Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  Kurt’s big face stared at me. Blinked a few times.

  “Do we have a deal?” I said.

  He smiled. His face pulled back, and I could see my office. He’d been sitting at my computer. Maybe a camera hooked up to it. Maybe the concealed one. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  All I cared about was that this looked like it might work.

  The elevator made another jolt, and it started to move.

  I turned away from the ceiling-mounted eye. Watched the buttons on the control panels light up orange: 12…13…

  Hit redial on the cell phone. This time the call went through. It rang once, twice.

  “Police emergency.” A man’s voice, clipped.

  “I’m in an elevator in the Entronics building in Framingham,” I said. “My name is Jason Steadman. My life is in danger. There’s a guy on the twentieth floor who’s trying to kill me.”

  “Hold on, please.”

  “Just send someone!” I shouted.

  The orange 20 button lit up. A ding. The elevator doors opened.

  On the phone, another voice came on. “Trooper Sanchez.”

  I didn’t understand. “Sanchez? Where’s Kenyon?”

  “Who’s this?” Sanchez said.

  I could see a figure in the shadows in the twentieth-floor lobby. Kurt, it had to be.

  “Jason Steadman,” I whispered. “I’m—I know Kenyon. I’m in the Entronics building—you’ve got to radio Kenyon, send someone over here now. Hurry, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Steadman?” Sanchez said. “That scum-sucking piece of shit?” His Hispanic accent was even thicker now.

  Two figures emerged from the shadows. Kurt was holding a cell phone to his ear. “Would you like Sergeant Kenyon’s voice mail,” Kurt said in his Sanchez voice, leering.

  Another man, holding a pistol.

  Ray Kenyon.

  In his other hand was a pistol. Kenyon waved it at me. “Let’s go,” he said. “Go, go, go. Hand me the other half.”

  I stared in shock. I’d pressed 911. Nine, one, one. I was sure of it. I hadn’t hit redial, hadn’t called Kenyon.

  “Jerry,” came Kurt’s voice. “Hand me the weapon. I’ll take over.”

  Jerry. Jeremiah. Jeremiah Willkie. His Special Forces brother. The one who wouldn’t testify against him. Who owned the auto body shop.

  Who was “Ray Kenyon.”

  Jeremiah Willkie handed Kurt the weapon. It looked like the Colt I’d stolen from Kurt’s storage locker, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “The guys are never going to believe this one,” said Willkie/Kenyon.

  “No, they won’t,” said Kurt, and he pointed the barrel at Jeremiah Willkie and fired. “Because they’re not going to hear about it.”

  Willkie collapsed to the floor. His left temple was bloodied. His eyes remained open.

  I stared at Kurt.

  “Jeremiah has a drinking problem,” Kurt said. “Get a couple vodkas in him, and he talks too much. But he made an awfully convincing cop, didn’t he? He always wanted to be a cop. His uncle was a cop.”

  “I called 911.”

  “It’s called cell phone phreaking. Cloned your phone so I could listen to all your calls. And pick up on outgoing calls too. Your old cell, your new one, made no difference. So let’s finish our business here.”

  He pointed the gun at me. “Sounds like you hid the part in your office. You tricky, tricky guy. Let’s go.”

  I walked to my office, and he followed. I entered the office, stood in the center of the room, my thoughts racing. The wind howled. Papers covered the carpet, and piles of whitish glass fragments.

  “Well, I know it’s not in your desk,” Kurt said. “Or in your bookcase. Or any of the usual hiding places.”

  My eyes flicked toward the briefcase, then quickly away. It was still there.

  “Ceiling panel,” I said.

  He’d seen my eyes.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Kurt said. “Hand the piece over, and you’re free to go.”

  “I’m not going out that window,” I said.

  “Hand me the rest of the shaft.”

  My eyes darted again, almost involuntarily, toward the briefcase next to my desk.

  “I’ll need your help,” I said. “I need a ladder or something so I can reach the ceiling panel.”

