Anyway, does he look like he resents it? I think it makes him feel useful. Needed.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, it strikes me as a little—I don’t know, entitled.”

  “Entitled?”

  “Like you’re the lady of the manor, and he’s some peasant.”

  “Or maybe I’m Lady Chatterley and he’s the gamekeeper, is that it?” she said sarcastically.

  I shrugged. I didn’t get the reference.

  “Do I detect a note of jealousy?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You are jealous, aren’t you?”

  “Jesus, Kate. Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re jealous of the fact that he’s so handy, such a regular guy.”

  “A regular guy,” I repeated. “And I’m—what? Thurston Howell the Third? My dad worked in a sheet-metal plant, for God’s sake.”

  She shook her head, snorted softly. “When you told me he was Special Forces, I was expecting something, I don’t know, different. Crude, maybe. Rough around the edges. But he’s awfully considerate.” She let out a low giggle. “Plus, he’s not unattractive.”

  “‘Not unattractive’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Not—not what I expected, that’s all. Don’t be jealous, sweetie. You’re my husband.”

  “Yeah, and he’s, what? Now he’s like your—your Yohimbe warrior with the blowgun and the machete?”

  “Yanomami.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, sometimes a machete is just the tool you need,” she said.

  I sulked for a while in the car, but by the time we got there I’d cooled off.

  My wife likes films that have subtitles. I like movies that have cars that crash through plate-glass windows. Her all-time favorite movie is Closely Watched Trains. She likes them slow and contemplative, preferably in Czech or Polish, captioned in Serbo-Croatian.

  Whereas my all-time favorite movie is Terminator 2.

  I like movies, not films. My requirements are simple: big explosions and car chases and gratuitous violence and unnecessary flashes of female nudity.

  So naturally we’d gone to a foreign-film theater that evening in Kendall Square in Cambridge to see a film set in Argentina about a young priest in a coma who’s in love with a quadriplegic dancer. Or maybe I should say, she watched it while I snuck glances at my BlackBerry, which I hid from her behind the popcorn bucket. The guy I was dealing with at Chicago Presbyterian, the Assistant Vice President for Communications, had once again changed his specs for the plasma screens he wanted in their one hundred operating rooms and wanted me to reprice the whole proposal. The facilities manager at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport said that he’d just been told by Pioneer that their plasma displays had a higher resolution and a better greyscale performance than Entronics and wanted to know if that was true. I was damned if I was going to lose this deal to Pioneer.

  And an e-mail from Freddy Naseem. He wanted me to give him a call.

  What the hell could that be about?

  “Did you like it?” Kate said, as we walked to the car. You had to take your parking ticket to get it validated in one place, then pay for it somewhere else. It was a system apparently designed in the Soviet Union.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was moving.”

  I figured that would make her happy, but she said, “Which part?”

  “Most of it, really,” I said.

  “What was it about?”

  “What was what about?”

  “The movie. What was the plot?”

  “Is this a quiz?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What was the story?”

  “Come on, Katie.” I beeped the Mercedes open and went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door for her.

  “No, I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t think you watched any of it. You spent the whole time on your BlackBerry. Which really pissed off everyone around us, by the way.”

  “I glanced at it a couple times, Kate.” She stood there, refusing to get in. “There’s some stuff I really needed to check on.”

  “This is a night off,” she said. “You’ve got to stop.”

  “I thought you said you understood this came with the job. Didn’t we talk about this? Come on, get in.”

  She stood there, arms folded. She was starting to show already. You could see the swell in her belly underneath her cotton dress. “You need an intervention or something. You’re out of control.”

  “You’re never going to live like you did when you were a kid, you know. Not as long as you’re married to me.”r />
  “Jason, that’s enough.” She looked around as if to see who might be listening. “My God, I feel like I’ve created a monster.”

  32

  In the morning I called Freddy Naseem at eight-thirty on the dot, when I knew he always got in.

  “Jason,” he said, sounding overjoyed to hear from me. “Did you ever find out how quickly you’d be able to get us the plasma monitors?”

