Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  I worked out in the hotel fitness center and had a late room-service lunch while I did e-mail and returned calls. I checked in with Kate at home and asked how she was feeling, and she said the cramps had gone away so she was a lot better.

  TechComm, I should explain, is the big trade show for the audiovisual industry, which is just about as geeky as it sounds. Twenty-five thousand people from eighty countries attend, all of them connected in some way to a multibillion-dollar industry that’s populated by the guys from the Dungeons & Dragons Club in high school. Understand that the highlight of the whole show is not the awards banquet but the “Projection Shoot-out” a big demo of LCD projectors, okay?

  At five, I dressed in Miami casual, which meant a nice golf shirt and a pair of pressed chinos, and went down to the big opening reception in Ballrooms B and C. It was the kickoff to the convention. When I got there, I saw that the whole Band of Brothers, plus Gordy, were dressed pretty much the same way as me. There was bad music and decent hors d’oeuvres and drinks. People were getting their badges and program guides and figuring out which seminars and panel discussions they wanted to go to when they weren’t on booth duty. “Principles of AV Design”? “Fundamentals of Video Conferencing”? The hot one seemed to be “The Future of Digital Cinema.”

  Snatches of conversation wafted by me: “…Native resolution of nineteen-twenty-by-ten-eighty…that four million pixels makes HD video look soft…unstable signal environments…totally seamless playback…” Festino told me that NEC was giving away a Corvette and wondered whether we could enter the drawing. Then he said, “Hey, look. It’s Mister Big.”

  Dick Hardy entered the party like Jay Gatsby. He was a big, trim man with a big head, a ruddy face, a strong jaw. He looked like a CEO out of Central Casting, which is probably why our Japanese overlords named him to the job. He was wearing a blue blazer over some kind of white linen T-shirt.

  Gordy spotted him and rushed over, gave him a bear hug. Since Hardy was a lot taller than Gordy, the hug was comic—Gordy’s arms grabbed Hardy around the belly.

  Nerdy or not, TechComm is pretty damned cool. Everywhere the next morning you could see huge screens and displays, multimedia shows of light and sound. Video walls twelve feet high playing movie trailers and commercials. One booth was a virtual-reality simulation of a Renaissance palace you could walk into, all done by hologram. It was magic. The future was on display. People in the rental and staging business were checking out the latest audio-mixing consoles. One company was showing off its wireless digital video broadcast system for the home. Another one was inviting people to try its wireless phone conference system. Yet another had outdoor digital touchscreens.

  We had the PictureScreen on display, mounted into a big picture window, along with our biggest and best plasma and LCD displays and our six newest, lightest, and brightest LCD projectors for schools and businesses. I manned the booth a little, greeting walk-bys, but most of the time I was in meetings with big customers. I did two lunches. Kurt and a couple of guys from our facilities department had gotten here early to set up the booth and get it wired and move boxes, and Kurt had spent much of the day hovering nearby, keeping watch on the equipment and especially the unguarded area behind the booth. He’d gotten pretty popular among the Band of Brothers, I noticed.

  I didn’t see Gordy much. He and Dick Hardy had a long meeting with some folks from Bank of America. I was perfectly civil to him, of course. He was a scumbag. What else was new? During a break between meetings, Gordy stopped by our booth, glad-handed a little, and took me aside.

  “Booya on that Belkin dealership deal,” he said, an arm around my shoulder. “You see the press release Dick Hardy just sent out?”

  “Already?”

  “Hardy doesn’t waste time. Entronics stock is already trading higher on the New York Stock Exchange.”

  “Because of that one deal? That’s got to be a pimple on Entronics’ ass.”

  “It’s all about momentum. Who’s up, who’s down. Good timing, too, Entronics announcing the deal at TechComm. Love it. Love it!”

  “Good timing,” I agreed.

  “You know something, Steadman? I’m starting to think I might have underestimated you after all. When we get back, we should get together one of these nights, you and me and the ladies, huh?”

  “That sounds like a lot of fun,” I said with a straight face.