  “A ladder?” he said. “Boy, I sure don’t think you need a ladder.” He stepped toward my desk, grabbed the English leather briefcase. “Didn’t I teach you about the ‘tell’? Those little giveaway signs in a person’s face? You’re good at reading them, but not so good at hiding them.”

  I tried to grab the briefcase back from him, but of course he was much stronger, and he wrested it from my grip. Both his hands were on the briefcase, and as he fiddled with the latches, I took advantage of his momentary distraction, backed away from him.

  “Nowhere to run, Jason,” Kurt said, loud but matter-of-fact. I backed away slowly as he flipped open one of the brass latches, then the other, and then my back was against the doorframe. Twenty feet away, maybe.

  A tiny scraping sound.

  I saw the realization dawn on Kurt’s face, an expression of fury combined with something I’d never seen in his face before.

  Fear.

  But only for a fraction of a second before the blast swallowed him, blew him apart, limbs flying, horrific carnage like something you might see in a war movie. The immense explosion threw me backwards, slammed me against something hard, and as I tumbled I felt hard things spray against my face, fragments of wood and plaster, maybe, and I didn’t know what else.

  I struggled to my feet, ears ringing, my face stinging.

  A block of Kurt’s own C-4 plastic explosive connected to the confetti-bomb apparatus he’d put in my briefcase that day. I’d left it in my briefcase and gone back to using my old one.

  And he was right that a little C-4 was enough. I knew there was no chance of him surviving.

  Reached the elevator banks, then stopped. Wasn’t going to try that again.

  The stairs. Twenty flights was nothing. I’d learned that. I was in great condition now.

  Well, not exactly. My back ached, and a couple of my ribs were sore, probably bruised if not broken. I was hurting, but I was also flooded with adrenaline.

  Opened the door to the stairs and started down the twenty flights. Walking, not running. I was limping, and I grimaced from the pain, but I knew I’d make it just fine.

  Not a problem. Easy.

  Epilogue

  Kurt was right, of course.

  It was a girl. Nine pounds, twelve ounces. A beautiful, healthy little girl. Well, not so little. Big, in fact. She looked sort of like Jack Nicholson, with the straggly black hair and the bad comb-over. And I’d always hoped that, if we got a girl, she’d look like Kate Hepburn. Like her mom. Oh, well. Close enough.

  The baby—Josephine, we named her: Josie—was so big that Kate had to deliver by C-section. So the delivery was scheduled a couple of days in advance, which was, unfortunately, plenty of notice for my brother-in-law to fly in from L.A. to join his wife and Kate and me in sharing the happy occasion.

  I was so happy I barely minded having Craig there.

  I had a lot on my mind anyway.

  The police business took a few days to straighten out. Graham Runkel and I spent long hours at state police headquarters going over and over what had happened that night. Graham told them about how Kurt had locked him into a trunk, where he might have suffocated had I not released him, barely in time.

  They wanted to know how I’d learned to make a bomb. I told them Kurt had done most of the work for me, and the rest I’d gotten online. It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.

  Now that Kurt was dead, it was fairly easy to get his Special Forces teammates to come forward and talk about what kind of person he’d been. The picture that emerged was consistent, and it wasn’t pretty. Just about every one of the cops and detectives who interviewed me said I was “lucky”
I hadn’t been killed.

  Lucky. Yeah, right.

  Not long after Yoshi had passed on to Tokyo the information about how it was that the CEO of Entronics USA, Dick Hardy, had been able to afford his yacht and his house in Dallas, Hardy was jettisoned.

  The board of directors voted unanimously to instruct their General Counsel to inform the SEC’s Enforcement Division, and that started the ball in motion. The SEC soon brought in the FBI, and then the IRS Criminal Division, and pretty soon Dick Hardy was facing what Gordy used to call a “gangbang” of civil and criminal and tax fraud charges. He put his yacht up for sale on the Robb Report just two days before the IRS seized it.