  “But I thought you were all set with Panasonic. You said they could get the screens to you within a week. Did something change?”

  He paused. “They got us all the monitors yesterday. But there was just one little problem. None of them worked.”

  “None of them?”

  “Every single one—dead as a doornail. Panasonic is blaming some glitch at their Westwood warehouse. They say there was a gas leak of some sort—chlorine gas, I think. Apparently chlorine gas destroys the microchips or some such thing. And hundreds of flat-screen TVs and monitors in that warehouse were ruined. The problem is, they won’t be able to replace the product for a few months at least, and Harry Belkin is desperate to have them in.”

  I answered slowly. My mind was reeling. “Well,” I said, “you’ve come to the right place.”

  I found Kurt in the company Command Center on the ground floor adjacent to the main entrance. I’d had to page him, and when I told him I needed to see him right away, he told me to meet him there.

  The Command Center was lined with banks of Entronics closed-circuit TV monitors and a big curved console around the room where guys wearing microfleece pullovers—the air was cold here because of all the computers—sat tapping at keyboards or shooting the breeze with one another. You could see on the monitors every entrance to the building, every computer room and common area; you could see people coming in and out and walking around. It was amazing, and a little creepy, how much of the company you could see from here.

  Kurt was standing with folded arms talking to one of the guys in fleece. He was wearing a blue shirt and rep tie and looked very much in charge. The guys in fleece were, I knew, contract security officers, so Kurt really was their boss.

  “Bro,” he said when he saw me. He looked concerned. “What’s up?”

  “We gotta talk,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulder.

  His eyes grew hard. “Let’s talk.”

  “In private,” I said. I led the way out of the Command Center to the hall and found an unoccupied break room. It was littered with old copies of the Herald and a Dunkin’ Donuts carton and discarded cardboard coffee cups, and it smelled like someone had been sneaking a smoke.

  “I just got a call from Freddy Naseem.”

  “The guy from Harry Belkin.”

  “Right. He told me that all the Panasonic monitors arrived dead, so he wants to do business with us.”

  “Hey, that’s great news. Big win for you.”

  I stared at him. “There was a chlorine-gas leak at Panasonic’s Westwood facility. Fried the printed circuits in the monitors.”

  “You asking me to do something for you?”

  “I think you already did,” I said quietly.

  He blinked. His face was unreadable. He turned away, studying the empty Dunkin’ Donuts box. Then he said, “You got the deal back, didn’t you?”

  My stomach sank. He’d done it.

  If he’d done that, then was there really any question that he’d done the things Trevor accused me of? Trevor’s car trouble. The plasma screen that conked out at Trevor’s presentation to Fidelity. Gleason’s Blue Screen of Death.

  Doug Forsythe’s job offer drying up.

  What else had he done?

  “This isn’t the way I wanted it, Kurt.”

  “Panasonic snaked you. That’s unsat.”

  “Do you realize what kind of deep shit we’d both be in if anyone connected us to what happened?”

  Now he looked annoyed. “I know how to cover my tracks, bro.”

  “You can’t do this,” I said. “Maybe sabotage is acceptable in the Special Forces, but not in the business world.”

  He stared right back at me. “And I expected a little gratitude.”

  “No, Kurt. Don’t ever do this again. Are we clear? I don’t want any more of your help.”

  He shrugged, but his eyes were cold. “You don’t understand, do you? I take care of my friends. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. Like the Marines say, no better friend, no worse enemy.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “I’m glad I’m not your enemy.”

  33

  I had a midmorning flight to Miami, out of Logan, so I didn’t go in to work. I decided to sleep late. Late being relative, of course. Kate snuggled right up against me in bed, which was nice, until I suddenly noticed the time. It was almost eight. I bolted out of bed to finish the packing I’d started the night before.

  “Hey, Kate,” I said, “aren’t you going to work?”

  She mumbled something into the pillow.

  “What?”

  “I said, I don’t feel well.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Cramps.”

  Alarmed, I went to her side of the bed. “Down—there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been pregnant before.”