  Later on, I did the booth crawl, checking out the competitors. People were grabbing freebies all over the place, swag like messenger bags and beach towels and Frisbees. I stopped at the booth of one company that did rotating video displays and weatherproof, 360-degree outdoor LED displays. I’d removed my badge so they’d think I was just another end user. At the booth of a company that sold huge indoor/outdoor LED video screens, assembled from smaller modular panels, I really dug deep, asking a bunch of questions about pixel pitch and color correction. Questions that probably made me seem smart, like the number of nits, which is a unit of brightness, and the pixel uniformity technology. But I wasn’t trying to impress them. I really wanted to know what the competition was up to. They told me their video screens had been used in Sting and Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.

  I checked out the booth of a company called AirView Systems, which sold flight information display systems to airports. They were one of our biggest competitors for the Atlanta airport contract, so I wanted to see what they did. AirView wasn’t a big company, so all the top officers were there schmoozing. I shook hands with the CFO, Steve Bingham, a handsome guy in his fifties with silver anchorman hair, a lean face, deep-set eyes.

  Then I stopped at the Royal Meister booth, which was larger than ours, and even more decked out with plasmas and LCDs and projectors. The young guy who was manning the booth was all over me, since he thought I was a potential customer. He handed me his business card, wanted to show us the latest and greatest. He could have been me five years ago. He asked for my business card, and I patted my pockets and told him I must have left them back at my hotel room and turned to get the hell out of there, hoping he wouldn’t see me at the Entronics booth when he did his booth crawl.

  “Let me introduce you to our new Senior Vice President of Sales,” he said.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got to get to a seminar.”

  “Are you sure?” a woman said. “I always like to say hello to prospects.”

  I didn’t recognize her at first. Her mousy brown hair was the color of honey. She’d put highlights in her hair too. She was wearing makeup for the first time.

  “Joan,” I said, startled. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Jason,” Joan Tureck said, extending her hand to shake. “I don’t see an exhibitor badge—you’re no longer with Entronics?”

  “No, I—I think I misplaced the badge,” I said.

  “Along with his business card,” said the young sales guy, now visibly ticked off.

  “But I thought you were with FoodMark.”

  “This position opened up suddenly, and I couldn’t resist. Meister wanted someone with an intimate understanding of the visual systems space, and I happened to be available. Being a carnivore wasn’t a requirement.”

  It made perfect sense that Royal Meister had hired Joan Tureck. In the big battle between divisions, with two megacorporations duking it out over which sales force lived and which died, she was a huge asset. She knew where all the bodies were buried at Entronics. She knew where all our fault lines were, all our weaknesses and soft spots.

  “You—you look great,” I said.

  “It’s Dallas,” she shrugged.

  “So you’ve got the equivalent of Gordy’s job,” I said.

  “I wish that were all there was to it. Most of my job these days is taken up with planning for the integration.”

  “Meaning what’s going to happen to your sales force?”

  She smiled again. “More like what’s going to happen to your sales force.”

  “You look like the cat that got the cream,
Joan.” Old Cal Taylor’s line.

  “Strictly two percent. You know me.”

  “I thought you hated Dallas.”

  “Sheila grew up in Austin, you know. So it’s not so bad. They’ve invented something called air-conditioning.”

  “They have great steak houses in Dallas.”

  “I’m still a vegan.” Her smile faded. “I heard about Phil Rifkin. That was a shock.”

  I nodded.

  “He was such a nice guy. Brilliant. A little strange, sure, but he never struck me as suicidal.”

  “I never thought so either.”

  “Very peculiar. And very sad.”

  I nodded.

  “I saw the press release Dick Hardy put out. I guess Gordy landed a major deal at the Harry Belkin auto dealerships.”

  I nodded again. “That was news to me, too,” I said. “I thought I’d done it, but hey, what do I know?”

  She drew closer and walked with me out of the booth. “Jason, can I give you some unsolicited advice?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve always liked you. You know that.”

  I nodded.

