Hard Stop (3 page)

It took a long, nerve-wracking time, but I finally found George Donovan’s bedroom, which I was deeply grateful to see was free of Mrs. Donovan. Better yet, it had Mr. Donovan, lying flat on his back on top of the bedspread, snoring like an unlubricated chain saw.

I took the last few steps and stood by his bed. I flicked on the little Maglite and stuck it in my mouth. Then I vaulted onto the bed, landing with my knees astride Consolidated Global Energies’ Chairman of the Board. His eyes popped open.

“Hi, George,” I said, after taking the Maglite out of my mouth.

Terror and confusion raced across his face.

“What’s this?”

“The cops call it a home invasion. Pretty unsettling, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand,” he said, buying time while he corralled his faculties.

One of my worries going in was shocking Donovan into a heart attack. He had to be in his late sixties, in good shape,
but nevertheless. Looking at him harden under the light of the flashlight took care of that worry.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“You don’t remember?”

I moved the flashlight to the side so he could see my face.

“I thought I was unforgettable.”

“Good God. You have to be out of your mind.”

“Maybe.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“You know.”

“Of course I don’t.”

He looked down at where I was sitting on him, struggling with the sensation of being pinned by one of his former divisional vice presidents. It was only a little less weird for me, and I’d had a few hours to get used to the idea.

“You’re not going to lie about a guy named Honest, are you?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Honest Boy Ackerman. You sent him to study me. In his words, to find some dirt. What he found was a busted lip and a free night in a secure place. This surprises me, George. I thought you were more circumspect than that.”

He thought his face wasn’t betraying him, but he was wrong. Few people can keep strong emotion out of their eyes.

“He’s Marve Judson’s hire,” he finally said.

“This is where you have to ask yourself,” I said to him, sticking the flashlight closer to his face, “can you convince Marve Judson to tell a jury that he ordered Ackerman to break into my house and assault me, with criminal intent, at night, with a gun? That it was his idea, even when Ackerman says it was all yours? And even if Judson could persuade the court, why would he want to? You think he’s prepared to destroy his career and do years of hard time for you just
because you’re the Chairman of the Board? Have you gotten that delusional?”

He just looked at me, running the calculations. We both knew which way the math would work out.

“I got you, George,” I said. “You’re sunk.”

“That must give you some pleasure, Sam. You probably think I ruined your life.”

“You didn’t ruin my life. I did that all on my own. You’re not that good.”

“You were always mentally unstable,” he said.

“I’m unstable? Did I hire a guy to attack you in your own house?”

“That’s not what I was doing,” he said, quietly. He tried to shift under my weight. “And if you don’t mind, I prefer discussing things with people who aren’t sitting on top of me.”

I moved the Maglite closer to his face. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head.

“You got anything to drink in this house?” I asked.

He opened his eyes.

“Everything.”

“Okay. But before I get up, here’s the deal. I have Ackerman on ice. I can make a call and the whole thing goes away. Or not. The missile will stay in the silo, or it’ll go off. You can fire back if you want, but which of us has the most to lose?”

I looked around the sumptuous bedroom. He took the point.

“Just get off me and we’ll have that drink.”

I got off and scooped his cell phone off the side table. While Donovan rose unsteadily and pulled on a robe, I took the phone into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

I escorted him to the library on the first floor, where he kept his booze and a few thousand books, few of which he’d ever read. His wife once proudly told me they’d been selected
by an interior decorator based on the color and composition of their spines.

I didn’t relax until we were in opposing Chesterfield easy chairs next to the yawning fireplace. The scotch he poured was probably older than both of us.

“So Ackerman isn’t in police custody,” said Donovan after a sip of his drink.

“Like I said, that depends on you.”

“One would think after forty years in business I would know how to size up a risk.”

“You used to be pretty good at it.”

“Very good. But not perfect.”

“Apparently.”

