Killer Instinct (34 page)

48

The intercom buzzed, and Franny said, “It’s Mr. Hardy.”

“Jason,” came the big mellifluous voice, “please forgive this short notice, but I need you to fly out to L.A. tomorrow. I’ve set up a meeting, and I want you there.”

He paused. I groaned inwardly, said, “Gotcha.”

“With Nakamura-san,” he added.

“Nakamura-san? Hideo Nakamura?” Did I misunderstand him? Hideo Nakamura was the chairman of the board of the Entronics Corporation. He was like the great Oz. No one had ever seen him. Just Gordy, once.

“You got it. The great man himself. He’s flying in from New York, en route to Tokyo. I persuaded him to make a quick stopover in Santa Clara, receive a personal briefing from my best-and-brightest. See for himself how you’ve turned around sales.”

“Just—me?”

“You and two of the other top VPs. I want to knock his socks off.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Can do.”

“I had to do a good deal of arm-twisting to get him to make a stop. He comes to the U.S. once or twice a year, if that, you know.”

“Wow.”

“I think he’ll be impressed with you. I know he’ll be impressed with what you’ve done.”

“Should I prepare an agenda?”

“Of course. Nakamura-san loves PowerPoint. Do a brief PowerPoint presentation. Five or six bullet points, no more. Very macro. The ten-thousand-foot view. Performance of your division, key achievements, key struggles. He always likes his employees to acknowledge their struggles.”

“Gotcha.”

“Arrive by ten-thirty at the boardroom here at Santa Clara. I’ll go over your PowerPoint first. Nakamura-san and his entourage will arrive at precisely eleven o’clock, and will leave at precisely twelve o’clock. One hour. Chop chop.”

“Gotcha.”

“Leave plenty of time for delays. It is imperative that you be on time.
Imperative
. Nakamura-san is extraordinarily punctual.”

“Gotcha. It’s too late to make an evening flight, but I’m sure there are plenty of early-morning ones.”

“Remember to bring your business cards. Your
meishi,
as they call it. Present it to him with both hands, holding it at the corners. When he gives you yours, accept it with both hands and study it carefully. And whatever you do, don’t put it in your pocket.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I know the rituals. I’ll be there.”

“On time,” Hardy said.

“Early,” I said.

“And afterward, if you have time, come out for a sail with me on the
Samurai
.”

“The
Samurai
?”

“My new eighty-foot Lazzara. It’s a real beauty. You’ll love it.”

While Franny set to work on getting me a flight, I canceled my next day’s appointments, and called Kate to tell her my change in plans. I told her I’d fly back home tomorrow, after the big presentation. Then I started crunching numbers and composing a rough draft of my PowerPoint slides for Franny to make up.

A little while later she stopped in. “This is a tough one. It’s too late to make the six or seven o’clock flights tonight,” she said. “There’s an 8:20
P.M
. to San Jose, but that’s full. Overbooked, in fact. San Francisco, Oakland, same thing.”

“How about the corporate jet?”

“In your dreams, honey.” The corporate jet lived in New York or Tokyo and wasn’t for the likes of me. She knew I was kidding.

“What about flying out in the morning?”

“There’s only one flight that’ll get you there with enough time. U.S. Air’s six-thirty into San Francisco. Arrives nine fifty-two. It’ll be close. Santa Clara is thirty-one miles away, so I’ll rent you a car. The usual Rolls-Royce?”

The woman was developing a sense of humor. “I think a Bentley this time.”

She went back out to her cubicle to call our corporate travel company, while I went out, the corporate hunter-gatherer, in search of numbers to crunch.

When I got back, twenty minutes or so later, Franny said, “Kurt was here.”

“Oh?”

“Put something on your desk. He said he’ll stop by later. He had something important to discuss, he said.”

I felt a prickle of tension. Kurt had no business-related reason to come by. It couldn’t be good.

There was nothing on my desk.

My cell phone rang. I looked around my desk for it, couldn’t find it. It rang again, sounding muffled and distant. It was coming from my fancy English briefcase. I didn’t remember leaving it in my briefcase, but I was a little scattered these days.

I lifted the briefcase from the floor next to my desk, opened it—

And something exploded.

There was a loud pop, a great whoosh, and something hit my face, a whole scattering of something, momentarily blinding me. I leapt backwards and out of the way.

