Casualties (8 page)

Ruth smiled at Robbie, motioned to Neal, and mouthed,
Another Coke
. She turned away from them and spoke in a low voice. “What's up?”

“There are protesters all over the front steps of the building and more keep coming. A whole busload just arrived.”

So it was RyCom's turn, Ruth thought. Other defense contractors occasionally had to put up with peace groups but until now, they'd been lucky. She glanced at Robbie, who was looking back at her with an expression she couldn't read. “Isn't this something that Gordon can handle with his security guys?”

“He's the one who's telling Don you need to be here. Says he told you something was going on with insurance claims and a lawyer.”

Claims. Lawyer. Ruth's stomach clenched as she remembered the morning Gordon surprised her by showing up at her meeting. Then Robbie had called, two new contracts hit her desk, and she decided it could wait a few days. That was a week and a half ago. Shit. Just yesterday, Legal had wanted to meet with her, but she'd put them off. Still, she was confused.

“What's that got to do with protesters?”

“That's who's out there,” Terri said. “Ex-contractors, families. There's a lawsuit, filed yesterday. They must have told the media beforehand because there's a big story in the paper today,” Terri said. “The vans from the TV stations are out there now too.”

Ruth looked around her for the paper. “Neal? Where's the
Union Tribune
?”

“What?” He was in the kitchen getting the soda.

“The
U-T
? Did you bring it up?”

Robbie pushed himself away from the deck railing. “I'll get it,” Robbie said. “Front steps, right? Think I heard the guy toss it there this morning.”

Ruth nodded her thanks. Terri was speaking again in her ear.

“When do you think you can get here? I've got to report back to Don's office, let him know I've reached you.”

“Robbie just got home. There's got to be some way I can handle this from here.”

The phone line went quiet. Then Terri said, “You may want to be here in person.”

“What are you saying, Ter?”

Another silence. Her assistant's voice dropped as if she were trying not to be overheard. “From what I can gather, Don is listening pretty closely to Gordon right now. He's laying it all at your feet.”

The bastard. Paper rustled next to her. Robbie was back, reading the front page. Neal stood next to him, holding the can of Coke and reading over his shoulder. Ruth caught a glimpse of the headline:
RyCom Contractors Sue Firm
.

“Let me look and I'll call you back.”

“What do I tell Don?”

“That he's a . . . Never mind. Tell him I'll be there in an hour,” Ruth said into the phone and disconnected.

Robbie looked up at that. “You're going to work?” The catch in his voice caught her off guard. Again, Ruth saw the young Robbie in the full-size version before her.

“Just for a little while. I'll come back early. Promise. We'll have the afternoon. Tomorrow too and the day after. I'm taking the whole week off. I just need to put this fire out.”

“Pretty big fire,” Neal said. “I'm going to need to make some calls myself.”

“Let me see.” Ruth scanned the first few lines of the paper.
Families of contractors employed by RyCom Systems filed suit this morning against the local defense firm. The suit alleges the company has failed to provide insurance or pay claims on existing policies for contractors wounded or killed in the Middle East
.

“Saw some people wearing the old RyCom logo when I was back there,” Robbie said. “Doin' all kinds of stuff.”

“We have more than one division,” Ruth said without looking up.

“Can some guy really make a hundred thousand for swinging a hammer?”

“It's not that simple,” Ruth said automatically. She turned the paper over, looking for the rest of the article. “They're working under unusual conditions.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Ruth looked up, stricken. Robbie stared back at her like he didn't know her. Neal cocked his head as if waiting to see what she would say. “Robbie, my God, of course . . . I didn't mean . . .”

Robbie cut her off, shrugging. “It's a good deal for them. If they make it, they deserve whatever they can get. Anyway, the paper's full of shit, right?”

“Of course.” Ruth's stomach churned. She needed one of those heartburn pills.

“My phone's going to be ringing today. I'll want to know what to tell my folks,” Neal said, all business now. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his phone.

Ruth shot Neal a look she hoped would silence him. “I hate this, Robbie, but I need to be there. Only for a little while, just have to set the wheels in motion, get this straightened out. You understand, right?”

Robbie looked past her. He waited so long to reply that she wondered if he'd even heard her. Finally, he shrugged again. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

We do what we have to do. Then we can do what we want to do.
She'd said it for years to motivate or reassure herself, and to show him what it meant to be a grown-up. Now, though, it sounded like an accusation. She spoke louder than she needed to, trying to sound more confident than she felt.

“I'll be back before you know it. You need to rest anyway. Go for a swim. Take a nap. We'll have the rest of the day together.” She saw Robbie glance at Neal, who was checking his messages.

“Just us. Neal has business for the next couple of days, so he's heading over to his place.” Neal nodded and smiled before turning toward the kitchen.