  “Get out now, while you can. Before you and all the rest of you are out on the street. It’s much easier to look for a job when you already have one.”

  “It’s not a sure thing, Joan,” I said weakly.

  “I’m telling you as a friend, Jason. Call me a rat, but I know a sinking ship when I see one.”

  I didn’t reply, just looked at her for a few seconds.

  “We’ll stay in touch,” she said.

  35

  When the show was closing for the day, I stopped back in to check in on my guys and see who they’d connected with. Festino had the Purell out and was furiously trying to kill the microbes he’d picked up from the disease-ridden hands of hundreds of customers. Kurt was at work securing the equipment for the night.

  “Coming to the big dinner?” I asked Kurt, as he secured the equipment.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it,” he said.

  As I walked back to my room to shower and change into a suit, I saw Trevor Allard standing by the elevator banks. “How’s it going, Trevor?” I said.

  He turned to me. “Interesting,” he said. “It’s always nice to run into old friends.”

  “Who’d you see?”

  The elevator binged, and we got on, the only ones.

  “A buddy of mine from Panasonic,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Mm-hmm.” The elevator doors closed.

  “He told me you got the Harry Belkin contract because a whole shipment of Panasonic plasmas were DOA.”

  I nodded. I was feeling the usual anxiety, being inside the steel coffin, but now I felt a dread of a different sort. “It’s weird,” I said.

  “Very weird. Bad for Panasonic. But good for you.”

  “And Entronics.”

  “Sure enough. Your deal, of course. A huge win for you. Good bit of luck, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Hey,” I said, “you make your own luck.” Or someone makes it for you.

  “Really got me thinking,” Trevor said carefully. We were both watching the elevator buttons. No elevator TV here, unfortunately. What would the word of the day be? Imputation? Insinuation? “Took me down memory lane. Reminded me of Fidelity. I had a bum monitor, too, remember?”

  “We’ve been through that, Trevor.”

  “Yep. I lost Fidelity over it. Then there was that car trouble I had a few months ago—I lost Pavilion, remember? Then there was Brett Gleason’s Blue Screen of Death.”

  “You’re still harping on this nonsense?”

  “Bad things happen to your adversaries, don’t they? There seems to be a real pattern here.”

  The elevator binged again, and we’d arrived at our floor.

  “Right,” I said. “And even paranoids have enemies.”

  “I’m not dropping this, Jason,” he said as he turned right and I turned left to go to our rooms. “Brett and I are going to dig deep. I know you’re behind all this stuff, and I’m going to find out the truth. I promise you.”

  36

  I called Kate, took a shower, and changed into a suit and tie for dinner. Entronics had taken over one of the Westin ballrooms. Gordy had, as usual, kept the theme of the dinner a secret.

  His TechComm dinners were always blowout extravaganzas. The year before, the theme had been The Apprentice, and he got to be Donald Trump, of course. The year before that was Survivor. Everyone got bandanas and was forced to eat a bowl of “dirt,” made of crumbled Oreos and gummy worms. He always gave an over-the-top, borderline-insane talk, a cross between that self-help guru Tony Robbins and Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs.

  We were all wondering what it would be this year.

  When I walked in I saw that the whole place had been decorated, at what had to be enormous expense, to look like a boxing arena. Projected on the walls—using Entronics projectors, no doubt—were all sorts of vintage fight posters, the kind that usually came in mustard yellow with big red-and-white crudely printed letters and monochrome photos of the fighters. There were posters for JERSEY JOE WALCOTT VS. ROCKY MARCIANO and CASSIUS CLAY VS. DONNIE FLEEMAN and SUGAR RAY FORSYTHE VS. HENRY ARMSTRONG.

  In the middle of the room was a boxing ring. I’m serious. Gordy had actually had a boxing ring brought in—he must have rented it somewhere in Miami—steel frame and corner posts, covered ropes, canvas floor, wooden stepladder to climb in, even the stools in opposite corners. There was a black steel ring gong mounted on a freestanding wooden post nearby. It sat there in the middle of the banquet hall, surrounded by dining tables.

