Final Approach (27 page)

“I won't. I told him he was insufficiently informed of the realities of corporate finance.”

“Wow. I'm impressed.”

Sean fell silent for a few minutes, watching the glut of tall buildings as they passed the LBJ Freeway.

“Dad? Could I ask you a … a question you may not like?”

David looked at his son, evaluating the determined expression on his face, amazed to find his own defense responses activating. This was his boy. He didn't need defenses.

“Sure. What?”

“Don't leaders of big companies have to consider the welfare of those who work for them? Or are they only required to make money for themselves and the stockholders, whoever the stockholders are?”

“That's not a simple question to answer, Sean.”

“Well, do you care, Dad, about North America's employees?”

“Of course I do!” David kept his eyes on the road as he thought through the question, the motivation, and the response. “Son, these are complex matters. As head of the corporation, my first responsibility is to the stockholders who have invested their money in our company.”

“Okay, but say the airline
is
making money and it's got a bunch of very experienced people who've been there many years, and some new group buys all the stock and decides it could make even more money if it didn't have to pay so much in salaries. Let's say it's someone like Frank Lorenzo, and he comes in one day and says”—Sean adopted a gruff voice—“‘Okay, you jerks, you're making too much, so we're going to cut your salary and take away your health insurance and your retirement. That way, we'll make a lot more money, and if you don't like it, we'll just replace you.' Now, this leader doesn't cut
his
salary, he just says
I
make too much, even though maybe I can just barely pay my bills. I'm a little guy with no protection. Isn't there a rule or a law which forces that leader to be concerned about me?”

“In a word, no.”

David looked at his son, half in admiration, half in consternation for the grilling. “Sean, look at my situation. I don't own North America, I merely run it. It's my job to keep it in business and out of bankruptcy. I have to answer to a board of directors, and if they decide I'm not running things right or I'm making the company too little money because, for instance, I'm being too generous with our employees, they'll just fire me and hire another chairman and president who will do what they want.”

“Really?”

“Really. In addition, if I give the employees the majority of the profits and then we can't pay decent dividends to our stockholders, our stock price goes down and our ability to issue bonds and raise funds declines, and our overall ability to command good financing rates and terms is imperiled even when we issue new stock.”

“You're saying you can't care about the people?”

“No!” David realized his tone was growing irritated, and he softened it. “What I'm saying is that I have to juggle hundreds of conflicting interests, and I can't give everyone everything they want. For instance, I want the best safety system for our airline, but if I go overboard and let our maintenance people spend double the industry average while not being able to increase our fares, or if I fail to cut costs when everyone else has cut theirs, we'll eventually go bankrupt. That's the battle I've been fighting for the last few years, keeping our costs down to keep us alive. Same thing with labor costs—salaries. If our competition can get more work for less money, they can charge less for a ticket and make more profit, so I have to get our people to accept less money, even though it hurts them and makes them mad. I'm sorry if they're upset, but I'm paid not to care so much about their feelings that I hurt the profitability of the company. See, if I don't force them to accept such realities and we go out of business, no one will have a job, so we all lose. You've got to understand that I'm simply the ringmaster trying to keep things in balance. But I don't make the laws of gravity.”

David glanced at Sean, half expecting boredom. Instead he found two eyes watching him intently, hanging on every word.

“Your hands are tied, huh, Dad?”

“In many cases, yes. But if I keep the company making money for the stockholders, the employees always benefit. I care how they're treated, but for the day-to-day, hands-on management of them I have to rely on my junior executives and managers. I don't get involved because the chairman doesn't have time. It's a very complex structure operated under complex rules. There's no law that forces the president of a public corporation to check on whether a decision will or won't have an economic impact on his people. He either has a conscience about it or he doesn't. And there's only so much he can do. That's the system.”

“Then the system has to change, Dad, because that's dumb.”

