You all right, man?”
Kenyon Arndt blinked up at the personal trainer kneeling over him where he lay twisted on the floor of the 24 Hour Fitness center in Scarsdale.
“Don’t move him,” someone yelled. “Nobody move him. And turn off the goddamn treadmill.”
A second face appeared. “I’m a doctor. Can you bend your arms or legs? ”
Arndt looked past the woman toward the television screen hanging from the wall he’d been facing as he jogged. Anthony Gilbert’s photo had appeared, followed by a report of the discovery of his frostbitten body in a dumpster behind a market and by a description of his injuries: crushed skull, smashed fingers.
Arndt now remembered the tread belt ripping his legs out from under him, his knee hitting and then his shoulder, and the machine spinning him onto the carpeted floor and bouncing him into the crossbeam of a weight bench.
“I think I can move,” Arndt said. He rolled over onto his back. Nausea waved through him and his mouth watered. He swallowed hard and tried to sit up. Dizziness stopped him. He closed his eyes. He let the doctor support the back of his head and ease him back down again.
Arndt felt a towel press against his forehead. He opened his eyes again as the doctor pulled it away. He winced at the splotch of blood.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not as bad as this makes it look.”
“I need to get to my office.”
She smiled. “The first sign of a concussion is talking nonsense. And the idea of you driving to your office in your condition is nonsense.”
Arndt rolled back onto his side and pushed himself to his knees. She helped him to his feet, steadied him as he found his balance, and then sat him down on the weight bench.
“You’ll need to make a stop at the emergency room before you can even think of going into work.” She handed him the towel. “Hold this against your head.”
The club manager walked up. “We’ll have to insist that you get examined,” he said to Arndt, then to the trainer, “Rope off the machine until we can determine whether there was a mechanical problem.”
Arndt shook his head, then looked up. “It was my fault. I forgot to hook the emergency stop cord onto my shirt.”
Someone in the crowd laughed and said, “It’s worse than a concussion. It’s actual brain damage. Who ever heard of a lawyer passing on a lawsuit.”
Maybe he’s right, Arndt said to himself. Maybe I should sue. It may be the only way I’ll be able to make money now that my career has gone down the tubes.
Instead, he said, “I’ll telephone my wife. She can take me to the hospital.”
“What’s her number?” the manager asked, pulling out his cell phone.
Arndt shook his head again. “I’ll call her from the locker room.”
Five minutes later, Arndt felt strong enough to make his way across the gym. He pretended to call his wife, then got dressed and went out to his car.
His boss answered on the first ring.
“I know,” Wycovsky said. “I got a call.”
“I quit,” Arndt said, staring through his windshield at the gym, imagining Gilbert’s face on the television screen. “I want out. I didn’t sign up for this.”
“You need to have your head examined.”
“Craziness is staying involved in this, not in getting out-and I’m getting out.”
“Do you have a single shred of evidence that Gilbert’s death has anything to do with us?”
Arndt cringed. His mind locked up. He couldn’t think of an answer.
“We don’t know what else he was working on,” Wycovsky said. “He sure as hell didn’t work for us full-time. And the guy was a royal asshole. Good at his work, but still an asshole.”
By that criterion, Arndt thought, Wycovsky would’ve been murdered ten times over and a hundred people would still be standing in line to kick his lifeless body.
“Look, kid,” Wycovsky said, “every tree that falls in the forest isn’t aiming at you.”
Arndt knew that Wycovsky was right, logically, but he felt, more than he knew, that the logic was an evasion. Even worse, Wycovsky had once again beaten him back into line with an analogy.
“Anyone who says capisci,” Wycovsky said, “is just asking for his head to get kicked in. I’ll expect you to be in the office at the usual time.”
As Arndt disconnected, he felt a rumble in his stomach, then a sour taste in his mouth. He got the door open just before his half-digested breakfast sprayed out of his throat and onto the slush and snow.
CHAPTER 20
Vice President Cooper Wallace scowled, looking past his wife sitting across from him in front of the inglenook fireplace in their official residence at the Naval Observatory.
“It was what?” Wallace said into his cell phone. “Arson? A billion-dollar arson?”
“That’s what the RAID people on the ground in Chengdu are reporting,” Chief of Staff Paul Nichols told Wallace. “It withstood the quake, but the story they’re hearing is that a mob broke through the perimeter fence. The guards were no match. They were posted there only to prevent thefts from the construction site, not to stop a rebellion.”
“What about the Spectrum distribution center?”
“Still standing. Looted, but still standing.”
Wallace pushed himself to his feet. “The Chinese government will have to pay RAID and Spectrum back every single dollar-”
“Yuan. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. You may even want to think twice about asking for it.”
“Why the devil not?”
“Because what Tiananmen Square was to political protest, Chengdu will be to economic protest, except worse. The turmoil in the city is starting to spread to other towns and villages in the earthquake zone.”
“What about the army?”
“It looks like they learned their lesson in 1989 and are staying out of it-for now.”
Nichols found himself once again looking for a way to dissuade Wallace from a course that would make a fool either out of himself or out of the president.
“It only confirms what you’ve been saying all along,” Nichols finally said, suppressing what he was afraid might sound like a patronizing tone. “Neither RAID nor Spectrum should’ve gone in there. Let them learn their lesson by eating their losses.”
Wallace paused and stared down at the morning’s Washington Times lying on the coffee table. His eyes fell on a profile of the marketing director of the Arizona Camelback mega-church. He then recited, more to himself than to Nichols, “Moses took the calf they had made and burnt it; he ground it to powder, sprinkled it on water, and made the Israelites drink it.”
“You’re right,” Wallace said to Nichols. “Let them choke on it. I warned them. If they’d spent as much time reading the Bible as they did spreadsheets and profit projections and financial models, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“I also think we should call the folks at the Baptist Missionary Convention and tell them not to send any kids over there. The mobs haven’t turned on foreigners yet, but they will as soon as they connect the dots.”
“Connect the dots… What do you mean, connect the dots?”
Nichols cringed. Wallace was the leading Republican contender for the presidency, but he sometimes displayed a provincial naivete.
“Corruption, Mr. Vice President. The RAID facility didn’t cost a billion dollars, it cost three-quarters of a billion, the rest was used to pay bribes from Beijing to Chengdu. And one of the things those payments bought was the right to pollute the countryside and poison the people. Right now the mobs are more focused on the corrupt
