A Billion Ways to Die (21 page)

We came to a single elevator that the woman called to our floor with a key. We rode it up to the best address in the building, where the reception area was paneled in stainless steel and the receptionist an attractive young woman whose welcome involved the barest arch of her penciled-on eyebrows. Following a hushed exchange with our guide, she pushed a button on a console hidden behind her desk and spoke a few words into a nearly invisible black headset.

There were no chairs in the waiting room, so we stood. I was grateful no one tried to make small talk. I kept my eyes averted toward the floor, occupying myself admiring Gyawali’s handmade, two-tone Oxford brogues, and wondering if Imogene knew how to polish the pointy-toed slip-ons that likely represented her finest footwear.

Another woman emerged from a door neatly blended into the room’s gleaming walls. Our guide handed us off without a word and went over to the elevator, pushing the down button. Our new escort was very tall, angular and late middle-aged, with a hairdo so tightly held together I felt you could lift it like a helmet off her head. She introduced herself as Patricia Cheerborg and looked each of us closely in the eye when she shook our hands. She wore a thin sweater over her shoulders and her glasses hung around her neck on a beaded necklace.

“Mrs. Cheerborg handles communications for Chuck,” said Gyawali. “She’s the voice of Fontaine Cultural and Economic Development.”

“Patricia, please,” she said, though she allowed the grand characterization to stand.

Slightly stooped, she loped down a long carpeted hallway and we followed, eventually arriving at a conference room anchored by a massive mahogany table. At each seating was a high-backed leather chair, a leather blotter, personal electrical and electronic connections that popped straight up from the table, and a black puck protected by a wire mesh I assumed was a microphone.

I gave her the flash drive with my presentation and she disappeared for a few minutes. She came back holding a remote, which she pointed at one end of the room. A screen descended out of the ceiling and the first page of my presentation appeared immediately after it stopped in place. She handed me the remote.

“Forward arrow makes it go forward, back arrow back,” she said, helpfully.

Manfred nodded, as if pondering the wonder of it all.

Gyawali, after some indecision, assigned us our seats, which he had us claim by putting copies of our report on the leather blotters. In front of the opposite chairs we put our business cards, in neat vertical rows with his on top. Then we waited.

Andalusky didn’t arrive so much as burst into the room. He wore an open-neck khaki shirt and olive drab Dockers, as if in vague mimicry of an army uniform. His grip was dry and solid and he used our first and last names as he shook our hands.

“Marty Goldman,” he said to me, then paused before letting go of my hand. “Have we worked together before?”

“Not that I remember,” I said.

“I meet a lot of people, but I’m good with faces, thank God, since I suck at names. I can barely remember my own.”

“I’d remind you, but then you’d miss the chance to practice.”

I could sense Gyawali stiffen as Andalusky chewed on what I said. Then he grinned.

“I get it. Pretty funny,” he said, letting go of the handshake gradually, as if releasing me on my own recognizance.

“Imogene Nikolayevich,” he said, taking her hand in both of his. “I always feel like bowing when I say that. So royal.”

“Royalty in Russia usually meant getting shot in the head,” she said. “After people bowed.”

“That would be a terrible crime in your case.”

“It’s a terrible crime in every case,” she said, gently pulling back her hand.

“You’re right about that,” he said, moving on to Manfred and Gyawali, then asking if we needed anything. Gyawali started to demur, but I said, “Coffee. Please. Black.”

He looked over at Patricia, who got the hint and left the room after taking orders from the others, somewhat perturbed by Imogene’s interest in organic tea.

“I’ll see what they have in the little white cup things.”

Andalusky sat on our side of the table and put his fists on the polished surface.

“Rajendra says you’ve got some interesting stuff on the Jordanian de-sal project. I tried to get more out of him, but his lips were sealed.”

“I wanted you to see how the concept is laid out,” said Gyawali. “It’s better if Martin just takes us through it.”

Andalusky spun around in his chair and looked up at the title page on the screen.

“I’ve already read a counterargument from Ansell Andersen,” he said, looking back at me. “Made me even more curious.”

Gyawali sat bolt upright in the chair he’d assigned himself.

“Ansell shared the report?” he asked Andalusky, in a hoarse voice.

“Just the high points as a way of telling me Marty was full of crap. Don’t worry, Rajendra. You know I’ve got an open mind.”

“I know you do, Chuck. I just wish Ansell would leave it to me to manage things.”

“He does have a bug up his ass about something, that’s for sure. But some people around here like him.” He moved closer to Gyawali and put his hand on the other man’s forearm. “I got your back, Rajendra. You’re my guy in research, and that’s the way it is. Okay?”

“Yes, Chuck. Thank you.”

Patricia came back in the room nervously balancing a tray full of coffee, cream and sugar, and a tiny pot of tea, which she dropped without comment in front of Imogene.

“Okay, let’s see this thing,” said Andalusky. “We’ve got a lot of expensive talent burning up time in here.”

I took him through a shorter, duller and less assertive version of what I showed in the peer review, but all the essentials were there. Andalusky concentrated keenly on each point, moving things along quickly by saying “okay,” and “next slide,” and making a clicking pantomime as if he held the remote. I skipped over some of the content I realized was more supportive than central to the case, and drove to the conclusion as rapidly as clarity would allow.

“Okay, got it,” he said, when I finished. Then he asked several questions that betrayed how well he’d retained the material despite the brisk pace.

“Andersen thinks Jordanian agriculture could increase productivity dramatically with some fairly simple upgrades in technology and best practices,” he said.

“Not without a capital infusion or consolidation of the type we experienced here in the States,” I said. “Fewer family farms, more cultural disruption.”