She raised herself on her toes, kissed Robbie on the cheek, and then patted the spot she had kissed. Stubble. A beard. She patted his cheek again. Then he surprised her by grabbing her hand. The tremor she'd felt earlier ran from his hand into hers. His palm was clammy with sweat. For the first time she noticed the little white lines at the corners of his eyes. He'd been squinting in the sun so long that the fissures were left untanned. Then she saw that he was smiling at her. The smile was tentative, tired, but it was there.

“We can go out for lunch,” he said. “I can meet you at work. I'll even pay.”

The band of tension around Ruth's chest loosened and she smiled as she squeezed Robbie's hand. “How could I refuse an invitation like that?” She held his hand a little longer, hating to give it up. “That will be wonderful. Thank you so much, honey.” She looked at his tired, smiling face and smiled back. He was home. “I love you.” She squeezed his hand one more time and forced herself to let go.

—

Ruth stripped and stepped into the shower. She barely felt the jets of steaming water. The allegations in the article were absurd: unpaid insurance claims, lapsed life insurance policies, misleading recruitment practices. But the negative publicity could queer the Transglobal deal, which was probably why Don jumped in and called the meeting and why Gordon was blaming her.

Ruth turned off the water, grabbed her towel, and headed for the walk-in closet that opened off the bathroom. As she rubbed herself dry she tried to focus on what lay ahead. The bathroom door swung open. Neal's flip-flops slapped across the tile into the closet.

“You better get going,” he said to her reflection in the mirror. “Square this thing away before it blows out of proportion.”

She tossed the towel into the hamper.

“Do me a favor, buy me some time to deal with this.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Tell your clients that when all the facts come out this will go away. Tell them not to hit the panic button.” She grabbed a silk blouse from the “white section” of the closet.

“They'll want to know—I want to know—if anyone associated with our projects is suing.”

Ruth caught her toe in the hem of a gray skirt and tore it loose. “Damn.” She tossed the skirt aside and reached for another one, nearly the same color but shot through with black and blue threads. “I'll call you. Just give me a little time.”

When she glanced in the mirror, she saw Neal's brow relax but only a little. He moved toward the section of her closet she'd cleared for a few of his clothes. Then it hit her: If they both left now, Robbie would be alone. “Neal.”

“Mmm?”

“You don't have to rush off. Stay and have a little breakfast with Robbie.” She shoved her toes into a pair of slingbacks and leaned over to pull the straps over her heels.

Neal looked surprised. “I guess that would work.”

“He doesn't know the house, where things are, anything.” And he hadn't spent more than a half hour with Neal since he was fifteen. It might help Robbie, though. She knew she'd feel better. Ruth crossed to Neal and cupped his cheek in her palm.

“You said yourself that the first day back could be difficult for him. If we both leave at once, it just seems—”

Neal pulled Ruth to him. “Sure.” He gave her a quick hard hug. “I can't stay too long, though. I want to start calling folks before they call me. You've got to keep me up to date on this thing, okay?”

Ruth nodded, but she'd stopped listening. She needed to get to work.

Ruth's BlackBerry rang again as she backed her Jaguar out of the garage. She tapped her earpiece. “I'm here.”

“Stand by for Don. The meeting is underway.”

Ruth kept her eyes on the road, but most of her attention was focused on the voices that pushed their way through the speakerphone into her ear. She heard Andrea, who seemed to be reading from the article in the paper. Ruth knew the men who were leaning forward, pens tapping out their impatience on the conference table, interrupting with questions no one knew the answer to yet. She knew the few who would be sitting back, creating as much distance as possible between themselves and this crisis. She was unsurprised by the baritone that plowed through the noise.

“This is all bullshit,” Don Ryland said. The other voices subsided suddenly. “They're saying we didn't tell them it would be dangerous? It's a fucking war zone. Right there in the want ads, it says, ‘hazardous conditions.' It's why goddamned truck drivers are making nearly two hundred grand a year.”

Now came a voice with a pitch somewhere between gravel and
buzz saw. Gordon. “Perhaps the reality was more than some of them bargained for.” He would be slouching in a chair at the other end of the table, eyes flicking around the room, yellowed fingers picking up and putting down his pack of cigarettes. “Ruth's on the line; let's hear from her.”

“I know what I read in the paper,” she said. “And I know it can't be accurate.” She glanced into the rearview mirror and then pulled out to pass a minivan.

“That's reassuring,” Don said. Was he being sarcastic? Ruth suddenly felt like a blind person in a room full of knives. “Tell us more.”

The line went quiet then. Ruth imagined everyone's eyes on the speakerphone lying in the middle of the conference table like a beached manta ray. Acid seared the back of her throat. She steered with her left hand and grabbed her purse with her right, hoping to find some Tums.

