The First Billion

6

Standing on a granite pedestal opposite Gavallan’s desk was an imposing four-foot statue of a shaman carved from the wood of a Canadian maple by the Haida tribe of the Queen Charlotte Islands, south of Alaska. It was a strange-looking creature, with an abbreviated torso, narrow neck, and large, grotesque head that was all bulging eyes, flattened lips, and flared nostrils.

“The shaman is a mystical and omnipotent medicine man,” the dealer in Indian curios had explained to him when he’d first seen the statue three years before. “He knows all, does all, and judges all.” Gavallan had locked eyes with the carving and decided at once that he had to have it.

Since then, whenever something unforeseen came up in his life—good or bad, important or trivial—he consulted the shaman. When the markets caught fire or fell in the dumps, when his putts rimmed out or his drives sailed a mile, when his emotional entanglements threatened to suffocate him if his commitment to his business didn’t, he consulted the shaman.

The statue didn’t offer any answers. He didn’t speak in tongues or send telepathic messages. He just looked back, bored, impassive, and generally disdainful of all things human, counseling faith in the grand scheme of things while reminding Gavallan that he wasn’t as important a shit as he sometimes got to thinking.

Sinking into his chair, Gavallan gazed imploringly at the shaman. He didn’t need any reminders about his human frailties this morning, no rejoinders about hubris, arrogance, or cocksureness. He simply needed its help.

Returning to the office, he’d found no messages waiting from Grafton Byrnes. Nothing on his E-mail or voice mail. No chits left with Emerald, Gavallan’s secretary of seven years, to call him back at the Metropol or the National or any of Moscow’s better hotels. Nothing. The harried executive in him told him to wait until noon before reacting and to concentrate on other matters. The concerned friend urged him to get on the horn with Konstantin Kirov, tell him of their plans to disprove the Private Eye-PO’s accusations, and demand his help in tracking Byrnes down. Respect for his friend’s judgment and Gavallan’s innate discipline won out. He would wait.

“You take care of my buddy, okay?” he said, holding the shaman’s eye.

Opening his satchel, Gavallan withdrew the copies of the documents he’d signed at Norgren’s and filed them in his drawer along with the other markers routing his path to perdition. He folded the receipt for the two-million-dollar check in two and slipped it into his pocket. Then he leaned back his chair, kicked his feet up onto the desk, and laughed.

It was not a joyful laugh, nor one with any hint of amusement hidden inside its rolling baritone folds. It was a sad laugh, a mocking laugh, one tinged with doubt, disdain, and wonderment at his own folly. Oh yes, he was cutting it close this time. He was hanging it out there in the wind real far. He’d always been one to enjoy the roll of the dice, to crave the giddiness of a measured risk, but this time he had overextended himself. This time he’d bet on events that he could not control, only witness. This time he’d been plain old stupid, and it was about time he admitted it.

Gavallan felt a wave of reckless anger build inside him, a steady roar expanding in his chest, filling his lungs, and scratching at his throat. If his rage was directed at himself, it was no less explosive for it.

In response, he made himself absolutely still. He slowed his breathing and laid his palms facedown on his desk as if he were about to stand. But he didn’t move, not a muscle. Instead, he closed his eyes and began to count. He’d taught himself this trick years ago, when he was young and wild and given to bouts of unbridled fury. As a teenager he’d gotten into frequent fights. Not the clawing, awkward wrestling bouts of high school rivalries, but knock-down-drag-out, bare-knuckled exchanges with older, stronger men, the winner losing a tooth and the loser going to the hospital for stitches and X rays.

Gavallan didn’t know from what spring the violence inside him flowed. His father was distant, but kind; his mother a fixture in the household; his sisters adoringly attentive. He himself was for the most part an obedient, dutiful, and undemanding youngster. Yet there was no doubting the wild streak, the inclination toward anger, the predilection for the nervy, rash act. Twice he was arrested for disorderly conduct. The first instance was when he beat the tar out of a Texas A &M lineman who’d stood up his oldest sister for her senior prom; the second and less valiant occasion occurred when, shit-faced in a Matamoros bar, he picked a fight with the biggest Mexican in the room just to prove he could whip him. He did, but he’d ended up with three broken knuckles, a cracked rib, and an eye swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Only through the benevolence of a local police officer had both acts been expunged from his record.