“Experience teaches you to hedge your bets,” he said. “But a hedge isn’t a guarantee.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Your hedges have worked out better than mine.”

George Donovan could have been the smartest man alive. I didn’t know him well enough to say. I knew the way he ran the company made a lot of money for him and the shareholders. It wreaked havoc on the employees, though there might have been good business reasons for that, too. History would have to sort it out.

I really didn’t know if he was a good man or not. I’d never seen him be overtly heartless or cruel. Only selfish and greedy. He delegated heartless and cruel.

“You were hoping to get some leverage as a hedge against a risk,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Donovan nodded appreciatively.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Sam. Still sharp as a dart.”

I remembered how he talked about me in front of the board. I ran the company’s Technical Services and Support Division, which included R&D and product development.
By fact and implication the company’s technological brain trust. Since I ran the unit, he felt compelled to joke that
I
was the smartest man alive. Then he decided one day to shed my whole division with about as much concern as you’d flick a bit of lint off your suit coat. This settled the question as to who was the most powerful guy in the company, if not the smartest.

“We signed an agreement, remember?” I said. “I’ve always held up my end of the deal, and so has Con Globe. What the hell do you need leverage for now?”

“There are two forms of leverage, Sam,” he said, with a touch of condescension, “carrots and sticks. I like to have both before entering negotiations. With you, as it turns out, I have a whole garden full of carrots. What I lack is a stick.”

He held his drink upright with his elbow braced on the arm of the chair and swirled the ice around the glass, studying me while he continued studying his options.

“Thanks for the lesson, George. People would pay a lot of money for wisdom like that.”

“They do.”

“I’ll start paying when you tell me something I don’t already know.”

“You’ll be able to afford that when I make you a rich man,” he said with a soft smile. “Well, not rich exactly, though wealthy enough to allay any financial concerns, which by my reckoning should be considerable.”

Okay, I thought. That I didn’t know. It must have showed on my face.

“Don’t tell me Jason didn’t mention the intellectual property dispute we’re wrapped up in. The one we’ll apparently have to settle, which of course is tantamount to admitting we’ve lost.”

He had. Jason Fligh was the only friend I still had on Con Globe’s board. We’d kept in sporadic touch since I left the
company. He’d told me that Con Globe and the people who bought my division had been sued by a group of employees—mostly design engineers and bench researchers—who challenged the clause in the company’s standard employment agreement dealing with patent rights on products developed on the job. We’d always assumed you signed all that away when you joined the firm, but an entrepreneurial spouse of one of my engineers—a legal expert on intellectual property—had apparently found a gaping loophole. The net result would likely be a nice hunk of dough distributed to some of the people I used to work with.

Jason called me when he heard about the lawsuit, but I had to disappoint him. The severance agreement I’d signed would trump anything in a potential settlement. I asked him not to tell me what that meant financially. I didn’t want numbers like that rattling inside a brain already overloaded with regret and self-recrimination.

I told as much to George Donovan.

“I know that, Sam. But what you
don’t
know is that I have my finger on a button that will delete that portion of your agreement. Without nullifying the rest of the deal. You’d get your fair share of the booty. If, like me, you’d spent the better half of a year poring through the company’s patent filings, you’d know how much that could be.”

This is the sort of thing I’ve always detested. That skip of the heart you feel when some manipulator sneaks around your natural defenses and triggers a flood of hope and expectation. The killer emotions. The greatest peril to the healthful cynicism that sustains life. The last guy in the world I wanted this from was George Donovan.

I took a deep breath.

“God preserve me, George,” I said. “But I don’t want your fucking money. I do carpentry now for a guy named Frank
Entwhistle. So far I haven’t seen strings attached to what he pays me. That’s my wealth in the world. I don’t have shit but I don’t owe anybody anything.”

“Including your daughter?” he asked.

That was the other thing I really detested. Being threatened with guilt. Especially since I had nothing to feel guilty about, except almost everything I’d ever done in my life. Especially when it came to my daughter.

