Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  “You’re talking to me now.”

  “I have to trust you. Can I?”

  “Trust me how?”

  “Not to tell anyone else in the state police that I’ve spoken with you.”

  “I can’t promise you that.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not a priest, Mr. Steadman. This isn’t a confessional. I’m a cop. If you committed a crime—”

  “I didn’t commit a crime.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about. I’m also not a reporter for the Globe. I don’t plan to publish an exposé. Point is, I don’t want to give you assurances I can’t keep.”

  “He knows people in the state police. A lot of people. He has contacts who tell him what’s going on.”

  Kenyon smiled cryptically, nodded.

  “What?” I said. “You look skeptical.”

  “No. In fact, I’m not skeptical. I’m not going to lie to you. I’d like to tell you that kind of thing can’t happen, but the truth is—well, I can believe it. We leak like a sieve. Military guys like your friend here, sometimes they know a lot of people on the force.”

  “Great,” I said darkly. “If he finds out I’ve even talked to you, he’ll do something to my wife. He works in Corporate Security—he knows the names of everyone who comes and goes here. You probably signed in at the front desk, right? You wrote Mass. State Police, and your name, right? To see Jason Steadman?”

  “It’s not like that. I’m here to talk to a lot of people.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to need to get specifics from you. Like some of the ‘underhanded things’ this Semko person did. Were any of them targeted at Allard or Gleason?”

  I felt a pulse of relief. “Absolutely.”

  He turned a page of his notebook. He asked me questions. I talked, and he took a lot of notes.

  “Maybe we can help each other,” he said. He handed me his card. He wrote down another number on the back. “My direct line, and my cell. If you call me at the DA’s office, sometimes my partner, Sanchez, answers my line. You can trust him.”

  I shook my head. “If I call you, I don’t want to leave my name. How about if I use a fake name. I’ll use—” I thought a moment. “Josh Gibson.”

  His big white smile took over his face. “Josh Gibson? You’re thinking the Josh Gibson? Negro Leagues?”

  “One of the greatest power hitters of all time,” I said.

  “I’ll remember,” Kenyon said.

  53

  I had a lunch presentation to one of our dealers and Rick Festino, trying to save a deal he was losing. I hadn’t been on my game—I was too distracted by Sergeant Kenyon—and I probably shouldn’t have gone.

  Right after lunch, instead of returning to the office, I drove to a Starbucks a few miles from the Entronics building. I ordered a large cappuccino—I refuse to use the bogus Starbucks language like “venti” and “grande”—and found a comfortable chair in a corner and plugged in my laptop. I bought a month’s worth of wireless Internet access, and a few minutes later I’d set up several e-mail addresses.

  I had no doubt that Kurt could pretty much find out anything I did online while I was at the office. But it wouldn’t be easy for him to discover this Internet account, and even if he did, it would take him a while. And at the rate things were happening now, I didn’t need more than a couple of days.

  Man, you don’t know what a pawn you are, Kurt had said.

  Ask the merger integration team from McKinsey if they’re here to save the Framingham office or sell the building. Amazing what you can find if you look.

  Did that mean that the MegaTower had been planning all along to shut down my division? Had that already been decided? If it had—then why had Dick Hardy been pressuring us so hard to perform, to sign up new business?

  I didn’t get it. What was the logic? Entronics was a few weeks away from closing a massive deal to acquire Royal Meister’s U.S. plasma-and-LCD business. Why the hell would anyone in Tokyo care about how their own U.S. business unit did if they were about to close it down?

  What piece of the puzzle was I missing?

  The answers probably lay in the confidential Entronics strategic-planning documents that concerned the acquisition of the Meister unit and their plans going forward. Most of these documents were probably in Japanese and stored in some inaccessible, compartmented corporate intranet.

  But there were other ways.

  Like the consulting firm of McKinsey and the merger integration team that had recently been prowling the halls.