  It looked incredibly stupid.

  Kurt saw me enter and came right up to me. “This must have cost a couple of bucks, huh?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll see. Gordy asked my advice. I should be flattered.”

  “Advice on what.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Where’s Gordy?”

  “Probably backstage having a last hit of courage. He asked me to go get his Scotch bottle.”

  I found my assigned seat, at a table close to the boxing ring. Each of the Band of Brothers was seated, one or two to a table, with important customers.

  I just had time to introduce myself to a guy from SignNetwork before the lights went down and a pair of spotlights swung around and stopped at the blue velvet stage curtains at the front of the room. A loud trumpet fanfare blared from loudspeakers: the theme from the movie Rocky.

  The curtains parted and two burly guys burst through carrying a throne. On it sat Gordy, wearing a shiny red boxing robe with gold trim and hood, and shiny red boxing gloves. He was wearing black high-top Converse sneakers. The throne was labeled “CHAMP.” In front of them scurried a young woman, flinging rose petals from a basket. Gordy was beaming and punching the air.

  The burly guys carried Gordy down a path cleared between the dining tables, while the woman threw rose petals just ahead of them, and “Gonna Fly Now” blared from the speakers.

  There was tittering, and some outright laughter, from the tables. People didn’t know what to make of it all.

  The guys set the throne down next to the boxing ring, and Gordy rose to his feet, gloves way up in the air, as the music faded.

  “Yo, Adrian!” he shouted. The rose-petal woman now busied herself clipping a wireless lapel mike to his robe.

  There was laughter. People were starting to roll with it. I still couldn’t believe Gordy was doing this, but he was known to do strange routines at our annual kickoffs.

  He turned around to show off the back of his robe. It said ITALIAN STALLION in gold block letters. It even had a white patch sewn on the top that said SHAMROCK MEATS INC., just like in the first Rocky movie.

  He turned back around and lifted his robe coquettishly to give us a peek of his stars-and-stripes boxing trunks.

  “Wrong movie,” Trevor shouted from his table over to one side. “That’s R
ocky III!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gordy said, beaming.

  “I thought you’re Irish!” shouted Forsythe, getting into it.

  “Honorary Italian,” he said. “My wife’s Italian. Where’s my drink?” He found his bottle of Talisker 18 on a little table next to the ring, glugged some into a glass, and took a swig before stepping into the ring. He made a hand gesture, and the rose-petal woman hit the ring gong with a striking hammer. He bowed, and there was applause.

  “Booya!” he shouted.

  “Booya,” some of the guys replied.

  “Booya!” he yelled, louder.

  “Booya!” everyone shouted back.

  He pulled down the hood but left the robe on—probably a wise decision, given his physique. “We at Entronics are going to go the distance for you,” he shouted. There was a high-pitched squeal of feedback.

  “Yeah!” Trevor shouted back, and he was joined by a bunch of the other guys. I clapped and tried not to roll my eyes.

  “We’re going all fifteen rounds!” Gordy shouted.

  The rose-petal woman was standing at a long table next to the ring, cracking eggs into glasses. There was a pile of egg cartons on the table. I knew what was coming up. There were probably twenty-eight glasses lined up, and she was cracking three eggs into each glass.

  Gordy took another gulp of his Scotch. “When your back is to the wall and it’s do or die, you look within yourself to find the spirit of a hero,” he said. “Like Rocky Balboa, we think of ourselves as the under-dog. Rocky had Apollo Creed. Well, we have NEC and Mitsubishi. Rocky had Mr. T—we have Hitachi. Rocky had Tommy Gunn—we have Panasonic. Rocky had Ivan Drago—we have Sony!”

  Raucous cheers from the Band of Brothers, and from some of the channel partners and distributors now too.

  “We say, ‘Be a thinker, not a stinker!’” Gordy said. “We’re here to make your dreams a reality! Now, I’m not going to get down and do one-arm pushups for you.”

  “Aww, come on!” Taminek shouted. “Do it!”