Walter Calley had been shocked to the depth of his being that moving across Louisiana farmland at night in mid-October could be so damned difficult. He had left the old barn after sundown Tuesday evening, confident his Army survival training was enough. But by midnight he was ready to give up the trek and look for a car to steal.

He must survive, he knew that. The knowledge he had in his head about Congressman Larry Wilkins, his friend and surreptitious employer, must survive. It would scandalize the nation and probably make their dream of becoming a true force in American politics come true. As Senator Joe McCarthy had accidentally done for communism by making commie hunting unfashionable for twenty years, the assassination of Larry Wilkins might make white supremacist bashing unacceptable for a decade. He had a mission, perhaps a historic mission, and he would carry it out. Important thoughts like that had kept him going, but at 12:25
A.M.
Wednesday morning, the sight of an old Ford pickup parked at the top of a sloping driveway by a remote farmhouse was too much to resist.

Walter watched the farmhouse for a half hour before slipping slowly into the yard, carefully getting in the truck by slithering through the open passenger window. There was no key in the ignition, but he could feel the wires behind the dash. If he could locate the right ones …

The bright light that exploded in his face caught him totally off guard. He had heard no one approaching.

“Freeze, bub! What the hell are you doin' with my truck?”

The owner of the farm had a 12-gauge leveled at him. You don't argue successfully with a 12-gauge, Walter reminded himself, carefully opening the door with his hands in view. “Don't shoot, I can explain.”

He began to do so, and the farmer, having no love for official Washington, listened, almost believing the filthy, mud-caked man before him was running from injustice, rather than escaping the law. The offer of money, however, was what got his full attention at last.

“Look, I was going to leave you several hundred dollars just to borrow the truck. I'll give you four hundred dollars if you'll let me use it.” Calley saw the man relax a bit. “Let me carefully reach in my satchel here—I've been carrying my things in this fish creel, hold on.” He diverted his eyes down to the bag, searching with his right hand and watching to make sure he had what he was reaching for. In his peripheral vision, Calley saw the barrel of the shotgun slowly drop toward the ground, the farmer at last removing his finger from the trigger guard, shifting the gun to rest position. Walter Calley had been hoping for exactly that reaction, and as he looked up and smiled at the man, he lashed out with his right foot, catching the stock of the shotgun and flinging it harmlessly off into the dirt several yards away as his right hand pulled the .357 magnum from the bag in one fluid motion, leveling it in the old man's face before he had a chance to react. “Don't!” Calley told him.

The farmer saw he'd been tricked and froze, waiting for the click of a hammer. The man's son, standing silently in the shadows of the porch some 10 yards away, saw only the glint of a lethal gun barrel aimed at his father's head. His Winchester 30-30 had already been cocked, and a bead drawn on the thief's head minutes before as his father had crept forward to surprise the intruder. There was no hesitation now, and no contest as a single shot rang out, the bullet finding its mark just forward of Walter Calley's left ear, destroying his brain and removing most of the right side of his head instantly.

Nearly a half hour passed before the farmer and his son recovered enough from the shock to call the sheriff.

By noon Wednesday, Forrest Rogers and the members of what had been Larry Wilkins's inner circle of advisors, friends, and supporters had heard the details of Calley's death. It had taken only an hour to identify the body—Calley's driver's license was stuffed in his undershorts—but the story didn't hit the state news wires until midmorning. By 10
A.M.
someone in the state patrol had backtracked and found the Camaro, partially explaining the mystery police-car-tire shooting of Monday morning. What the county and state police couldn't figure out, however, was why the man was running in the first place. There were no wants or warrants in the computer, the FBI had no knowledge of him, and other than the shot-out tire and what appeared to be a stolen license plate, his actions were a mystery.

“An obscure electronics engineer from a defense contractor in Kansas” had been the line used on New Orleans stations all afternoon.

At 12:45 the tape had arrived at Forrest Rogers's home, a routine delivery with the bills and the rest of his mail. He had summoned the others immediately. Forrest refrained from opening it until they had come. With Walter dead, only the tape would tell the tale.