“Jesus!” I shouted.

I swept small, hard particles off my face, out of my eyes. Looked at what came off in my hands: tiny, colorful bits of plastic and silver foil in the shape of parasols and stars. My desk was covered with the stuff.

Confetti.

I heard low, hoarse laughter. Kurt was standing there, laughing helplessly. Franny had run in, her hands to her face, terrified.

“Happy birthday,” Kurt said. “Excuse me.”

He nudged Franny out of the door and closed the door behind her.

“It’s not my birthday,” I said.

“Had this been an actual emergency, you’d be pink mist.”

“What the hell was that?”

“Look for yourself. Hobby store stuff. Model rocket motor, electrically initiated. A microswitch from Radio Shack. A clothespin, a couple of thumbtacks, some rosin-core solder, and a nine-volt battery. Fortunately for you, the rocket motor was stuck in a bag of confetti. But let’s say instead of a rocket motor, I used an electric blasting cap. And let’s say instead of a bag of confetti I used some C-4 plastic explosive. Granted, can’t get that stuff at Radio Shack, but some of us know where to get it, right?” He winked. “My point getting through here? One day you open the trunk of your car, maybe. Kablooey. And it’s not going to be confetti.”

“What do you want, Kurt?”

“I got a heads-up from a buddy of mine on the state police.”

I shrugged.

“Said someone called in with an anonymous tip. About the death of Trevor Allard. From a pay phone. The one off the cafeteria.”

Jesus
. I blinked, shrugged again.

“The caller mentioned my name.”

I prayed nothing in my face gave me away.

“My buddy said, ‘What the hell’s going on, you piss someone off, Kurt? Someone trying to smear dirt on you?’”

“What are you talking to me for?”

Kurt drew close. “Let me tell you something,” he said, almost under his breath. “I’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places. Anyone you talk to in the cops, guaranteed I’ll hear about it within a couple hours. Who the
hell
you think you’re playing with?”

I tried to look right into his eyes, but they were too intense, too menacing. I looked down at my desk, shook my head.

“You don’t want to be my enemy, bro. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Because you kill your enemies. Right? Why haven’t you killed me yet? I don’t understand.”

“You’re not my enemy, Jason. If you were, you wouldn’t be here.”

“So I guess that makes me your friend.”

“Has anyone ever done more for you than me?”

I was struck speechless for a few seconds. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I hope you don’t think you got where you are today on your own. You owe it all to me. We both know that.”

“Yep,” I said. “I really have no talents or intelligence of my own. I’m just your puppet.”

“Talent without drive gets you nowhere, friend. I changed your life.”

“You were just willing to play dirty, Kurt. I should have cut you off long ago, but I was weak. I’m not weak anymore.”

“Because you think you don’t need me. That’s all. But we were a team. Look at how well we worked together. Anything in your way—any obstacles—they just vanished, didn’t they?”

“You were out of control,” I said.

“And you don’t know what a pawn you are. You have no idea. ‘Save the division’? That’s a laugh. Ask the merger integration team from McKinsey if they’re here to save the Framingham office or sell the building. Amazing what you can find if you look. I found job security. Just by uncovering Dick Hardy’s Hushmail account. Interesting stuff there.”

I shook my head. What was he getting at? What did he have on Dick Hardy?

“Gordy was just waiting for the right opportunity to get rid of you, you know. You were a threat to him.”

“So you got him drunk, that it?”

“Drunk? That wasn’t just booze, friend. Roofies, for one thing.”

“Roofies?”

“Rohypnol. The forget-me drug. Betcha Gordy didn’t remember any of it the next day. A cocktail. A drop of DMT—Dimethyltryptamine, a psychedelic. Plus a little upper. And he lost his inhibitions. Showed his true colors. Like Napoleon said, ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.’”

“You’re a goddamned lunatic.”

“Does this mean you’re not going to make me your kid’s godfather? Don’t tell me you didn’t know what I was doing. You knew all along. You
wanted
me to do what I did. You just didn’t want to acknowledge it. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Where’s your gratitude?”

“You didn’t kill Trevor and Gleason because of me. You killed them because they were uncovering what you’d done. They could have landed you in serious trouble.”

