Killer Instinct

37

The first thing I did was to get rid of the Caribbean. I had them remove all the PictureScreens from my new office. I wanted to be able to see out of the windows, even if all I could see was the parking lot.

Everything Gordy used to do I wanted to do the opposite. After all, I was the anti-Gordy. That’s why Dick Hardy had named me the new VP of Sales.

That and the fact that Entronics was desperate to fill the slot as fast as possible. They wanted to put the Gordy debacle behind them.

Gordy’s drunken rampage was all over the Internet the next day. The message boards on Yahoo were filled with stories of the Rocky show, the glasses of raw eggs, the Rolex and the Hummer, and especially the anti-Japanese slurs. Gordy, who was well-known in the small world of high-tech sales, had become a celebrity.

And in Tokyo, the top officers of Entronics were beyond embarrassed. They were livid. They’d been willing to accept Gordy’s private bigotry, but the moment he began spouting publicly, he had to be shot.

The Entronics Public Relations Manager in Santa Clara put out a press release saying that “Kent Gordon has left Entronics for personal and family reasons.”

I got a slew of congratulatory phone calls and e-mails-from friends I hadn’t heard from in years, from people who were probably positioning themselves for a job with Entronics, not knowing there might not be any jobs at all soon. Joan Tureck sent me a very nice e-mail congratulating me and adding, ominously, “Good luck. That most of all. You’ll need it.”

The second thing I did was to call in Yoshi Tanaka and let him know that things were going to be different from now on. Unlike my predecessor, I wanted to work with him. I wanted his input. I wanted to know what he thought. I wanted to know what he thought the guys in Tokyo thought. I spoke slowly, used simple words.

I won’t say Yoshi smiled at me-his facial muscles apparently didn’t have that ability-but he nodded solemnly and thanked me. I think he understood what I was saying, though I couldn’t be sure.

The third thing I did was ask Dick Hardy to make a stopover in Boston on his way from New York to Santa Clara. I called all my troops together in our biggest conference room to meet Mister Big and give them a rousing, inspirational speech. I told them my door was always open. I told them they should feel free to come to me with any complaints, that although I expected nothing but the best efforts from them, I wasn’t going to ream them out for telling me when something wasn’t going right, that I was here to help. I announced a small increase in incentive pay and bonuses. This turned out to be a bit more popular with the Band of Brothers than the Queeg Memo.

Dick Hardy stood next to me in the front of the room, wearing a navy blue suit and crisp white shirt and blue-and-silver-striped rep tie and looking very much the CEO, with his big square jaw and his silver hair combed straight back and the heavy dark pouches under his intense, icy blue eyes. He shook everyone’s hands as they filed in, and said, “Good to know you” to each one as if he really meant it. He told them they were the “lifeblood” of Entronics Visual Systems and that he had “complete confidence” in me.

Hardy clapped me on both shoulders when we had a few private moments after the staff rally. “It’s been a rough ride,” he said soulfully. “But if anyone can steady the keel, it’s you.” He loved sailing metaphors. He looked directly into my eyes, and said, “Remember: You can’t control the wind. You can only control the sail.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I take heart in your string of successes, though.”

“I’ve had a nice run of luck,” I said.

He shook his head solemnly. “As one of my vice presidents, you’re going to get sick of hearing me say it, but I firmly believe you create your own luck.”

And the fourth thing I did was to promote Trevor Allard to my old job. Why? It’s complicated. I think partly it was to make amends to him. I didn’t like the guy, but if it hadn’t been for Kurt, Trevor would probably have been in Gordy’s office, not me.

Partly it was because I knew he’d be good at the job, like it or not. And partly, I admit, it was that old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

So now I had to work with him. I don’t know who it was most uncomfortable for, him or me. I assigned Gordy’s old assistant, Melanie, to Trevor, which might not have been considerate to her-it was a big step down in prestige-but I knew I could trust her to keep her eyes on him, since she liked me. Plus, she was used to working for jerks. I kept Franny, who’d been around forever and knew how things worked better than anyone else.

And, finally, I told Kurt that I really didn’t need his help anymore. I didn’t want his inside information; I didn’t want him misusing Corporate Security that way. I sure as hell didn’t want anyone finding out.

Kurt’s reaction was muted. It was clear that his feelings were hurt, although he wasn’t the type to ever say so.

I broke it to him early one morning at the gym in Somerville while I was lifting and he was spotting. “I can’t risk it,” I said. On the third set, I wimped out on the sixth rep, my arms trembling, going into muscle failure, and for the first time he didn’t help me finish the set. He also stopped spotting me. He just watched me struggle to raise the bar high enough to replace it in the stand.

I didn’t make it, and the bar came crashing down on my chest. I groaned. Then he lifted it up and out of my way. “You’re afraid you’re going to get caught?” he said. “That it?”

“No,” I said. “Because it’s wrong. It creeps me out.”

“Look who’s suddenly got religion.”

“Come on,” I said, sitting up, feeling a stabbing pain in my rib cage when I breathed. “I’ve always been…uncomfortable about it.”

“But you haven’t stopped me.”

“Like I could.”

“Not when you really needed my help. You didn’t refuse to read Gordy’s e-mails to Hardy, did you? And believe me, there’s going to be times when you need me again.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m just going to have to do without your help.”

“Now’s when you need me more than ever. You’re running the sales force of a major division of Entronics. You can’t afford to make a wrong move. You need to know everything that’s going on. IFF, we call it.”

“IFF?”

“Identity Friend from Foe. Basic procedure. So you shoot your enemies and not your friends. One of the things you learn downrange. Sometimes, when you’re outside the official battle lines, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Lots of companies hire competitive intelligence firms, you know.”

“Not like this.”

“No,” he admitted. “They’re not as good. Not as thorough. Like, for example, you need to know what Yoshi Tanaka’s really up to. He’s the key player here. He’s incredibly powerful. You want to stay on his good side.”

“I assume he’s working for the top guys, not for me. His loyalty lies in Tokyo. As long as I keep that in mind, I’m fine.”

“You think that’s all you need to know about Yoshi? What if I told you I’d captured a couple of e-mails he’s sent to Tokyo in the last couple of days? Encrypted, of course-512-bit public-key encryption-but Corporate Security is required to hold one of the keys. Written in Japanese, but I know a Japanese chick. Tell me you don’t want to know what he’s saying about you.” He smiled.

I hesitated, but only for a second. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“And your buddy Trevor?”

I shook my head. I was tempted to tell him about Trevor’s suspicions, but I decided not to. “No,” I said. “No more.”

His smile looked a little sardonic now. “Up to you, boss.”

Dick Hardy checked in on me fairly often, by phone or by e-mail. I felt a little like a teenager who’d just been given a learner’s permit and the keys to Dad’s car, and every night Dad checked it over for dings. He went over projections for the third quarter, wanted to make sure they were on target, wanted to see if I could jack them up a bit, wanted to know the status of every major deal. Wanted to make sure I was riding my guys hard enough.

“You can’t let up, even for a second,” he said on the phone several times. “This is it. This is the big time. Everything’s riding on this. Everything.”

I told him I understood. I told him I appreciated his faith in me, and he wouldn’t be disappointed.

I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

I was in the restroom taking a pee when Trevor Allard came in. He nodded at me and went to the urinal at the far end of the row.

He waited for me to talk first, and I waited for him. I was his direct boss now.

I was perfectly willing to be civil to the guy, but I wasn’t going to extend myself. That was his job. Let him suck up a little.

We each stared at the walls vacantly, which is what guys do when they urinate. We’re animals that way.

When I’d finished, I went to the sink to wash my hands, and after I’d dried them and wadded up the paper towel, Trevor spoke.

“How’s it going, Jason?” His voice echoed.

“Good, Trevor,” I said. “You?”

“Fine.”

I was Jason now, no longer Steadman. That was a start.

He zipped up, washed his hands, dried them. Then he turned to face me. He spoke softly, quickly. “Brett Gleason went to Corporate Security to ask for copies of the surveillance tapes-the AVI files, actually-for the night and day before his computer got wiped out. And guess what happened to them?”

“Why are we still talking about this?” I said.

“They’re gone, Jason. Erased.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Would you like to guess who the last person was to access those files? Just a couple of weeks ago? Whose name do you think was on the log?”

I said nothing.

“A guy in Corporate Security named Kurt Semko. Our pitcher. Your asshole buddy.”

I shrugged, shook my head.

“So you know what it looks like to me? It looks like you’re abusing Corporate Security to get revenge on people you don’t like. You’re using this guy to do your dirty work, Jason.”

“Bullshit. I don’t think Kurt was even working here when Brett’s computer crashed. And I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to wipe out a computer. You’re full of it.”

“Yeah, I bet it was really hard to get Kurt in here before he got his own employee badge. If you think you can get away with using Corporate Security as your personal goon squad, you’ve got your head up your ass.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“A lot of the guys are taken in by you. Your whole Easy Ed act. But I see right through you. Like when I had car trouble two days in a row, made me lose the Pavilion deal. You think I didn’t follow up on that? You think I didn’t call and apologize and tell them what happened? And you know what they told me?”

I said nothing.

“They said I called them from a golf club. Like I was playing golf, blowing them off. Well, I know someone who’s a member at Myopia, and I asked around. And the lady who runs the pro shop told me some guy in a leather Harley jacket came in that morning and asked to use the phone. Right around the time Pavilion got that call. She remembers because he didn’t look like a member.”

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

“Of course not. What do they call that-plausible deniability? Well, stay tuned, Jason. There’s more to come. A lot more.”

38

Kate wanted to celebrate my latest promotion, but this time she wanted to throw a dinner party for the occasion. She’d hired a caterer, the same one who’d catered several of her friends’ parties.

I didn’t want to celebrate this promotion. The circumstances were too unpleasant. But it seemed important to Kate. I think she wanted to show off to her friends that I was finally a success. So I said okay.

If a caterer had come to our old house for a dinner, she’d have run screaming after seeing our kitchen. But the kitchen in our Hilliard Street house was spacious and newly renovated-not concrete, but French tile countertops and island, fairly modern appliances. The caterer and her all-female staff set to work in the kitchen, preparing the grilled fillet of beef in an herbed crust with chanterelle Madeira sauce and Muscovado glazed carrots.

Or maybe it was grilled beef in a Muscovado sauce and Madeira glazed carrots. Whatever.

Meanwhile, Kate and I were upstairs getting dressed. I’d brought her a half glass of cold white wine. She liked to have a little wine before people came over, and her obstetrician had told her that a little wine was not a problem. After all, he said, look at all those French and Italian women who drink wine throughout their pregnancies. French and Italian kids come out just fine. If you overlook the fact they can’t speak English.

She sat on Grammy Spencer’s chaise lounge and watched me undress. “You know, you’ve got a great body.”

“Are you putting the moves on me, woman?”

“You do. Look at how you’ve slimmed down. You’ve got pecs and delts and all that. You’re a very sexy guy.”

“Well, thanks.”

“And don’t say I look great too. I’m fat. I have fat ankles.”

“Pregnancy becomes you. You’re beautiful.” And yes, you have fat ankles now, but it’s okay. I was never really an ankle man.

“Are you excited about the baby?” She asked that every forty-eight hours.

“Of course I’m excited.” I’m terrified. I’m dreading it. When the baby was just hypothetical, no one was more enthusiastic than me. But I was the Senior Vice President of Sales of Entronics USA, and in a few months, I’d have a newborn and be totally sleep-deprived, and I didn’t know how I’d get through. Or I’d be out of a job, and then what?

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m terrified.”

I came up to her and kissed her. “Sure you are. So am I. It’s like you’ve got this thing growing inside you that’s going to take us over when it pops out. Like Alien.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Sorry. Maybe it’s like-it’s like you’re jumping out of a C-141 Starlifter over Iraq. You don’t know if your parachute’s going to malfunction or if you’re going to get shot at on the way down.”

“Yep, that sounds like Kurt,” she said.

I shrugged, embarrassed. “He’s got some great stories. He’s done some amazing stuff.”

“Stuff you’d never want to do.”

“That too. And…some stuff he shouldn’t do.”

“Hmm?”

“He reads people’s e-mail, for one thing.”

“Whose? Yours?”

“Gordy’s.”

“Fine. Anyway, they say you really shouldn’t send anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t put on a postcard. Isn’t Corporate Security supposed to monitor e-mail?”

I nodded. “I guess.”

“He’s really loyal to you, Jason. He’s a really good friend to you.”

“Maybe too good a friend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? He’d do anything for you.”

I was quiet for several seconds. Yeah, “anything” is right. The “backgrounders”-the inside information he’d gotten me on Brian Borque of Lockwood Hotels and on Jim Letasky-that was borderline acceptable, as far as I was concerned. It made me uncomfortable. But what he’d done to all the Panasonic monitors: That was some kind of lunacy. A felony, probably, given the value of the equipment he’d destroyed. But worse, it was evidence of a strange violent streak, a brazenness. He was dangerous.

And what about Gordy’s drunken tirade? Gordy had asked Kurt to get him the Talisker bottle. Did Kurt spike it with something?

That broke dick’s not going to get away with screwing you over again, he’d said.

Well, Kurt was right. That was the end of Gordy.

Kurt had boosted me up the corporate ladder, a fact that I never wanted to tell Kate. But now he was out of control. He had to be stopped.

Trevor was digging, and in time he’d unearth proof that Kurt had done some of these things. And I’d be implicated too. I’d go down. It would end my career.

And that I couldn’t afford. Not with this house, this mortgage, car payments, and a baby on the way.

I’d made a terrible mistake getting him a job in the first place. Now I’d have to make things right. I’d have to talk to Dennis Scanlon, Kurt’s boss, and lay it all out.

Kurt had to be fired. There really was no choice.

I took a deep breath, weighing how much to tell Kate.

But then she cocked her head. “I think I hear the doorbell. Can you go down and let them in?”

39

In the morning I flew to Chicago with one of our junior sales reps, Wayne Fallon, for a quick morning meeting to try to nail down the big hospital contract. I met in a conference room of Chicago Presbyterian with the Assistant Vice President for Communications, a guy named Barry Ulasewicz. He was a top administrator who was in charge of the hospital’s media services-everything from photography to satellite teleconferencing to their TV studio. We’d been going back and forth on prices and delivery dates for months now. He wanted fifty-inch plasmas for their one hundred operating rooms, plasmas and projectors for more than a hundred conference rooms, and a bunch more for their waiting rooms and lobbies. Wayne was there to observe, mostly, and he watched the jousting match between me and Ulasewicz with fascination.

I didn’t like the guy, but that wasn’t important. Just so long as he liked me. And he seemed to. We started at ten in the morning and met with a parade of administrators and techies. He even brought in the CEO of the hospital for a grip-and-grin.

Around one in the afternoon, when I was feeling squeezed out like a lemon and was in desperate need of lunch and a caffeine fix, Ulasewicz suddenly pulled out a proposal he’d gotten from Royal Meister that was identical in every way except for the prices, which were about ten percent lower. I’d given him the lowest price I could get away with-really cut to the bone-and this pissed me off. He yanked the RFP out with a theatrical flourish, like some cheesy actor in a bad dinner theater doing Hercule Poirot or something.

And he expected me to cave. Because I’d put in months and months, and flown to Chicago, and I thought it was a lock. I’d almost caught the mechanical bunny rabbit. Ulasewicz figured that at this point I’d do anything to save the deal.

But he didn’t realize that I had flow. I once read an article on the Internet by some guy with an unpronounceable name about something he called “flow.” It’s the way a painter gets so absorbed in his canvas that he loses track of time. The way a musician disappears into the piece she’s playing. Happens to athletes and surgeons and chess players. You’re in this state of ecstasy where everything comes together, you’ve got the juice, you’re in the zone. The good neurotransmitters are flooding your synapses.

That’s what had happened to me. I was in the zone. I had flow.

And I was doing it on my own, without Kurt’s poisoned candy.

I calmly looked over the Royal Meister proposal. It was full of tangled and hidden clauses, all kinds of smoke and mirrors. The delivery dates were estimates. The prices could change due to fluctuations in the euro. I don’t know who wrote this contract, but it was brilliant.

I pointed this out to Ulasewicz, and he began to argue.

And then I stood up, shook his hand, and packed up my leather portfolio.

“Barry,” I said, “we’re not going to waste any more of your time. I see where this is headed. Obviously you prefer the uncertainty of Meister’s terms, and you don’t mind their higher failure rate. You don’t mind the fact that you’ll probably end up paying more for an inferior product that you won’t get when you want it and that won’t get replaced if anything goes wrong. And that’s okay. So I want to thank you for considering Entronics, and I wish you the best of luck.”

And I picked up our contracts and left the room. I was able to sneak a glimpse of Barry Ulasewicz’s stunned expression, which almost made it all worth it. Wayne grabbed me in the elevator, panic-stricken, and said, “We just lost it. We just lost the deal, Jason. Don’t you think you should have negotiated? That’s what he wanted to do, I think.”

I shook my head. “Just be patient,” I said.

By the time we got down to the parking garage, my cell phone was ringing. I looked at Wayne and smiled. His look of panic had changed to wide-eyed admiration.

I flew back home with executed copies of the agreement.

40

I went straight from the airport to the office.

There was a Hardygram waiting for me in my e-mail-“Great job in Chicago!” Dick Hardy wrote. Joan Tureck congratulated me, too, which was gracious of her, considering that I’d outsold her.

A little too gracious, I thought. The graciousness of a victor, maybe.

I considered, then rejected, e-mailing Dennis Scanlon. I knew Kurt was able to read my e-mail and everyone else’s. I didn’t want to take that chance. Instead, I called Scanlon. Got him on the second try. I asked him to come to my office.

Dennis Scanlon always reminded me of Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. His shirt and tie were so tight around his neck that I worried he was going to lose circulation and pass out in front of me. He was sweaty and eager to please and had a funny sort of speech impediment.

I told him I wanted to speak in absolute confidence, and then I told him that I had some concerns about one of his employees, Kurt Semko.

“But-weren’t you the one who recommended him?” he said.

“I think frankly I may have made a mistake,” I said. “I didn’t know him well enough.”

He ran a hand over his damp face. “Can you give me any specifics? As to your concerns, I mean. Has he been causing problems of any sort?”

I folded my hands and hunched forward. “I’ve been hearing complaints about Kurt from some of my employees. Little pranks he’s pulled. Harassment.”

“Pranks? Not good-natured pranks, I’m assuming.”

“Bad stuff. Destructive.”

“Can you give me specifics?”

I could give him all sorts of specifics. Many of them just allegations. But did I really want Scanlon investigating whether Kurt had tampered with Brett Gleason’s computer? How far did I want to go with this? Should I tell Scanlon about all the e-mails Kurt had accessed?

No. Any or all of it could come back to bite me in the ass. Kurt would fight it. Might even say that I’d asked him to get me information-after all, it only benefited me, not him. I couldn’t take that chance.

“I don’t know all the details,” I said. “But it’s my strong feeling-and, again, it’s of the utmost importance that this conversation remain strictly confidential-that Kurt should be let go.”

Scanlon nodded for a long time. “Are you willing to file a complaint report?”

I hesitated, but only for a second. “Not with my name on it, no. I think that would get too complicated. Especially given the fact that I mistakenly recommended him in the first place.”

He nodded some more. “I can’t just let him go for no reason. You know that. You’ve got to paper the file. Would any of your employees be willing to file complaints with me, then?”

“I’d rather not ask them. Plus, I don’t think anyone would want to stick their necks out. You understand, I’m sure.”

“You sound like you know something.”

“I’ve heard things, yes.”

“He says you and he are good friends.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Listen, Jason. Kurt is one of the best hires I’ve ever made. The fellow can do anything.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t want to lose him. But I also don’t want any of my employees causing trouble up here. So I’ll look into this.”

“That’s all I ask,” I said.

I called Kate at work and was told she’d taken the day off. I called her at home, and woke her up.

“You still have cramps?” I said.

“Yeah. I thought I should stay home.”

“What did DiMarco say?”

“Just lie down until they pass.”

“Is it-anything? Anything serious?”

“No,” she said. “He says it’s normal. Just take it easy.”

“Good idea. I wanted to remind you that I have a business dinner tonight.”

“Oh, right. The hospital people?”

“Airport. Atlanta airport. But whatever.”

“Atlanta airport in Boston? I don’t understand.”

“It’s boring,” I said. “Trade show.”

It was the big Information Display trade show at the Bayside Expo Center. I didn’t have to work the show, thank God-I’m sure it would have been a regular laff riot-but some of my guys did. When I heard the Atlanta folks were going to be in town for the Information Display show, I invited them all out for dinner, told them it would be a great opportunity to “celebrate” our agreement. Translation: I wanted to try to nail down the huge Atlanta airport deal.

A man can hope.

“Where are you taking them?”

“I don’t know the name of it. Some fancy restaurant in the South End that Franny likes. But if you need to reach me, I’ll have my cell with me.”

“I’m not going to bother you.”

“In case there’s a problem. Don’t hesitate, babe.”

I hung up the phone, and then I noticed that Kurt was standing in the doorway to my office.

“Missed you at the gym this morning,” Kurt said.

“Had to fly to Chicago early.”

“So, you were talking to Scanlon.”

I nodded. “A background check that HR doesn’t seem to be able to do.”

“You can always ask me, you know.”

“Thought it might be better to separate the business from the personal.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” he said, closing the door. “So if you have a problem with my work, you should take it up with me. Not with my boss.”

I swallowed. “I don’t have a problem with your work.”

“Really? Then why’re you trying to get me fired?”

I looked at him for a few seconds. “What makes you say that?”

He advanced into my office. Stood directly in front of my desk. “My suggestion to you-my strong feeling”-his eyebrows shot up, and he began speaking archly-“and, again, it’s of the utmost importance that this conversation remain strictly confidential…” He smiled. “…Is that if you have issues with me, you take them up with me. Mano a mano. But don’t sneak around. Don’t go behind my back. Because I will find out. And you will regret it.” His stare was icy. “Are we clear?”

I was freaked out: He knew what I’d said to Scanlon, word for word.

I didn’t know how, but it had to be some surveillance device he’d placed in my office. He sure had the technology.

Now I wondered what else he’d heard me say in the office. I’d been concerned about Scanlon being indiscreet, saying something to Kurt. But I realized that Kurt didn’t need to hear it secondhand.

And now that he knew I was trying to have him terminated, there was going to be trouble between us. Things could never go back to the way they used to be.

In the car on the way to South End, my phone rang. I was back to my bad habits, using the cell phone in the car, but I had no choice. I had to be reachable at all times.

It was Dick Hardy. “What’s your take on the Atlanta airport?” he said.

“I’m feeling good about it.”

“Then I’m feeling good about it. If this comes through, this may do it. This may save the division.”

“All I can do is my best.”

“I’m counting on it, Jason. Everything’s riding on this. Everything.”

I handed my keys to the valet and entered the restaurant with a nonchalant grin plastered on my face. Unfortunately, it was one of those restaurants with an open kitchen, which always made me nervous, maybe because I was subconsciously afraid I’d have to do the dishes after we ate.

Jim Letasky was already at the table, studying a file. We were fifteen minutes early. I’d invited Jim Letasky to join me at dinner. I wanted to bring him in on the biggest deal I had going. I needed his wattage. He’d gotten us a table far away from other people, and he’d tipped the waiter to leave us alone as much as possible, because this was a business dinner.

I had an ulterior motive, too, but he was a smart fellow, and he’d figured it out.

“I know why you wanted me here,” he said.

“Besides the fact that you’re great at what you do?”

“Because you’re afraid that our main competition is NEC.”

“Who, me?”

“I’ve just spent nine years telling the world how much better NEC’s products are than anyone else’s, and now-”

“Now you’ve found God.”

“I feel bad about it, you know.”

“Not too bad, I hope.”

“Not too bad. It is war, after all.”

“That’s the attitude.” I looked over the wine list, trying to figure out which wines to order. My Queeg Memo had instructed all Entronics salespeople to make sure they always ordered the wine at a customer dinner and not leave it to the customer.

“But listen, Jason. I think you’re wrong about NEC.”

“Don’t tell me we’re going head-to-head with Royal Meister again?”

He shook his head, squeezed lime into his Pellegrino water. “I dug deep into the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport website. There’s a company called AirView Systems, based in Atlanta.”

I nodded. “I met the CFO at TechComm. Guy named Steve Bingham.” I remembered the silver anchorman hair, the deep-set eyes.

“Biggest provider of flight information display systems. They put in the system for Atlanta last time. So my big question is, how come the airport isn’t going with them again? Why change horses in midstream?”

“Maybe that horse was too expensive.”