  I didn’t know any of them, but I did know some of their names. And after some quick research on their website, I found the name of the most senior partner on the Entronics account. And then I found the name and e-mail of his executive assistant.

  Then, Dick Hardy sent her an e-mail. He used his Hushmail account.

  Well, actually, the e-mail came from rhardy@hushmail.com.

  An account I’d set up. Dick Hardy was e-mailing from his yacht, see. He’d misplaced the latest draft of the merger integration report, and he needed a copy e-mailed to him at once. To this private address, of course.

  I finished my cappuccino and got another coffee, black, and while I waited for McKinsey’s reply, I went back to the Army Court of Appeals website and found Kurt’s court-martial record. I remembered that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had done a report on the fragging, in the course of which their investigator had interviewed everyone else on Kurt’s Special Forces team.

  Everyone on the team but one had told the CID interviewer that they thought Kurt had done the murder. I wrote down the full names of each of the team members. His only defender was named Jeremiah Willkie.

  I remembered the night I’d met Kurt, when he took me to that auto-body shop owned by a friend and SF buddy of his. He’d asked after the owner, whose name was Jeremiah.

  Not too many Jeremiahs in the Special Forces, I figured.

  Willkie Auto Body had repaired my Acura. That was the place where Kurt mentioned he kept a storage unit for his tools and such.

  I did a quick Google search under Willkie Auto Body and pulled up an interesting fact. Willkie Auto Body was listed as the owner of a towing company called M.E. Walsh Tow. That was the towing company Kurt used to work for, I remembered. He said it was owned by a buddy of his.

  Then I began to plug into Google the names of the other members of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 561. Some of the names, even with middle initials, came up in different locations around the country. That just meant I hadn’t narrowed them down enough. Was James W. Kelly now a software developer in Cambridge, England? I didn’t think so. An accordionist and composer? A surgeon? A professor of oceanography and meteorology? A full-time blogger?

  But a few names were unusual enough for me to be certain I had the right man, and of those, a few even had biographies online. One was a fireman in a small town in Connecticut. Another worked for a security firm in Cincinnati. Another taught military history at a community college in upstate New York.

  I found the e-mail addresses of the last two easily. I sipped some more of my coffee, trying to kick my brain into higher gear. I figured they disliked Kurt, since they’d both been called as witnesses at Kurt’s court-martial and had testified against him. So I wrote to each of them. Using a third e-mail address, with a fake name, I told them that Kurt Semko had moved in next door and was spending a lot of time with my teenaged daughter, and I wanted to make a discreet inquiry into whether it was true he’d fragged a fellow officer in Iraq.

  One of them, the one who worked for the security firm, answered right back.

  “Kurt Semko is a discredit to the Special Forces,” he wrote. “He’s a dangerous and unbalanced man. If it were my daughter, I’d keep her away from Semko. No, I’d probably move.”

  I thanked him and asked him to give me specifics about what Kurt had done.

  I waited, but there was no reply.

  Then I checked Di
ck Hardy’s Hushmail account. The executive assistant from McKinsey had replied, with an attachment containing the merger integration team report. I downloaded it.

  The McKinsey report went on forever, but everything was in the executive summary up front.

  And it was all there.

  They weren’t evaluating Dallas versus Framingham. They weren’t trying to decide which unit got shuttered and which survived.

  It was a business case for closing the Framingham office and an action plan for how to do it.

  The whole bake-off thing that Gordy and Hardy had talked about—it was a ruse. The McKinsey report never even mentioned it.

  We’d all been hoodwinked.

  But why?

  Why the bake-off? Why pit Framingham against Dallas? Why crack the whip so hard?

  One of the appendices to the McKinsey report was the confidential term sheet for the Entronics-Meister acquisition. All the secret details were there. Maybe the answer was in the term sheet.

  If you knew how to read it.

  I didn’t, but I knew someone who did.

  Fifteen minutes later, Festino entered Starbucks, looked around, and found me in my comfortable chair in the back corner.