“I could have handled it,” Kurt said. “Everything I did, I did for you. Aren’t you the guy who’s always talking about killing the competition?” He chuckled. “Hey, it’s like your books say. The
Take No Prisoners Guide to Business
? What do you think ‘take no prisoners’ means? You don’t take any enemy prisoners because you kill them instead. No Havahart traps in the field, Jason. What part of this do you not understand? So my advice to you is to keep your goddamned mouth shut. Because everything you do, I’m watching. Everywhere you go. Every call you make. It’s like that Police song, right? ‘Every breath you take’? I’m listening. I’m watching. There is
nothing
”—he bared his lower teeth like some sort of rabid animal—“nothing you can do that I won’t find out about. You’ve got a lot to lose.”

He winked. “You know who I mean.”

The bottom of my stomach dropped. I knew he meant Kate.

“And after all I’ve done for you,” he said, and turned. “You disappoint me.”

“Any idea when I can get started on the PowerPoint slides?” Franny asked. “I’ve got three teenage sons who’ll burn down the house if I don’t get dinner on the table.”

“You’d better tell ’em to get takeout,” I said. “Gonna be a late night.”

I could barely concentrate on the PowerPoint slides. Next to Kurt’s threat, they seemed a pointless distraction.

I didn’t get out of the office until almost nine, but before I left I did a quick search for the Special Forces website that Trevor had mentioned. The one where he’d posted a question about Kurt, and someone had answered.

The search didn’t take long. I just put “Kurt Semko” and “Special Forces” in Google and immediately found it. It was a Special Forces “teamhouse,” some kind of a Listserv for former members of the Special Forces and their friends and family. In one area of the site was the “guest book,” where Trevor had posted his question, and I found the reply, from someone named Scolaro with a Hotmail address.

I clicked on the address and wrote Scolaro an e-mail. “What kind of ‘sick shit’ did he get into?” I wrote. “Guy lives next door and I want to know.” I put down an AOL address I rarely used, the initials of my college and year of graduation. No name.

It felt like putting a message into a bottle and hurling it into the ocean. Who knew what I’d get back, if anything—and when, if ever.

My phone had been ringing, but I’d shut off the ringer so I could concentrate, and asked Franny to answer, and only put the call through if it was Kate or Dick Hardy. She didn’t put any calls through.

I closed my office door and said good night to Franny, who was eating a grilled chicken Caesar salad she’d had delivered. A PowerPoint slide was on her big Entronics monitor.

“You like?” she said. “I can do a Teal Taffy double fade, if you want.”

“Nothing fancy,” I said. “Bare bones. Nakamura is probably a ‘just-the-facts, ma’am’ kind of guy.”

“Flash? Swish? Wipes?”

“No thanks.”

“Oh, and you got a call, but I didn’t disturb you for it. Well, you got a bunch of calls, but one I thought you should know about. From the state police. An investigator named, let me see here, Ray Kenyon. He wanted to talk to you. I said you’d gone home for the day.”

“Great. Thanks.”

An investigator
.

“Did he say what it’s about?”

“Just left his name and number.” She handed me a message slip. “You want me to put the call through for you?”

“No, thanks,” I said. I put the message in my pocket. “I’ve got to get home. It’s late.”

“That’s right,” Franny said. “You have a pregnant wife to buy pickles and ice cream for. I’ll e-mail you the presentation when I finish. Good luck tomorrow.”

“I’ll need it.”

“You? Why do you think Hardy wants you out there? You’re a star.”

“Did I ever tell you I like you, Franny?”

“No, I don’t think you ever have.”

“Oh. Franny?”

“Yes?”

“Could you do me a favor?”

“Perhaps.”

“Could you take down all those military posters from my office walls? I’m tired of looking at them.”

49

I got to the airport at 4:45
A.M
., almost two hours before my flight was supposed to leave. I left my car in the Terminal B garage and went to one of the E-ticket kiosks. The terminal was dark, almost deserted. I found the one open coffee place, got a large coffee and a bagel and sat down on a plastic bucket seat. I took my laptop out of my old nylon briefcase—I’d left the English briefcase, the one Kurt had tampered with, back in my office—ponied up the eight bucks for WiFi Internet access, and checked my e-mail. Went over the PowerPoint presentation. Rehearsed it silently, although I think a cleaning lady looked at me funny when she heard me talking to myself.