“AirView just sold them a bunch of portable LED signs.”

“News to me. All I know is, they’ve been negotiating hard.”

“You’ve been negotiating directly with Duffy, right?”

“You do your homework,” I said. Tom Duffy was the Aviation General Manager of the airport. Mister Big. Lorna Evers, our other dinner guest, was the Deputy Procurement Officer for the City of Atlanta in the Aviation Division.

“The workday starts the night before.”

I smiled. “Duffy’s the decision maker. Lorna I’ve never met, but she’s basically a rubber stamp.”

“They’re not just in this for a free dinner, right?”

“I think they want to close the deal.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“The power of negative thinking,” I said, and then I saw our two dinner guests enter the restaurant. “Let’s knock ’em dead, Letasky.”

Lorna Evers was a buxom blonde of that indeterminate age that could have been early fifties or maybe hard-living forties. She’d also obviously had work done: Her eyes had a slight Asian tilt to them. She had big bee-stung, cosmetically enhanced lips-trout pout, I think it’s called. Her face was a deeply tanned mask. When she smiled, only her overstuffed lips moved. Someone had overdone the Botox and the collagen injections.

“So you’re the new Gordy,” she said, adjusting the gold silk scarf around her neck.

“You could say that.”

“Don’t let this man have any Scotch,” she said, and she threw back her head and gave a raucous, openmouthed laugh. Her eyes didn’t move.

Tom Duffy was an affable, moon-faced, burly man with a double chin and a gray crew cut. He wore a bow tie and a loose navy blazer. He laughed quietly.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, extending a hand. Her fingernails were pink and dangerously long. “So there’s been a hell of a lot of turnover at Entronics, I hear.”

“I just joined Entronics from NEC,” Letasky said. “I figured it was time to join the championship team.”

Score one for Letasky. Give this man a raise.

“I’m talking about layoffs,” she said, settling into her chair. I held it for her. Not that I’m such a gentleman, but I wanted to make sure she sat so that she and Duffy couldn’t make eye contact without our seeing it. A basic sales meeting trick. Duffy sat where we wanted him to as well. “You guys going to be there next year?”

“Entronics was founded in 1902,” I said. “Back when it was called Osaka Telephone and Telegraph. I think it’ll be around long after we’re gone.”

“Is it true you guys had a suicide there not too long ago?”

“A tragedy,” I said. “Phil Rifkin was one of our finest employees.”

“Entronics must be a stressful place to work,” she said.

“Not at all,” I lied. “You just never can know what’s going on in someone’s personal life.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what’s going on in my personal life,” said Lorna. “Thirst. I need a glass of wine.”

“Let’s order,” I said, reaching for the long leather wine list.

But Lorna was quicker. She grabbed the menu-there was only one, unfortunately-and flipped it open.

“Warm evening like this, I like to get a nice crisp white,” Duffy said.

Lorna was peering at the list through black reading glasses. “And I was thinking of a Pauillac. How about the Lafite Rothschild?”

I almost gulped. That was four hundred dollars a bottle, and this woman looked like she was a serious wine guzzler.

“Great idea,” Letasky said, giving me a quick look that said, I think, that for the millions we’re going to make on this deal, forget about the wine bill.

Lorna waved the waiter over and ordered the Pauillac and an expensive Montrachet for Duffy and a couple of bottles of Pellegrino for the table.

“So, Atlanta airport is one of the busiest in the country,” Letasky said.

“The busiest in the world, in fact,” Duffy said.

“Not O’Hare?”

“Nope. And we’ve got the flight records to prove it. We had thirteen thousand more flights than O’Hare this year, January to June. We serve three million more passengers.”

Lorna’s cell rang, and she picked it up and began talking loudly. A waiter came over and whispered in her ear, and she glared at him, then snapped it closed with visible annoyance.

“They insist all guests turn off their phones,” she announced. “As if anyone can hear a cell phone ring in this place. I’m going positively deaf.”

I reached down and turned mine off, trying to be subtle about it.

After dinner-Lorna ordered a lobster dish with truffles, the most expensive thing on the menu, of course, and Duffy ordered the Statler chicken-I excused myself to go to the john.

Letasky joined me in there a minute or so later.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” he said, standing at the other urinal, “I think Tom Duffy has been deballed.”

“You know what a ‘tell’ is in poker?”

“Sure. Why?”

“People take classes in how to read facial microexpressions,” I said. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“You don’t need any of that junk to see that every move she makes, Duffy mirrors. She’s the decision maker. Not Duffy.”

“You think they’re sleeping together or something?”

“No way. I can tell.”

“I’ve seen stranger couples. This is not looking good, this dinner.”

“We’re getting jerked around,” I said. “This woman changes the whole equation, damn it. I had Duffy hooked until she showed up.”

“You think she has another candidate?”

“I’ll tell you this much-she didn’t listen to a word I said.”

“She nodded a lot when you were talking.”

“Women do that. They nod to show they’re listening. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re right. You think it’s time for a little brinksmanship?” I’d told him about Chicago.

“No,” I said. “She’s not ours. We get up from the table, and the deal goes to Hitachi or whatever.”

“AirView Systems.”

The restroom door opened, and Duffy entered.

“All yours,” I said, going to the sink.

By the time dinner was over, the conversation had rambled everywhere but flight information display systems. We’d gone through three bottles of the Pauillac, and Lorna had had a great time. I silently cursed her and her immobile face.

We said good night, and I got my car from the valet and popped my phone into the hands-free cradle and turned it on.

There were six voice mail messages.

Kate’s voice was weak. “Jason, I’m-I’m bleeding.”

I went cold all over.

The next four messages were from Kate, too. She was sounding weaker and more desperate. There was a lot of blood, she said. She needed help.

“Where are you?” she said. “Will you call me back? Please?”

The sixth message was a male voice. Kurt’s.

“Jason,” he said. “I’m with Kate at the Children’s Hospital emergency room. Just drove her over here. Call me on my cell. Or just get over here. Now.”

41

I rushed into the emergency room, saw Kurt sitting in the waiting room, his face stony.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Trauma room.” He pointed, off there somewhere. “She’s okay. Lost a lot of blood.”

The big dinner was sitting heavy in my stomach. The wooziness from all the wine was gone, replaced by fear and adrenaline.

“Did we lose the baby?” I couldn’t believe I was saying the words.

He shook his head. “Talk to the nurse. I think it’s okay.”

“Thank God.”

His eyes were fierce. “Why the hell didn’t you tell her where you were?”

“I-” I began. What, I didn’t know the name of the restaurant? “She has my cell phone number.”

“Yeah, and you should have left it on. You’ve got a pregnant wife, for Christ’s sake. You’re out at dinner and you turn off your phone because you don’t want to screw up a sale? That’s messed up, man.” He shook his head.

I felt a rush of contradictory emotions. Gratitude that he’d brought her here. Anger at his indignation-where did he get off being so righteous? Massive guilt. Relief that Kate was okay. Relief that we hadn’t lost the baby. “I had to turn it off.”

“You’re lucky I was there.”

“She called you?”

“I called the house. Good thing too.”

“Mr. Steadman?” An ER nurse approached Kurt. She wore blue scrubs, had silver hair, clear blue eyes. She looked to be in her late fifties and had a reassuring air of authority. “Your wife is fine. She came in anemic, but we’re replacing the lost blood.”

“I’m the husband,” I said.

“Oh,” the nurse said, turning to me. “Sorry. She’s, what, sixteen weeks pregnant?”

“Right.” I noticed she hadn’t used the past tense. She is pregnant. Not was.

“Would you prefer to speak in private, Mr. Steadman?”

“No, it’s all right.” I glanced at Kurt. “He’s a friend.”

“Okay. She has something called placenta previa, where the placenta covers the cervix. Do you need me to explain?” She spoke in a calm, almost hypnotic voice. She had a working-class Boston accent, sounded like my mom.

“I think I get it,” I said.

“Her pregnancy is considered high-risk. She’s going to have to stay in the hospital for a couple of days, in the high-risk maternity ward, then stay in bed for the remainder of the pregnancy. On bed rest. That means lying on her side as much as possible, using bedpans. After a while she’ll be able to sit up and take the occasional car ride. But she can’t exert herself. There’s a risk of preterm delivery. At this stage of the pregnancy, the fetus wouldn’t make it.”

“What’s the risk to my wife?”

“Only ten percent of women diagnosed with placenta previa still have it when they deliver. There’s a pretty good chance the placenta will start to move away from the cervix on its own. She should be fine.” The nurse crossed her fingers.

The fetus. It was a baby, dammit. “How’s the baby?”

“The fetal heartbeat is normal. That means the fetus wasn’t distressed by all the loss of blood.”

I nodded.

“Did she have any cramping before this? Any bleeding?”

“I don’t think there was any bleeding. But she had cramps.”

“Did she see her obstetrician?”

“He just told her to take it easy.”

“I see. When did you last have sexual intercourse?”

It’s stupid, but I became aware of Kurt’s eyes on me. Of all the ridiculous things to get defensive about at a time like this. “A while,” I said. “Probably a month. Can I see her?”

Kurt stayed out in the waiting room while I went in to see Kate.

She looked pale, circles under her eyes. Looked sad. She was hooked up to a couple of IVs, one with blood and one with clear fluid, and a cardiac monitor and a fetal monitor.

“Baby,” I said. I put a hand on her forehead, stroked her face, her hair. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. I almost passed out. There was blood everywhere.”

I nodded. “They said you’re going to be okay. The baby’s going to be okay.”

“There was a surgeon in here who said I have to stay here for a while.”

“Just a couple of days.”

“I’m going to have to stay in bed until I deliver.”

“I know. But you’re okay, and the baby’s okay.”

“I guess that means I’m taking an early pregnancy leave.”

“The foundation will get by without you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She smiled a little, an attempt at a joke.

“I’m sorry I had my cell phone turned off. The restaurant made me do it, but I should have left it on anyway. Or called you with the number of the restaurant.”

“It’s okay. I called Claudia, but she’s in New York, and I called Sally and Amy, and I couldn’t reach either one of them, and then I was about to call an ambulance, but then Kurt called, thank God.”

“Thank God.”

“What a good friend that guy is, huh?”

No better friend, he’d said. No worse enemy.

I nodded but didn’t reply.

42

I spent the night in Kate’s hospital room on a couch. In the morning, aching all over and exhausted, I drove home, retrieved some things she wanted, and brought them to the hospital. Not until noon did I get to work.

I found a message on my cell phone from Jim Letasky, but when I called him back, there was no answer on his cell or at his office. I called Festino and asked him to locate Letasky for me. Festino said Letasky was out of the building at a presentation but wanted to talk to me about something important.

When I got into the office, I checked my e-mail while listening to my voice mail on speaker, and I was surprised to hear a message from Kurt.

“Hey,” he said. “Let me know the latest on Kate, man, okay?”

Now I felt really weird, totally conflicted, about Kurt. I owed him in a big way for taking Kate to the hospital, but that didn’t change how I felt about him, fundamentally, or what I knew I had to do. He had to leave the company. But I was beginning to feel that he deserved better than my going behind his back again to get him fired. At the very least, he deserved to hear it from me face-to-face. Scanlon hadn’t called back, and I doubt he’d seriously “looked into” firing Kurt.

So I decided to tell Kurt, man-to-man, that he had to leave Entronics. I’d help him find a good job somewhere else. But his career at Entronics was over.

As I picked up the phone to call Kurt, the phone rang.

“How’s she doing?” Kurt said.

“Better. Still on fluids.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you about not answering your cell,” he said.

“No, you’re right. I shouldn’t have turned it off. Screw protocol. And Kurt-I never thanked you.”

“No need.”

“Well, thanks, man. I owe you one.”

“You keeping score?”

Every chance I got I went on the Internet and researched placenta previa. Some of the websites made it seem like not a big deal. Some of them made it sound awfully dire. I didn’t know which one to believe.

Letasky appeared in my doorway, dressed in a suit and tie.

“You have your browser open?”

“Yeah?”

“Go to the City of Atlanta website.”

I typed in the web address.

“Now go to Departments, and then Procurement. Got it?”

“What is it, Jim? You gonna torture me?”

“No, I want you to see it. You see ‘Aviation RFPs/Bids’?”

It came up on the screen: The deal I once thought was ours. In red letters it said APPARENT LOW BIDDER AIRVIEW SYSTEMS CORPORATION and CONTRACT AWARD PENDING. The contact name was Lorna Evers.

My stomach sank. “Crap. You mean those bastards let us take them to dinner, and all the while this was up on their website?”

“Just appeared this morning.”

I sank down in my chair. “Shit. We needed this. I thought we had it.”

“You didn’t have a chance,” Letasky said. “We didn’t have a chance. The fix was in.”

The fix was in. Every salesman’s favorite complaint. That along with They never return my calls. “You have no idea how badly we needed this. So is this it? The deal’s done?”

“Officially and formally it’s tentative. ‘Under consideration,’ meaning it just requires sign-off at the highest levels. But yeah, it looks like it’s done.”

“We tried,” I said. “Tried our best.”

“Not always good enough,” Letasky said.

An e-mail popped up in my in-box from Dick Hardy. The subject line was: ATLANTA. The message contained one word: “Well?”

I e-mailed back, “Still working it. Not optimistic.”

On his way out of the office, Letasky stopped for a few seconds and turned back. “Oh, listen. Trevor invited me to play basketball with him on Thursday nights, and if Gail lets me, I’ll probably do it.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure what he was getting at.

“I just wanted you to know. It’s not like I’m choosing up sides or anything.”

“Sides? Trevor’s my second-line manager. We’re not on opposite sides.”

“Okay.” Letasky nodded, humoring me. “It’s just that-well, you know, maybe it’s none of my business, and maybe I should keep my mouth shut, being new and all. But, well, did anyone ever tell you that Trevor sometimes…says stuff about you?”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not always very nice. Kinda bad-mouths you, sometimes. He says you can be ruthless-that you do stuff to your rivals.”

I shook my head, smiled sadly.

“I just thought you should know,” he said.

“Well, that’s too bad. But I appreciate your telling me.”

After Letasky had left, I stared for a long time at the City of Atlanta website. Then I picked up the phone and called Kurt.

“I need your help,” I said. Dear God, I thought, now you’re really mucking things up. “Just one more time.”

43

At the hospital that night we got the word that Kate was okay to go home in the morning. Which worked for me, because I was in serious need of a chiropractor after spending the nights on the soft couch in her room. I told Kate I wanted to hire a private nurse to help her out at home, since she was supposed to get out of bed as little as possible, but she told me I was being ridiculous, she didn’t need a nurse.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Susie wants to visit. You know, make sure I’m okay.”

I nodded. “Good. I don’t want you home alone.”

“She’s flying over from Nantucket.” Craig and Susie had taken a house in Nantucket for August and September, as usual.

“It’ll be nice to see Susie and Ethan again,” I said. I’d enjoy seeing Ethan, in fact. “Craig, not so much.” Christ, I thought, wasn’t there some legal limit on the number of times I had to see Craig?

“Craig isn’t coming. He’s back in L.A. She’s bringing Ethan. It really would be good for Ethan to spend more time with you.”

“It would be good for Ethan to be taken away from them and placed in foster care.”

“Jason.”

“Anyway, I don’t have much time to hang out with him, you know that.”

“I know.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s coming.” Without Craig.

Kurt called me on my cell phone as I was drifting off to sleep.

“How long does this trade show go on?” he asked.

“The one at Bayside?”

“Right. The one your friends from Atlanta are attending.”

“Two more days. Why?”

“I came across something interesting. Called in some favors with an SF guy in Marietta, Georgia, who knows people in Atlanta.”

“Interesting how?”

“Let’s talk in the morning when I have something more concrete.”

In the morning, they did an amnio on Kate to make sure everything was okay. The nurse asked us if we wanted to know the sex of the baby, and Kate quickly said no, so the nurse said they’d send the results without mentioning sex.

Then I signed Kate out of the hospital, and one of the nurses brought her down to the main entrance in a wheelchair and I drove her home. I skipped my morning workout and instead spent a few hours being a good husband, getting her set up in bed with a commode right next to her so she wouldn’t have to get up to relieve herself. I made sure the phone and the TV remote were within reach on the bedside table. I set up one of those Airport gizmos, which wasn’t as hard as I feared, so she could easily use her laptop in bed, lying on her side. I put a tall stack of books on the table too. For Christmas last year I’d bought her a hardcover set of Russian novels in a “hot new translation,” as Kate put it. Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and The Double and The Gambler, and a bunch more. One of them had been an Oprah Book Club selection. Her idea, obviously; to me, that’s worse than getting socks for Christmas. She often talked about how she wished she had time to read all of Dostoyevsky. Now was her chance. She’d grabbed The Brothers Karamazov greedily and dived right in.

I arrived at the office late, and among my many voice-mail messages was one from Kurt inviting me to lunch. I called him back and said, “Thanks, man, but I’m just going to grab a sandwich and work at my desk. You know, the old crumbs-in-the-keyboard-”

“I’ve made reservations at a really nice Japanese restaurant in Boston,” Kurt interrupted. “One o’clock.”

I didn’t even know Kurt liked Japanese food, and I didn’t quite get his insistence. “Another time would be great.”

“This is not optional,” Kurt said. “We’ve had a lucky break. Meet me at Kansai at one.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“That’s okay. I’m in the city already. Took the morning off work.”

I’d worked for a Japanese-owned company for years, but I’d never really gotten into Japanese food. Too healthy, maybe. Too minimalist.

“So what’s this about?” I said.

“You’ll see. Are you hungry?”

“Not so much.”

“Me either. No worries.”

We were shown to a low black-lacquered table where we had to remove our shoes and sit on tatami mats on the floor. There was a hot plate on the table with a big bowl on it boiling away, a big hunk of kelp floating in some murky water.

“Need to use the bathroom?” he said.

“No, thanks, Dad.”

“Why don’t you anyway?”

“This going to be a long lunch?”

“Men’s room is down the hall on the left. But you might want to keep going down the row to the last booth on your right.”

“And?”

“Go ahead.”

I shrugged and went down the hall to the last booth on the right. A rice-paper screen provided privacy, but by shifting over a few inches I was able to see in at an angle.

What I saw in there almost took the top of my head off.

Lorna Evers, the Deputy Procurement Officer for the City of Atlanta, was enjoying a romantic luncheon with a man with silver anchorman hair and deep-set eyes. Steve Bingham, the CFO of AirView Systems.

The company that had just won the Atlanta airport contract that we should have gotten.

They were sitting next to each other on one side of the table, sucking face, and Lorna’s hand was expertly kneading the man’s crotch. On the table in front of them, untouched, was a platter of paper-thin, blood-red slices of raw beef.

It took a lot of willpower to keep from knocking over the shoji screen and telling Lorna Evers what I thought of her procurement process. I went back to our table.

Kurt watched me approach, eyebrows raised.

“How’d you know?” I asked, stony.

“Told you, I know a guy in Marietta. Who knows a P.I. in Atlanta. Who deals a lot with the City of Atlanta. So I did a little prep work in Lorna’s hotel room.”

“Goddammit. She’s the goddamned deputy procurement officer. The city’s got to have all kinds of laws against this.”

“Code of ethics, sections 2-812 and 2-813,” Kurt said. “Thought you’d want to know some specifics. Miss Lorna can not only lose her job but also get locked up for six months. I also don’t think her husband would be too happy about it.”

“She’s married.”

“So is Steve Bingham. Steve has five kids too.”

I stood up. “Excuse me. I want to say hi to Lorna.”

I made my way back to her booth and barged right in to the gap between the rice-paper screens. The two were going at it hot and heavy, and they looked up, embarrassed.

“Oh, hey, Lorna,” I said. “Great place, huh?”

“J-Jason?”

“I hear the hand roll’s excellent.”

“You-what are you-?”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” I said. “Steve, right? Steve Bingham, from AirView? I think we met at TechComm.”

Steve Bingham’s deep crimson blush contrasted interestingly with his silver hair. He crossed his legs to conceal the obvious bulge in his trousers. “We’ve met?” he said, and cleared his throat.

“TechComm can be a zoo,” I said. “You meet so many people. But you two are obviously well acquainted.”

“Jason-” Lorna said in a pleading tone.

“Awful sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I’ll call you on your cell later on.” And I gave her a little wink.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to call Lorna. She called me an hour or so later. She’d found some “discrepancies” in AirView’s bid, she said, and had decided to award the contract to me.

I should have been elated, but instead I felt sullied. This was not how I’d hoped to win the biggest deal in my career.

The Hardygram came a few minutes after I e-mailed him the good news, sent from his BlackBerry. In all caps, he wrote:

YOU DID IT!

He called shortly thereafter, almost giddy with excitement, to tell me that he was almost certain I’d saved our division from the chopping block.

“Great,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“Boy, are you low-key about this,” Hardy said, his voice booming. “You’re a modest fellow, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Well, the press release is going out over the Internet any minute now. Hedge fund managers are starting to look at Entronics stock differently now. They know what a big deal this is. Even if you don’t.”

I stopped home to change and check on Kate. She was lying on her side in bed, tapping away on her laptop. She was researching placenta previa, too, but apparently she’d only found the scary websites. I told her about the less scary ones, and how the nurse had said that if she took it easy everything would probably be okay.

She nodded, considering. “I’m not worried,” she said. “You’re right. If you go by the odds, I’ll be fine.” She placed a hand on her belly. “And baby’ll be fine too.”

“Right,” I said. I tried to sound upbeat and authoritative.

“So I’m not going to worry about it.”

“Exactly.”

“Worrying won’t do me any good.”

“Right.”

“Right.” She took a breath. “This morning I e-mailed some JPEGs of Marie Bastien’s work to the director of the Franz Koerner Gallery in New York.”

It took me a minute to remember who Marie Bastien was. “The quilts,” I said.

“The director’s a friend of Claudia’s.”

“Convenient.”

“Yeah, well, if you’ve got the connections, use them, I figure. I’m not going to say a word to Marie, of course. But if they’re interested, this could be just the breakthrough she needs. You look bored.”

“I’m not bored.”

“I didn’t ask you about your day. I’m sorry. How was your day?”

I told her that I’d just probably saved the division by winning the Atlanta airport contract, but I didn’t tell her how. She responded with a pretty convincing imitation of enthusiasm. Then she said, “The cable’s not working.”

“That’s a bummer. Did you call the cable company?”

“Obviously,” she said, peevishly. “They said we have a signal. Which is not true. They said if we want the box replaced, they can get someone out here in a couple of days. I really don’t want to wait. I’m under house arrest here.”

“Well, at least you’ve got the Internet.” We had high-speed DSL through the phone company.

“I know. But I want to watch TV. Is that so much to ask? Can you please take a look at the cable?”

“Kate, I have no idea how to fix a cable box.”

“It might just be the wiring.”

“I’m not a cable guy. It all looks like a bowl of spaghetti back there to me.” I paused a second and couldn’t resist adding, “Why don’t you call Kurt? He can fix anything.”

“Good idea,” she said, not getting my little dig. Or maybe she did and she didn’t want to “dignify it,” as she liked to say. Not that my digs ever needed dignifying. She turned back to her laptop. “You know that actress who was in the movie we saw last night?” She now had two accounts with an Internet movie-rental company so she could rent twelve DVDs at a time. She’d been renting a lot of indie films. I believe they all starred Parker Posey. “Did you know she was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?”

“News to me.”

“And did you know the director grew up in Malden? He used to write for Major Dad.”

“I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time on the Internet,” I said. I noticed that her bookmark in The Brothers Karamazov was still only about a millimeter of the way into the book. “How’s the Brothers K? A real page-turner, I see. Can’t put it down if you don’t pick it up.”

“That’s the thing about bed rest,” she said. “You have all the time in the world, but you lose the ability to concentrate. So I just go on the Internet and look something up, and that leads to something else and something else, and I just click and click and click and pretty soon I’m lost in cyberspace. I thought you have a game tonight.”

“I do, but I’m staying here with you.”

“For what? Don’t be silly. If I need to reach you, I know how. Just keep your cell on this time.”

Kurt was really pitching lights-out that night, as the radio announcers say. But what was really amazing was how many long balls Trevor hit. He was good, and he usually hit a home run in each game. This evening, though, every time he stepped up to the plate, the balls just exploded off his bat, each flying easily three hundred feet. Trevor himself seemed amazed at how well he was playing. I figured his confidence was stoked by the possibility of bringing me down. He was playing better than Kurt.

The Metadyne guys weren’t great, weren’t terrible. This was a company that made testing equipment for semiconductor chips, which is as exciting as it sounds, so softball was the high point of their week, but they weren’t enjoying this game.