“Looks like you could use another scotch,” I said. “Don’t get up. I’ll pour.”

I needed something to cover my reaction, though it probably wouldn’t work. I’d never underestimated George Donovan before, and it was good to remind myself not to start now.

I topped us off and sat back down.

“I’m getting this vague feeling you want something from me,” I said to him. “I don’t know. Call it a sixth sense.”

He let a pause collect in the air before answering.

“I do. I have a personal situation. One I can’t entrust to people inside, or outside, the company, however competent. To even speak the words necessary to explain the situation is a grave risk.”

“Hence all the carrots and sticks.”

“I know you’re indifferent to the fortunes of the firm, but I’ve stayed abreast of you. Jason Fligh, in fact, has kept me filled in, as a way of expressing his displeasure at the way he thinks you were mistreated. In analyzing my options, it dawned on me you’d be the perfect person to call on for assistance. Amusing notion, don’t you think?”

“No kidding.”

“I still believe it’s true, despite Mr. Ackerman’s dismal failure. Assuming your fabled talent for self-destruction hasn’t completely overwhelmed your common sense.”

Big assumption. I really didn’t give a crap about his money.
But I did give a crap about my daughter. She was a full-grown adult supporting herself in the City. She’d never asked her parents for money, but if she did, it would have to come from her mother. I know it’s old-fashioned, but that bothered me.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s hear it.”

“There’ll be conditions.”

“You’re right. These are the conditions. You tell me what’s really going on and I’ll spring Ackerman. Though we keep the gun and the bullet it fired, which is safely lodged in my ceiling. You tell me what you want from me, and if I can do it, you release my royalties without qualification. If I can’t, everything goes back to the way it was and you leave me alone forever.”

He smiled. “Here I am giving you lessons on negotiation.”

“Yeah, I wrote the book on it. It’s called
Take It or Leave It
.”

He looked like he was still deliberating, but the climate in the room told me he was ready to get down to business.

“Very well,” he said, as if this was all my idea. “It’s rather simple, actually.”

“So am I. What is it?”

“I’ve lost my girlfriend and I need you to find her.”

“You’re serious.”

He looked at me like a boa constrictor who’d just noticed somebody’d dropped a mouse in his aquarium.

“Deadly serious.”

I
HAD A LOT OF DIFFERENT TITLES
when I worked for the company, but my job was basically to figure things out. First as a field engineer with the operating units, diagnosing process and equipment failure. I loved that job. Not for the big hairy catastrophes; those were relatively easy. But for the subtle ones, the failed efforts to optimize, or improve efficiency, or repurpose operations. The tricky stuff that usually had everybody stumped.

I loved walking onto a site, looking up at the gigantic cracking towers and smelling the fragrance of partially remediated sulfur and complex hydrocarbons. The look of confusion and near panic in the eyes of the plant operators and engineers—some filled with hostility toward the asshole from White Plains, whom they assumed was just another ambitious prick fresh out of the corporate grooming salon. What they got was a lot more complicated, but sometimes a lot more dangerous in the long run.

Whether this was adequate preparation for the project George Donovan had in mind was yet to be proven.

“Just give me the whole story,” I told him. “Don’t make me fill in the holes.”

He sighed.

“It all sounds so dreary and predictable. We hired a consultant to help with strategic planning. They assigned a woman who’d worked with us years before, when she was barely out of business school. A brilliant, attractive woman. We spent a lot of time together and you won’t believe me when I say I’ve never done anything like it before, in all my years, despite the ongoing opportunities. I don’t flatter myself to think it’s my beauty and charm. I know it’s just money and power. Nevertheless, this particular woman was different. More exotic, more intelligent, more powerfully compelling in her own right. And there I was approaching that now-or-never age. It all conspired to produce the inevitable.”

I looked around for a pad and pen to write things down. With all the craziness and adrenaline poisoning, I wasn’t about to trust my memory.