  I was flown to New York to meet with our worldwide CEO, Hideo Nakamura, and about a dozen other honchos, both Japanese and American, to interview for Dick Hardy’s job. It was me versus a bunch of other internal candidates, all of them older and more experienced and much more qualified. Instead of just sitting there on the hot seat being grilled by Nakamura-san, I decided to go out on a limb and make a PowerPoint presentation to my interviewers. Hardy had told me how they all loved PowerPoint.

  My presentation made a business case for shutting down Entronics headquarters in Santa Clara, selling off its valuable and overpriced Silicon Valley real estate, and moving headquarters to lovely Framingham, Massachusetts, where Entronics already had a building. All it needed was some repair work on the twentieth floor, where a blast had turned my corner office into a charred cave.

  The kicker was my slide showing how Royal Meister’s Dallas offices could be sold at an immense profit. The Dallas Cowboys, see, wanted to build a new stadium, and they were willing to pay handsomely for the land.

  This impressed them, I think.

  I didn’t mention that I had my personal reasons. Like the fact that Kate refused to leave Cambridge. She finally had her dream house, and she’d already furnished the nursery, and she simply wasn’t moving. So either I moved to Santa Clara without my lovely wife and baby, or I turned down the job. But I wasn’t going to tell them that. That would not be good for my image as a killer.

  The interviews seemed to go well, if facial expressions are any indication. I didn’t understand a word they were saying. Yoshi Tanaka sat by my side the entire time, throughout every single interview, as if he were my attorney.

  In the last interview there seemed to be a really heated exchange. Yoshi spoke to Nakamura-san and another board member in rapid Japanese while I sat there smiling like a doofus. They seemed to be arguing back and forth until Yoshi said something, and they all nodded.

  Finally, Yoshi turned to me and said, “Oh, please forgive me, I’m being terribly rude.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. He was speaking in a plummy British accent. He sounded like Laurence Olivier or maybe Hugh Grant.

  “It’s just that they keep referring to you as nonki, which I suppose I’d translate as ‘easygoing,’ and a gokurakutonbo, which is more difficult to translate. Perhaps you might say it means a ‘happy-go-lucky fellow.’ But I’m afraid neither is a compliment in Japanese. I had to explain to them that your people regard you as ruthless. They speak of you with a certain trepidation. I told them that’s what I like about you. You have that killer instinct.”

  Later on, as Yoshi and I waited for the hiring committee to finish their deliberations, I blurted out, “Your English is amazing. I had no idea.”

  “My English? My dear boy, you’re too kind. I did my master’s thesis at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the late novels of Henry James. Now there’s a true master of the language.”

  The realization hit me then and there. Of course. How else could he get people to talk so freely in his presence?

  “So when I told you all about my big idea for the PictureScreen, and you just stared blankly—”

  “In stunned admiration, Jason-san. That was when I realized you were a bloody visionary. I immediately told Nakamura-san, and he insisted on meeting you in Santa Clara. But alas, it was not to be.”

  In the end, I was tapped for Dick Hardy’s job, and after a few nerve-racking weeks, when Kate and I agreed not to talk about it, they also approved my suggestion to move U.S. headquarters to Framingham. And move Royal Meister’s top performers to Framingham, too—those who wanted to leave Dallas, anyway. Now Joan Tureck was working for me, and she and her partner were quite happy to be back in Boston.

  So where was I?

  Oh, yes. At the hospital, Craig seemed to treat me with newfound respect. He kept talking about the Entronics Invitational at Pebble Beach, what a blast he had last year when Dick Hardy had invited him to join all the celebs, how cool it was playing a few holes with Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh. I guess I was a little distracted, with our newborn baby, but it took me a while to figure out that Craig was angling for an invitation again this year. Now that I was the CEO of Entronics. Poor Craig was sucking up to me.

  But I was as friendly as could be. “We’re trying to keep the head count down this year,” I said, “but I’m sure we can work something out. Just contact my assistant, Franny Barber. I’m sure we can arrange it.”

  I have to say that I enjoyed that.

  We all sat in Kate’s room watching Baby Josie clamp on to Kate’s boobs and suck away like a champ. Finally, she fell asleep, and the nurse came and put her in the bassinet.