In the fourth inning, Trevor slugged another one, and his bat went flying out of his hands, slamming against the dirt with a loud metallic ping, and then something bizarre happened.

The end of his bat had popped off. The end cap had separated from the barrel and rolled a good distance away into the infield. A bunch of the players laughed, even Trevor. The ball was gone. One of the out-fielders gamely gave chase. Another one of the Metadyne players picked up the end cap as Trevor ran the bases.

He looked at it curiously, weighed it in his hand. “Man,” he said. “Heavy. Look at this!”

He took it over to another one of the Metadyne players, who I remembered was an electrical engineer. The engineer weighed it in his palm just like the other guy had done. “Oh, man, someone put, like, lead fishing weights and hot melt inside this cap. Unbelievable.” Then he walked over to the decapitated metal bat and picked it up. He looked inside, then waved some of his teammates over.

“Hey,” one of them shouted. “This bat is juiced!”

Trevor, running triumphantly home, nowhere near out of breath, looked to see what the commotion was.

“You doctored the bat,” another one of the Metadyne guys shouted.

“What?” Trevor said, loping over to where they were all inspecting his bat.

Our own team had left the benches to see what the fuss was about.

“The inside of this bat’s been machined, or lathed, or something,” the engineer was saying. “Like maybe with one of those Dremel tools. You can even see the shavings-graphite or resin, I think. And check out this lead tape inside the end of it.”

“Hey, I didn’t do that!” Trevor protested. “I wouldn’t even know how.”

“Nah,” said another Metadyne guy with an adenoidal, buzz-saw voice, “he sent it to one of those bat doctors.”

“No way!” Trevor shouted.

“It’s a forfeit,” the engineer said. “The game gets forfeited. That’s the rules.”

“No wonder these Entronics guys are suddenly on a winning streak,” said the buzz-saw-voiced guy. “They’re cheating.”

The Metadyne team insisted on doing a visual inspection of all the rest of our bats, and all they found were the usual scratches and dings. Only Trevor’s bat had been doctored. Apparently thinning the walls with a lathe to make it springier, and weighting the end, increased what the Metadyne engineer called the trampoline effect, making the bat really hot.

But Trevor was not going down without a fight. He stood there in his cargo shorts and his LIFE IS GOOD T-shirt and his pukka shells and his brand-new white Adidas and his backwards faded Red Sox cap, and he protested that he’d never in his life cheated at sports, that he’d never do such a thing, that he wouldn’t even know how to begin.

It was hard to tell how many of the guys believed him. I overheard Festino say to Letasky, “For a company softball game? Now that’s competitive.” Letasky, ever the diplomat, pretended he hadn’t heard. He was playing basketball with Trevor and Gleason on Thursday, he’d told me. He was being very careful not to take sides, as he’d put it.

“Either the thing came that way,” Trevor said, “or…”

He looked at Kurt. “This bastard did it.” His voice rose. “He set me up again.” Now he pointed to me, then to Kurt. “Both of these guys. It’s like a goddamned reign of terror around here, have you guys noticed?”

Kurt gave him a puzzled look, shrugged, then headed off toward the parking lot. I followed him.

“How come?” I said when we were out of earshot of our teammates.

“You don’t think I did that, do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

But Trevor had caught up with us, walking alongside us, speaking quickly, in clipped tones. “You’re an interesting guy,” he said, addressing Kurt. “A man of many secrets.”

“That right?” Kurt said blandly, not letting up his pace. It was twilight, and the sodium lamps in the parking lot were sickly yellow. The cars cast long shadows.

“I did a little research on you,” Trevor said. “I found this Special Forces website, and I posted a notice. I asked if anyone knew a Kurt Semko.”

Kurt gave Trevor a sidelong glance. “You discovered that I don’t exist, right? I’m a mirage. I’m in the Witness Protection program.”

I was looking back and forth between the two of them, watching this verbal tennis match, bewildered.

“And someone posted an answer the next day. I didn’t know you had a dishonorable discharge from the army, Kurt. Did you know that, Jason? You vouched for him. You recommended him.”

“Trevor, that’s enough,” I said.

“But did you know why, Jason?”

I didn’t answer.

“How much do you know about the-what’s the term they used?-‘sick shit’ Kurt got into in Iraq, Jason?”

I shook my head.

“Now I see why your friend is so willing to do your dirty work,” Trevor said. “Why he’s so willing to be your instrument in your little reign of terror. Because you got him a job he never would have gotten if anyone did a little digging.” He looked at Kurt. “You can threaten me all you want. You can try to sabotage me. But in the end, both of you are going down.”

Kurt stopped, came close to Trevor. He grabbed Trevor by the T-shirt and pulled him close.

Trevor drew breath. “Go ahead, hit me. I’ll see to it you don’t have a job to go to tomorrow morning.”

“Kurt,” I said.

Kurt lowered his head, moved right in so their faces were almost touching. He was just about the same height but much broader and much more powerful-looking. “I have another secret I want to share with you,” he said in a low, guttural voice.

Trevor watched him, wincing, waiting for the blow. “Go ahead.”

“I killed Kennedy,” Kurt said, letting go of Trevor’s T-shirt abruptly. Trevor’s shoulders slumped. The fabric of his LIFE IS GOOD T-shirt remained bunched.

“Trevor,” Kurt said, “are you sure?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“Your shirt, I mean.” He pointed at Trevor’s T-shirt. His index finger circled the LIFE IS GOOD logo. “Are you sure life is good, Trevor? Because I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”

44

When I got home, Kate was still awake. She was clicking away on her laptop, surfing a tsunami of trivia on the Internet, digging deep into movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels.

“Aren’t you the one who said that watching movie versions of Jane Austen’s novels was like hearing a Beethoven symphony played on a harmonica?” I said.

“Did we ever rent Clueless? You might be into that one. It’s Jane Austen’s Emma, but it’s set in a Beverly Hills high school and it stars Alicia Silverstone.”

“You know they’re remaking Pride and Prejudice with Vin Diesel as that guy?”

“Mister Darcy? No way!” She was appalled.

“Way. In the first scene, Vin drives his Hummer through the plate-glass window of this English manor house.”

She glared at me. “I asked Kurt to take a look at the cable,” she said. “As you suggested.”

“That’s nice.”

“He’s coming over tomorrow after work. I also invited him to stay for dinner.”

“For dinner?”

“Yeah, is that a big deal? You’re always saying I exploit him-I thought it was only right to invite him to break bread with us. Or papadams, at least. Maybe you can pick up some Indian, or Thai, or something.”

“I thought your sister’s coming tomorrow.”

“I thought she and Kurt might enjoy meeting each other. Ethan would definitely love Kurt. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” I could think of a couple of reasons, like she was still spending too much time with Kurt. Or like I couldn’t see Kurt and St. Barths Susie having a whole lot to talk about.

Or like he scared me.

“Um, Kate, I think we need to talk.”

“Isn’t that my line?”

“It’s about Kurt.”

I told her what I should have told her before.

“How come you never said anything?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said after a long pause. “Maybe because I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? About what?”

“Because if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t believe that. Maybe he gave you a leg up, but it’s you who’s doing the job so incredibly well.”

“I think maybe I was afraid that if I told you, you’d want me to just-shut up and go along. Put up with it.”

“Why in the world would I want that?”

“Because of this.” I waved around the room, just as she’d once done, indicating the whole house. “As long as Kurt was helping me up the greasy pole, I knew we’d have this. And I know how much this house means to you.”

She blinked and shrugged. Then I saw the tears at the corner of her eyes.

More softly, I said, “And I knew that as soon as I went up against him, I’d be putting all this in jeopardy.”

She bowed her head, and a few tears dripped to the bedsheets. “So what?” she said, her voice muffled.

“So what? Because I know how important this house was to you.”

She shook her head. Her teardrops were making big damp splotches. “You think that’s what I care about?”

I was silent.

She looked up. Her eyes were red. “Look, I grew up in a huge house with servants and a pool and tennis court and horseback-riding lessons and ballet classes and winters in Bermuda and spring vacations in Europe and summers on the beach. And all of a sudden, poof, it was gone. We lost the house, the Cape house, I got yanked out of school…It was really hard to lose all that. And yeah, I miss it, I won’t lie to you. But that’s not what I’m about.”

“Hey, correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t you the one who was looking at houses on Realtor.com?”

“Guilty. Okay? Did I want our kids to grow up in a house that has room to run around in, and a yard, and all that? Sure. Did it have to be this nice? Of course not. I love this place, I won’t deny that. But I’d give it up in a second if we had to.”

“Please.”

“I didn’t marry you because I thought you’d make me rich again. I married you because you were real. All those phonies I went out with, mouthing all that crap about Derrida and Levi-Strauss, and then all of a sudden I meet this guy who’s got no pretense, no phoniness, and I loved it.”

“Levi-Strauss,” I began.

“The anthropologist, not the jeans,” she said, shaking her head, knowing I was about to poke fun at her. “And I loved your energy. Your drive, your ambition, whatever you want to call it. But then you started to lose it.”

I nodded.

“You can see how you’ve changed, can’t you? The confidence? You’re not settling anymore. I admire you so much, you know that?”

Tears were running down her cheeks. I flicked my eyes at her, looked down. I felt like a jerk.

“Because you know something? When I was born, I was handed the keys. And you had to earn them.”

“Huh?”

“I was given everything, all the advantages, all the connections. And what have I done with them? Nothing.”

“Look what you’re doing for the Haitian quilt lady,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said miserably. “Once in a while I help out some poor artist. That’s true. But you-look at where you’ve come from. What you’ve achieved on your own.”

“With the help-”

“No,” she said fiercely. “Without Kurt. That’s what makes me happy. Not all the toys we can afford to buy now. Like that ridiculous starfish.”

“That Tiffany’s thing?”

“I hate it. I’m sorry, but I do.”

I groaned. “No wonder you never wear it. Do you have any idea how much-” I stopped. “Thanks for telling me now. It’s kinda late to return it.”

“Jason, it’s not me,” she said gently. “It’s glitzy and showy and…hideous. It’s Susie, not me.”

“You went gaga over it when you saw it on her.”

“I was just trying to make her feel good. You think I want to compete with Susie on everything? I don’t want her husband and I don’t want her kid and I hate the way they treat him and I don’t want her stupid glitzy social-climbing life. You think I’m like my sister? Ever notice she’s got a thousand dollars’ worth of cosmetics in her travel bag? I use stuff from CVS. We’re just worlds apart. Always have been.”

Maybe I underestimated her even more than she ever underestimated me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“The brooch? Nah, I can deal. Actually, I’m just glad I don’t have to look at the thing.”

She laughed, relieved, through her tears. “You really think it’s too late to return it?”

“They won’t be happy about it, but hey, I’m in sales. I’m sure I can persuade them to take it back.”

“What am I going to do about tomorrow?” she said. “I can’t uninvite Kurt, can I?”

I shook my head. “Better not to, I think.”

“I think it’s better for him to think everything’s normal.”

“Whatever normal is with him.”

“Well,” she said, “until you do whatever you do about him-and you need to do something-I just think it’s better to stay on his good side.”

45

Thursday afternoon Kate called me to ask me to pick up some Thai food for dinner. “Susie loves Thai food,” she said.

“Why don’t you ask Susie to pick it up?”

“She doesn’t have a car, you know that.”

“Oh, right. Is Kurt there now?”

“He just left. He already fixed the cable box, but he’s coming back around seven.”

“I’ll be home at six forty-five,” I said.

On the way home I picked up a book on medieval torture that I was fairly certain Ethan didn’t have. I was long past feeling guilty about aiding and abetting Ethan’s twisted obsessions. I also stopped at a cell phone store and bought a new cell phone, keeping the same phone number. I had no idea if it was even possible to bug a cell phone, but if so, I’d have to assume that Kurt had bugged mine.

I kissed and hugged Susie, who was making herbal tea for Kate in the kitchen. She was so deeply tanned she looked like she’d applied walnut stain. “Enjoying Nantucket?” I said. “You’ve really been out in the sun.”

“Me? Please. Clarins self-tanner. I hate the sun.”

“And where’s Ethan?”

“Upstairs reading.” She noticed the gift-wrapped book. “Is that for him?”

“The latest from the Torture-Book-of-the-Month Club.”

“Oh. Um, he’s not into torture anymore.”

“Hey, well, that’s good news.”

“Well, it’s not really an improvement,” she started to say, but Ethan had appeared in the kitchen doorway.

I went up to the kid and gave him a hug. “I bought you a book, but I guess I’m behind the curve. I hear you’re not interested in medieval torture these days.”

“I’ve become interested in cannibalism,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I bet that makes for some fascinating dinner conversation.”

“I told him he should look into vampires,” Susie said, with an edge of hysteria. “There’s lots of books on vampires. Lots of excellent novels.”

“Vampires are for teenage girls,” Ethan said. “Did you know the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea used to eat the brains of their deceased relatives, and that’s why they got this fatal disease called kuru?”

“That’ll teach you not to eat your relatives’ brains,” I said, wagging my forefinger sternly.

“Who’s this friend who’s coming over for dinner?” Susie asked.

“He’s-he’s an interesting guy,” I said. I looked at my watch. “He’s late.”

“Is that dinner?” Ethan asked, pointing at the oil-stained paper bags I’d just brought in.

“Yep,” I said. “Thai food.”

“I hate Thai food. Is there any sushi?”

“No sushi,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Mom, can I have Froot Loops for dinner?”

“Kurt’s late,” I said to Kate. “Should we just start eating?”

“Let’s wait a bit longer.”

I’d set up the Thai food in a kind of buffet on a table in the dining room. Kate was lying back on Grammy Spencer’s couch. She was now allowed to sit up, even get out of bed, so long as she lay down as much as possible.

She was tapping at the keyboard of her laptop. “Hey, you’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I just got an e-mail from the director of the Koerner gallery in New York. She loves Marie’s works. I mean, loves it. She compares her to Faith Ringgold-just like I told you! She thinks Marie’s going to be up there with Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, and she’s throwing around names like Philomé Obin and Hector Hyppolite!”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

At seven forty-five I tried Kurt’s cell, but there was no answer. I took out his business card from my wallet and got his office number and tried it, but there was no answer there either. I’d never called him on his home phone, just his cell, but I looked in the phone book, just in case. No Kurt Semko listed.

By eight, Susie and Kate and I started in on the skewers of chicken satay. At eight-thirty, the doorbell rang.

Kurt’s hair was wet, and he smelled like soap and looked like he’d just gotten out of a shower. “Sorry, man,” he said. “I must have fallen asleep.”

“Turned off your cell? After giving me all that grief?”

“Didn’t have it with me. Sorry.”

“I hope you don’t mind we ate already.”

“No worries. Can I join you anyway?”

“Of course.”

Ethan came down from his bedroom and said hello. “Are you a soldier?” he said.

“Was,” said Kurt.

“Do you know that when Napoleon’s army retreated from Russia they got so hungry they ate their own horses? And then they resorted to cannibalism?”

Kurt glanced at me quickly, then said, “Oh, sure. That also happened to the German soldiers during World War II. Battle of Stalingrad. Ran out of food, so they started eating their fellow soldiers. Dead ones, I mean. Talk about your military snafus.”

“That wasn’t in my book,” Ethan said. “I’m going to have to look into that. Soldiers and cannibalism.”

He followed me into the living room, where Kurt kissed Kate on the cheek. I didn’t know they were on kissing terms already, but I didn’t say anything. He shook Susie’s hand. “How’s the cable TV?” he asked Kate.

“You know,” Kate said, “I’ve noticed the reception is even better than it used to be. I mean, it’s digital cable, and it’s supposed to be perfect, but the analog channels were always a little fuzzy. Now they’re as good as the digital ones. Oh, there’s one satay skewer left-sorry-but there’s plenty of pad thai.”

I thought I heard my cell phone ringing in my study upstairs, but I ignored it.

Kurt took a paper plate and shoveled on pad thai, vegetables in garlic sauce, fried rice, beef salad. “I don’t know who wired the cable for you, but I changed the RF connection to S-video, and it’s way better. Now you’re taking advantage of the plasma.”

“I see,” Kate said. “Thank you.”

“Plus, I replaced the old four-way splitter with a powered signal amplifier/splitter-makes a big difference. Also the analog-to-digital converter hardware in this cable box was lousy-I went over to the cable company and swapped this out for a new box. They never tell you, but they have a much better one now. And I put in some nice silver-coated video cables. Really upgrades the picture.”

“You’re starting to sound like Phil Rifkin, may he rest in peace,” I said.

“How do you know all this stuff?” Susie marveled.

“Did a lot of the electronics in the Special Forces.”

“How are you at PowerPoint?” I asked.

“You were in the Special Forces?” Susie said. “Like, the Green Berets?”

“No one calls it that anymore,” Kurt said.

“The guys who looked for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan?”

“Not me, but some of the SF guys, yeah.”

“Is it true you guys had him surrounded in Tora Bora but you had no orders to capture him so you had to stand by and watch as Russian helicopters landed and spirited him away to Pakistan?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Kurt said.

It definitely was my cell phone, and it was ringing again, a second or third attempt.

“He doesn’t have anything to drink,” Kate said. “Jason, could you go to the kitchen and get him a beer? We have Sam Adams, do you like that?”

“Just water. Tap’s fine.”

I went down the hall to the kitchen, and the wall phone rang.

“Jason? Jason-it’s Jim Letasky.” He sounded out of breath.

“Oh, hey, Jim,” I said, a little surprised that he was calling me at home. “Was that you on my cell just now?”

“Jason-oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.”

“What is it?”

“It’s-my God. My God.” He was breathing hard.

“What is it, Jim? You okay?”

“I was at this-this high-school gym in Waltham, I guess? Where Trevor and Brett play basketball? And-and-”

“And what? Something happen? Everything all right?”

“Oh, Christ. Jason, there was an accident.” He was crying. “Car accident. They’re-dead.”

“Dead? Who’s dead?”

“Trevor and Brett. He-Trevor was driving his Porsche real hard, and I guess he lost control-oh, man. This guy saw it happen. They went into the median strip and hit a guardrail and flipped over. The cops came and everything and…”

I felt unsteady. My knees buckled, and I sank to the kitchen floor, the phone receiver flying out of my hand, dangling on its cord.

After a minute or so of sitting there, in a state of shock, I got up unsteadily and hung up the phone. I sat on a kitchen chair staring into space, my mind racing. I must have sat there for five, maybe ten minutes.

Then I was jolted by Kurt’s voice. He stood in the kitchen doorway. “Hey, bro,” he said, peering at me curiously. “You okay?”

I looked up at him. “Trevor and Gleason were in a car accident,” I said. “Trevor’s car went out of control.” I paused. “They were both killed.”

Kurt seemed to take this in for a couple of seconds. Then his eyes widened. “You’re kidding me. This just happen?”

“They were on their way to basketball. Trevor was driving his Porsche. Car hit a guardrail and rolled over.”

“Oh, shit. Unbelievable.” His eyes were on mine. He didn’t glance away, nothing like that.

It felt like there was an icicle in my stomach, in my bowels. I shuddered.

That CD I’d listened to in the car about nonverbal communication. Kurt had recommended it to me. It was all about reading people’s faces to look for tiny changes in the facial muscles, little subconscious gestures we all make.

Even practiced liars.

It was the delay in Kurt’s reaction, a quick tightening of the muscles around the eyes. The way he lifted his chin, tilted his head back almost imperceptibly. A couple of rapid blinks.

He already knew.

“Huh,” I said.

Kurt folded his arms. “What?”

I smiled. A forced smile, but still a smile. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple of guys.”

Kurt watched my face, didn’t react.

I breathed in, breathed out. Kept the smile on. “Sometimes fate just lends a hand,” I said. “Kicks in when you need a little cosmic help.”

Kurt didn’t react.

“Couldn’t ask for a more convenient car accident.”

Kurt was watching my face, I could see that. Watching closely. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

He was reading me. Assessing me. Trying to determine whether I meant it. Whether I was really that cold-blooded.

Whether I was trying to manipulate him.

I relaxed my face. Didn’t want him to think I was trying to read him back. I looked down, wiped a hand across my forehead, brushed back my hair. Like I was deep in thought. “Let’s face it,” I said. “The guy was a cockroach, right? Both of them were.”

Kurt grunted. The kind of grunt that says you don’t agree, you don’t disagree.

“They could have caused me some serious problems,” I said.

After a pause, Kurt said, “Might have.”

“You watch out for me,” I said. “I appreciate that.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying,” Kurt said. I couldn’t read his expression.

“Are you absolutely positive,” I said very quietly, “that no one can ever find out?”

I didn’t look at him. I looked down, studied the tile.

Waited.

“Find out what?” he said.

I looked around the kitchen, as if checking to make sure no one was within earshot.

I looked up, saw the set of his mouth, a glint in his eyes. Not quite a smile, not a smirk. But something. An unspoken satisfaction. Irony, maybe.

“How’d you do it?” I said, even more quietly. Looked at the floor, then back up at him.

Five, ten seconds.

“You did something to his car, didn’t you?” I said. My stomach was flooded with something sour.

A bitter taste in my mouth. I felt something acidic rise.

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

I lunged for the kitchen sink and vomited.

Heaved, retched until there was nothing left in my stomach, and then kept going. The taste of acid and copper pennies in my mouth. Pinpoints of light hovered around my head. I felt as if I was going to pass out.

I could see Kurt standing beside me, his face looming grotesquely large. “You okay?”

Another wave of nausea hit me, propelling my head forward, down toward the sink. Nothing left in my stomach. Dry heaves.

I gripped the edge of the counter, the tile cold in my hands. Slowly I turned to face him, my face hot, everything around me too bright, tiny lights dancing in my peripheral vision. The stench of vomit rose up to assault my nostrils. I could smell undigested pad thai.

“You killed them,” I said. “You goddamn killed them.”

Something hardened in Kurt’s expression.

“You’re upset,” he said. “Lot of pressure on you, obviously. Now this.”

“You killed them. You did something to Trevor’s Porsche. You knew they’d both be in it on their basketball night. You knew he likes to drive it hard. My God.”

Kurt’s eyes went flat, dead. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve crossed the line there, buddy. Throwing wild accusations around like that. The only people who talk to me like that-”

“Are you denying it?” I shouted.

“Will you chill, please? Throttle back, huh? And keep your voice down. Now, you’re going to have to stop with the crazy shit. I don’t like to be accused of something I didn’t do. Upset or not, I don’t care. You’re going to have to hold it together. Calm down. Get hold of yourself. Because you don’t want to be talking to me like that. I really don’t like it.”

I just looked at him, didn’t know what to say.

“Friends don’t talk to me like that,” he said, an opaque look in his eyes. “And you don’t want me as your enemy. Believe me. You don’t want me as an enemy.”

Then he turned around slowly, and without saying another word he walked out of the house.

46

Should I have told Kate right then and there?

Maybe so. But I knew how upset she’d be when I told her my suspicions.

Neither one of us wanted to jeopardize the pregnancy. Maybe it was too late in the pregnancy for stress to cause her to lose the baby-I had no idea-but I wasn’t going to take that chance.

Kurt had denied it, of course. But I knew.

At some point soon I’d have to tell her. Or she’d find it out. But I wanted to get myself together, tell her in the right way. Calmly, reasoned. Having thought everything through. Sounding in control, a protector.

“Was that you throwing up?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think the food was bad?” Susie said. “Like the chicken or something? I thought it might have tasted funny.”

“No, the food’s fine. Just a case of nerves, I guess.”

“Stress,” Susie said. “Craig throws up every time he has to present a pilot to the network execs.”

“Yeah?” I said, wishing she’d leave already.

“Where’s Kurt?” Kate asked.

“He had to take off.”

“Did you guys have a fight or something? I thought I heard an argument.” She looked at me closely.

“No big deal. Yeah, we sort of had it out on something at work. Nothing important. Can I put the food away?”

“Jason, you look really upset. What happened? Who was that on the phone?”

“Really,” I said. “Nothing important.”

“Well, in the meantime, I just called Marie and told her about the gallery. And do you know what she said to me? She said something in Creole, I don’t really remember how it goes, but it means something like, You must remember the rain that made your corn grow. That was her way of saying she owed it all to me. Isn’t that just the sweetest?”

“I’m proud of you, baby. You did a good thing.”

“You don’t look right, Jason,” she said. “Are you sure everything’s all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said.

I barely slept.

I got up at my usual, ridiculously early, five in the morning, my body trained to grab a cup of coffee and head out to Kurt’s gym. But then, as I slipped silently out of bed, I remembered.