  “Call Dr. DiMarco.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Call him anyway.”

  She paged him while I nervously bustled about packing, brushed my teeth, took a shower, shaved. When I came out of the bathroom, she was asleep.

  “Did he call back?”

  She turned over. “He said not to worry. Said call him if there’s spotting or bleeding.”

  “Will you call me on my cell?”

  “Don’t worry about it, sweetie. I’ll call if there’s anything. How long are you going to be gone for?”

  “TechComm lasts three days. Think of all the foreign movies you can watch on Bravo while I’m gone.”

  Just about all of the Band of Brothers was aboard the Delta flight to Miami. Everyone but Gordy sat in economy. Gordy was in business class. Not sitting in first class was his money-saving gesture.

  I had an aisle seat, several rows away from any of the other guys, and I was enjoying the fact that there were empty seats on either side. Until a woman sidled past me, holding a screaming baby. She started speaking Spanish to the infant, who wouldn’t stop crying. Then she poked a finger into the baby’s diaper, unwrapped it, and began changing the wriggling creature on her lap, right there. The smell of baby poop was overpowering.

  I thought: Good God almighty, is this what’s in store for me? Changing diapers on airplanes?

  When the mother finished changing the diaper, she scrunched up the old one, reclosed the Velcro tabs to tighten the poop package, then jammed the soiled diaper into the seat pocket in front of her.

  Behind me, some of the Entronics guys were getting a little rowdy, like frat boys. I turned around for a quick look. They were laughing loudly as some guy, whose face I couldn’t see, was showing them something in a magazine. Trevor waved the guy over, said something, and both of them exploded in guffaws. The guy punched Trevor lightly on the shoulder and turned around and I could see it was Kurt.

  At that moment he saw me and walked down the aisle. “This seat taken?” he asked.

  “Hey, Kurt,” I said warily. “What are you doing here?”

  “My job. Booth security. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Sure, but it might be someone’s seat.”

  “It is. It’s mine,” he said, squeezing past me. He turned to the Spanish woman with the baby. “Buenos días, señora,” he said in what sounded to me like an awfully good Spanish accent. She said something back. Then he turned back to me. “Cuban,” he whispered. He sniffed the air, caught the diaper aroma. “That you?” He was trying to defuse the tension by cracking a joke.

  I smiled to say I got it but it wasn’t funny.

  “So, you still don’t
want my help?”

  I nodded.

  “That include information I happened to come across that concerns you.”

  I hesitated. Inhaled slowly, then let out my breath even more slowly. I couldn’t let him keep doing this. It was wrong, and I knew it.

  But the lure was overpowering. “All right,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

  He unzipped a nylon portfolio and took out a brown file folder and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  He spoke quietly. “You know that big idea you came up with at Fenway?”

  “The billboard thing?”

  “Take a look.”

  I hesitated, then opened the folder. It held printouts of e-mails between Gordy and Dick Hardy, the CEO of Entronics USA.

  “I guess our CEO was in Tokyo for the Global Executive Summary. But he’s coming to TechComm.”

  “He never misses it.” I read through the e-mails. Gordy was all excited about a “major idea” he’d come up with, a “disruptive” application of existing technology that could transform Entronics’ position in the global market. Digital signage! He used some of the exact phrases I’d used: “The sunk costs are already budgeted.” And “It will put Entronics on the map in the digital signage industry.” And: “PictureScreen will make existing LED display technology look like JumboTron in 1985.”

  “This pisses me off,” I said.

  “I thought it might. That broke dick’s not going to get away with screwing you over again.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not talking.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing. When you’re in combat, you don’t have time to think. You just act.”

  “No,” I said. “No favors.”

  He was silent.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  He remained silent.

  “Come on, Kurt. No more. Please.”

  34

  The hotel was a big fancy Westin attached to the convention center. Our rooms all had balconies overlooking Miami and Biscayne Bay. I’d forgotten how much I liked Miami, even though the heat was oppressive in the summer, and I wondered why I didn’t live here.