Aware of this flaw in his character and unwilling to allow it to defeat him, Gavallan had decided to isolate it and raze it from his behavior—or, at the very least, to keep it hidden from public view. Deep down, he knew his anger to be primal and lurking, and impossible to extinguish altogether. But slowly, and with an iron discipline new to him, he’d altered the way he acted.

He had always harbored ambitions, dreams of a life that would take him far away from the twelve-hundred-square-foot cinder-block home where he had grown up sleeping in the same bedroom as his three sisters, away from the unrelenting heat and humidity, from the mosquitoes that preyed on a man from dawn till dusk, from the bleak horizons of his parents’ timid expectations.

By the age of fifteen, he knew what he wanted. He wanted to see the world as a pilot in the United States Air Force, and to be an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of the words. He wanted to be honorable, truthful, dependable, and courageous. He wanted to be respected not only for his skills as a pilot but for his integrity and character, and he expected to earn that respect. He wanted a wife and two children, and it was very important to him that he fall truly, madly in love. One day he hoped to wear a general’s star on his shoulder.

To others, his dreams appeared fanciful or, worse, illusory. He had no money, no connections, no guidance but his own. But never did he doubt that he would gain his ambitions. He set forth a plan and he did not alter from it. He knew what he had to do. He must work harder than the rest, he must expect unfairness and some degree of intolerance. He must never complain. He must present the world a façade of unrelenting good spirit, equanimity, and drive. Above all, he must harness his rage.

To a large extent, Gavallan succeeded. He tempered his behavior. He fought down his rage and played up his humor. He showed the world what it most liked about itself.

Most of his ambitions were realized, though for a price beyond his reckoning. But deep inside him, the anger still burned, the rage still flickered, and he knew he must be ever watchful. For if he wasn’t, one day it would surely rise up and destroy him. In the blink of an eye.

Reaching the count of one hundred, Gavallan exhaled audibly. For now, the anger was gone; the struggle for control won for another day. Happier, he turned and glanced at the pictures on his wall, wanting to share the victory, however minor. There was Gavallan and his father shaking hands on graduation day at the Air Force Academy. The old man looked as stern as ever, paying no mind to the fact that he was wearing his son’s dress cap on his head. He never got over his boy’s leaving the service, or the less than satisfactory general discharge that had made it official. Until the day he died, he insisted to his friends that his son had left the cockpit over the lack of decent pay.

“Money,” sniffed Gavallan. “If only…”

The true cause of his sudden, and not altogether voluntary, separation from the United States Air Force could be found on a ninety-minute videocassette kept shut in the bottom corner of his flight locker alongside his jumpsuit, his flying scarf, and his old Omega Speedmaster. The tape was dated February 25, 1991, and titled Day 40—Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex. It had been made with an infrared camera mounted on the underside of his F-117. The tape was a copy, a pirated bootleg, and his possession of it was a jailable offense. The original was kept in a more secure location, most likely somewhere deep inside the Pentagon where the United States Armed Forces hid its dirty laundry.

Gavallan’s eyes dodged his father, only to land on himself. There he was, a twenty-six-year-old superman gussied up for combat, strapped into his G suit, helmet in hand, standing beside the cockpit of his Desert Storm mount, an F-117 he’d christened Darling Lil. Look at that smile. Top of the world, eh, kid? The photo had been taken in a hangar at King Khalid Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia. A giant American flag hung from the rafters behind him. Beat that, Tom Cruise!

Another photo showed his mother and three sisters standing at the base of Big Tex, the 150-foot cowboy, at the state fair in Dallas ten years back. Mom, meek and gray, with her haunted smile, the woman who’d gifted him the name of Jett, not out of any premonition of the future, but because of her long-held crush on an unknown actor who’d visited her hometown of Marfa, Texas, one teenage summer, to stand before the cameras as Jett Rink, impetuous wildcatter who struck it rich in the glorious Technicolor Texas epic Giant. James Dean did a number on Marfa. Look in the phone book. You’ll find a dozen men aged forty and up carrying the ridiculous name of Jett.

Above the photos hung two wooden plaques with attached miniature replicas of an A-10 bomber. Flowery script declared: “Captain John J. Gavallan, USAF, Squadron and Wing Top Gun at Red Flag ’89 and ’90.” Red Flag was the annual competition staged at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, where a pilot’s proficiency was measured during several days of demanding flight exercises. As always, the mementos triggered a desire to fly, a yearning so strong he could feel it.

Trade your company, your career, to do it again? a skeptical voice demanded.