I made coffee and checked e-mail in my study. Wrote an e-mail to all employees of the Framingham office telling them the news. Was it “sad” news or “tragic”? I finally decided to open with “It is my sad duty this morning to tell you of the tragic deaths of Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason…”

At around six, I went down to get the Herald and the Globe from the front porch. I scanned them quickly, looking for articles on the accident, but I found nothing. The Herald lived to report that sort of thing-the print equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads”: two young men, top employees of one of the largest corporations in the world. A Porsche spinning out of control, both occupants killed. But the news hadn’t made it into either paper yet.

I drove to the office in silence-no books on tape, no General Patton, no music, no talk radio-and thought.

When I got to the office-the first one there-I opened my Internet browser and Googled “Massachusetts State Police” and “homicide” and seeing if any of the names that turned up were familiar. The first thing that came up was the Massachusetts State Police web page with a welcome message from a scary-looking dude in full state trooper dress uniform, a colonel who I guessed was the superintendent of the state police. On the right was a column of “News & Updates,” and the first line jumped out at me: WALTHAM FATAL. I clicked on the hyperlink. A press release came right up, headed, “State Police Respond to a Single-Car Fatal Crash in Waltham.”

Trevor’s name in boldface, and Gleason’s. Phrases: “pronounced deceased at the scene” and “traveling north on Interstate 95 in Waltham south of Exit 26.”

It said, “Preliminary information collected in the investigation by Trooper Sean McAfee indicates that a 2005 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S veered off the road into the median and struck the guardrail and an abutment before rolling over. The vehicle was towed by J & A Towing.” It said, “The cause of the crash remains under investigation with the assistance of the State Police Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section and the State Police Crime Scene Services Section.” And: “Though the crash remains under investigation, speed is believed to be a factor in the crash.” And: “No further information is available for public disclosure. Please do not contact the barracks directly.”

Man, everything and everyone has a website these days. I was amazed that the news was already public. When I Googled Trooper Sean McAfee, nothing came up. But it wouldn’t be hard to find his phone number by calling the state police.

And then what? What did I have besides suspicion? Was I going to call Trooper McAfee and tell him that I thought my colleague and friend Kurt Semko had done something to the Porsche to cause the crash? He’d ask why I thought so, what reason I had to suspect Mr. Semko.

No, that would be stupid. The crash was under investigation. Maybe they’d find something in the wreck of the Porsche that would tell them what really happened. Until I had something concrete, though, there was no sense in dropping the dime.

I didn’t know what Kurt would do if he heard that I’d reported my suspicions to the cops, but I could imagine it wouldn’t be good.

Still, I had to do something. I’d come to my senses. It had taken me too long to realize that Kurt was a dangerous man, that he was out of control, that I had to stop him. He’d helped me in all sorts of ways, big and small. Maybe in ways I wasn’t even aware of. And I’d silently gone along with the things he’d done for me, even though I knew they were wrong.

Ambition only went so far, though. Should only go so far, anyway. I’d crossed a line, yes. I wanted to do the right thing.

But what?

47

The guys started gathering in my office around nine-first Letasky, then Festino and Forsythe, until I had a small crowd. Whether or not they liked Trevor Allard or Brett Gleason, they’d worked with the two, seen them every day, bantered with them in the break room, talked sports and women and cars and business, and they were all in shock. They spoke quietly, trying to puzzle out what had happened. Letasky told them what he’d heard from the basketball team member who’d been driving behind the Porsche-how the highway curved to the right but the Porsche drove straight into the guardrail and then a concrete bridge-support column, and then the car had flipped over. The emergency medical technicians who arrived and realized that no ambulance was needed: Both men were dead. How the left lane was closed down for hours.

“Was Trevor drunk or something?” Forsythe asked. “I don’t remember Trevor as a big drinker.”

No one knew, of course.

“The pathologist usually tests for blood alcohol,” Festino said. “That’s what you see on, like, CSI, anyway.”

“I doubt it,” Letasky said. “I mean, I didn’t know Trevor as well as you guys, and I barely knew Gleason at all, but they were on their way to play basketball. They weren’t going to get plowed before a game. After, maybe. Not before.”

“Gleason was a big drinker,” Festino said. “Big party animal.”

“But still,” said Letasky.

There was nodding all around. Allard couldn’t have been drunk; it didn’t figure.

“I know he drove fast,” Forsythe said. “Really fast. But he knew how to drive. How could he lose control of the car? It didn’t rain last night, right?”

Letasky shook his head.

“An oil slick or something?” Forsythe asked.

“I took 95,” Letasky said, “and there wasn’t any kind of oil slick that I saw.”

“Ever meet his wife?” asked the youngest sales rep, Detwiler.

“A real hot babe,” Festino said. “Blonde, big tits. What you’d expect Trevor to marry.” He looked around, saw the disapproving looks. “Sorry.”

“They didn’t have any kids, thank God,” Letasky said.

“Thank God,” I said. I’d been listening, not talking. I didn’t want to risk letting them know my suspicions.

“Mechanical defect or something?” said Detwiler.

Letasky inhaled. “I suppose anything’s possible.”

“Mrs. Allard’s going to have one hell of a lawsuit against Porsche,” Festino said.

As the guys filed out a few minutes later-everyone had calls to make-Festino lingered behind.

“Say,” he said tentatively. “About Trevor?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I hated the asshole. You know that. I assume you did, too.”

I didn’t answer.

“But-I don’t know-maybe he wasn’t so bad. Gleason, too. Though he was even harder to like.”

I just nodded.

“And, well-I know it’s probably in bad taste, but have you decided who you’re going to assign their accounts to?”

News travels fast in the age of e-mail. Just before lunchtime I got an e-mail from Joan Tureck in Dallas:

I’m so sorry to hear about Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason. I can scarcely believe it. If I were at all superstitious, I’d say Entronics is cursed.

Maybe she had a point.

At lunchtime, I found a pay phone in the employee cafeteria. It’s hardly ever used-not in an office building where everyone has desk phones and cell phones.

I’d decided to call the cops.

What I really wanted to do was to call some anonymous crime tip line. But amazingly enough, the Massachusetts State Police didn’t seem to have one. On their website I found tip lines for terrorism, arson, fugitives from justice, auto theft, charity scams. Even an Oxycontin tip line. But nothing for plain old murder.

So I called the state trooper whose name was on the online press release. Trooper Sean McAfee, the one who was in charge of investigating the collision, was out of the Concord barracks of the state police. Troop A headquarters. Though I doubted he was doing anything but the most pro forma investigation.

I didn’t want this call tracked back to me, though. The police, I assumed, can trace just about any call these days, including cell phones. If they were going to trace the call, at least they’d get no further than a pay phone in the employee cafeteria of the Entronics building in Framingham.

“This is Sergeant McAfee,” said a rough voice, Southie vowels.

No one was anywhere nearby-this was an alcove off the cafeteria by a service door-but I still didn’t dare speak loudly. Yet I wanted to sound confident, sure of myself. “Sergeant McAfee,” I said in my best cold-calling voice, “you’re investigating a collision that took place last night on I-95 in Waltham? The Porsche?”

Suspicious: “Yeah?”

“I have some information about it.”

“Who’s this?”

I was prepared for that. “I’m a friend of the driver’s.”

“Name?”

My name? Name of the driver? “I’m afraid I can’t give my name.”

“What’s your information?”

“I think something might have been done to the Porsche.”

Long pause. “Why do you think that?”

“Because the driver had an enemy.”

“An enemy. You think someone forced him off the road, that it?”

“No.”

“Then you think someone monkeyed around with the car?”

“That’s what I think.”

“Sir, if you have information that might be material to this investigation, you should do yourself and the deceased a favor and come in to talk to me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I’m happy to come out to Framingham,” he said.

He knew where the call was coming from.

“I can’t meet with you.”

The cop began to sound exasperated. He raised his voice. “Sir, without more information, like a name of this ‘enemy’ you’re talking about, I don’t have enough to work with. The crime scene techs did a whole investigation of the scene last night, the forensic mapping, the whole nine yards. And there’s no tire marks, no skid marks or yaw marks, nothing that tells us anything except the driver drove straight into the guardrail. Far as we’re concerned, it’s a single-car fatal, driver error. Now, if you got something that’ll change our minds, you should give us what you got. Otherwise, forget it.”

I wasn’t expecting the cop to get belligerent on me. I wondered whether he was trying to shame me into cooperating, or whether he really just didn’t give a shit.

“I just think,” I said very quietly, “that you should have your guys look very closely at the car. I’ll bet you find evidence of sabotage.”

“Look closely at the car?” the cop shot back. “Sir, the car was totaled, and then it caught fire. There’s not a hell of a lot left of the car, okay? I doubt anyone’s going to find anything.”

“His name’s Kurt Semko,” I said quickly, and I hung up the phone.

As I walked out of the alcove and back to the cafeteria, I saw Kurt, sitting with a couple of guys from Security. They were talking loudly, and laughing, but Kurt was watching me.

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.

I tried to keep my mind on my presentation and Nakamura-san, not on Kurt’s threats. Or on the police detective who’d left a message. Which, if I allowed myself to think about it, would make me far more nervous than presenting to Nakamura-san.

You’ve got a lot to lose.

You know who I mean.

When I’d arrived home last night, everyone in the house was asleep.

They were all still asleep, naturally, when I left the house at four-thirty in the morning. That was just as well; I might have been tempted to talk to Kate, tell her about Kurt’s threats. Which I most definitely didn’t want to do.

Because I had no doubt that Kurt had somehow rigged Trevor’s car to make it crash.

And I knew he was an extremely dangerous man. Who was no longer my friend.

He’d warned me not to tell anybody my suspicions about Trevor’s car. Not in so many words, but he’d made that clear. He knew I’d tried to get him fired.

No, I couldn’t prove anything, but his threats alone told me he was guilty. Yet what was I supposed to do when the police detective asked me questions about the car crash? Probably the safe thing to do was to say nothing. To tell the detective I knew nothing about it. Strictly speaking, that was true. I had only suspicions. I knew nothing.

Because I didn’t doubt that if I talked to the cops, Kurt would find out.

I’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places.

An hour later I got into the security line. There were other people already in line, probably all flying to San Francisco. Some businessmen and businesswomen, probably going to Silicon Valley via San Francisco because they wanted to arrive earlier than the flights to San Jose. Or maybe they didn’t want to change planes in Phoenix or Atlanta or Houston. Since I travel a lot, I’ve got it down to almost a science-BlackBerry and cell phone in my briefcase, the slip-on shoes with no steel shank, all my metal objects in one pocket for quick removal.

The line moved slowly. Most people in line were half-asleep anyway. I felt like a sheep being herded into the pen. Ever since 9/11, traveling has been a nightmare of taking off shoes and putting stuff on moving belts and getting wanded. There was a time when I loved to travel, but no longer, and it wasn’t just salesman burnout. It was all the security, which didn’t make us any more secure.

I took my laptop out of my briefcase and put it on the conveyor belt, put the briefcase on the belt after it, slipped off my shoes-the lace-up ones were in my overnight bag, since the slip-on ones weren’t dressy enough for Nakamura-san-and put them in the gray Rubbermaid tray. I put my keys and coins in the little coin tray, and shuffled through the metal detector. Passed with flying colors, and smiled at the somber guy standing there. A woman asked me to turn my computer on, which I did.

I padded over to the next portal, one of the new explosives detectors they’d just installed. Stood there while I was hit with a blast of air. An electronic voice told me to move on.

And then, a few seconds later, a high-pitched alarm went off.

One of the TSA security agents grabbed my overnight bag as it emerged from the explosives detector. For some reason, my overnight bag had set off the alarm. Another one took me by the elbow, and said, “Sir, please come with us.”

I was no longer half-awake. The adrenaline had kicked in. “What’s going on?” I said. “There some kind of problem here?”

“This way, sir.”

People in line stared as I was pulled off to the side, behind a tall panel. “Hands in front of you, sir,” one of them said.

I put my hands out. “What is it?” I asked.

No one answered. The other agent passed a metal-detector wand up and down my chest, up the inside of my legs to my crotch and back down the other leg. When he was done, a third guy-a supervisor, I guessed, a thick-necked man with a bad comb-over and oversized glasses, said, “Follow me, sir.”

“I have a flight to catch,” I said.

He led me to a small, harshly lit, glassed-in room. “Sit here, please.”

“Where’s my briefcase?” I said.

He asked for my ticket and boarding pass. He wanted to know what my final destination was, and why I was flying to California and back in one day.

Ah. Maybe it was the one-day trip to California that had aroused suspicion in their pea brains. Or the fact that I’d booked the flight the night before. Something like that.

“Am I on some kind of no-fly list?” I said.

The TSA man didn’t answer.

“Did you pack your bags yourself?” the man asked, not exactly answering my question.

“No, my valet did. Yes, of course I did.”

“Was your suitcase out of your possession at any time?”

“My overnight bag? What do you mean, out of my possession? Here at the airport, this morning? At any time?”

“At any time.”

“I keep it in my office. I travel a lot. Sometimes I leave my office to go home. What’s the problem? Was there something in it?”

He didn’t answer. I looked at my watch. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I said. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the TSA man said. “You’re not going to be on that flight.”

I wondered how often this man got to really bully passengers around, really scare the shit out of them. Less and less often, I figured, as we moved farther and farther away from 9/11, when traveling in the United States was sort of like moving around Albania.

“Look, I have a really important business meeting. With the chairman of the board of my corporation. The Entronics Corporation.” I looked at my watch, remembered that Franny had said only one flight would get me there in time for Nakamura-san’s arrival. “I need my cell phone.”

“Not possible, sir. All the contents of your briefcase are being swabbed and inspected.”

“Swabbed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Swabbed for what?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are you at least going to get me on the next flight out?”

“We don’t have anything to do with the airlines, sir. I would have no idea what other flights there are or when they leave or which flights have availability, if any.”

“Then the least you can do is let me use a phone so I can get myself on the next flight out.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be on the next flight out, sir.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said raising my voice.

“We’re not done with you.”

“You’re not done with me? What is this, East Berlin?”

“Sir, if you don’t keep your voice down, I can have you arrested.”

“Even when you’re arrested you’re allowed one phone call.”

“If you want to be arrested, I’d be happy to arrange that.”

He stood up and walked out. Closed the door behind him. I heard it lock. A National Guardsman, crew-cut and bulky and wearing camouflage fatigues, was now standing guard outside the room. What the hell was this?

Another twenty minutes went by. I’d definitely missed my flight. I wondered if another airline had a flight that would get me there close to eleven. Maybe I could floor it and still get to Santa Clara on time. Or just a little late.

I kept looking at my watch, saw the minutes tick by. Another twenty minutes later, a couple of Boston police officers, a man and a woman, came into the room, showed their badges, and asked to see my ticket and boarding pass.

“What’s the problem, Officers?” I said. Outwardly I was calm, friendly. Reasonable. Inwardly I wanted to rip their faces off.

“Where are you traveling, Mr. Steadman?” the man said.

“Santa Clara. I just went through all this with the TSA guy.”

“A one-day trip to California?” said the woman.

“My wife’s pregnant,” I said. “I wanted to get back home so she’s not left alone. She’s confined to bed. A high-risk pregnancy.”

Get it? I wanted to say. Corporate executive, family man, married, wife pregnant. Not exactly the standard profile of an al-Qaeda terrorist.

“Mr. Steadman,” the woman said, “your suitcase tested positive for the presence of C-4. Plastic explosives.”

“What? That’s obviously a mistake. Your machine’s screwed up.”

“No, sir,” the male officer said. “The screeners confirmed it by running another test. They took a swab and wiped down the portfolio and ran it through another machine, and that came up positive, too.”

“Well, it’s a false positive,” I said. “I’ve never touched C-4 in my life. You might want to think about getting your machines checked out.”

“They’re not our machines,” the woman said.

“Right. Well, I’m a senior vice president at a major corporation. I’m flying to Santa Clara for a meeting with the chairman of the board. At least I was. You can check all that out. One simple phone call, and you’ll be able to confirm what I’m saying. Why don’t you do that right now?”

The cops remained stony-faced.

“I think we all know there’s been some kind of a mistake. I’ve read about how those three-million-dollar machines can be set off by the particles in stuff like dry cleaning fluid and hand cream and fertilizers.”

“Are you carrying any fertilizer?”

“Does my PowerPoint presentation count?”

She glowered at me.

“You get my point. Machines make mistakes. Now, can we all be reasonable here? You have my name and my address and phone number. If you need to reach me for anything, you know where I live. I own a house in Cambridge. With a pregnant wife and a mortgage.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, sounding like he was concluding the interview. They both got up and left me there to cool my heels for another half an hour or so before the TSA supervisor with the comb-over came in and told me I was free to go.

It was just after eight in the morning. I ran to the departure gate and found a U.S. Airways agent and asked her when the next flight to San Francisco was. Or San Jose. Or Oakland.

There was an American Airlines flight at 9:10, she said. Arriving at 12:23. I could be in Santa Clara at 1:00. When the extremely punctual, and very pissed off, Nakamura-san would be sitting in first class on his way to Tokyo.

I called Dick Hardy. In California it was a little after five in the morning, and I knew he wouldn’t appreciate being awakened at home.

“Steadman,” he said, his voice thick.

“Very sorry to wake you, sir,” I said. “But I’m not on the flight to San Francisco. I was detained for questioning. Some sort of huge screwup.”

“Well, get on the next one, for God’s sake.”

“The next one gets me in at 12:23.”

“Twelve twenty-three? That’s too late. Nakamura-san will be long gone. Got to be an earlier flight. He’s arriving at eleven o’clock promptly.”

“I know. I know. But there’s nothing else.”

Now he was fully awake. “You’re standing up Hideo Nakamura?”

“I don’t know what else to do. Unless you can reschedule him-”

“Reschedule Nakamura-san? After the way I twisted his arm to get him here for one goddamned hour?”

“Sir, I’m terribly sorry. But all these ridiculous terrorist precautions-”

“Goddamn you, Steadman,” he said, and he hung up.

I walked back to the parking garage, dazed. I’d just blown off my boss and the chairman of the board.

It was unreal, an out-of-body experience.

I kept flashing on the TSA supervisor with the stupid comb-over.

“Did you pack your bags yourself?”

And: “Was your suitcase out of your possession at any time?”

Was it out of my possession at any time?

Franny saying, “Kurt was here.”

“Oh?”

“Put something on your desk.”

He knew I was flying to Santa Clara, and he’d been in my office recently, rigging up my briefcase with his little toy confetti bomb. I kept my overnight bag in my office closet.

He’d set me up.

The way he’d set the other guys up. Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason were dead.

And now Kurt had turned on me.

50

My day’s appointments had been canceled, so I drove straight home, steaming mad. Kate was surprised to see me at home. She seemed somber, depressed, remote. She told me that her sister had taken Ethan to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at the mummies, and I gave her the short version of how airport security had detained me for almost two hours on a bogus suspicion that I was carrying a bomb.

She was barely listening, and normally this was the sort of thing that really got her going. Normally she’d be listening with eyes flashing, indignant along with me, saying things like, “Oh, you’re kidding,” and “Those bastards.”

Instead she made little pro forma clucks of sympathy, her mind somewhere else far away. She looked haggard. Her eyes were bloodshot. While I was telling her how Dick Hardy had basically exploded, she cut me off. “You must be so unhappy with me.”

“Now what?” I said. “What in the world makes you say that?”

Her eyebrows knit together. Her face crumpled. Her eyes got all squinty, and her tears began flowing. “I sit here all day like-like an invalid-and I just know how sexually-frustrated you must be.”

“Kate,” I said, “where’s all this coming from? You’re pregnant. High-risk pregnancy. We both understand that. We’re in this together.”

She was crying even harder. She could barely speak. “You’re a senior vice president now. A big shot.” Her words came in ragged clumps, between gasps. “Women are probably coming on to you all the time.”

I leaned over next to her, took her head in my hands, stroked her hair. The pregnancy, the crazy hormones, all this time in bed. She was going out of her mind. “Not even in my wet dreams,” I tried to joke. “Don’t worry about it.”

But she reached over to her nightstand and picked something up, held it out to me without looking.

“Why, Jason? How could you?”

I looked. It was a condom, still in its packet. A Durex condom.

“That’s not mine,” I said.

She shook her head slowly. “It was in your suit jacket.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You dropped your suit on the bed this morning when you were packing. And when I got up, I felt something in one of your pockets.” Her breathing was uneven. “And I-you-oh, God, I can’t believe you.”

“Baby, it’s not mine.”

She twisted her head to look up at me. Her face was all red and blotchy. “Please don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me you’re carrying someone else’s condom around.”

“I didn’t put it there, Kate. Believe me. It’s not mine.”

She bowed her head. Pushed my hands away. “How can you do this?” she said. “How can you do this?”

Furious now, I grabbed my BlackBerry from my suitcoat pocket and hurled it toward her. It landed on the pillow next to her head. “There you go,” I shouted. “That’s my personal scheduler. Go ahead, look through it. Maybe you can figure out when the hell I’d even have time to have an affair, huh? Huh?”

She stared at me, taken aback.

“Let’s see,” I said. “Ah, yes. How about sneaking in some quickie nookie between my eight forty-five supply-chain management call and the nine o’clock long-term-strategy staff meeting? Slip in a little horizontal mamba between the ten o’clock end of the staff meeting and the ten-fifteen sales call with Detwiler? Some coochie in the two minutes between the meeting with the systems integrators at the Briefing Center and the forecast review session?”

“Jason.”

“Or maybe a minute and a half of the funky monkey between the eleven forty-five cross-functional concall and the twelve-fifteen meeting with the order admin, then a quick game of hide-the-salami in the fifteen seconds I have to get to a lunch meeting with the district managers? Kate, do you realize how insane this is? Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I don’t have a goddamned free second! And for you to accuse me of something like this just pisses me off. I can’t believe it.”

“He told me, you know. He told me he was worried for us.”

“Who?”

“Kurt. He said-said he probably shouldn’t say anything-wasn’t his business, he said-but he wondered if maybe you were having an affair.” Her words were muffled, and I had to listen hard to understand.

“Kurt,” I said. “Kurt said this. When did he say this to you?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago.”

“Don’t you understand what he’s doing? That just fits right in to the pattern of everything else.”

She glanced at me, shaking her head, a disgusted look on her face. “This isn’t about Kurt, whatever his flaws,” she said. “We have bigger problems than Kurt.”

“No, Kate. You don’t know about Kurt. You don’t know what he did.”

“You told me.”

“No,” I said. “There’s more.”

I told her everything now.

Her disbelief slowly melted. Maybe it’s more accurate to say it turned into disbelief of another kind.

“Are you leaving anything out?”

“Nothing.”

“Jason, you’ve got to talk to the police. No anonymous calls. Openly. You have nothing to hide. Tell them everything you know. Tell them what you told me.”

“He’ll find out.”

“Come on, Jason.”

“He knows people all over the place. In the state police, everywhere. He’ll find out. He’s got everything wired.” I paused. “And-he threatened me. He said he’ll do something to you.”

“He wouldn’t. He likes me.”

“We were friends, too, him and me-remember? But he’s totally ruthless. He’ll do anything to protect himself.”

“That’s why you’ve got to stop him. You can do it. I know you can. Because you have to.”

We were both quiet for a few seconds. She looked at me. “Do you hear a funny sound?”

I smiled. “No.”

“It sounds like a…maraca. Not right now, but I keep hearing something.”

“I don’t hear anything. Bathroom fan, maybe?”

“The bathroom fan’s not on. Maybe I’m losing my mind. But I want you to call the police. He’s got to be arrested.”

I fried some eggs, toasted an English muffin, brought a breakfast tray up to her. Then I went to my study and called Franny and filled her in.

“The detective called again,” she said. “Sergeant Kenyon. He asked for your cell number, but I wouldn’t give it to him. You’d better call him back.”

“I will.”

As I spoke, I was tapping away on my laptop. I pulled up that Special Forces website I’d bookmarked and went to the “Guestbook” where Trevor had posted his question about Kurt. No other replies had gone up.

“I’ll be in soon,” I told Franny, and hung up.

I signed on to AOL, the account I hardly ever used. Six e-mails in the in-box. Five of them were spam.

One was from a Hotmail address. Scolaro. The guy who’d replied to Trevor, said he knew something about Kurt.

I opened it.

I don’t know this guy Semko personally. One of my SF brothers does and I asked him. He said Semko got a DD for fragging a team member.

DD, I remembered, meant “dishonorable discharge.” I hit reply and typed:

Thanks.

Where can I get proof of his DD?