“But increased productivity will help the country overall,” said Andalusky.

“Agreed. Which is why they need the desalinization plant,” I said. “They don’t need to revolutionize their farming techniques.”

“Be a nice new market for American technology,” he said.

“Does Fontaine sell agricultural machinery?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Just chemical plants for making fertilizer. And we already have all the contracts in the region.”

“Does our competition sell agricultural machinery?”

“Some do.”

“Then why would we kill ourselves to enrich our competition while screwing up a segment of the population that just might not enjoy an American company screwing them up?” I asked. “When instead we can just irrigate the hell out of their fields, sit back and share the love with the Jordanian government, who I bet has more than one major capital project in the pipeline.”

He pulled back from the table and crossed his legs, slumping slightly in his seat.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” he said to Gyawali. “All upside, no downside for Fontaine. Nice stuff.”

“I’m pleased you agree,” said Gyawali, though no hint of anything but cautious concern showed on his face.

“You two haven’t said much,” said Andalusky to Manfred and Imogene. “What do you think?”

“We agree, too,” said Manfred, then went on for about fifteen minutes, ten minutes longer than Andalusky clearly wanted, reiterating points that had already been made. To his credit, Andalusky waited him out, then spun back around to Gyawali.

“It’s good to have your people not only sell you on an idea, but tell you why you ought to be sold on it,” he said.

He looked over at Patricia Cheerborg.

“You’re not going to have a different opinion, are you?”

She took off her glasses and dropped them over her sunken chest.

“Heavens, no, Chuck. How ill-advised would that be at this point?”

“But you agree with Goldman.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t.”

“Isn’t that a double negative? You’re supposed to be our staff writer,” he said.

“I’m your Director of Communications, Chuck. The staff writers work for me.”

He looked around at all of us, grinning.

“Isn’t she great?” he asked. “Don’t know what we’d do without her.”

“You’d hire another Director of Communications. She just wouldn’t be as good as me. Now, can we let all this expensive talent go back to doing honest work?”

Andalusky had us take everything with us when we left.

“Otherwise, some pain in the ass will get hold of it and start whispering in the CEO’s ear before I have a chance to give him the story.”

“You have your own Ansell Andersens, perhaps?” asked Imogene.

Andalusky didn’t comment, but at the door he stopped and thanked me for the report.

“And I’m going to remember where we worked together,” he said, poking me gently in the sternum. “I’m nothing if not persistent.”

“Me, too, Chuck,” I said.

C
HAPTER
17

A
week later, my sister called. Before I had a chance to feel bad about undercommunicating, she got to the point.

“Our mutual friend needs to hear from you,” she said.

“Really. Do you know why?”

“I do. I’m afraid to say.”

“How come?” I asked.

“He thinks they’re watching me. In fact, this is the last time I’m calling on this phone.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“I don’t think he’s being paranoid,” she said, and hung up.

I was in the kitchen leaning against the counter. Natsumi was putting two mugs of coffee on a tray with assorted muffins. It was Saturday, just after sunrise. Natsumi was in her sweat suit. She looked up when I put the phone back in my pocket.

“It was Evelyn,” I said. “Shelly wants to talk to us. She sounded spooked.”

“More than usual?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know why?” she asked.

“No. She was in a hurry to get off the phone.”

“Should we be worried?”

“Not until we talk to Shelly.”

The family room, equipped with a large-screen TV we never watched, was our favorite room in the house. The attraction was a wall of windows and french doors that looked out over the woods. Squirrels and intrepid snowbirds were already up foraging. At other times, we’d seen fox, deer and coyotes. Having grown up in an apartment and living most of adulthood staring at books, paper reports and computer screens, the abundance of wildlife in a county adjacent to New York City was startling.

“They’re just biding their time,” Natsumi said. “Eventually we humans will screw everything up and they can have back all the real estate.”

We sat on opposite couches, nursing our coffees.

“I set up Shelly with a secure phone number, online drop box and dedicated e-mail,” I said. “Why would he send us a message through my sister?”

“None of those things are actually secure.”

“That’s part of the message,” I said. “He’s being monitored.”

“So what do we do?”

“Fix his plumbing.”

“Of course.”

T
HE
NEXT
Wednesday morning, I called in sick. Gyawali was kind and sympathetic, as I expected him to be. He said nothing I was working on was so pressing that it couldn’t wait a few days. Then he said he had some news for me, but thought it best to wait until I came in. I asked for a headline, but he insisted I forget about work and concentrate on feeling better. Since I couldn’t tell him this made it impossible not to think about work, I thanked him and hung up.

Then I left Natsumi and drove up the Merritt Parkway into Connecticut to a diner in Stamford where I met up with Little Boy Boyanov and one of his men, a quietly vicious guy named Kresimir. Little Boy, a block of a man with a head the size of a medicine ball, greeted me with a bone-crushing handshake and an order of pancakes, sliced bananas and a side of ham.

“Need to keep your strength up for the caper,” he said.

“Did you get everything?” I asked him. He looked a little disappointed.

“Give me something hard to do, then you can ask if I got everything.”

“Sorry. Of course you did.”

“Nothing stolen,” he said. “All borrowed from the brother of a friend of mine. Twenty-five hundred bucks will cover the whole day.”

“That’s not borrowed, that’s rented.”

“You’re good for it, Mr. G., I know that.” He handed me a baseball cap with the name of a plumbing contractor embroidered on the front. He and Kresimir put on caps of their own. “Tool belts and other plumbing shit is in the van. I’m wearing my tightest jeans so my ass hang out the back.”

“Probably not necessary,” I said.