  “You didn’t invite me here for an Iced Caramel Macchiato, I assume,” he said grumpily.

  “Go ahead and get one,” I said. “On your nickel.”

  “Yes, boss. Hey, thanks for lunch, by the way. We landed the deal.”

  “Good to hear,” I said, although I really didn’t care at that moment.

  He returned after a few minutes with his drink, then pulled up a chair next to mine. “Jesus, will you look at this seat cushion? Can you imagine how many filthy asses have been on it?” He inspected it suspiciously and sat down slowly, reluctantly. “So what’s this?”

  I told him about the fraudulent bake-off.

  His mouth came open, and his face reddened. “Those bastards. The whole thing was a cruel hoax?”

  “So it appears.”

  “So in a month I’m going to be standing over a Frialator in the back of some McDonald’s? They couldn’t have told me this in June, when McDonald’s was hiring? Hand me your laptop.” He squinted at the screen for a moment. “How’d you get this?”

  “I think they call it ‘social engineering.’”

  “From the ghoul squad themselves?”

  “The merger integration team? Sort of.”

  “Hey, this is the term sheet for the Meister deal. Coolio.”

  “Yep.”

  “This is supposed to be under lock and key. Double-secret probation. You really do know how to get stuff, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He was silent a while longer. Then he started muttering words like “consideration” and “exchange ratio” and “closing price,” and he said, “Man, this is some complex deal. But the boot’s less than twenty percent. That’s standard.”

  “The boot?”

  “Cash. Investment banker talk. And there’s a soft collar in the deal.”

  “Now it’s a collar?”

  “See, if the price of Entronics stock goes down by closing date, they have to pay Meister more. If Entronics stock goes up, they pay less. A lot less, it looks like. Okay, now…I have a theory. Let me…” He was on the Internet, searching. “Yes. Here we go. Look at this—since the day the Meister deal was announced, Hardy’s given exactly three interviews. In Japanese.”

  “In Japanese?”

  “I mean, to Japanese newspapers. One in English, to the Japan Times. One to Asahi Shimbun. Another one to Nihon Keizai Shinbun. All of them upbeat, bragging about how Entronics U.S. business in flat-screens is taking off.”

  “So?”

  “Why do you think he only talked to Japanese journalists?”

  “That’s simple. Entronics is a Japanese company. He figured his bosses would read the interviews and be impressed.”

  “Come on, Jason. His bosses knew the numbers before Nihon Keizai Shinbun did. See, when you’re going through a merger or acquisition, the SEC’s always on your ass about talking to the press. But they can’t stop you from talking to foreign journalists in foreign countries. And who reads Japanese newspapers? In addition to Japanese-speakers?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “The Japanese offices of some of the biggest American hedge funds, okay? They pick up a morsel of news about Entronics, figuring they got a jump on the rest of the world, and they start buying. Next thing, the program traders kick in. Pretty soon Entronics stock starts jumping.”

  “So Dick Hardy was helping Entronics save a bundle on the Meister deal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So he lights a fire under us, gets us to sign deals all over the place so we can save our jobs, but in reality all we’re doing is helping Entronics do a little bargain shopping.”

  “Exactly. Evil, huh?”

  “But we don’t know whether Dick Hardy did this at the direction of the MegaTower, or whether this was his own idea.”

  “Who cares? Either way, he’s going to get a gold star,” Festino said. He took out a brand-new miniature bottle of hand sanitizer, unwrapped it, and squeezed out a big dollop onto the palm of his left hand. “And we get screwed.”

  “Aha.”

  “You can’t do anything about this, you know. In case you were planning something. This is all far, far above your pay grade.” He began feverishly rubbing his hands together. “Look at the stains on this arm-rest. It’s disgusting. I don’t think it’s coffee either.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Anyway, I always liked McDonald’s fries. Even after they stopped frying them in beef tallow. You coming tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “The softball game. Remember? You haven’t played in two weeks. And now that I’m coach, it’s all on my shoulders. We’re down two players.”