I hit SEND, and was about to sign off, when the little blue AOL triangle started bouncing. New mail.

It was from Scolaro.

If he got DD he was court-martialed. Army court documents are public record. Go to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals website. They’re all available online.

Quickly I typed a reply:

What’s your tel #? I’d like to give you a call.

I waited a minute. E-mail is strange-sometimes it goes through in a couple of seconds; other times the big pipeline, wherever it is, gets clogged, and mail won’t get through for an hour.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to answer.

While I waited, I did a Google search for the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. The browser cranked and cranked and eventually popped up with a warning box.

Access Restricted to Military Active Duty, Reserve or Veterans. Please enter valid military ID or Veterans Identification card number.

I couldn’t get in.

I sat there for a few moments, thinking. Who did I know who might have a military ID number?

I picked up the phone and called Cal Taylor. “Cal,” I said, “it’s Jason Steadman.”

A long, long silence. A TV blared in the background, some game show. “Yeah,” he said at last.

“I need your help,” I said.

“You’re kidding me.”

I entered Cal’s ID number, and the website opened.

I scanned it. I didn’t know what that guy Scolaro was talking about. I didn’t see any court documents. On the menu bar on the left, one of the items was “Published Army Opinions,” and I clicked on “By Name.”

A list came right up. Each line began with a last name. Then ARMY and a seven- or eight-digit number-a court case number, maybe?-and the “United States v.” and the rank and name of a soldier. Staff Sergeant Smith or Colonel Jones or whatever.

The names were listed in alphabetical order. I scrolled down, so fast that the list became a blur, then slowed down a bit.

And came to SEMKO.

“United States vs. Sergeant KURT L. SEMKO.”

My heart raced.

The blue AOL triangle was bouncing. Another e-mail from Scolaro. I double-clicked on it.

No way. Not talking about Semko. Said too much already. I got a wife and kids. Sorry. You’re on your own.

I heard Kate’s voice from down the hall. “Jason, there’s that maraca sound again.”

“Okay,” I yelled back. “Be there in a minute.”

A PDF document opened.

UNITED STATES ARMY COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS UNITED STATES, Appellee

v.

Sergeant First Class KURT M. SEMKO

United States Army Special Forces, Appellant

A lot of names and numbers and legalese. Then:

A general court-martial composed of officer and enlisted members convicted appellant, contrary to his pleas, of signing a false official document with intent to deceive (three specifications), one specification of false swearing, and three specifications of obstruction of justice. Appellant pled not guilty to and was acquitted of premeditated murder…

I skimmed it quickly. Kurt had been charged with the murder of a fellow soldier-a “fragging,” they called it-named Sergeant First Class James F. Donadio. Donadio was described as “formerly a close friend of the appellant.” A “protégé,” some of Kurt’s teammates testified. Until Donadio had reported to their captain that Kurt had been stealing war trophies-“retained illegal weapons”-which was against regulations.

Then Kurt had turned on his former protégé. It was all there, under “Background and Facts.” Donadio had found a cartridge jammed into the barrel of his M4 rifle. The weapon would have blown up if he hadn’t noticed it. Then a “flash-bang” grenade, normally used to clear a room, had been rigged up to Donadio’s bed so it exploded one night. Flash-bang grenades made a loud explosion but caused no injuries.

Another time, a jumpmaster noticed that Donadio’s static-line parachute had been sabotaged. If he hadn’t realized that the pack closing loop had been switched with another line, Donadio would have been badly hurt.

Pranks, I guess you’d say.

Kurt was suspected of all these acts, but there was no evidence. Then one morning, Donadio had opened the door to the Ground Mobility Vehicle he always drove and maintained, and an M-67 fragmentation grenade exploded.

Donadio was killed. No grenade was found to be missing from Kurt’s gear, but one was missing from the team’s general weapons locker. Everyone on the team had the combination.

All but one of the twelve team members testified against Kurt. But again, the evidence was lacking. The defense argued that Kurt Semko was a highly decorated, much-lauded soldier of documented bravery in combat. He’d won three Purple Hearts.

Kurt was found not guilty of premeditated murder, but found guilty of making false statements to the criminal investigator. He was given a dishonorable discharge but not sentenced to any time.

So that story he’d told about confronting his commanding officer over a “suicide mission” that killed Jimmy Donadio-he’d made it up. The truth was simpler. He’d fragged a protégé who’d turned against him.

The words on the laptop began to swim. I felt a little light-headed.

“Jason,” Kate called out.

I was stunned but not surprised. It all made perfect sense

But this was exactly what I needed. The state police would see who they were dealing with. There’d be no doubt that Kurt was capable of disabling Trevor’s car, killing him and Gleason. No doubt at all.

I hit PRINT. Printed five copies.

Then went down the hall to the bedroom to see what Kate wanted. As I neared the bedroom, Kate began screaming.

51

I ran into the bedroom.

Kate was cowering on the bed, screaming, her hands flailing in the air, gesturing toward the bathroom.

I turned my gaze to the bathroom and saw it.

Undulating, slithering along the baseboard, moving slowly from the bathroom to the bedroom. It must have been six feet long and as thick as my arm. Its scales were large and coarse, yet intricately patterned: black and beige and brown and white with a white diamond pattern. It was rattling and hissing.

I’d never seen a rattlesnake outside the movies, but I knew right away what it was.

Kate screamed.

“It’s a rattlesnake,” I said.

“Oh, God, Jason, you have to kill it,” she shouted. “Get a shovel or something.”

“That’s when they bite you. When you try to kill them.”

“Get it out of here! Oh, my God!”

“I don’t want to go near the thing,” I said. I was maybe twenty feet away. Frozen in place, right where I stood. “When these guys strike, they can move like a hundred, two hundred miles an hour or something.”

“Jason, kill it!”

“Kate,” I said. “Quiet. Keep your voice down.” The snake had stopped slithering and had begun to double back on itself, forming a loose coil. “Shit. That’s what they do when they strike.” I backed away slowly.

Kate was pulling the sheets and blankets up over her head. “Get-it-out of here!” she screamed from under the bedclothes, her voice muffled.

“Kate, shut up!”

The snake was rearing up now, its wide head moving slowly back and forth, two or three feet in the air, exposing a gray belly. It was flicking a long, forked black tongue and rattling its tail. It sounded like an old bathroom ventilation fan, getting faster, louder.

“Don’t make a sound,” I said. “It’s scared. When they’re scared, they attack.”

“It’s scared? It’s scared?”

“Quiet. Now, I want you to get out of bed.”

“No!”

“Come on. Out of bed. Quietly. I want you to get out of here, down to my study, and I’ll call someone.”

“Who?”

“Well,” I said. “Not Kurt.”

From my study I called a company called AAAA Animal Control and Removal Service. A professorial-looking guy showed up half an hour later, carrying a long pair of broad-jawed tongs, a pair of elbow-length gloves, and a flat white cardboard carton, open at both ends, that said SNAKE GUARD on it. When he entered our bedroom, he let out a low whistle.

“Don’t see many of those critters around here,” he said.

“It’s a rattlesnake, isn’t it?” I said.

“Eastern Diamondback. Big mother, too. You see these guys in Florida and North Carolina. Sometimes Louisiana. Not in Massachusetts, though.”

“How’d it get here then?” I asked.

“Who the heck knows? I know people buy exotic snakes over the Internet nowadays. VenomousReptiles.com, places like that.”

The snake had gone back to slithering along the bedroom carpet and was approaching the TV.

“Looking for a place to hide,” the animal control guy said. He watched for a minute longer, and then put on the long red gloves and got about ten feet away from the snake before he put down the cardboard box, right up against the wall, and pushed it closer to the snake with the long blue aluminum tongs.

“They like the close spaces. Looking for shelter. Coupla drops of snake lure inside, but I doubt we need it. Belt and suspenders, I figure. Critter gets stuck on the glue inside.”

I watched as the rattlesnake, sure enough, began undulating slowly toward the box, stopped curiously just before it, then poked its head inside one end.

“Man,” the animal guy said, “I saw one of these back in Florida when I was a kid. But never up here. Never. Watch him.”

It was slithering into the box.

“Good thing you didn’t get too close. This fella bites you, you’re gonna die. Most dangerous snake in North America. Largest rattlesnake in the world, matter of fact.”

Then Kate’s voice: “What are you going to do with it?” She was standing at the threshold to the bedroom, a blanket wrapped around her like a cape.

The white box began to move. Shake back and forth. More than half the snake’s body was still outside the trap, and it began whipping back and forth, trying to free itself. It wriggled farther into the trap, and now most of the thing seemed to be stuck.

“What are we going to do with it?” the animal guy said. “Legally, I’m supposed to tell you we dispose of it humanely.”

“And in reality?” Kate said.

“Depends on whose definition of humane. Ours, or the snake’s. We got the critter, that’s the main thing.” He walked right up to the white box and picked it up. “Boy, you just never see Eastern Diamondbacks around here. Fact, I can’t remember the last time I even saw a venomous snake in this town. Gotta wonder how the heck it got in here.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, heavy on the sarcasm. “Gotta wonder.”

She got back into bed, but only after I’d checked the bedroom and the bathroom, even lifted the lid to the toilet tank.

Then she read over the court-martial record that I’d printed out.

“Is this enough to get Kurt arrested?”

“I doubt it. But it’ll help. It’s obviously enough to get him fired, but that’s only the first step. A half measure. And what do I do until then? Until I can convince the police to arrest him?”

She nodded. “He’s totally charming and seductive. He likes to feel superior. Narcissists like that, they need to be adored. They crave it. They’re like drug addicts. He needs your adulation.”

“The way he got yours, let me remind you.”

“We were both taken in.”

“Well, that’s over, and he knows it. It’s all out in the open between us now. He knows how I feel.”

“Well, turn the tap back on. The adulation. This is what you’re good at. Sell him. Let him think there’s more hero worship in the tank, that you’ve got an endless supply.”

“Why?”

“To neutralize him. Until you get the cops in to arrest him.”

“You make it sound easy,” I said. “It’s not going to be easy at all.”

“Do you have a choice?” she said.

I headed right to Corporate Security to look for Scanlon.

I was mad, and in a hurry, and I didn’t have my badge out, so I used the biometric fingerprint reader to get in.

I remembered Kurt’s threat: “…Everything you do, I’m watching. Everywhere you go. Every call you make. It’s like that Police song, right?”

As the fingerprint reader beeped to admit me, I suddenly realized how Kurt always knew where I went in the building, and it was so obvious I felt like a moron. My access badge, the fingerprint reader-every time I accessed another part of the building, he probably knew right away.

I found the door with the plaque that said DIRECTOR OF CORPORATE SECURITY. It was closed. I walked up, grabbed the knob, but I was stopped by Scanlon’s secretary, who was sitting at a desk perpendicular to the door.

“He’s on the phone,” the secretary said.

“Good,” I said, and I turned the knob and barged right into Scanlon’s office. Against the sun streaming in from the glass, the security director was only a silhouette. He was on the phone, looking out the window.

“Hey,” I said. In one hand I held a printout of Kurt’s court-martial record.

He swiveled around slowly. “You’re looking for the director?” Kurt said, putting the phone down.

I stared in shock.

“Scanlon opted for early retirement,” Kurt said. “I’m the new Director of Corporate Security. Can I help you?”

When I got to my office, I saw a man sitting at the empty cubicle near Franny’s cube that I used as a waiting room for my visitors. He was a black man, maybe fifty, with small ears and a large bullet head. He wore khaki dress slacks and a blue blazer, a blue shirt and solid navy blue tie.

“Jason,” Franny said, turning around in her chair.

“Mr. Steadman,” said the man, rising quickly. I noticed a pair of handcuffs on his belt, and a gun. “Sergeant Ray Kenyon, Massachusetts State Police. You’re a hard one to reach.”

52

He wanted to talk in my office, but I led him instead to an empty conference room.

“I’m investigating a collision involving two of your employees, Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason.”

I nodded. “A terrible tragedy. They were both friends of mine. Anything I can do to help.”

He smiled. His skin was very dark, and his teeth were incredibly white. Up close he might have been in his midforties. Hard to tell. His head was a cue ball, so shiny it looked waxed. He spoke slowly, like he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I could see that his eyes missed nothing.

“How well did you know these two men, Mr. Allard and Mr. Gleason?”

“Fairly well. They worked for me. I can’t say they were close friends, but I saw them every day.”

“You all got along?”

“Sure.”

“There was no animosity between and among you all?”

“Animosity?” I wondered who he’d talked to, what he knew about how I’d come to really dislike those two. Had I sent Trevor or Gleason any hostile e-mails? Not my kind of thing, usually-if I wanted to chew either one of them out, I did it in person. Fortunately. “Sergeant Kenyon, I don’t get why you’re asking all these questions. I thought Trevor and Brett died in a car crash.”

“They did. We want to find out why that happened.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t just an accident?”

He peered at me for a few seconds. “What do you think?”

I stared right back, but squinted as if I didn’t quite understand.

I knew that whatever I said next would change everything.

If I said I had no suspicions about the crash-well, what if he somehow knew I’d made that damned “anonymous” call? If so, then he knew I was lying.

But how could anyone prove it had been me who’d used the pay phone next to the cafeteria, and not someone else in the company?

Obviously I wanted the police to investigate the crash-but for me to accuse Kurt openly…Well, there was no putting that toothpaste back in the tube. Kurt would find out.

“I’ve wondered about it,” I said. “How it could have happened, you know? Was there something done to Trevor’s car?”

“That’s not my department. That’s Accident Recon. The CARS unit. Collision Analysis and Reconstruction. They’re the experts on all the mechanical stuff. I just do the background investigation. Help them out.”

“They must have found something,” I said. “If you’re here.”

“Well, now,” he said, and I thought he looked pretty darned evasive, “we work separately, understand. They look at the brake lines and such, and I look at the people.”

“So you’re talking to Trevor’s and Brett’s friends and acquaintances.”

“And coworkers. Which brings me back to my question. Which you didn’t answer. Whether there was any tension, any bad feeling, between you and them.”

I shook my head. “Not that I can recall.”

A ghost of a smile. “There was, or there wasn’t?”

“There wasn’t,” I said.

He nodded for what must have been half a minute, exhaling loudly through his nostrils. “Mr. Steadman, I don’t have any reason to dispute what you’re saying. I’m just trying to make all the pieces fit, you know? But what you’re saying, it doesn’t quite dovetail with this.”

He pulled out of his pocket a folded piece of white paper. He unfolded it, put it on the conference table in front of me. The paper looked like it had been folded and refolded dozens of time. It was a photocopy of an e-mail.

From me to Trevor. Dated about a week ago.

I won’t put up with your disrespect & your undermining of me anymore. There are ways to get rid of you that don’t involve HR.

“That’s not me,” I said. “It doesn’t even sound like me.”

“No?”

“I’d never make a threat like that. That’s ridiculous. And I’d sure never put it in an e-mail.”

“You wouldn’t want a record out there, that it?”

I closed my eyes in frustration. “I didn’t write it. Look I-”

“Mr. Steadman, have you ever been in Mr. Allard’s car?”

I shook my head.

“Did he have a regular parking spot here, at work?”

“Not an assigned spot.”

“You’ve never touched his car? I mean, placed your hands on it at any point?”

“Place my hands on it? I mean, theoretically, it’s possible, but I don’t recall ever even touching his car. It’s a Porsche, and he’s pretty fussy about it. Was, I mean.”

“What about his home? Have you been there?”

“No, never. He never invited me over. We weren’t really personal friends.”

“Yet you knew them ‘fairly well,’ you said.”

“Yes. But I also said we weren’t close friends.”

“You know where he lives?”

“I know he lives-lived-in Wellesley. But I’ve never been to his house.”

“I see. And his home garage-connected to his house. Were you ever there?”

“No. I just told you, I’ve never been to his house.”

He nodded. Kenyon appeared to be thinking. “So I’m just wondering, you know, why your fingerprints might have been found in his garage.”

“My fingerprints? That’s impossible.”

“Your right index finger, anyway. Doesn’t seem to be any doubt about that.”

“Come on,” I said. “You don’t even have my fingerprints to compare them against.”

He looked puzzled. “You didn’t give the print of your index finger to your Corporate Security department? For the new biometric reader?”

“Yes. Right. I forgot. I did-we all did. Our forefinger or our thumb. But I never went to Trevor Allard’s house or garage.”

His eyes watched me steadily. They were large and a little bloodshot, I noticed. “See, the problem with fingerprints,” he said quietly, “is that they don’t lie.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as maybe a little too convenient?”

“What’s too convenient, Mr. Steadman?”

“The one fingerprint you found in Trevor’s garage is my right index finger, right? Which is the one print that Corporate Security has in their biometric reader?”

“So?”

“So you tell me-aren’t there ways to copy and transfer a fingerprint? You guys believe in coincidence?”

“Coincidence?”

“What do you have? A print from one single finger that happens to be the same as the one print I gave Corporate Security. An e-mail I didn’t write-”

“There’s all kinds of headers and paths and directories on every e-mail, Mr. Steadman-”

“Which can be forged,” I said.

“Not so easily.”

“It’s easy if you work in Corporate Security.”

That shut him up for a second. “See,” I said, “we have an employee who’s done this sort of thing before.”

“In Corporate Security?”

I swallowed. Nodded. I leaned forward, my eyes on his. “I want to show you a document,” I said. “That should give you a sense of who we’re dealing with.”

I handed him the court-martial printout. He read through it. He took a lot of notes in his spiral-bound notebook.

And when he’d finished, he said, “Jesus Christ, your company hired this guy?”

I nodded.

“Don’t you do background checks?”

“It’s my fault,” I said.

“You didn’t hire the guy, did you? Corporate Security hired this wack job, right?”

“Because I vouched for him. I didn’t know him well at the time.”

He shook his head, looking disgusted. But I could tell that he was looking at me differently. Something in him had shifted. He seemed to be taking me seriously now.

“This guy Semko,” he said. “What kind of reason would he have to set you up?”

“It’s a long story. Complicated. He and I were friends. I brought him into the company. He has a military background, and he’s pretty smart.”

Kenyon’s expression had grown very still. He was watching me closely. “You’re friends,” he said.

“We were,” I said. “He did some things to help me out. Some things he shouldn’t have done.”

“Like?”

“Underhanded things. But…Look, Detective-”

“Sergeant Kenyon.”

“Sergeant. He’s already threatened me. He told me if I said anything to the cops, he’d kill my wife.”

Kenyon raised his eyebrows. “Did he?”

“If he finds out that I talked to you-I know him. He’ll carry out his threat. He’ll make it look like an accident. He knows lots of clever ways to kill people.”

“You’re talking to me now.”

“I have to trust you. Can I?”

“Trust me how?”

“Not to tell anyone else in the state police that I’ve spoken with you.”

“I can’t promise you that.”

“What?”

“I’m not a priest, Mr. Steadman. This isn’t a confessional. I’m a cop. If you committed a crime-”

“I didn’t commit a crime.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about. I’m also not a reporter for the Globe. I don’t plan to publish an exposé. Point is, I don’t want to give you assurances I can’t keep.”

“He knows people in the state police. A lot of people. He has contacts who tell him what’s going on.”

Kenyon smiled cryptically, nodded.

“What?” I said. “You look skeptical.”

“No. In fact, I’m not skeptical. I’m not going to lie to you. I’d like to tell you that kind of thing can’t happen, but the truth is-well, I can believe it. We leak like a sieve. Military guys like your friend here, sometimes they know a lot of people on the force.”

“Great,” I said darkly. “If he finds out I’ve even talked to you, he’ll do something to my wife. He works in Corporate Security-he knows the names of everyone who comes and goes here. You probably signed in at the front desk, right? You wrote Mass. State Police, and your name, right? To see Jason Steadman?”

“It’s not like that. I’m here to talk to a lot of people.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to need to get specifics from you. Like some of the ‘underhanded things’ this Semko person did. Were any of them targeted at Allard or Gleason?”

I felt a pulse of relief. “Absolutely.”

He turned a page of his notebook. He asked me questions. I talked, and he took a lot of notes.

“Maybe we can help each other,” he said. He handed me his card. He wrote down another number on the back. “My direct line, and my cell. If you call me at the DA’s office, sometimes my partner, Sanchez, answers my line. You can trust him.”

I shook my head. “If I call you, I don’t want to leave my name. How about if I use a fake name. I’ll use-” I thought a moment. “Josh Gibson.”

His big white smile took over his face. “Josh Gibson? You’re thinking the Josh Gibson? Negro Leagues?”

“One of the greatest power hitters of all time,” I said.

“I’ll remember,” Kenyon said.

53

I had a lunch presentation to one of our dealers and Rick Festino, trying to save a deal he was losing. I hadn’t been on my game-I was too distracted by Sergeant Kenyon-and I probably shouldn’t have gone.

Right after lunch, instead of returning to the office, I drove to a Starbucks a few miles from the Entronics building. I ordered a large cappuccino-I refuse to use the bogus Starbucks language like “venti” and “grande”-and found a comfortable chair in a corner and plugged in my laptop. I bought a month’s worth of wireless Internet access, and a few minutes later I’d set up several e-mail addresses.

I had no doubt that Kurt could pretty much find out anything I did online while I was at the office. But it wouldn’t be easy for him to discover this Internet account, and even if he did, it would take him a while. And at the rate things were happening now, I didn’t need more than a couple of days.

Man, you don’t know what a pawn you are, Kurt had said.

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.

Did that mean that the MegaTower had been planning all along to shut down my division? Had that already been decided? If it had-then why had Dick Hardy been pressuring us so hard to perform, to sign up new business?

I didn’t get it. What was the logic? Entronics was a few weeks away from closing a massive deal to acquire Royal Meister’s U.S. plasma-and-LCD business. Why the hell would anyone in Tokyo care about how their own U.S. business unit did if they were about to close it down?

What piece of the puzzle was I missing?

The answers probably lay in the confidential Entronics strategic-planning documents that concerned the acquisition of the Meister unit and their plans going forward. Most of these documents were probably in Japanese and stored in some inaccessible, compartmented corporate intranet.

But there were other ways.

Like the consulting firm of McKinsey and the merger integration team that had recently been prowling the halls.

I didn’t know any of them, but I did know some of their names. And after some quick research on their website, I found the name of the most senior partner on the Entronics account. And then I found the name and e-mail of his executive assistant.

Then, Dick Hardy sent her an e-mail. He used his Hushmail account.

Well, actually, the e-mail came from rhardy@hushmail.com.

An account I’d set up. Dick Hardy was e-mailing from his yacht, see. He’d misplaced the latest draft of the merger integration report, and he needed a copy e-mailed to him at once. To this private address, of course.

I finished my cappuccino and got another coffee, black, and while I waited for McKinsey’s reply, I went back to the Army Court of Appeals website and found Kurt’s court-martial record. I remembered that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had done a report on the fragging, in the course of which their investigator had interviewed everyone else on Kurt’s Special Forces team.

Everyone on the team but one had told the CID interviewer that they thought Kurt had done the murder. I wrote down the full names of each of the team members. His only defender was named Jeremiah Willkie.

I remembered the night I’d met Kurt, when he took me to that auto-body shop owned by a friend and SF buddy of his. He’d asked after the owner, whose name was Jeremiah.

Not too many Jeremiahs in the Special Forces, I figured.

Willkie Auto Body had repaired my Acura. That was the place where Kurt mentioned he kept a storage unit for his tools and such.

I did a quick Google search under Willkie Auto Body and pulled up an interesting fact. Willkie Auto Body was listed as the owner of a towing company called M.E. Walsh Tow. That was the towing company Kurt used to work for, I remembered. He said it was owned by a buddy of his.

Then I began to plug into Google the names of the other members of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 561. Some of the names, even with middle initials, came up in different locations around the country. That just meant I hadn’t narrowed them down enough. Was James W. Kelly now a software developer in Cambridge, England? I didn’t think so. An accordionist and composer? A surgeon? A professor of oceanography and meteorology? A full-time blogger?

But a few names were unusual enough for me to be certain I had the right man, and of those, a few even had biographies online. One was a fireman in a small town in Connecticut. Another worked for a security firm in Cincinnati. Another taught military history at a community college in upstate New York.

I found the e-mail addresses of the last two easily. I sipped some more of my coffee, trying to kick my brain into higher gear. I figured they disliked Kurt, since they’d both been called as witnesses at Kurt’s court-martial and had testified against him. So I wrote to each of them. Using a third e-mail address, with a fake name, I told them that Kurt Semko had moved in next door and was spending a lot of time with my teenaged daughter, and I wanted to make a discreet inquiry into whether it was true he’d fragged a fellow officer in Iraq.