“Every recruiting document, every insurance plan was reviewed and approved by Legal and HR—” she started.

“Still, here we are, with a lawsuit on our hands,” Don interrupted. “The Transglobal people are going to be on our backs, and I want to make them feel real confident that there are no bumps. Think you can do that?”

“I'll need a team to help with the communications plan,” Ruth said. “Gordon, tell the HR folks to clear their schedules. We'll need Legal too.”

“They've been waiting for your call,” Gordon rasped into the phone. “For a while now.”

Bastard.

“I'm putting Andrea on this with you,” Don said.

Great. Ruth swallowed but her throat continued to burn. “Thanks. That'll help.” She hit the accelerator and blasted past the minivan.

The blare of a horn followed Ruth as she edged right again and cut toward the exit to the office complex rising on the northbound
side of the 5 freeway. “I'm just pulling in now.” She braked to a halt as a TV van pulled a U-turn in front of her and parked. A crowd of people clutching signs milled around the entrance to the RyCom headquarters building. A couple more vans splashed with the logos of local television channels were parked on the fringe. “My God,” she said aloud.

“That's your welcoming committee,” Don said. She'd forgotten the phone was still live. He must be watching the scene from the conference room window above. She disconnected the phone and slowed as she passed the entrance. A young woman stooping over a figure in a wheelchair looked up as she rolled by. Another woman, gray-haired, was climbing the steps, one hand holding a poster showing a youthful male face, the other the edge of a banner. In her rearview mirror, Ruth watched a man with a cane take the other edge of the banner and unfurl it.
Families of the Forgotten
, it read.

A woman with a notebook peeled off from the protesters and peered in Ruth's direction. A reporter. Ruth avoided eye contact and guided the car into the parking garage. A few minutes later, she'd given Danny the car to park and run to the side entrance before she could be seen.

She felt better once she walked into the lobby. No matter how fast the lights on her switchboard lit up, Marcia spoke with unhurried assurance as she routed or deflected the calls.

“Robbie got home last night,” Ruth said in a low voice as she passed the reception desk. Marcia smiled and shot her a thumbs-up sign. Ruth decided the expectations waiting for her upstairs were like the black diamond ski trails she'd mastered long ago: challenging, a few sharp turns and steep drops, but nothing she couldn't handle.

She dialed Terri from the elevator and issued clipped instructions: set up a meeting with HR in half an hour, pull all files on anything to do with contractor agreements and recruiting, have it all on her desk so she could dive in the minute she broke free.

Then she went straight to the conference room, now empty except for Don Ryland. He didn't turn around. The fluorescent lighting produced a dull gleam on his shaved head. His shoulders remained square, his hands clenched together behind his back. There was a time when she'd known that back intimately, had kneaded the muscles until they relaxed in her hands. They had celebrated deals with champagne and sex in the hotels, sometimes the offices, where the deals had been made. That time had long passed but her usefulness had not; she'd seen to it. She'd been his gatekeeper, his second set of eyes, his right hand for over twenty years, longer than either of his marriages. That had to count for something.

“They want to bring me down,” Don said. Ruth joined him at the window. The figures below were grouped around the banner. In front of them, a man with a briefcase was being interviewed by a woman holding a microphone.

“Who's that?”

“Their lawyer,” said a woman.

The voice came from behind Ruth. Andrea. Ruth hadn't realized that she was still in the room, half seated on the edge of the table, eyes down, her thumb moving across the keypad of her BlackBerry. She glanced up. “His name is Breen.”

“Candy-assed liberal prick,” Don grunted. “Wants to make his name on me.”

“They'll have to make a case to do that, and they can't,” Ruth said. She tried to sound confident. Confidence was what he was looking for, and she'd give it to him.

Don allowed his lips to part in the smallest of grins. “Andrea has spent all morning pulling the information together on these idiots.”

The implication was clear. While Ruth had been busy lolling at home, Andrea was getting the job done.

“It's all printed out and on your desk,” Andrea said without looking up. “Here's the latest on Transglobal.” She held the
BlackBerry out but Don crossed to her and read the screen over her shoulder, just far enough away that he wouldn't need the reading glasses he hated, Ruth thought. Old fool. He eyed her from beneath the thatch of his brows.

“Don't let us keep you,” he said.