  “Festino.”

  “Sorry. But we are.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  54

  I pulled into the Entronics parking lot at just before five-thirty. A black Mustang pulled in the space beside me with a loud squealing of brakes, and Kurt jumped out.

  I sat in the car, waited for him to keep going. But he opened my passenger-side door and got in.

  “How goes the battle?” he said.

  “Tough day. Weirdest thing happened at home. We found a rattlesnake in our bedroom.”

  “That right,” he said. “I didn’t even know there were any rattlesnakes in Massachusetts. Live and learn. But I thought you were going to California.”

  “Missed the flight,” I said.

  “That’s a bummer.”

  “Yeah, well. It happens. So, congratulations on your promotion.”

  He nodded, smiled. “It’s good to be king.”

  “I’m impressed. Dick Hardy must think highly of you.”

  “Dick Hardy wants me to be happy. He’s decided I’m invaluable.”

  “You got something on him, huh?” I smiled, nodding, as if I appreciated his cleverness. He could have been a wholesaler bragging to me about some clever way they’d scammed Best Buy into paying for shipping.

  “He even invited me on his yacht. Ever been on his yacht?”

  “He invited me,” I said. “But I couldn’t make it.”

  “It’s an eighty-foot Lazzara, I read. A bargain at 2.3 million. But it sure seemed out of his league, given his salary. So I did a little digging. Turns out Hardy has been doing a little stock trading on the side. Set up a Channel Island trust in the name of something called the Samurai Trust. Samurai being the name of his yacht, you see. And the Samurai Trust has been buying and selling out-of-the-money options on Entronics stock on the Australian Stock Exchange. Every time an Entronics press release goes out, every time there’s another blip of good news, the Samurai Trust cashes in. Making a fortune. Of course, if there’s bad news, he makes money, too, on shorts. Very clever—just about
impossible to get caught. And all to pay for his yacht. Man, he could buy ten yachts by now.”

  Finally, I understood. Dick Hardy might have been trying to save Entronics a bundle on the Royal Meister deal, but that wasn’t his sole motive. He was lining his own pockets at the same time.

  “He’s a clever guy,” I said.

  “Clever enough to do his personal banking business using an encrypted Hushmail account. Not clever enough to realize that whenever he did e-mails on the company computer, I could access his hard disk remotely.”

  “Wow. Very cool.”

  “Everyone’s got a secret. You’ve got your secrets too. I just happen to know them. And there you are, you and your Band of Brothers, working your butts off to try to save your division. When all you’re really doing is paying off his yacht. Or his new house in the Highland Park section of Dallas.”

  “Dallas?”

  “Choke on that, buddy. Wonder why he’s moving to Dallas.”

  “You’re right. I was a pawn.”

  He shrugged.

  My shoulders sagged. I looked up, shaking my head regretfully. “You were just trying to help me out. And I’ve been taking you for granted. Like an idiot. While Gordy and Hardy were moving me around like a chess piece. You’re my only ally.”

  He turned to look at me. I couldn’t read his face.

  It was funny to remember how marginal he looked when I’d first met him, like an old hippie, someone who’d fallen off the grid. The goatee, the bandana, the mullet, the ratty T-shirts. Now he was well dressed and successful looking, in a good suit and tie and conservative shoes.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I really don’t give a shit what you did to Trevor and Brett. I freaked out, I admit it. I called the cops—I’m not going to lie to you. That was a stupid thing to do.” I sounded so genuinely contrite that I was beginning to believe it myself. “I could say I’m sorry, but that’s inadequate. You’ve been a good friend to me. This whole time. I just didn’t see it.”

  He was staring straight ahead out the windshield.

  I fell silent. My old sales guru, Mark Simkins, whose CDs I used to play over and over again, was always talking about the strategic pause. The most important skill in closing, he said, is silence.