One of them, the one who worked for the security firm, answered right back.

“Kurt Semko is a discredit to the Special Forces,” he wrote. “He’s a dangerous and unbalanced man. If it were my daughter, I’d keep her away from Semko. No, I’d probably move.”

I thanked him and asked him to give me specifics about what Kurt had done.

I waited, but there was no reply.

Then I checked Dick Hardy’s Hushmail account. The executive assistant from McKinsey had replied, with an attachment containing the merger integration team report. I downloaded it.

The McKinsey report went on forever, but everything was in the executive summary up front.

And it was all there.

They weren’t evaluating Dallas versus Framingham. They weren’t trying to decide which unit got shuttered and which survived.

It was a business case for closing the Framingham office and an action plan for how to do it.

The whole bake-off thing that Gordy and Hardy had talked about-it was a ruse. The McKinsey report never even mentioned it.

We’d all been hoodwinked.

But why?

Why the bake-off? Why pit Framingham against Dallas? Why crack the whip so hard?

One of the appendices to the McKinsey report was the confidential term sheet for the Entronics-Meister acquisition. All the secret details were there. Maybe the answer was in the term sheet.

If you knew how to read it.

I didn’t, but I knew someone who did.

Fifteen minutes later, Festino entered Starbucks, looked around, and found me in my comfortable chair in the back corner.

“You didn’t invite me here for an Iced Caramel Macchiato, I assume,” he said grumpily.

“Go ahead and get one,” I said. “On your nickel.”

“Yes, boss. Hey, thanks for lunch, by the way. We landed the deal.”

“Good to hear,” I said, although I really didn’t care at that moment.

He returned after a few minutes with his drink, then pulled up a chair next to mine. “Jesus, will you look at this seat cushion? Can you imagine how many filthy asses have been on it?” He inspected it suspiciously and sat down slowly, reluctantly. “So what’s this?”

I told him about the fraudulent bake-off.

His mouth came open, and his face reddened. “Those bastards. The whole thing was a cruel hoax?”

“So it appears.”

“So in a month I’m going to be standing over a Frialator in the back of some McDonald’s? They couldn’t have told me this in June, when McDonald’s was hiring? Hand me your laptop.” He squinted at the screen for a moment. “How’d you get this?”

“I think they call it ‘social engineering.’”

“From the ghoul squad themselves?”

“The merger integration team? Sort of.”

“Hey, this is the term sheet for the Meister deal. Coolio.”

“Yep.”

“This is supposed to be under lock and key. Double-secret probation. You really do know how to get stuff, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

He was silent a while longer. Then he started muttering words like “consideration” and “exchange ratio” and “closing price,” and he said, “Man, this is some complex deal. But the boot’s less than twenty percent. That’s standard.”

“The boot?”

“Cash. Investment banker talk. And there’s a soft collar in the deal.”

“Now it’s a collar?”

“See, if the price of Entronics stock goes down by closing date, they have to pay Meister more. If Entronics stock goes up, they pay less. A lot less, it looks like. Okay, now…I have a theory. Let me…” He was on the Internet, searching. “Yes. Here we go. Look at this-since the day the Meister deal was announced, Hardy’s given exactly three interviews. In Japanese.”

“In Japanese?”

“I mean, to Japanese newspapers. One in English, to the Japan Times. One to Asahi Shimbun. Another one to Nihon Keizai Shinbun. All of them upbeat, bragging about how Entronics U.S. business in flat-screens is taking off.”

“So?”

“Why do you think he only talked to Japanese journalists?”

“That’s simple. Entronics is a Japanese company. He figured his bosses would read the interviews and be impressed.”

“Come on, Jason. His bosses knew the numbers before Nihon Keizai Shinbun did. See, when you’re going through a merger or acquisition, the SEC’s always on your ass about talking to the press. But they can’t stop you from talking to foreign journalists in foreign countries. And who reads Japanese newspapers? In addition to Japanese-speakers?”

“I’m not following you.”

“The Japanese offices of some of the biggest American hedge funds, okay? They pick up a morsel of news about Entronics, figuring they got a jump on the rest of the world, and they start buying. Next thing, the program traders kick in. Pretty soon Entronics stock starts jumping.”

“So Dick Hardy was helping Entronics save a bundle on the Meister deal.”

“Exactly.”

“So he lights a fire under us, gets us to sign deals all over the place so we can save our jobs, but in reality all we’re doing is helping Entronics do a little bargain shopping.”

“Exactly. Evil, huh?”

“But we don’t know whether Dick Hardy did this at the direction of the MegaTower, or whether this was his own idea.”

“Who cares? Either way, he’s going to get a gold star,” Festino said. He took out a brand-new miniature bottle of hand sanitizer, unwrapped it, and squeezed out a big dollop onto the palm of his left hand. “And we get screwed.”

“Aha.”

“You can’t do anything about this, you know. In case you were planning something. This is all far, far above your pay grade.” He began feverishly rubbing his hands together. “Look at the stains on this arm-rest. It’s disgusting. I don’t think it’s coffee either.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s nothing I can do.”

“Anyway, I always liked McDonald’s fries. Even after they stopped frying them in beef tallow. You coming tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“The softball game. Remember? You haven’t played in two weeks. And now that I’m coach, it’s all on my shoulders. We’re down two players.”

“Festino.”

“Sorry. But we are.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

54

I pulled into the Entronics parking lot at just before five-thirty. A black Mustang pulled in the space beside me with a loud squealing of brakes, and Kurt jumped out.

I sat in the car, waited for him to keep going. But he opened my passenger-side door and got in.

“How goes the battle?” he said.

“Tough day. Weirdest thing happened at home. We found a rattlesnake in our bedroom.”

“That right,” he said. “I didn’t even know there were any rattlesnakes in Massachusetts. Live and learn. But I thought you were going to California.”

“Missed the flight,” I said.

“That’s a bummer.”

“Yeah, well. It happens. So, congratulations on your promotion.”

He nodded, smiled. “It’s good to be king.”

“I’m impressed. Dick Hardy must think highly of you.”

“Dick Hardy wants me to be happy. He’s decided I’m invaluable.”

“You got something on him, huh?” I smiled, nodding, as if I appreciated his cleverness. He could have been a wholesaler bragging to me about some clever way they’d scammed Best Buy into paying for shipping.

“He even invited me on his yacht. Ever been on his yacht?”

“He invited me,” I said. “But I couldn’t make it.”

“It’s an eighty-foot Lazzara, I read. A bargain at 2.3 million. But it sure seemed out of his league, given his salary. So I did a little digging. Turns out Hardy has been doing a little stock trading on the side. Set up a Channel Island trust in the name of something called the Samurai Trust. Samurai being the name of his yacht, you see. And the Samurai Trust has been buying and selling out-of-the-money options on Entronics stock on the Australian Stock Exchange. Every time an Entronics press release goes out, every time there’s another blip of good news, the Samurai Trust cashes in. Making a fortune. Of course, if there’s bad news, he makes money, too, on shorts. Very clever-just about impossible to get caught. And all to pay for his yacht. Man, he could buy ten yachts by now.”

Finally, I understood. Dick Hardy might have been trying to save Entronics a bundle on the Royal Meister deal, but that wasn’t his sole motive. He was lining his own pockets at the same time.

“He’s a clever guy,” I said.

“Clever enough to do his personal banking business using an encrypted Hushmail account. Not clever enough to realize that whenever he did e-mails on the company computer, I could access his hard disk remotely.”

“Wow. Very cool.”

“Everyone’s got a secret. You’ve got your secrets too. I just happen to know them. And there you are, you and your Band of Brothers, working your butts off to try to save your division. When all you’re really doing is paying off his yacht. Or his new house in the Highland Park section of Dallas.”

“Dallas?”

“Choke on that, buddy. Wonder why he’s moving to Dallas.”

“You’re right. I was a pawn.”

He shrugged.

My shoulders sagged. I looked up, shaking my head regretfully. “You were just trying to help me out. And I’ve been taking you for granted. Like an idiot. While Gordy and Hardy were moving me around like a chess piece. You’re my only ally.”

He turned to look at me. I couldn’t read his face.

It was funny to remember how marginal he looked when I’d first met him, like an old hippie, someone who’d fallen off the grid. The goatee, the bandana, the mullet, the ratty T-shirts. Now he was well dressed and successful looking, in a good suit and tie and conservative shoes.

“I mean it,” I said. “I really don’t give a shit what you did to Trevor and Brett. I freaked out, I admit it. I called the cops-I’m not going to lie to you. That was a stupid thing to do.” I sounded so genuinely contrite that I was beginning to believe it myself. “I could say I’m sorry, but that’s inadequate. You’ve been a good friend to me. This whole time. I just didn’t see it.”

He was staring straight ahead out the windshield.

I fell silent. My old sales guru, Mark Simkins, whose CDs I used to play over and over again, was always talking about the strategic pause. The most important skill in closing, he said, is silence.

So I said nothing. And waited for it to sink in.

God, I hoped Kate’s theory was right, that Kurt was a sucker for adulation.

Kurt’s eyes flicked toward me, then back toward the windshield.

I compressed my lips. Stared at the steering wheel.

“You talked with that cop,” Kurt said. His voice was softer. “Kenyon. Did I not warn you to keep your mouth shut?”

“You did. And I did. But the guy showed up at my office. He said he’s talking to everyone who worked with Trevor and Brett. So I gave him a whole lot of blather. He asked about you, and I told him that as far as I knew you had a good relationship with those two. That you played softball with them, and they really admired you.”

Kurt nodded. “That’s good,” he said.

It was working. Thank God. Relief flooded my body.

“That’s very good. Very smooth. I see why you’re so good at closing deals.” He turned, his face a few inches from mine. “Because you’re a goddamned liar,” he shouted. His voice was deafening. His spittle sprayed my face. “I know every goddamned word you said to that cop. ‘He knows lots of clever ways to kill people,’ you said.”

No. Had Kenyon talked to somebody on the force who knew Kurt?

“‘I have to trust you,’” he went on. “‘Can I?’ No, asshole, you can’t trust anyone. You think you can talk anywhere in the building without my knowing?”

Of course. With all the Corporate Security resources he had at his disposal, he had the conference room bugged too.

“Now, I’m not going to say this again. Go behind my back one more time-within the company, to the police, anybody-I will find out. There is nothing you can do that I don’t know about. Nothing. And if you step over the line-one millimeter over the line…”

“Yeah?” My heart was thrumming, fast and loud.

“A little friendly advice? You think you and your wife live in a safe neighborhood. But break-ins happen all the time in that part of town. Home invasions. Bad guys take stuff. Sometimes they even kill innocent people. Happens. You’ve got a wife and unborn child, Jason. You want to be real careful.”

55

Graham Runkel’s apartment still smelled like a bong, and his 1971 VW bug was still in his backyard. It looked like he was working on it.

“How’s the Love Bug?” I said. “El Huevito.”

“I’m hot-rodding it. Turbo rebuild. Wait right here.”

He came back with a Ziploc bag of marijuana buds. “The last of the White Widow. A peace offering. Welcome back.”

“Not for me, thanks. I told you, I don’t do that anymore.” I handed him a wrapped package.

“What’s this?”

“A guilt offering. Because I’m a jerk.”

He tore it open. “A complete set of The Prisoner on DVD? Unfreakingbelievable, Steadman.” He admired the picture of Patrick McGoohan on the front of the box. Back in Worcester, Graham used to come over to my house when my parents were at work, and we’d get high and watch old reruns of the classic British spy show. “What’s the occasion? Is it my birthday? I forget.”

“No,” I said. “I’m here to ask for your help, and I feel like such an asshole just showing up after all these months that I figured this might make you feel a little less pissed off at me.”

“It certainly goes a long way,” he said. “But what you really need is the comfort of the White Widow. You’re wound tighter than a…whatever’s wound really tight.” Graham’s brown hair was shoulder length and looked dirty. He was wearing his old red T-shirt with yellow McDonald’s golden arches on it. It said MARIJUANA and OVER 1 BILLION STONED.

“If you wanted to do something to someone’s car so it wiped out while he drove it, what would you do?”

He looked at me funny. “Wiped out?”

“Crashed.”

“Cut the brake lines? This a quiz?”

“If you cut the brake lines, wouldn’t the brakes feel all mushy as soon as you start driving it?”

“What’s this about, J-man?”

I gave him a quick overview, told him about Kurt and what I thought he’d done. Graham listened with his bloodshot eyes open wide. This was a guy who believed the DEA put transmitters in every copy of High Times magazine, so he was inclined to believe my theory.

“It was a Porsche?” he said.

I nodded. “Carrera 911. Brand-new. At most, a year old.”

“Was the driver wasted?”

I shook my head.

“Just lost control? No other car involved?”

“Correct.”

“Hmm. Well, yeah, you wouldn’t cut the brake lines. The driver would know right away. You wouldn’t loosen the lug nuts on the wheels either-the car would start wobbling as soon as it hit the road. But look, man, unless the cops are total bozos, this is the first stuff they’d look for-missing lug nuts, slashed tires, a bolt missing from the steering knuckle, cut brake lines. Shit like that.”

“It’s all going to be fairly obvious,” I said.

“Of course, if somebody screwed with the ball joints…man.”

“What?”

“The driver would just lose control.”

“Screwed with the ball joints? How? Like, cut it? Wouldn’t that be obvious?”

“Unless they weren’t cut. Shaved down or filed away or something. Weakened somehow. So when the car-”

“Weakened?” I said. “How do you weaken metal?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Lots of ways, I figure.”

“Weaken metal,” I said aloud, but really to myself. I thought of that story Kurt had once told me about how his team had put something from a tube on parts of a Taliban helicopter in Afghanistan. “I think I know.”

“Okay, man. Good. So why don’t we celebrate?” He reached for the bag of marijuana. “Last call,” he said.

I got home around seven-thirty. Susie and Ethan were finishing up a take-out dinner in the kitchen-I guess they’d found a sushi place that delivered-and Kate was in bed and clicking away in cyberspace.

“Kate, have you been outside at all today?”

“Outside?” She gave me a puzzled look.

“You look like you could use a little fresh air.”

“Fresh air?” Then she saw me putting my index finger over my lips. She nodded. “Good idea,” she said.

She slipped out of bed, and I lifted her up. It was surprisingly easy, probably because of all of Kurt’s strength conditioning. I carried her down the stairs and out of the house. Ethan came out of the kitchen, saw me carrying Kate, and rolled his eyes.

I took her out to our small backyard. “I’m sorry, but I have to assume that Kurt has our bedroom bugged.”

Her eyes widened. “No way!”

“I don’t know. I just have to assume it. Listen, how long does Susie have that rental in Nantucket?”

She cocked her head. “Till the end of September, probably. Why, you’re thinking maybe we could borrow it for a couple of days? I’m not exactly in the best condition to take a vacation.”

“I’m not talking about a vacation. Do you think it’s safe for you to fly over there?”

“Flying’s fine. As long as I don’t exert myself. But what’s this all about?”

“I want Susie and Ethan to go back to Nantucket and take you with them. As soon as possible. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

She looked at me. A series of expressions played on her face: confusion, skepticism, amusement.

Then realization. “It’s about Kurt, isn’t it?” she said.

Susie and Kate and Ethan got in a cab the next morning for Logan Airport and a flight to Nantucket. I went to the office, and at nine o’clock I grabbed a few minutes between meetings. I returned a call from the CEO of the Red Sox, who turned out to be a supernice guy-I guess I was expecting George Steinbrenner with a Boston accent or something-and wanted me to set up a demo of the PictureScreen and get him some numbers. We agreed to meet in a week.

As soon as I hung up, I took the elevator down to the lobby. Left the Entronics building, drove a few blocks away, took out Sergeant Kenyon’s card, and called him from my cell.

The phone was answered in a gruff voice, a Spanish accent: “State police, Trooper Sanchez.”

Office noise in the background, phones ringing, voices.

I said, “Sergeant Kenyon, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

I paused just a second. “Josh Gibson.”

In a minute, Kenyon picked up. “Mr. Gibson,” he said. “Let me take this in my office.” He put me on hold, then picked up again a few seconds later.

“Well, this is a nice bit of timing,” Kenyon said. “I was going to call you, give you the news.”

“News?”

“Accident Recon found nothing.”

“They found nothing,” I said. That stopped me in my tracks.

“That’s right. No evidence of a crime. No evidence of a crime means no investigation. Means I get assigned to something else.”

“But I know that Kurt-I know he did something to the car.”

“If the CARS unit says there’s nothing wrong, there isn’t a lot I can do.”

“They didn’t look hard enough.”

“You may be right. I don’t know. They’re busy. Lots to do.”

“It’s there. He did it. I know it. Did anyone check the ball joints?”

“I don’t know what they checked. All’s I know is, they didn’t find anything.”

“Where’s the wreck?”

“Scrapped, I bet.”

“Scrapped?”

“Processed out of the system, anyway. That’s what they normally do.”

“Who?”

“Tow yard. It’s theirs now. Normally they ask the deceased’s family if they want it, and when it’s totaled like this, the family always says no, so they sell it off for scrap. Why?”

“You’ve got to get your Accident Recon people over there to look at it again before it’s scrapped.”

“Out of my hands. Out of police custody too.”

“Which tow yard?”

A pause. Kenyon laughed. “Uh-uh. Forget it.”

I tried another approach. “If you search Kurt Semko’s apartment, I’ll bet you find some tubes of something called LME. Liquid Metal Embrittlement agent. Issued to the U.S. Army Special Forces.”

“LME, huh? Well, here’s the problem, see. There’s not going to be any search. No evidence of a crime means no investigation means no search warrant. That’s the way it goes in the real world.”

“He’s got the stuff there. I’ve seen it. That’s your evidence.”

“Let me explain something to you, Mr. Steadman, because you obviously don’t know how the system works. If you want to get a search warrant, you have to get a judge to sign off. The judge isn’t going to sign off unless there’s what you call probable cause.”

“I’ve seen the stuff in his apartment.”

A pause. “I don’t know what you saw, but my instinct about you is that you’re an honest fellow. Are you willing to be my informant?”

“Confidential, sure. But not named. No way in hell. Kurt knows people all over. He’d find out. Kurt bugged the room you and I talked in at Entronics, you know. He heard every word we said.”

“Jesus.”

“The guy is dangerous. So you see why I can’t go on the record as your informant.”

“Doesn’t work that way, Mr. Steadman. Judge uses something called the Aguilar-Spinelli test.”

“The who?”

He sighed. “Basically, it means that you can’t issue a search warrant based on plain old hearsay. If the warrant application’s based on information you get from an informant, you’ve either got to list the name publicly or establish a long history of reliability. As a confidential informant. Which obviously you don’t have. Now, if you’re willing to put your name on the search warrant-”

“Forget it. Not going to happen.”

“Then there’s no search warrant.”

“Don’t you want to solve this case?”

“Look here, Mr. Steadman. My hands are tied. As far as the state police goes, there is no case anymore. I’m sorry.”

“So Kurt’s just going to get away with this?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Steadman.”

I called directory assistance, got the number for J & A Towing-the company that had towed away Trevor’s car-and gave them a call.

“You have my brother’s Porsche,” I said to the woman who answered the phone.

“Okay?”

“Name is Trevor Allard.”

“Hold on.”

When she got back on, she said, “Hey, looks like we already talked to your brother’s-widow. She said she didn’t want the wreck. She gave us the go-ahead to sell it for scrap.”

“Shit,” I said. “That was my brother’s car.”

“The wife was listed as the next of kin. It’s probably been picked up already. Wish I could help you.”

“Can you find out if it’s been picked up yet? I’m sorry to bother you-it’s just that-well, it was my brother’s car. And if I can salvage anything from it-well, there’s, like, a sentimental value. He really cared about that car.”

“Hold on.”

I waited.

A man picked up. “This is Ed.”

“Ed, my name is-”

But he kept talking. “We followed all the proper procedures, sir. We notified the next of kin, and she authorized us to scrap it. The wreck’s scheduled to be picked up this afternoon by Kuzma Auto Salvage-”

“You still have it?”

“Like I said, it’s scheduled to be picked up.”

“Listen. This is really important to me. What do you get from the salvage company for it?”

“I really couldn’t tell you. That’s worked out between them and us at the time.”

“Ballpark.”

“Could be a hundred, two hundred bucks.”

“I’ll give you three.”

“You really want this wreck, huh?”

“If I can salvage something from it-anything-for my brother’s sake-”

“I don’t think three hundred bucks is going to motivate anyone, know what I’m saying. We got a relationship with this salvage company, and we already sold a bunch of vehicles by weight.”

“Ed, is this your towing company?”

“Sure is.”

“Three hundred to your company, and another three hundred to you personally for expediting this sale.”

He chortled. “That important to you, huh?”

“Do we have a deal? Or do I have to buy it off of Kuzma Auto Salvage, for what I’ll bet will be a fraction of that?”

“It’s a Porsche, you know.”

“A Porsche or a Kia, it’s a heap of steel and aluminum now.”

“Cash?”

“Tow it to my yard in Cambridge, and you’ll get six hundred bucks in cash. Unless that Porsche’s made of titanium, you’re getting a pretty damned good deal.”

He chortled again. “I’ll have one of the guys tow it out to you tomorrow.”

“Today,” I said. “By two o’clock this afternoon. Before I come to my senses.”

56

My comfortable corner chair at Starbucks was still available.

I sent an e-mail to Yoshi Tanaka’s personal e-mail address-it was on the back of his business card, which I kept in my wallet-from Kurt_Semko@yahoo.com.

“Kurt” wanted to pass on to Yoshi some troubling information he’d discovered about Dick Hardy in the course of a routine security sweep-Hardy’s Hushmail account, the Samurai Trust in the Channel Islands, the trading of Entronics options on the Australian Stock Exchange. “Kurt” wasn’t comfortable reporting this within normal channels in the company, since no one, not even he, the new Director of Corporate Security, would dare take on the powerful CEO of Entronics USA. But he thought Yoshi should know about it. “Kurt” insisted that none of this ever be discussed over the phone or in person. He told Yoshi not to write to him at his Entronics e-mail address.

I hoped Yoshi could read English better than he spoke it.

If Kurt was telling me the truth-and I had no reason to doubt that he really did have the goods on Dick Hardy, since that was what he was good at-then what Hardy was doing was not only illegal, it was basically disgusting.

I was sure the top leadership of Entronics in Tokyo had no idea what he was up to. The Japanese were far too cautious, far too scrupulous, to play that kind of sleazy, low-level game. The games they played were on a far higher level. They’d never tolerate this. They’d get to the bottom of it, confront Hardy, and bounce him out on his ass in a Tokyo minute.

Trevor Allard’s wrecked Porsche was a terrible sight. The front end was so badly crumpled it was almost unrecognizable. The hood stuck way up, the driver’s door was just about off its hinges, both front tires were flat. The undercarriage had been ripped apart. Looking at it, you could see that no one could have possibly survived the crash.

Graham and I stood there, looking at it solemnly.

“My landlord’s going to have a cow,” Graham said. “Did I say you could have it towed here?”

“Yeah. This morning.”

“I must have been asleep. I thought-I don’t know what I thought.”

“As soon as you find the damaged part, I’ll have it towed away.”

“And if I don’t find anything?”

I shrugged. “It’ll just have to stay here until you do.”

He wasn’t sure whether I was kidding. “Guess I’d better get to work.”

He got out his toolbox and began dismantling the wreck. After a while, he said, “This is not fun. No wonder they didn’t find anything.”

He removed the front left wheel and poked around in the dark innards of the wheel well. “This one’s fine,” he said. “No ball joint damage here.”

Then he went around to the other wheel and did the same. A few minutes later, he announced, “This one’s fine too.”

“What else could it be?”

“This is a tough one. I hate to say it, but maybe I’m not being fair to the cops. Maybe they really did look.”

I made work phone calls in his backyard while he continued to search through the wreck for another hour and a half.

Finally, he got up. His work gloves were covered in grease. “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing. Now I got to get over to Cheepsters.” That was the record store where he worked.

“A little longer,” I pleaded. “Half an hour.”

“Hand me my cell phone and I’ll see if I can trade off an hour now for an hour of bondage later.”

I helped him pull the front hood open-it was so damaged that the electric engine-cover release wouldn’t have opened it even if he’d applied an external battery to the fuse box. But there seemed to be nothing there either.

“Damn, this is frustrating,” he said. He opened the driver’s side door and wriggled into the collapsed front seat. He sat there for a moment. “Speedometer’s stuck at sixty-five,” he said. “They weren’t speeding.”

He pumped the brakes with his foot. “They work fine.”