Any day, he answered.

To be at the stick of a jet was like nothing else in the world. To soar like an eagle and dive like a tern, while enveloped in the sky’s royal blue cape. If there was magic in the world, Gavallan had found it in the cockpit of a jet aircraft.

Dismissing his longing, he continued on his nostalgic tour. There was only one place left to visit. Like any sentimental fool, he’d left his heart’s graveyard for last.

Opening the bottom drawer of his desk, he rummaged through a dozen photographs, most framed with simple silver settings, a few loose, the dates and places written on the backs. Leaning to his side, he picked up one photo, then the next. With each, he stared into the woman’s bold, ebullient green eyes, imagining the touch of her pillowed lips, sighing, smiling, longing, always wishing he could reshape the past. Flipping over the snapshots in turn, he read the inscriptions penned on the back: Manhattan, Valentine’s Day; Chicago, Xmas Eve; Hong Kong, Easter Sunday. The script was looping and feminine, but never less than purposefully legible. Lingering over the words, he felt happily vulnerable, close to her again.

Cate who was kind but serious. Cate who was shy but sensual. Cate who was painfully honest yet a mystery even to those nearest to her. Cate who never raised her voice but let her eyes argue for her. Cate who declined his proposal of marriage with a single word and no backward glances.

Gavallan brooded for a minute or two, still in a kind of suspended state of disbelief that she’d turned him down. He hadn’t seen it coming. Not after two years of dating and six months of living together. One moment, he’d popped the question; the next, she was out of there. Not a sock, stocking, or bobby pin left behind.

Cate who was gone.

The last picture in the stack had been taken just a few hours before he’d proposed, and showed the two of them at the rail of Sten Norgren’s fifty-foot Wellington as it passed by the Presidio, San Francisco’s oldest military installation. Cate’s lustrous black hair, sparkling in the mid-morning sun, whipped across her face. Her eyes were partially hidden, but there was no disguising the smile or the quicksilver brilliance of the perfect white teeth. And no mistaking the unalloyed joy behind them.

Bringing the photo closer, he traced a thumb over her features, searching her obscured expression for a hint of what was to come. Looking past the hair into her eyes, checking her smile, he fought to glimpse a trace of discord, a measure of dissembling, some signal of the betrayal that lurked around the corner. He’d been doing the same stupid thing every day for a month, and every day he came away empty. She hadn’t given him a clue.

This failure to foresee her actions had left him feeling powerless, the fool. Later, when she’d refused to explain her reasons, or to even speak with him, his emotions had hardened and he’d felt tricked and cheated and vengeful.

A few nights ago, he’d woken in a sweat, trembling, his heart racked with a terrifying anxiety. He hadn’t suffered a nightmare. No subconscious spasm that his bet on Mercury would turn sour, no clawing certainty he’d lose everything he’d worked toward since leaving the Air Force, that he might end up penniless and without a means of supporting himself. The fear that stole upon him out of the darkness was deeper and more personal. It was fear sprung from his most desperate insecurity, more a premonition really, a merciless and exacting portrait drawn in black and gray of his life to come.

He saw himself in twenty years. He looked as he did now. He had all his hair, was trim and fit. He knew as you do in the subterfuge of dreams that he still had Black Jet, that he played golf once a week and went sailing on occasion, and that he was as well-off as he would ever need to be. Yet his image was surrounded by a naked aura of despair. Waves of loneliness rose from him like heat from the desert floor. Here was a man who had spent his life wedded to his business, involved in the stark, predictable activity of making money. Here was a drone who embraced repetition and success as a substitute for passion—and who, for all his effort and infinite industry, had no one.

Awake, perched on the edge of his bed in the dead of night, he’d suddenly realized that he had no possibilities without her, that he would never find someone to replace her, that there was no one in the world who could excite him and challenge him and thrill him as she had. No one who would own him so utterly.

Gavallan’s phone rang. Bolting forward, he dropped the pictures into the drawer, slid it shut, and picked up the receiver. It was Emerald Chew on his private line.

“Yes, Emerald.”

“Sorry to disturb you, but Tony’s on his way in. He’s very agitated.”

“Agitated?” Gavallan dropped his feet to the floor and sat bolt upright. “Did he say what it’s ab—”

Just then the door burst open and Antony Llewellyn-Davies, the firm’s head of capital markets, rushed into the room.

“Tony, what is it? What’s wrong?”

But one look had already told him everything he needed to know.