Ruth made herself smile and walk out of the room with a purposeful but unhurried stride. She wouldn't give Don Ryland the satisfaction of a reaction. He must be more rattled than she'd realized if he needed to humiliate her in front of Andrea. His rough dismissal burned as she threaded her way through the pods of cubicles to her office. She'd like to cast it as an old man's weakness for young attractive women, but Don was too practical for that to matter by itself. As his company had grown, he wanted connections. And Andrea had them: Stanford and four years of working for a member of the Armed Services Committee in Washington. The last new junior executive had been the son of a senator. Like Andrea, he'd been young, not quite thirty, assigned to work under Ruth in some vague capacity that didn't matter because the real job was to swim after Don like some kind of pilot fish. “My mentees,” he called these young people hatched in nests of wealth, nurtured in private schools, and then let loose among their own kind, secure in the belief that they had earned everything they'd gotten and deserved better.

Ruth was the product of public schools in a county Don had never heard of followed by four years at the University of New Hampshire, in-state tuition being all her grandparents, and she, could afford.

Ruth picked up her pace as she neared her office, where she could see Terri and another person silhouetted in front of the frosted glass walls. She couldn't afford thoughts like this now. She had work to do. She saw Terri wave a hello in her direction and then recognized the other woman as Sylvia, the head of Human Resources, a lumpy woman so burdened with files that she reminded Ruth of a camel. Ruth took a deep breath, crossed the threshold, and dove in.

—

A little over an hour later, she sat back in her chair, stunned.

“You're telling me that our people filed their medical claims and the insurance company still hasn't paid out? None of them?”

“These have been paid,” Sylvia said, pushing a page across the desk. “Partially. The company has denied payment for the rest of the claims. It's standard operating procedure. Most will eventually be paid once reviews have been completed.”

Ruth looked from the names on the single page in front of her to the eleven-inch stack of files Sylvia had dumped on her desk. The “pending” files. Some of the claims had been “pending” for eleven months. Some longer. Ruth had opened the files before she stopped, rattled by the juxtaposition of ordinary job descriptions and extraordinary injuries: interpreter, double amputee; truck driver, quadriplegic; medical technician, brain trauma. She tried not to read the names but they were right there, on the first page, their stories crammed into small boxes below: Ahmed Hazazi, born in Detroit, fluent in Arabic, IED blast. Marissa Albertson, age twenty-seven, caught when a newly built clinic she was working in collapsed after a nearby explosion; the truck driver, Clayton Massey, spinal cord severed after his caravan was ambushed.

Each name clawed at her in a way she'd never expected. By the tenth file, she'd had to stop looking.
They knew the risks
, she told herself, just as she'd told Robbie.
We told them there would be risks.
Still, she grabbed the top folder and shook it at Sylvia.

“We're paying out huge premiums. There's no reason to sit on these.”

Sylvia's shoulders, straining the seams of her black blazer, rose in a shrug. “As I said, standard procedure. Out of our hands.”

“Until now. Now it has landed in our goddamned laps. Why didn't you tell me about this right away?” Ruth's voice rose.

Sylvia straightened; her wattle trembled. “This information is
included in every monthly report I send out. The last one went out four days ago.” The older woman's eyes narrowed behind her glasses. “You haven't opened it. I track all my e-mails.”

“Good for you, Sylvia.” The woman was Gordon's creature, a senior executive who acted like a goddamned clerk. “But we need solutions, not record keepers.”

Ruth grabbed the phone on her desk and punched the keypad. “Terri, call—Sylvia, who's the boss of the person you deal with at”—Ruth looked down at the papers on her desk—“Excel Insurance?”

Then she saw something she hadn't noticed before. The letterhead in front of her identified Excel as “a Transglobal Company.” She had not paid attention to the selection of the insurer. Olson had handled it. They'd made the switch to Excel about eight months ago. That was when talks about merging with Transglobal had gotten serious. Ruth put the phone down, then stared at the files before her.

The premiums were huge, probably three times what they should have been. Neither Olson nor Don would care, she knew that. The cost would be passed on, along with a hefty upcharge, to the next client up the food chain—ultimately the Department of Defense. Giving the business to Excel was, essentially, giving a chunk of money to Transglobal. A little sugar to sweeten the pot.

Sylvia pushed another sheaf of papers toward Ruth.

“What?” Ruth's mind was racing, trying to find one small crack in the wall that had suddenly risen before her, someplace where she could get a finger hold, and pull herself up and over.

“The life insurance claims. Since you haven't seen my report, you won't have seen this. Excel isn't paying out on these life insurance claims.”

“Why not?”

“The denials state that their deaths were not a result of their jobs. A couple are called accidents that happened on leave in Qatar. Two are said to be suicides. The rest were—”

“Well, suicide can't be a job-related death.”

“Of course.” Sylvia paused. “The families apparently see it differently.”

“That's between them and the insurer,” Ruth insisted. “We can't tell Excel people how to do their job.”

Sylvia's lips stretched in what might have been an approving smile. “That's our view as well.”

The phone buzzed. Ruth ignored it. She had to meet Gordon and Andrea in an hour. She had to understand everything before that.