He turned the steering wheel. “Oh, baby,” he said.

“What?”

“Turns a little too easy. Are the wheels turning?”

I stepped back and looked. “No.”

“This could be the problem. You’re driving on the turnpike at 65 and the road bends, so you steer, but your wheels keep going straight. You’d crash right into the guardrail.”

“What causes that?”

“Could be a couple of things.” He bent down and messed with the wires under the dashboard. With a long wrench, he removed two airbag screws behind the steering wheel. He took a screwdriver to the back side of the steering wheel and removed the airbag unit from the center of the steering wheel, then the airbag connector.

“Air bags didn’t even deploy,” he said. Now, with a wrench, he removed the steering wheel nut and bolt. He yanked at the steering wheel, but it didn’t move. Then he grabbed a rubber mallet from his toolbox and hammered at the steering wheel from behind a few times, then lifted the wheel straight out.

A minute later, I heard him say, “Oh, now, this is weird.”

“What?”

“Check this out.” He pulled out a thin rod about a foot long that had a U-joint at one end. The other end was jagged.

“What’s that?”

“Steering shaft.”

“Smaller than I thought.”

“That’s because it’s only half the steering shaft. This”-he pulled out a matching piece-“is the other half.”

“Broke?”

“These things are made to withstand a hell of a lot of torque. I’ve never seen anything like it. The steel didn’t snap. It looks like it ripped. Like a piece of licorice or something.”

“You should have been a cop,” I said.

On the drive back to work, I called Kenyon.

“State Police, Trooper Sanchez.” Hispanic accent.

I asked for Kenyon.

“I can give you his voice mail, or I can take a message,” Sanchez said in his heavy Hispanic accent. “Unless there’s something I can help you with.”

I didn’t trust him, only because I didn’t know him, hadn’t met him. Didn’t know who he knew.

I asked for Kenyon’s voice mail, and I asked Kenyon to call “Josh Gibson” back on my cell.

Then I called Kate’s cell from mine. She said they’d just arrived at Susie’s house, and that the trip over had gone well. She was taking it easy now.

“We got a call on the voice mail at home from the doctor’s office,” she said. “The amnio results are in, and everything’s totally fine.”

“Are we having a boy or a girl?”

“We told them not to tell us, remember?”

“Oh, right.”

“What’s going on over there-with Kurt.”

I told her I was going to call her back in a few minutes, from another phone, and I explained why.

The Plasma Lab was empty, I knew. I put my fingerprint against the biometric reader. It beeped and let me in.

Somehow, somewhere, an alarm had probably just gone off, and Kurt knew where I was.

I picked up the phone in the corner office, which used to be Phil Rifkin’s, and called Kate on her cell.

“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t want to call you from my office. I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“How so?”

“Sweetie, just listen. I’ve been thinking a lot. And this business about Kurt-I mean, if he’s doing stuff like tapping my phone, that’s one thing. But this-this thing with Trevor’s car-that he’d never do.”

“You don’t think?” She was an excellent actress, and she was playing her part perfectly.

“I don’t. I really don’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s crazy. It’s conspiracy thinking. The state police have examined the car wreck, and there’s nothing there.”

“I think you owe him an apology. You’ll see him at the softball game tonight, right? You should tell him you’re sorry.”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly. “I can’t do that, though. I’ll get grief from him forever.”

The apology thing I wasn’t prepared for. I guess she was improvising. Kurt, I figured, would never have believed me if I told him to his face that I’d decided he was innocent. But it would surprise me if Kurt weren’t listening in on this phone call. And he’d only believe I was on the level if he was eavesdropping on me.

Whatever it took.

Sergeant Kenyon had left me a message on my cell. I took the elevator down to the lobby, drove a few blocks, and called him back. This time he answered the phone himself.

“I asked around about LME,” Kenyon said without waiting to ask why I was calling. “You may have something there. Liquid Metal Embrittlement is scary stuff. I don’t know where you’d buy the chemical-a welding supply house, maybe?”

“Or take it from an army supply depot. I have a question for you. Let’s say I somehow managed to get a piece from Trevor Allard’s car that proved something had been done to it, some kind of sabotage. Would that be evidence you could use in court?”

“The car’s scrapped, I told you that.”

“Let’s just say.”

“What’d you do?”

“I’m asking you if the evidence would be admissible.” I’d watched my share of Law and Order on TV. “You know, chain of custody or whatever it’s called.”

“It’s complicated. I’ll have to get back to you on that. See what the DA’s Office tells me.”

“Soon as you can,” I said.

He called back ten minutes later. “Okay,” Kenyon said. “One of the prosecutors here tells me that, in this state, chain of custody goes to the weight of the evidence, not its admissibility.”

“You’re going to have to speak English.”

Kenyon laughed. “And I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

“Sorry.”

“What that means is, it’s not a deal killer. Legally, you don’t have to show every link in the chain. A good defense attorney will put up all sorts of arguments, but a judge has to allow it. So…I’ve answered your question. You answer a couple of mine. Do you have the piece or not?”

“I have it.”

“Okay. And you say it proves sabotage. How do you know that? No offense, but you’re a corporate executive. Not a metallurgist.”

“I can’t tell you for a hundred percent sure that it proves the car was sabotaged. But I can tell you that it looks like a Tootsie Roll that’s been twisted and then torn off. It’s not a normal metal break.”

“What kind of piece is it?”

I hesitated. “The steering shaft.”

“Well, let’s assume for the sake of argument that you’re right. In isolation, all that would tell me is that the car was tampered with. But I’ve still got a problem. A major problem.”

“Which is?”

“Connecting it to Kurt Semko. So you’ve got to establish that he had the means to do this-this LME. That he has or had access to it.”

“He has the stuff in his apartment,” I said. “I’ve seen it. All you have to do is search his apartment.”

“We come back to this,” Kenyon said. “I told you before, unless you’re willing to be a named informant, we’re not going to have probable cause to search. If only there was some other way. He never gave you a spare key to his apartment or anything?”

“No, of course not.”

“I don’t suppose he’d invite you over.”

“Not in a million years.”

“Then how the hell can you prove he has it?”

“How can I prove it?”

“That may be the only solution. Just as you got the steering shaft on your own.”

“Maybe there’s another way,” I said.

There was, of course. Graham Runkel was working on it.

“Like what?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said.

57

Kurt greeted me with a wave, from a distance, and a friendly smile. I smiled back, just as friendly, said, “Hey.”

He was on the mound already, warming up. The ballpark lights were on. The opposing team, a motley crew from the Bear Stearns retail group, was already inspecting our bats. The word had gotten around. They obviously didn’t realize that, with the exception of Kurt, the remaining members of the Entronics team weren’t good enough for a doctored bat to make any difference. But they’d soon find out. Festino was consulting with the other guys.

My cell phone rang. I knew who it was, so I walked off a good distance before I answered it, on the third ring.

“I’m in,” Runkel said.

“In the house?”

“You heard me.”

He had broken into Kurt’s rented house in the town of Holliston. I could picture it in my mind, from my one visit-everything about it neat and well tended, very hospital-corners.

“Not a problem?” I asked.

“The doors were double-locked, but the overhead garage door was open. The door to the house from the garage is always the weak link. Easy to pick.”

“No alarm?”

“Rented house like this? I didn’t expect it. But count on there being a good smoke alarm system. Landlord would make sure of it.”

“You know where to look?”

“You told me.” His voice was sort of jiggling as he walked through the house. “The spare bedroom off the family room, right?”

“Right.”

“You care what I use to set off the smoke alarm? Like a doobie?”

Kurt was waving to me again, and so was Festino. “Come on, Tigger,” Festino shouted. “The business day is over. We’re starting.”

I held up an index finger.

Once Graham found Kurt’s cache of stolen weapons and explosives, he was going to open the door to the room where the cache was kept and leave it open.

So that when the fire department came, summoned by the smoke alarm, and broke in, did their usual damage, they’d see the illegal armaments, and they would call in the police. In this age of terrorism, they’d have a crime scene on their hands.

And then we’d have Kurt nailed. No arrest warrant needed, and all perfectly legal.

“Find it?” I said.

“No,” said Runkel.

“What do you mean, no?”

“There’s nothing here.”

“Okay,” I said, “if you’re looking at the fireplace in the family room, it’s the door on your right. This hollow-core door. The only one on that wall.”

“I’m there. I see which door you’re talking about. But there’s no stash here.”

“It’s there,” I said, desperation rising. Kurt was walking toward me. I lowered my voice. “I’ve seen it.”

“I’m in the room,” Runkel said. “There’s a single bed, nothing on it. The room smells a little like gunpowder, maybe. Like there used to be something here. But there’s nothing here.”

“Then he moved it. Look in the basement. Look everywhere else. It has to be there.”

“Let’s go, Jason,” Kurt said, maybe ten feet away. “You’re keeping everyone waiting.”

“Don’t give up,” I said, and hung up.

Shit.

“You’re a busy guy,” Kurt said. “Who was that?”

“It’s a contract,” I said. “Guy misplaced it.”

“That’s annoying. So you’re playing first base. Can you handle that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Kurt. About all that-all that stuff I threw at you. About the car and everything.”

He shook his head. “Not now.”

“No, I just want to apologize. I was out of line.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “That’s the past. Come on, let’s get to the field.”

He put his arm around me, like a fellow soldier, the way he used to.

But I could tell there was something about him that had changed. He was hard and unyielding and distant.

He didn’t believe me.

Kurt had moved his cache of stolen Special Forces armaments and war trophies.

That made sense. The heat was on, and he didn’t want to risk a search.

So where had he moved it?

The answer came to me while I stood at first base, and it was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. Willkie Auto Body. The shop owned by Kurt’s friend and SF buddy, Jeremiah Willkie, where Kurt had taken my car the night I met him. Where he stored all his tools and stuff in the warehouse out back.

That’s where I had to go.

I tried to focus on the game. The Bear Stearns retail brokers weren’t very good. Without Kurt, neither were we, of course. Kurt struck the first two guys out, and then their third man up, who had been studying Kurt’s pitches, managed to hit a grounder to the right side of the infield. Letasky tried for it, but it glanced off his glove. Kurt ran off the mound and retrieved it, then threw it to me.

I caught it, but it slipped out of my glove, and the runner made it to first.

“Come on, man,” Kurt shouted, annoyed. Before he returned to the mound, I trotted over to him, pantomimed an apology, and pretended to hand him the ball. He glanced at me strangely, but walked slowly toward the mound, taking his time.

I returned to first base, the ball hidden in my glove. The runner, a pudgy, bespectacled kid, beamed me a smug smile. He saw that Kurt wasn’t looking, wasn’t even back on the rubber yet. Saw his opportunity to steal second, greedy man that he was.

And as soon as he moved off the bag, I tagged him.

He was out.

“Hey!” their coach shouted, running out into the field. “That’s a balk!”

Festino and Letasky and the others were watching with amazement. Festino burst out in raucous laughter, shouted, “Tigger!”

The umpire waddled onto the field. “He’s out. The old hidden-ball trick.”

“That’s a balk!” the Bear Stearns coach said.

“Nothing to do with a balk,” the umpire said. “You don’t even know what a balk is.”

“No one knows what a balk is,” Festino said.

“That’s the hidden-ball trick,” the umpire declared, “and it’s perfectly legal. Pitcher was not on the mound. Now, play ball.”

“This is sandlot stuff!” protested the Bear Stearns pitcher. Like this was some professional ball club.

Letasky laughed, said, “Steadman, where’d you get that?”

“I saw some guy from the Marlins do it against the Expos a couple of years ago,” I said.

As we left the field, Kurt came up to me. “Classic deception,” he said. “Never thought you had it in you.”

But I just nodded, shrugged modestly.

Go ahead, I thought. Underestimate me.

I excused myself, took out my cell, walked a distance away, and called Graham. The phone rang and rang, six times, then went to his voice mail.

Strange, I thought. The cell phone reception in and around Kurt’s house was perfectly good.

So why wasn’t Graham answering the phone? I had to know if he’d located the cache of weapons.

I hit redial. It rang six times again before going to his voice mail.

Where was he?

Kurt came up to me. “Come on, Grasshopper. We’re up.”

“One second,” I said. I hit redial again.

No answer.

Where the hell was Runkel?

“Jason,” Kurt said. “Come on. Time to play. Let’s show them what you’re made of.”

58

The minute the game was over-we managed to eke out a victory-I took Festino aside and asked him to invite Kurt out for drinks with the rest of the Band of Brothers. Make sure of it, I said. I didn’t give him an explanation, and he didn’t demand one.

Then, in the car on the way to Cambridge, I tried Runkel’s cell, then his home number. Still no answer, which freaked me out a little. It wasn’t like him to just fall out of contact. He was a hard-core stoner, but he was basically responsible, and he’d been pretty methodical about breaking into Kurt’s house.

So why wasn’t he answering the phone? I didn’t want to let myself think the worst-that something had happened to him. Besides, I knew Kurt couldn’t have done anything to him, since I’d been with Kurt the whole time.

He was fine. He had to be.

I’d been to Willkie Auto Body twice-once the night I met Kurt, and then again to pick up my car-so I vaguely remembered the directions. But I had no idea what I was going to do once I got there. I was pretty sure Kurt’s storage locker was in the back building, which was a ware-house for auto parts and paint and whatever else they needed. The front building, which looked like an old gas station that had been retrofitted, was where the customer waiting area was, and the small office, and the work bays, where they did the frame straightening and spray painting and all that.

Willkie’s Auto Body was a desolate, marginal-looking place. It was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, but its front gate was open. I knew the place was open late, but I didn’t know if that meant that there was someone there twenty-four hours, or just until midnight, or what.

The plastic red block letters of its sign were dark, the edge-lighting turned off as if to discourage anyone from driving up. Most of the redbrick front building was dark, too, except for the reception area.

As I turned into the lot, I shut off my headlights, slowed way down, and stayed all the way to the right side of the parking lot, where I hoped I wouldn’t be seen from inside. A few feet beyond the front building the asphalt pavement ended, giving way to hard-packed dirt.

The rear building was about a half story taller than the front one. It had corrugated steel walls, painted some light color, and it looked like an ice-skating rink. There were no lights on back here. The only illumination came from the almost-full moon. I killed the engine and coasted to a stop next to a Dumpster between the two buildings.

I waited in the car and just listened for a few minutes. No noise back here either. No one was working. So probably the only employee working was whoever was on the night shift.

I took my gym bag from the front seat and got out of the car quietly. Pushed the door shut.

Then I just stood there and listened a little more. No footsteps. No one approaching. No sounds except, every ten seconds or so, a car driving past. If the guy on the night shift, sitting in the front building, had heard me drive up, he probably assumed it was just road traffic and ignored it.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see a Mercedes S-class parked out back on the blacktop, in a marked space. It gleamed like polished obsidian. Probably a just-completed job. Next to it was a sixties-vintage Pontiac Firebird with custom flame-painting all over its body. I could never understand why anyone would want to do that to a perfectly good sports car.

Now I walked slowly to the rear building. There were no windows, just some flat steel doors, each one marked with a sign-PARTS and PAINT MIXING. A cluster of gas tanks, which I assumed were empty, or else they’d be inside. A loading dock around to the side, marked RECEIVING. I walked up close to it. A concrete pier about four feet off the ground, a rusted iron stepladder. On a wooden pallet to one side was a haphazard pile of discarded, long cardboard cartons.

Graham Runkel, an expert in breaking and entering until he got caught, had told me that loading docks were always a point of vulnerability. During business hours especially, when no one knew who was coming or going, in most places. But even at night, he’d said. Loading docks are built for easy access, quick deliveries. The loading-dock door was an overhead, folding-type door, probably steel. Around it was a black seal that looked like rubber. I doubted there were any serious security measures in this building, since all the valuable stuff-the cars-was in the work bays in the front building. It wasn’t like people were going to break in and steal an unpainted quarter panel or something.

But the question still remained: How was I going to get inside?

I went back to the front and tried one of the steel doors, just so I wouldn’t feel like an idiot when I found out later it was unlocked. It was locked. I tried each of the others, and they were all locked too. Okay, no surprise.

The overhead door was padlocked. I climbed the rusty stepladder to the concrete pier and unzipped my gym bag.

Inside were some basic tools I’d picked up at Home Depot on the way over, including a MagLite flashlight and a fourteen-inch pair of tungsten-carbide bolt cutters, which Graham had assured me would cut through just about any padlock like butter. I bent over to take a closer look at the padlock, and suddenly I was blinded by a bright light.

I looked up.

A high-powered flashlight was pointing at me from about twenty feet away. I felt a jolt of fear, a shot of adrenaline.

I was dead meat.

Shielding my eyes with a hand, I got to my feet. Something had kicked in, some hindbrain survival instinct. “Hey, where the hell were you?” I shouted.

“Who are you?” A man’s voice, a Middle Eastern accent. The voice sounded familiar.

“Didn’t you guys hear me?” I went on. “Didn’t you get the message?”

“What’s your name?” the Middle Easterner demanded.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Are you Abdul or something?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

I sauntered down the stepladder, the gym bag on my shoulder. “Kurt didn’t tell you I was coming by? He didn’t tell you Kenny was stopping by tonight to get stuff from his storage locker?”

I thought quickly, tried to remember Willkie’s first name. It came to me immediately-how could I forget “Jeremiah”?

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I thought Kurt and Jeremiah had this all worked out.”

“Had what worked out?” The flashlight was no longer in my eyes, but down on the ground. He came closer.

“Shit, let me use your phone. And your john, if you don’t mind. I got way too many beers in me tonight.”

“Bathroom’s out front,” Abdul said. “Did Kurt talk to Jeremiah?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Show me to the john first, or my bladder’s going to burst.”

He led the way over to the front building, took out a big ring of keys, and unlocked the back door. “Straight down the hall, on your right.”

I used the urinal, then took out a pen and Kurt’s business card from my wallet. On the back of Kurt’s card I wrote, in Kurt’s precise handwriting, all capital letters, “WILLKIE AUTO BODY” and the address. Then, “Abdul will meet you out back.” And: “If they give you a hard time, call me. Thanks!”

I put the card in my pocket, flushed the urinal, and came out.

“Aaah,” I said. “Thanks. Okay, now I can think straight. I forgot I have my cell on me-I don’t need your phone. Hold on.” I pulled out my cell phone, switched it back on, then called my office number.

“I’m here,” I said to my outgoing message. “Okay, so when are you going to get out?…But you left a message here, right? All right. All right. Later.” And I disconnected the call, then turned off the phone.

I reached into my pocket, took out Kurt’s business card, and handed it to Abdul. “Is this you?” I asked. “On the back?”

He flipped it over. Read the handwriting. “You should have just gone to the front office,” he said.

Along the back wall of the warehouse was a row of storage units, ten feet wide and high and twenty feet deep. Some of them were open and vacant, and a few of them were locked with old steel chain snaked through iron hasps and then through big old chrome padlocks. Abdul took out his key ring again and unlocked one of the padlocks.

“If you need anything, come get me,” he said, and he left me alone.

I pulled the iron door open and saw everything there, in neat stacks, in cartons and crates.

Much more, even, than I’d seen that day in his apartment. More than just his antique rifles and replica handguns. An entire pilfered armory.

Colorful spools labeled PRIMACORD DETONATING CORD, in festive orange and yellow, the color of kids’ soft drink mix. A box of M60 Fuse Igniters. A box marked CAP, BLASTING ELECTRIC M6.

A pile of blocks about ten inches long by two inches wide and an inch and a half thick, wrapped in olive drab Mylar film. Each one had printing on the top that said, CHARGE DEMOLITION M112 (1.25 LBS COMP C4).

I knew what that was. C-4 plastic explosive.

Kurt’s auto tools were there, too, in two tool chests, but I ignored them.

I found a tray containing several small tubes labeled LIQUID METAL EMBRITTLEMENT AGENT (LME)-MERCURY/INDIUM AMALGAM.

I took one of the tubes. My evidence.

Then I stopped and looked over the whole stash and realized there were some other things I could take.

59

When I was more than halfway to Boston, I pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and called Sergeant Kenyon on his cell.

“I have all the evidence you need to arrest him,” I said after filling him in briefly. “Enough to tie him to the murders of Allard and Gleason.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe? You’re the one who told me if I got the tube of LME that would do it.”

“I did. And maybe it will. And maybe not.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’re the cop. Not me. Why don’t you send some guys over to Willkie Auto Body right now? There’s a storage locker out back where Kurt’s got enough explosives and munitions to take down the John Hancock Building.”

“Your hearsay isn’t enough.”

“Oh, really?” I shot back. “Think of it this way, Kenyon. If you don’t do anything about this little tip from me, you’re going to be in a world of shit. It’ll be a career-ending mistake. Maybe you’d prefer me to just call the FBI, tell them the Massachusetts State Police weren’t interested in following up on my report of stolen army munitions? After 9/11, I have a feeling they’re not going to get too hung up on procedure.”

Kenyon paused. I heard a rush of static on the line. “I can send some guys over there,” he said.

“That would be a wise move.”

“Is it provably Semko’s storage locker?”

“Talk to Abdul,” I said. “Squeeze his nuts. Ask for his green card. Maybe ask him about his cell of Arab terrorists. You might be surprised at how cooperative he gets.”

My cell phone beeped. Call-waiting. I glanced at the readout, saw it wasn’t Graham; it said KURT.

“Let me call you back,” I said.

I clicked over to Kurt’s call, said, “Yeah?”

Raucous bar noise in the background. Loud voices and laughter.

“Hey there, bro. I just got a call from Abdul. You know Abdul.”

My stomach seized up. I didn’t reply.

“And I thought you were starting to get with the program.”

“Kurt,” I began.

“And the funniest thing happened tonight during the game. Some guy broke into my apartment.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Friend of yours.”

“Not that I know.”

“Hmm. Graham something. Runkel?” Casual, almost airy. “Had your phone number programmed into his cell. Gotta be a friend.”

I felt a chill. He knew Graham’s name, knew about the connection. Knew what was on his cell phone.

“Last number he called on his cell was yours. That who you were talking to at the game?”

“News to me,” I said.

“Nosy bastard. Made the mistake of looking in my footlocker. Hundred and ten volts wired to the lock on that baby, my little security measure. Knocked him right out.”

Tears sprang to my eyes.

I bit my lip. “Where is he?”

“You shouldn’t have done that. You just crossed the line one too many times.”

“Where is he, Kurt?”

“He’s resting comfortably, Jason, ole buddy. Tied up and locked inside a big old trunk I had lying around, until I make further arrangements. Well, maybe not so comfortably. Not a lot of air in there. Fact, he’s probably gone through most of the air by now-you know how panic makes you breathe harder, right?”

“In your house.”

“No. Somewhere else. Call it an undisclosed location.”

“I’ve got something you want,” I said abruptly.

“Oh yeah?”

“A piece of evidence. A damaged steering shaft from a Porsche Carrera.”

He laughed. “And now you want to play Let’s Make a Deal, that it? Do you want what’s inside my box, or what’s behind the curtain?”

“Let Graham go, and I’ll give you the part.”

“You’ll give me the shaft, Jason?” Kurt said, laughing again.

“An even trade,” I said. “My friend for a guarantee you won’t be going to prison for life. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

He hesitated for a second, considering. I knew his mind was spinning like a compact disk. He was naturally suspicious, far more than I’d ever be. Everything, anything might be a ruse, a trick. And I needed to sell him on the fact that I really wanted to make a deal. That it wasn’t a snare.

I needed to sell him on the fact that I was trying to sell him. This was a mirror reflecting a mirror.

“Sure,” he finally said. “I got no problem with that.”

I thrust back. “Sure, you’ve got no problem with that. I hand it over, you hand over Graham, and then you head over to Hilliard Street and kill my wife and then me.”

“Now, why in the world would I do that, Jason? After you’ve given me such a nice gift?”

If Kurt knew Kate had left the house, he’d have mentioned it. I wondered whether he had any idea she was gone.

“See, here’s the thing, Kurt. I don’t take anything for granted anymore. This piece I’ve got-this steering shaft-that’s kind of like my power. My weapon. Like I’m one of those primitive Amazonian warriors, and this is my club, you know? Without my club, I feel powerless. I don’t like that feeling.”

He paused again. Now he was really baffled. I was going back and forth, whipping between suspicion and what seemed like gullibility. He didn’t know which was the real me.

“You saying my word’s not good enough for you?”

I laughed. “It was, once. Not anymore. This steering shaft, it’s a key piece of physical evidence. Without it, the police have no probable cause for arrest. No evidence, no arrest warrant. You’re good to go. But what about me?”