  I gave Kate a smooch, and said, “I’m married to the greatest woman, and I have the greatest baby, and I just feel like the luckiest man in the world.” I was almost overcome by emotion.

  “I thought you said a man makes his own luck,” she said, arching her brows.

  “I don’t think I believe that anymore,” I said slowly. “Sometimes the luck makes the man.”

  Ethan sat in a corner of the room reading a book about great military blunders in history. This was his latest obsession. Apparently Kurt Semko’s remark about the Battle of Stalingrad had got Ethan thinking.

  “Uncle Jason,” he said, looking up from his book. “Are you aware that the First World War was started because a driver made a wrong turn?”

  “Ethan,” said his mother warningly.

  “Ethan,” said Craig. “The adults are talking.”

  “A wrong turn?” I said to Ethan.

  “That’s right. The chauffeur to the Archduke of Austria-Hungary accidentally turned into a street he shouldn’t have, where some guy was waiting with a gun, and he shot the Archduke and his wife, and that led to a whole world war.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said. “But it makes me feel better about my driving.”

  Kate and Susie were discussing nannies. Kate said she’d found several promising Irish nanny candidates on the Irish Echo newspaper’s website. Susie told her that the only nannies to hire were Filipinas. They went back and forth on this for a while, and of course Craig had to join in the dispute. I didn’t care one way or another, of course. I kept thinking about Festino’s warning about how the Barney song would get stuck in my head, and I’d be forced to watch The Wiggles.

  But when they started arguing about which was better, a live-in or a live-out nanny, I jumped in. “I really don’t want a stranger living under the same roof,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t be a stranger once we got to know her,” Kate pointed out.

  “Even worse,” I said.

  “You really want to be able to leave the baby with the nanny when you two go out,” Craig said. “That’s what was so great about Corazon. We were able to leave Ethan with her all the time. We barely saw him.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. Kate and I exchanged a look.

  He didn’t pick up on my sarcasm. “Whenever he started crying in the middle of the night,” Craig said, “Corazon would come running and change his diaper or feed him or whatever.”

  “I expressed my breast milk and put it in the Sub-Zero,” Susie said, nodding. “All Corazon had to do was heat the little bottles up in the microwave. But you have to stir them well. There’s really only one kind of breast pump to buy.�
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  “I know,” Kate said. “I’ve been on every baby website.”

  “Can we not talk about breast pumps?” I said. “I want to go back to the live-in/live-out thing.”

  “Why?” Kate said. “It’s decided.”

  “The hell it is. Don’t even bother.”

  Kate saw the resolve in my face. “Oh, I’ve only just begun,” she said with that knowing smile that she knew always turned me to mush.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Now it’s war.”

  Acknowledgments

  The fictional Entronics Corporation was built out of the bits and pieces of the giant electronics companies I visited and researched, but none was as helpful and as hospitable and interesting as NEC. Its Visual Display division is one of the largest providers of plasma screens in the world, and a great and innovative company besides. Ron Gillies, formerly the senior vice president and general manager (and now at Iomega), was enormously helpful and patient in answering my most outrageous, most dimwitted questions and in allowing me to talk to a whole range of people there, both in sales and in the more technical end of things. He, and his terrific, charismatic successor, Pierre Richer, were a pleasure to get to know. Thanks as well to Keith Yanke, product manager, Plasma Displays; Patrick Malone, district sales manager; Ken Nishimura, general manager; Bill Whiteside, inside sales; Tim Dreyer, public relations manager; and especially Jenna Held. I did not meet a Gordy there, nor a Dick Hardy, nor a Festino, nor a Trevor, nor a Rifkin. Elsewhere, yes. Not at NEC. And if I got any of my facts grotesquely wrong—well, that’s why they call it fiction, right?

  Other excellent sources in the world of high-tech sales who gave me a feeling for the culture, the stakes, and the challenges included: Bob Scordino, area manager, the EMC Corporation; Bill Scannell, senior vice president, the Americas, EMC Corporation; and Larry Roberts of PlanView. All were witty, personable, and generous with their time.