Fun and Games

33

Who is Dirty Harry?

—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Red Heat

FOUR HUNDRED miles away in San Francisco, in a hotel suite overlooking Union Square, Mr. Gedney sat and talked to Mr. Doyle about the events of the past nineteen hours. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue sat unopened on the marble desk between them, as well as a fine array of artisanal cheeses and hand-carved meats. The management always sent it up. Neither Gedney nor Doyle ever touched the stuff. Somewhere, a very lucky member of the cleaning staff probably had a kitchen cabinet full of the Blue.

Down on the square, a lone and mournful trumpet sent jazz notes ricocheting off the buildings. Late commuters scrambled for streetcars or squeezed past tourists trying to do a little shopping before the stores closed for the night.

“How are we feeling about containment?” asked Doyle. “Do we have a prayer?”

Gedney shook his head. “Jonathan placed three calls to reporters before he got smart and threw away his phone. I understand they’re already calling car dealerships. I don’t think they quite know what they’re looking for, but that won’t last. This thing is going to blow up. Getting rid of Jonathan now would be pointless, and actually work against us.”

“And the merger?”

“I think the merger as we know it is finished. We can rework it without McCoy, but that’s going to take many more months of negotiations and… well, I don’t have to tell you.”

Until today, the Blond Viking God—actor Allan McCoy—was the lynchpin of an agency deal that could move a lot of assets in the right direction.

A few weeks ago, they’d launched a quiet exposure assessment. Someone brought up the hit-and-run; it was included on a bullet-point rundown. The likelihood: low. Then came the tip from their source, Andrew Lowenbruck. The actress had told Lowenbruck: it’s tearing me up inside. Destroyed her confidence, her career, her soul. Lowenbruck reported this. The risk suddenly went way up. Especially with Jonathan Hunter’s TV show—which they owned, interestingly enough—pressure was mounting. It wasn’t a question of whether Lane Madden would snap, it was when.

And how long would it take her to call the Hunters?

Taking a cold look at the numbers, and gaming out the scenarios, they’d figured the elimination of Lane Madden and the Hunter family would remove the risk entirely and actually tweak potential profit even higher.

Now all that was lost.

Doyle was good at looking into the future; he saw that Allan McCoy really had no future.

“There is an upside,” Gedney said.

“And that is?”

“I think we have a new asset to consider. One who’d be ideal for another project.”

Doyle thought it over.

“You think so?”

“Based on what Mann says, he sounds perfect.”

“Okay. Send a team over to fetch him.”