“Well, think about it,” he said. “Without your club, you’re powerless. Means you’re no longer a threat.”

I smiled. That was just what I wanted him to say, precisely the conclusion I wanted him to reach. But I wanted it to be his idea. Like Freddy Naseem; like Gordy. Let the other guy take credit, and he owns it.

“But I know things,” I said. “Facts about you. In my head. How do you know I’m not going to go to the cops again?”

“How do you know I’m not going to head over to Hilliard Street? Pay the wifey and little baby a visit? So we’ve got ourselves a little situation here. It’s called mutual assured destruction. Military doctrine throughout the entire Cold War.”

I smiled again. Exactly.

“You have a point,” I said. “All right. So?”

“So we meet.”

“Where? It has to be someplace neutral. Someplace safe. Not public. Not your house. Not my house.”

I knew what he’d say. The old sharp-angle close. The Mark Simkins College of Advanced Closing. Maneuver the customer into making a demand you can meet.

“Work,” he said. “The Entronics building.”

Where he felt comfortable. Where he controlled the situation.

“One hour,” I said. “With Graham.”

“Two. And you’re not exactly in a position to negotiate. You give me the scrap of metal, and I’ll tell you where he is. So that’s the deal. You don’t like the terms, find another vendor.”

“All right.”

“Think it over. Take your time. I’ve got all the time in the world. Oh-that’s right. Your friend doesn’t. He has three or four hours’ worth of air. If he calms down and breathes normal. Which is hard to do when you’re tied up and locked in a box in an undisclosed location, huh?”

60

I called Kenyon back.

“I’ve just made a deal with Kurt Semko,” I said, and I explained.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?” he said.

“You have a better idea?”

“Hell, yeah. I’ll send a unit over to this auto body shop. Once they find the explosives, we’ll easily have enough to arrest Semko.”

“Between getting the unit together and equipped, out there and back, then preparing the arrest warrant, how long are we talking?”

“Six hours, I’d say, if we get a judge out of bed.”

“No,” I said. “Unsat. My friend won’t make it. So I’m meeting Kurt whether you like it or not, and I want you to wire me up. Put a concealed recording device on me. I’ll get him to talk.”

“Stop right there,” Kenyon said. “Number one, our Special Services staff don’t work at midnight. There’s no one around to do a professional hookup until tomorrow.”

“You telling me you don’t have a tape recorder and a concealable mike?”

“Well, sure. But we’re talking quick-and-dirty.”

“That’ll do.”

“Number two, if you think you’re going to get Semko to hand you one of those confessions out of the movies-the old ‘Now that I’m about to kill you, let me tell you all about my evil plans so I can cackle wickedly’-well, you got to start watching better movies.”

“Of course not. He won’t ‘confess’ a thing. But all we need is an exchange. A back-and-forth. Enough to indicate he did it. And if anyone can provoke him to talk, I can.”

More static. A long silence. “I don’t know about this. I’d be putting you in serious danger. It’s extremely irregular.”

“Serious danger? You want to talk serious danger? A friend of mine is slowly suffocating in a trunk somewhere. I’m going to meet with Kurt. If I have to use my own crappy tape recorder and tape a microphone to my chest, I’ll do it.”

“No,” Kenyon interrupted. “I’ll see what I can scrape together.”

“Good.”

“But are you certain you can get him to talk?”

“I’m a salesman,” I said. “This is what I do.”

61

I stopped at a Starbucks and did some quick Internet research just as they were closing. Then I met Kenyon about a half-hour later at an all-night Dunkin’ Donuts near the Entronics building. It was shortly after eleven. There were a couple of drunk young guys in Red Sox caps and low-hanging shorts with their boxer shorts showing. A tense-looking couple having a quiet fight at a table. A bum who’d surrounded his table with shopping bags full of junk. Nothing like a Dunks late at night.

Kenyon was wearing a navy sweatshirt and chinos and looked tired. We both got large coffees, and then he took me out back to a new-looking white van. He opened the rear doors and we climbed inside. He put on the dome light.

“This is the best I can do on short notice,” he said, handing me a coil of wire.

“Kurt knows how to search for concealed microphones and transmitters,” I said.

“Sure he does,” Kenyon said. “So don’t get too close.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Then we should be squared away.” He looked at my T-shirt. “You got something long-sleeved?”

“Not with me.”

He removed his sweatshirt. “Wear this. Just get it back to me sometime, okay?”

If I’m alive, I’ll be more than happy to. I nodded.

“Take off your shirt.”

I did. He taped the transmitter to the small of my back with a wide adhesive tape he wound around my chest. It was so sticky it was sure to rip out my chest hair when I removed it.

“Is he going to spot your backup team? Don’t forget, he’s a pro.”

“So are they.”

I took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “Is this going to work?”

“The transmitter’s going to work fine. Everything else-well, that depends on you. Whether you can pull it off. And that’s what scares the shit out of me.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Is there, like, a panic button built into this?”

“We’ll be monitoring the transmission. If you need us, just say something. Some phrase we agree on. And we’ll come running.”

“A phrase. How about, ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this’?”

“Works for me,” he said. “Okay, then. We’re good to go.”

It took me another forty-five minutes to get ready for my meeting with Kurt. I parked in back of a 7-Eleven that was closed and worked out of the trunk of my car.

The Entronics building was mostly dark, with a scattering of lights in the windows. Cleaning people, maybe. A few office workers who kept very late hours the way Phil Rifkin once did.

I saw that the lights were on in my corner office on the twentieth floor. I’d turned them off when I left for the day. The cleaning staff usually came through around nine or ten, so it wasn’t them. Not at one in the morning.

It had to be Kurt. Waiting for me.

62

Fifteen minutes before one in the morning.

I arrived at my office a quarter hour before the time we’d agreed to meet. I set down my gym bag and my briefcase as I entered. The lights were already on. So was my computer.

Kurt had been using it, I assumed, but for what?

I went behind the desk to look at the monitor, and I heard Kurt’s voice. “You have something for me.”

I looked up. Nodded.

“Let’s make this fast.”

I stood still, looked in his eyes. “What’s my guarantee Graham’s going to be where you say he is?”

“There’s no guarantees in life,” Kurt said. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word.”

“What good is this thing to you anyway?” I asked. “It’s just a piece of scrap metal.”

“It’s worth nothing to me.”

“So why are you willing to deal?”

Last-minute hesitation. Happened all the time in my business. How many prospects had suddenly developed a case of jitters just before signing on the dotted line? Usually when I saw it coming I’d head them off by throwing in some unexpected bonus, some pleasant surprise. It almost always worked. But you had to anticipate it.

“Why? Because I’d rather keep it out of the cops’ hands. Not that I couldn’t handle it if I had to. Not that my buddies on the force might not happen to ‘lose’ a piece of evidence against me. But I’m a thorough guy.”

“Who says the cops are even going to know what this is?”

He shrugged. “They might not. You’re right.”

“They might not even know it’s from a Porsche.”

“That kind of shit they can figure out. All it takes is one smart forensic guy to find traces of mercury or whatever’s on there. Or the pattern of breakage-I really don’t know. I don’t care. But why take the chance? When you and I can come to terms. And both of us live happily ever after.”

I nodded.

Got it.

That was enough. That was as much as I was going to get, and it was enough to incriminate him.

“I’m taking a huge chance,” I said.

“Life’s a risk. Hand it over.”

I was silent for a long time.

True sales champions, Mark Simkins said, can sit there quietly all day if they have to. It’s not easy. You want to say something. But don’t! Keep your mouth shut.

When enough time had passed, I picked up the gym bag, unzipped it. Pulled out the piece, which I’d wrapped in plastic and duct-taped up.

Handed it over to him.

“Good,” he said. He picked at the duct tape, unraveled the layers of plastic from the steering shaft. He threw the plastic onto the floor, held up the twisted thick steel rod with a U-shaped joint at one end. Weighed it in his hand, admiring it. It was heavy.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Graham?”

“You know where the old General Motors assembly plant is.”

“On Western Ave., a mile from here or so?”

“Right. That vacant lot there.” He handed me a small key. To the trunk, I guessed. “Funny how your life can depend on a little piece of metal,” he said. He walked slowly to the big glass window.

“Like a round of ammunition. It can save your life.” Now he was looking out the window. He swiveled around. “Or it can kill you.”

With that, he swung the steering shaft at the window.

The glass exploded with a loud pop, a million shards showering all over the carpet. “Cheap-ass tempered glass,” he said. “Contractors should have at least sprung for laminated, building this nice.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this,” I said to the hidden microphone.

Get the hell up here now, I wanted to shout.

“Jesus!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

Cold wind whipped into the office, a smattering of raindrops.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Sudden rise to the top. All sorts of pressures on you, trying to save the division-you didn’t know the whole thing was a trick. High-level games. You found out the truth, and it was too much.”

I didn’t like the way he was talking, but I knew what he was up to.

“Now a hundred fifty people are going to hit the unemployment lines because of you. Yeah, lot of stress on you. You’re going to lose your job too, and your wife’s pregnant. So you do the only thing that makes sense. In your desperate condition. You’re going to jump. It’s a good day to die, don’t you think?”

The wind was sluicing through the office, blowing papers around, knocking picture frames off my desk, off the credenza. I could feel the spray of cold rain.

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

I reached into the gym bag, pulled out Kurt’s Colt pistol. An army-issue semiautomatic.45.

Kurt saw it, smiled. Went on talking as if I were pointing a finger at him. “You’ve left a suicide note,” he said calmly. “On your computer. Happens more and more often these days.”

The gun felt heavy in my right hand, awkward. The cold blue-black steel, the rough grip. My heart was knocking so hard my hand was twitching.

“The cops can hear every word we’re saying,” I said. “I’m wired, my friend. Your suicide ruse isn’t going to work. Sorry.”

Kurt seemed to be ignoring me. “One-handed grip?” Kurt said, surprised. “That’s not easy.”

I brought my other hand up so I was holding the gun with both hands. I shifted my hands around, moved my fingers, tried to find a two-handed grip that felt natural.

“You’ve apologized to your wife and your unborn daughter. That’s what the amnio results said, by the way. A girl. Congratulations.”

For a second he almost stopped me. I froze for an instant. But then I went on.

“Like Phil Rifkin’s bogus ‘suicide,’” I said. “He didn’t hang himself. You garroted him, then made it look like a hanging.”

Kurt blinked. His smile diminished, but only a little.

“Because he caught you coming into the Plasma Lab. To do something to the plasma screen Trevor was demo’ing at Fidelity. You didn’t expect him to be in on a Sunday. You didn’t know the strange hours he kept.”

“Please tell me you didn’t just figure that out,” Kurt said.

“I think I’ve known it for a while. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

My left hand braced my right at the wrist. I had no idea if this was the right form. Probably it wasn’t: What the hell did I know? Point and shoot. Pull the trigger. If I’m off by a few feet, it’s trial and error, aim again, squeeze the trigger. Eventually I’m going to hit him. A lucky shot, an unlucky shot, I should get him in the chest, maybe even the head. My hands were trembling.

“Did you load it, Jason? Do you even know how?”

Kurt grinned. There was something almost paternal in his expression now, proud and amused, watching the antics of an endearing toddler.

“Man, if you load the rounds in the magazine wrong, or even jam the magazine in there the wrong way, you’re screwed. Gun could explode in your hands. Backfire. Kill you instead of me.”

I knew he was lying. That much I knew. But where was Kenyon? Couldn’t he hear me? How long would it take them to get up here?

“Good choice of firearms, Jason,” he said. He took a few steps toward me. “Model 1911 A1 Series 70. Outstanding weapon. I like it better than the Glock, even.”

He came closer.

“Freeze, Kurt.”

“Great safety features. Way better than the Beretta M9 the army hands out, which is a piece of shit. Superb stopping power.”

He came even closer. Maybe ten feet away. Very close. Not a problem now.

“Stop right there or I’ll blow you away!” I shouted.

I curled my forefinger around the trigger. It felt surprisingly insubstantial.

“You should have taken me up on my offer to give you shooting lessons, Jason. Like I said, you never know when you’ll need it.”

“I mean it,” I said. “You take another goddamned step and I’ll pull the trigger.”

Where the hell were they?

“Boy, the way you’re holding that weapon, the slide’s going to fly back at you and take off your thumb, man. You’ve got to be careful.”

I hesitated, but only for an instant.

“You’re not going to kill me, Jason. You’ve never killed a man before, and you’re not going to start now. A guy like you’s never going to take a human life.” He spoke quietly, steadily. Almost lulling. “That’s a nightmare you don’t want to live with. Close range like this, you get sprayed with blood and brain tissue, fragments of bone. It’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“Watch me,” I said, and I squeezed the trigger.

He didn’t move. That was the strange thing. He stood there, arms at his side.

And nothing happened.

The gun didn’t fire.

I squeezed again, pulled the trigger all the way back, and nothing clicked.

Suddenly his right hand shot out, pushed the gun to the side as he grabbed it, wrenched it out of my hands in one smooth motion.

“Friggin’ amateur,” he said. He turned the gun around, pointed it at me. “You loaded it, but you didn’t squeeze the grip safety.”

I spun around, ran.

A burst of speed. As fast as I could. Like racing up the steps of Harvard Stadium, like doing wind sprints along the Charles, but with every twitching fiber of my being engaged in a desperate attempt to save my life.

From behind I heard him say, “Colt’s not easy to use, for an amateur. You gotta push against the back strap while you’re squeezing the trigger.”

Out of the office, through the maze of cubicles.

He shouted: “Should have let me teach you.”

The elevators just ahead. I leapt toward the wall panel, pressed all the buttons, lit them up orange.

“Nowhere to run,” came Kurt’s voice, sounding closer. Why wasn’t he firing at me?

The bing of an elevator arriving. Thank God. Elevator doors slid open and I jumped inside, heard Kurt’s footsteps, punched the LOBBY button, punched and punched at it until the doors, so agonizingly slow, finally closed.

A hesitation. The elevator wasn’t moving.

No, please.

Then, a little jolt and it began to descend.

So damned slowly. Floor buttons began to light up one after another, slowly. Nineteen…seventeen. The flat-panel screen was dark, and the lights in the elevator cabin seemed dim. I stared at the numbers, willing them to move faster.

Where the hell was Kenyon?

The elevator shuddered to a stop. The orange 9 button frozen.

I punched L again, but nothing moved.

Then everything went dark. I could see nothing. Pitch-black.

Somehow he’d shut the elevator off. Turned off the power. I reached out in the darkness, flailing at the buttons, found them with my fingers. Ran my fingers over them, punched each one. Nothing.

The emergency switch was at the bottom of the control panel. I couldn’t see it, but I remembered its position. Was it a button or a switch? I felt along the panel, completely blind, sliding my hands down the two rows of buttons until I felt the bottom edge of the steel panel. What felt like a toggle switch. I grabbed it, flipped it up.

Nothing. No alarm, no sound, nothing.

Other buttons down there. Was it a button, then? I jabbed at the bottom row of buttons, but nothing. Silence.

A wave of panic hit me. I was stuck in total darkness in an elevator cabin. I felt the cold smooth steel doors, the palms of both my hands sliding along the metal until I found the crack where the two doors met.

A tiny gap, not enough to get my fingertips into. Sweat prickled at my forehead, the back of my neck.

In frustration, I pounded at the door. Kicked at it. The steel was cold and hard and unmoving.

Found my cell phone, opened it so the screen illuminated. Punched 911.

That little chirp tone that told me the call had failed.

No reception in here.

My heart racing. The sweat was beginning to trickle down my cheeks, into my ears, down my neck. Tiny dots of light danced in front of my eyes, but I knew this wasn’t real light. It was some random firing of neurons in my brain. I backed up, swung my arms around, felt for the walls of the elevator.

Closing in on me.

I flung my hands upward, felt for the ceiling, had to jump to reach it. What was up there? Little screws or something? Could you loosen them? Were there panels up there, a trapdoor, an emergency escape hatch?

I felt the brushed stainless-steel handrail that wrapped around three sides of the cabin, stuck out a few inches. Maybe four inches.

I jumped again, swept the ceiling. Felt something round, a hole. Remembered that the ceiling in here had little recessed downlights in it. No protruding screws. A smooth, flat, brushed-steel ceiling with halogen lights in a regular pattern. Which were now dark.

But there had to be an emergency escape. Right? Wasn’t that required by code?

And if there was some emergency hatch, and I managed to get it open-then what? What was I supposed to do? Climb up into the elevator shaft like James Bond or something?

The sweat was pouring now. I had to get out of here. I tried to swing my foot up onto the handrail, to boost myself up, but it was too high.

I was trapped.

The ceiling lights suddenly came on.

Then the panel lit up blue, then white, then…

Kurt’s face appeared.

A close-up of his face, slightly out of focus. A big smile. His face took up the entire panel.

“The word of the day is ‘retribution,’” Kurt said. “Good word, huh?”

I stared at his face on the monitor. How the hell was he doing this?

“Boy, you are drenched,” he said. “Hot in there, huh?”

I looked up, saw the silvery black dome in one corner of the ceiling. The big black eyeball of the CCTV camera lens.

“Yep, that’s right,” Kurt said. “That’s me. And you look like a drowned rat. No need to hit the emergency call button. I disabled it, and besides, there’s no one in the control room. I sent Eduardo home. Said I’m taking over, running some diagnostic tests.”

“What are you going to do, Kurt? Leave me in here overnight?”

“No, I thought I’d entertain you with a little live video feed. Watch.”

The image of his face stuttered, blinked, and the screen went dark. Then another image came up, fuzzy and indistinct, but it took me only a few seconds to recognize my bedroom. The image slowly zoomed in on the bed. Kate lying there. Her head on the pillow.

Strange blue light flickering over her face.

“There’s the wifey,” Kurt said. “Couple of nights ago. Guess she fell asleep watching TV while you were out somewhere. Desperate Housewives, maybe? She’s a desperate housewife herself.”

My heart was going ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

“Lots of opportunities to install that camera. Hell, she was always inviting me in. Like maybe she was attracted to me. A real man. Not a pathetic fake like you. A wannabe. You were always the armchair athlete, and the armchair warrior.”

Another scene appeared. Kate and me in bed. She watching TV, me reading a magazine.

“Oh, wait,” he said. “Here’s an oldie. From before she went to the hospital.”

Kate and me in bed. Making love.

The image had a greenish, night-vision cast.

“No comment on your sexual technique, bro,” Kurt said. “Let’s just say I’ve been seeing a lot of you two.”

“I guess you don’t want the other half then,” I said.

“The other half?” The image of Kate switched to Kurt’s face. Big, looming close-up. A curious look.

“The steering shaft in the Porsche Carrera is eighteen inches long,” I said. “The piece I gave you was, what-maybe ten inches? You figure it out.”

“Ah,” he said, chuckling. “Very nice. Maybe you did learn something after all.”

“I learned from the master,” I said. “Taught me to play hardball. You want it, you bring me back up to the twentieth floor. To my office. I get it from the hiding place, hand it to you. And then you let me go. I retrieve Graham. And it’s over.”

Kurt’s big face stared at me. Blinked a few times.

“Do we have a deal?” I said.

He smiled. His face pulled back, and I could see my office. He’d been sitting at my computer. Maybe a camera hooked up to it. Maybe the concealed one. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

All I cared about was that this looked like it might work.

The elevator made another jolt, and it started to move.

I turned away from the ceiling-mounted eye. Watched the buttons on the control panels light up orange: 12…13…

Hit redial on the cell phone. This time the call went through. It rang once, twice.

“Police emergency.” A man’s voice, clipped.

“I’m in an elevator in the Entronics building in Framingham,” I said. “My name is Jason Steadman. My life is in danger. There’s a guy on the twentieth floor who’s trying to kill me.”

“Hold on, please.”

“Just send someone!” I shouted.

The orange 20 button lit up. A ding. The elevator doors opened.

On the phone, another voice came on. “Trooper Sanchez.”

I didn’t understand. “Sanchez? Where’s Kenyon?”

“Who’s this?” Sanchez said.

I could see a figure in the shadows in the twentieth-floor lobby. Kurt, it had to be.

“Jason Steadman,” I whispered. “I’m-I know Kenyon. I’m in the Entronics building-you’ve got to radio Kenyon, send someone over here now. Hurry, for Christ’s sake!”

“Steadman?” Sanchez said. “That scum-sucking piece of shit?” His Hispanic accent was even thicker now.

Two figures emerged from the shadows. Kurt was holding a cell phone to his ear. “Would you like Sergeant Kenyon’s voice mail,” Kurt said in his Sanchez voice, leering.

Another man, holding a pistol.

Ray Kenyon.

In his other hand was a pistol. Kenyon waved it at me. “Let’s go,” he said. “Go, go, go. Hand me the other half.”

I stared in shock. I’d pressed 911. Nine, one, one. I was sure of it. I hadn’t hit redial, hadn’t called Kenyon.

“Jerry,” came Kurt’s voice. “Hand me the weapon. I’ll take over.”

Jerry. Jeremiah. Jeremiah Willkie. His Special Forces brother. The one who wouldn’t testify against him. Who owned the auto body shop.

Who was “Ray Kenyon.”

Jeremiah Willkie handed Kurt the weapon. It looked like the Colt I’d stolen from Kurt’s storage locker, but I couldn’t be sure.

“The guys are never going to believe this one,” said Willkie/Kenyon.

“No, they won’t,” said Kurt, and he pointed the barrel at Jeremiah Willkie and fired. “Because they’re not going to hear about it.”

Willkie collapsed to the floor. His left temple was bloodied. His eyes remained open.

I stared at Kurt.

“Jeremiah has a drinking problem,” Kurt said. “Get a couple vodkas in him, and he talks too much. But he made an awfully convincing cop, didn’t he? He always wanted to be a cop. His uncle was a cop.”

“I called 911.”

“It’s called cell phone phreaking. Cloned your phone so I could listen to all your calls. And pick up on outgoing calls too. Your old cell, your new one, made no difference. So let’s finish our business here.”

He pointed the gun at me. “Sounds like you hid the part in your office. You tricky, tricky guy. Let’s go.”

I walked to my office, and he followed. I entered the office, stood in the center of the room, my thoughts racing. The wind howled. Papers covered the carpet, and piles of whitish glass fragments.

“Well, I know it’s not in your desk,” Kurt said. “Or in your bookcase. Or any of the usual hiding places.”

My eyes flicked toward the briefcase, then quickly away. It was still there.

“Ceiling panel,” I said.

He’d seen my eyes.

“No, I don’t think so,” Kurt said. “Hand the piece over, and you’re free to go.”

“I’m not going out that window,” I said.

“Hand me the rest of the shaft.”

My eyes darted again, almost involuntarily, toward the briefcase next to my desk.

“I’ll need your help,” I said. “I need a ladder or something so I can reach the ceiling panel.”

“A ladder?” he said. “Boy, I sure don’t think you need a ladder.” He stepped toward my desk, grabbed the English leather briefcase. “Didn’t I teach you about the ‘tell’? Those little giveaway signs in a person’s face? You’re good at reading them, but not so good at hiding them.”

I tried to grab the briefcase back from him, but of course he was much stronger, and he wrested it from my grip. Both his hands were on the briefcase, and as he fiddled with the latches, I took advantage of his momentary distraction, backed away from him.

“Nowhere to run, Jason,” Kurt said, loud but matter-of-fact. I backed away slowly as he flipped open one of the brass latches, then the other, and then my back was against the doorframe. Twenty feet away, maybe.

A tiny scraping sound.

I saw the realization dawn on Kurt’s face, an expression of fury combined with something I’d never seen in his face before.

Fear.

But only for a fraction of a second before the blast swallowed him, blew him apart, limbs flying, horrific carnage like something you might see in a war movie. The immense explosion threw me backwards, slammed me against something hard, and as I tumbled I felt hard things spray against my face, fragments of wood and plaster, maybe, and I didn’t know what else.

I struggled to my feet, ears ringing, my face stinging.

A block of Kurt’s own C-4 plastic explosive connected to the confetti-bomb apparatus he’d put in my briefcase that day. I’d left it in my briefcase and gone back to using my old one.

And he was right that a little C-4 was enough. I knew there was no chance of him surviving.

Reached the elevator banks, then stopped. Wasn’t going to try that again.

The stairs. Twenty flights was nothing. I’d learned that. I was in great condition now.

Well, not exactly. My back ached, and a couple of my ribs were sore, probably bruised if not broken. I was hurting, but I was also flooded with adrenaline.

Opened the door to the stairs and started down the twenty flights. Walking, not running. I was limping, and I grimaced from the pain, but I knew I’d make it just fine.

Not a problem. Easy.