The weather had clouded over and cooled down, so his wife had started a fire in the den fireplace, and Forrest had perched himself in front of it to wait for the others—who arrived just before 2
P.M.

He shooed his wife out then and closed off the room as the six men settled into sofas and chairs. Forrest pulled the tape from the brown padded mailer and put it in the recorder. There was no note.

He had, Walter Calley's voice told them, called Larry Wilkins on Friday afternoon when he had seen what was going on at the plant near Leavenworth. The main tracking test module, a huge container, had been put on an oversize flatbed. He wasn't supposed to know, but a fellow worker had confirmed it was to be flown to somewhere in the Pacific from Kansas City Airport that night for operational testing.

Wilkins had been ecstatic, Calley said. He had suspected the Brilliant Pebbles people all along of trying to destroy the main Star Wars program for un-American reasons. They had forged a bipartisan agreement not to test components of either system, and here was apparent proof the agreement was being broken—and flagrantly at that! They would never risk moving the thing if they weren't going to test it, Wilkins had told Calley, deciding at the same moment to fly to Kansas City to see for himself. “He was going to get a cab,” Calley's voice continued, “go close enough to see, and if it was what I said it was, he was going to take pictures and call the national media right from there and embarrass the hell out of them. But then the plane crashed and killed him, and the second I heard—I stayed at home in Leavenworth—I knew our call had been tapped. I had made the horrible mistake, you see, of calling Larry from my office at the factory, 'cause I was so excited. So someone obviously overheard and knew they couldn't allow Larry to catch them, so they ordered him dead. There's no question. It was an assassination.”

Calley had paused in making the tape, and he could be heard clearing his throat and focusing on the next step. “Now, if anything happens to me before I get there, you've got to expose all this. Please. For Larry's sake, for the movement, for the country.”

The tape ended and the group sat staring at each other before Bill Hawkins broke the silence.

“What have we got here?”

Ed Trelonas shook his head in disbelief. “We ain't got shit.”

There was a collective sigh of astonishment as Hawkins spoke up again. “That little idiot! We've told the whole country we had proof. Hell, if anyone had overheard his call to Larry, it would've been a damn sight simpler to just cancel the shipment than kill an airplane full of people! I agree, we ain't got shit, but we do have a hell of a problem now. What do we tell the press and the feds?”

All six men exploded into simultaneous, animated, urgent discussion, the future of their political influence, the credibility of their public announcements—everything—hanging in the balance.

“They'll think we're neo-Nazi freaks and loonies, seeing ghosts in the woodwork. There's no damn conspiracy here, except what we jumped to ourselves, thanks to that dead idiot Calley.”

“Hey,” Forrest Rogers said, “at least let's mourn the poor guy. I've known him for years. Walter was a good man. Too intense, maybe, but will someone here please remember he got his head blowed off trying to bring us a warning, as crazy as it was?”

Several of the men looked at Rogers, remembering his willingness to abandon Calley—or worse—the day before.

All but one of them settled back into various chairs, leaving Bill Hawkins warming himself in front of the open fireplace. “Well,” he said at last, “we're looking at this all wrong. Who knows Calley had no evidence? Calley's dead. We don't know that he put everything he knew on that tape, now do we? Maybe there was more. I mean, either he really had something more or he was a raging paranoid, and I don't think the guy was a paranoid. So, what we do is publicize the truth as we think we see it. We publicize his death. This man Calley had the key to this assassination, we say, but he got killed before he could tell what he knew. He knew it was an assassination, but
he
got assassinated himself.”

“You do that, someone may go after that farmer and his kid.”

“No,” Hawkins continued, “we don't blame it on them. Poor old Walter was running from his pursuers, and he made a fatal mistake. It was the people that were chasing him caused him to try to steal that man's truck. Wasn't the farmer's fault. But the FBI or whoever—we can pin this on the FBI and the CIA if we do it right—they pushed him and chased him. Same boys that got Larry were after Walter, right?”